Doctor Who: Timelash (1984)

Nobody's favourite, this Colin Baker two-parter posits itself as a sequel to an unseen Third Doctor/Jo Grant story - but doesn't go the whole route, though it would have been easy to set this on Peladon or any other planet visited in that era rather than the anonymous Karfel and at this period the show had no qualms about doing sequels to serials most audiences didn't remember (they even developed a follow-up to The Celestial Toymaker).

It's even not a bad idea, undeveloped since The Ark, to have the Doctor show up generations after an initial visit and find himself almost a legendary figure, and there are a couple of other workable notions (an interplanetary war that needs to be averted rather than won) though it falls down on weedy guest cast, a ridiculous method of execution for an evil alien dictatorship (dumping dissidents in a time corridor that seems to end up in mediaeval Scotland, not that we ever go there or find out what happened to these nobodies - and which turns out to consist of cardboard crystals, tinsel and sparkle material when Baker is dangled into it), a non sequitur use of H.G. Wells (David Chandler) as a guest star (though very unlike the historical character, who would at least have tried to shag Nicola Bryant like every other sentient being in this part of the universe) and a general sense of mucking-about on a big set until it all falls apart.

Paul Darrow is a sneering guest baddie, who does evil laughs as he threatens, but the real villain is another old idea, a hideous mutant called 'the Borad' (Robert Ashby quite good make-up design) who uses a distinguished gentlemanly android as his Big Brother face to lay down the law to the puppet ruling council. Also with: blue-faced, blonde, mincing, squeaky-voiced identical androids. The invented titles for alien ranks (Mailin, the Borad) are intoned with undue and unearned solemnity.

First published in this form here.

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