Some stories seem to stay below the radar for me, and this is
definitely one of them. As is my wont at the moment in such cases, I shall do
the one minute brainstorm, and write down all I can think of to do with the
story. Here we go – The Master – Atlantis – Giant white birdman – Doctor lost
in the void and brought back inexplicably by the TARDIS. Not a lot, is it? This
is partly because it wasn’t released as a Target novelization until 1985, by
which time I was in the middle of studying for a degree in English Literature
from the University of London, and Terrance Dicks was sadly not on the
syllabus. On paper it’s not without interest – this is the last Earthbound
story for the Doctor. The next season opens with “The Three Doctors” which
brings the exile to an end. Ooops. Spoilers. This is also the penultimate story
for Roger Delgado. Yes, he’s there in “Frontier in Space”, but I don’t so much
rate it as a Master story. Mind you, it’s not totally a Dalek story either. We’ll
come to that after.
After Watching
Something has just occurred to me. This story was
written by Robert Sloman (and Barry Letts although he wasn’t credited), and
it’s the last story of season 9. Their story “The Daemons” was the last story
of season 8. Their “The Green Death” will be the last story of season 10, and
“Planet of the Spiders will end season 11, being the last ever Pertwee story.
That rather smacks of the Producer being a little bit, shall we say, naughty
there, keeping his own stories back to finish the season each time. It would be
even more naughty if they were turkeys. Well, “The Daemons” at least wasn’t.
How about “The Time Monster”?
I’m going to come straight out and say it now. This
story was mad, at times almost laughable, at times made little or no sense . .
. and I loved every minute of it. Even if I’m not entirely sure why.
Let’s try to explain the plot of this one. The Master
has decided that his latest scheme for universal domination is to gain control
of the greatest of all the Chronovores, Kronos. Chronovores are creatures who
live outside of Time, devouring it when they please, and giving it out when
they please, beings of immense, in fact unimaginable power. Exactly where this
fits in with the Time Lords, and the Guardians and all that stuff is never explored,
which is probably just as well, since the Guardians won’t be dreamed up until
Graham Williams takes over in a few years’ time.
In order to entrap Kronos, the Master has invented a
machine called (don’t Laugh) TOMTIT – Transmission Of Matter Through
Interstitial Time. The basis of this machine is a crystal which used to be part
of a much larger crystal in the ancient civilisation of Atlantis. The Master
uses the crystal and the machine to bring him Krasis the Atlantean High Priest
of Kronos, who has a medallion which Kronos seems scared of. The Master learn,
though, that he needs the full crystal, which he can only obtain from Atlantis
itself.
While all this is going on The Doctor and UNIT have been
doing their level best to thwart his plans. And so while he is preparing to
leave for Atlantis in his TARDIS, the Master subjects the Unit forces to attack
from, in kronological order, a knight in armour, a platoon of Roundhead
infantry, and a WWII V1 ‘doodlebug’ flying bomb. The Doctor, in a rather good
sequence, lands the TARDIS within the Master’s, and creates a standoff which is
only resolved when the Doctor emerges from his TARDIS, the Master sics Kronos
on him, and he is cast into the Time Vortex. Good job that the TARDIS has a
‘rescue the Doctor from the Time Vortex’ button built into the new console.
Both TARDISes land in Atlantis. The Master fails to
convince 500 year old King Dalios that he is an emissary of the Gods, but
indulges in a spot of hand holding with the Queen, which convinces her to stage
a palace coup. When he attempts to use Kronos to kill the Doctor and Jo, Kronos
goes on a destructive spree, enabling the two time Lords and to flee in their
respective TARDISes, with the Master still having the crystal, and Jo into the
bargain. The Doctor threatens to put the TARDIS into time ram, destroying them
both, but can’t quite bring himself to do it, so it is Jo who slams the
Master’s TARDIS into top gear, and smashed them both out of the space/time
continuum. This has the action of freeing Kronos, who, as a reward will allow
the Doctor and Jo to return home in the TARDIS. Despite her wish to keep the
Master in eternal torment, the Doctor successfully pleads for his freedom in
order to take him back to face Earth justice. Of course, he escapes. That’s
pretty much it.
Phew. Now, agreed, that is one busy script. But there
are some pretty clever things about it. For one thing, this obeys Robert
Holmes’ edict about the structure of a successful 6 parter, namely that it
should really be a 4 part story followed by a linked two part story. Which is
exactly what this is. There’s the 4 part story about the Master capturing and
using Kronos on contemporary Earth, and then the 2 part story about him trying
to obtain and use the full crystal in Atlantis. 4 part then 2 part – it’s the
classic way of making a 6 parter that doesn’t drag too much.
I know that I big up Roger Delgado in every story in
which the Master has appeared . . . so don’t expect me to make any exception
now. The man was just pure class, and I find myself getting sad as I write this
to think that there’s only one more story in which he appeared to watch now,
and he is only one in a number of features of that particular story. This one
really is The Master’s Master Plan. He’s just brilliant – barking mad, of
course – but brilliant, silkily menacing, and still charming, even when telling
Jo that he is casting the TARDIS – and her – adrift into the void. While we’re
talking about the regulars as well, this is a great Jo Grant story, possibly
her best so far. The scene in episode 6 where she pushes the Master’s TARDIS
into time ram is probably her finest hour – in this story it is Jo who saves
the Universe, not the Doctor. I’ll talk more about the Doctor’s developing
relationship with Jo in the round up of season 9 which follows this review, but
let’s just say that there’s a real bond between these two characters, real
tenderness, especially evident in the delightful scene where the Doctor talks
about telling the old hermit who lived on the hill all his troubles when he was
a little boy. It takes real confidence in yourself as a writer, and your cast
of actors to throw in changes of mood in the way this story does, and I think
it’s one of the things that lifted it above so much of what I’ve already seen
during the Pertwee era.
As for the guest stars, there’s an actor who I recognise
as playing K’Anpo Rimpoche in “Planet of the Spiders”, also by Robert Sloman,
which we’ll be getting at in about 10 stories time, called George Cormack who
plays King Dalios of Atlantis. He does a really splendid little turn in this,
where the Master tries to hypnotise him, and he just laughs politely, and
sounds amused that the master is using such a simple and old fashioned method
of hypnosis. It’s just one of a couple of lovely little touches to his
performance, which means that the story handles the way that everything changes
in the last two episodes with ease. I didn’t realise it before checking the
cast list a few minutes ago just before I started writing, but the Queen’s
serving girl, Lakis, is actually played by Susan Penhaligon. She was still
about 4 years away from “Bouquet of Barbed Wire” and stardom at the time. There
was no mistaking the late Ingrid Pitt as Queen Galleia, though. At the time
that this story was made, Ingrid Pitt was riding the height of the wave of her
cult status, earned through her starring roles in such edifying fare as “The
Vampire Lovers” and “Countess Dracula”. Look, it’s easy to say that her
inclusion in the cast was an attempt to include a little something to keep the
Dads and older brothers interested, and very difficult to argue against it
given the extensive amount of airtime given to her cleavage. She’s very
decorative, anyway. Rounding up the cameos, again, it was only when I looked at
the cast list that I noticed that the Minotaur, guardian of the crystal, was
played by none other than Dave Prowse. Dave Prowse. The man who played the body
of Darth Vader. The Green Cross Code Man. Dave flippin’ Prowse!
Yes, dear friends, I enjoyed the story so much that it
never occurred to me once to ask – how the hell is the Doctor’s TARDIS working
again? Because it is, with pinpoint accuracy. It’s hardly ever done that
before. More to the point, how the hell can the Doctor dematerialise it, when
all knowledge of dematerialisation theory and the dematerialisation codes has
been removed from his memory? Even in “The Curse of Peladon” in the last episode the Doctor did suggest that it was
all the Time Lords’ doing. In this one, nothing. Kronos’ birdman incarnation?
Not great but meh, what you gonna do on a tiny budget? Wobbly columns in the Minotaur fight? I’ve
seen worse. No, d’you want to know the only thing that really bothered me about
the design? In that case, you need to come back with me to 1982. It’s a Friday
morning, and I’m on the island of Ios. I discover that there’s no ferry to
Crete until the Sunday – and I really want to go to Crete. So I decide to get a
ferry to Thira/Santorini and take my chances of getting a boat from there. If
you haven’t ever been to Santorini, and you get the chance, leap at it. I took
the cable car to the town at the top of the rim of the extinct volcano (did I
mention that the town is built on the rim od an extinct volcano?) and was told
in the travel office that yes, there was a boat to Crete, leaving in about 20
minutes from the port on the other side of the island. After the scariest taxi
ride I have ever had in my life I made it with a couple of minutes to spare. I
spent a wonderful night in the doorway of the bus station in Iraklion (actually
it was wonderful, but that’s another story for another day), and the next day I
was on the first bus out to Knossos to see the Minoan Palace. Those couple of
days have stayed as full colour memories for the whole of my life since. So,
coming back to the design of the Atlantean episodes of “The Time Monster” what
I found really bugged me was that they’d got so much right in the design, what
with the costumes and the sets, but they’d used Greek columns rather than Minoan
columns which are very distinctive and completely different from Greek ones.
I’m a hopeless case.
I do like the redesigned TARDIS
interior though. The painted backdrop of roundels used for one wall since the
earliest days in the show have gone now, probably for good. The only difference
I could notice between the Master’s TARDIS and the Doctor’s was that the Master
had a shiny metal arrangement inside the central column, while the Doctors’ had
an arrangement of green and pink neon tubes.
Well, that was “The Time Monster”.
Completely bonkers, and yet thoroughly enjoyable from the first minute until
the last.
What Have We Learned?
Chronovores have a strange sense of humour, and a terrible sense of
décor.
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