November 25: Timelash Part Two

Let's start with what works in this episode.  The explanation of the burning android that we saw in part one is rather nifty, even if that explanation is a bit labored in its efforts to ensure the audience understands what's happening.  The interior of the Timelash, with the crystals jutting out, is nicely done (tinsel notwithstanding).  The actual Borad, once he's fully revealed, is an impressive make-up job, and Robert Ashby does an excellent job with his performance -- no mean feat when the majority of his face is covered by a latex mask.  Herbert in general continues to charm, and while he may become irritating from time to time, he almost always recovers to be generally worth watching.  Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are both up to their usual standards in this -- even if Timelash calls for a very generic Doctor, rather than something tailored to the sixth -- and Paul Darrow continues to be just about the best thing on screen, even if he's dead before the halfway point.

So those are the good bits; what about the rest?

The Doctor confronts Tekker and the Borad. (Timelash Part
Two) ©BBC

Far and away the biggest problem with Timelash Part Two (well, with all of Timelash, but it's even more of a problem here) is that it's really quite tediously dull.  There's hardly any action in it, and any momentum that the action scenes do happen to have is squandered by long drawn-out talking scenes.  Most of those involved in these talking scenes aren't worth watching, either -- most of the cast seems to be at a loss as to what they're really meant to be doing there.  And so there's lots of unnatural dialogue delivered unnaturally, punctuated with scenes that are supposed to look clever (the Doctor's fooling around with the Kontrol crystal device) but are immensely tedious instead.  And it doesn't help that the sets are boring too (by design, as it's a plot point, but it still doesn't help).

Then, to make matters worse, the natural climax of the episode (the death of the Borad) comes slightly past the halfway point, but as that still leaves almost twenty minutes to fill there's a lot of rushing around dealing with other problems that don't seem as consequential as the Borad was -- the Bandrils (Karfel's neighbors) are determined to attack the planet that they need to get their food from (um...) and are completely unwilling to call off the attack unless someone drags the body of the Borad in front of a camera to show them (um...), which leads to the Doctor doing some last-minute preparations in the TARDIS -- although this includes a scene of pure padding lasting over five minutes, mainly between the Doctor and Herbert, that somehow manages to be just about the most entertaining thing in the whole episode.  Then the Borad shows up again, somehow, because there's still time to kill.  Or maybe they just really wanted an excuse to smash that Pertwee painting, but then he's knocked into the Timelash to become the Loch Ness Monster.  Hilarious.  (And how did continuity adviser Ian Levine let this one through?)

There are moments where you can almost see how Timelash could have been worth doing, but more often than not those moments are overtaken by tedium and artificiality.  There seems to be a sense that no one here is sure what sort of show Timelash is supposed to be -- not Pennant Roberts, who appears to have decided to just shoot the thing and not worry about the result; not the majority of the cast, who frequently look like they're attending a camera rehearsal rather than the actual recording; and certainly not author Glen McCoy, who appears to be under the impression that a generic story with a few allusions here and there will work just fine.  The tag at the end, where we learn that Herbert is in fact H.G. Wells, is supposed to make us think this is all clever.  If they'd actually run with this idea and made things more overtly like Wells's stories, or if anyone had bothered to do some research into Wells himself, it might have actually been clever.  But they didn't, and so Timelash isn't.