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| The Doctor confronts The Borad (Paul Ashby). |
2 episodes. Approx. 90 minutes. Written by: Glen McCoy. Directed by: Pennant Roberts. Produced by: John Nathan Turner.
THE PLOT
The TARDIS's course is diverted by a Time Corridor, which brings it to the planet Karfel. The Doctor has visited Karfel before, when his interventioned saved the planet, and he expects to be greeted as a welcome visitor.
Things have changed on Karfel. The planet is under the rule of the Borad (Robert Ashby), a genius scientist who has diverted all the planet's resources into his time research. The fruit of the research is the Timelash, an unstable time corridor which acts as an execution method for any who oppose the Borad's rule.
The Borad has targeted the Doctor to become the Timelash's next victim. But for Peri, he has another fate in mind. She is to become his unwilling bride!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: The early TARDIS scenes see Colin Baker at his worst. Admittedly, these scenes are dreadful on the page. But instead of trying to act against the Doctor's boorish behavior, Colin embraces it - making him as unlikable as he's ever been! Once the Doctor and Peri have reached Karfel, his performance improves tremendously. He shows his softest and most compassionate side when interacting with Vena, and is genuinely commanding when he and the rebels take control of the Timelash in Part Two. Still, while there's no denying his enthusiasm, this is almost certainly Colin's weakest television performance in the role.
Peri: In bondage! Seriously - she spends a great deal of this story being taken captive, tied up, recaptured, yanked around with a bondage collar, attached by that collar to piping, and being menaced by a monster that looks like a giant penis. Easily the character's weakest story, though Nicola Bryant struggles gamely to invest some spark into her rather pathetic material.
THOUGHTS
Timelash is one of a handful of serials often cited as "the worst story ever!" It is certainly badly-made. It's glaringly obvious that this is the season cheapie, as guest actors in cheap quasi-Roman costumes wander around barely-adorned floodlit white stage sets. The Timelash itself is, infamously, a bit of tinsel, with the inside of the Timelash even more howlingly cheap-looking than the outside. Doctor Who was always a series made on a shoestring, but most stories worked to look as good possible within those limitations. This one looks like something that should be accompanied by a Tom Servo/Crow T. Robot commentary.
The story's single biggest problem isn't production, however. It's padding. This is another Season 22 story in which the Doctor and Peri don't get involved until more than halfway through the first 45-minute episode. The solution? To pad out the first half of Episode One with TARDIS scenes that are, if possible, even more painful than the ones in Vengeance on Varos. First the Sixth Doctor acts like more of an ass to Peri than he ever has before (even when he was insane and strangling her), then he wrestles with messes of wires and uses safety belts (but no chairs). Better to have just held the Doctor's introduction until the point at which the story called for him.
The story structure is actually reasonable enough, with each major story beat leading to the next. But it's clear early on that there isn't enough plot here for 90 minutes... and the story runs out completely a little over halfway through Episode Two. The Doctor confronts and defeats the Borad at about the 27 minute mark, leaving almost twenty full minutes to go. We then get an extended "comedy" scene in which he takes the TARDIS to intercept a missile heading toward Karfel, followed by a second climax in which the Borad comes back to life so that the Doctor can defeat him all over again - in a way that's much less dramatic than the first time around.
Given the shift to 45-minute episodes, I'm at a loss as to why this wasn't streamlined into a one-parter. Cut the early TARDIS scenes, make the Borad's first defeat the final one, and tighten some of the scenes in between, and this would be an ideal single-part story. As it stands, that last twenty minutes kills what had up to that point been an entertaining (if badly made) yarn.
There are some bright spots. Paul Darrow, as the evil Tekker, manages to be wooden and hammy at the same time. It's such a gleefully bad performance, it gives the serial a considerable shot in the arm for most of its run. Darrow is having so much fun chomping on the scenery that it becomes infectious.
His performance is a perfect illustration of why I don't think Timelash can rank among the series' worst: Namely, while it may be objectively terrible, it's also rather fun. It's true that some of the fun comes from laughing at the bad acting, sets, and general cheapness. But the combination of execution that is bad enough to be amusing and story structure that is competent enough to maintain dramatic shape keeps this very watchable, putting it well above such fare as Underworld, Time-Flight, or Time and the Rani, in my view.
So: Cheap, objectively bad, but kind of fun in spite (and in part because) of that. If it weren't for the whole thing running out of gas halfway through Part Two, this would probably be a solid "5." Even with that dead space that is the last twenty minutes, I still find Timelash to be a fair notch better than its reputation, even if it isn't ultimately very good.
Rating: 4/10.
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