Time-Flight

Did You Know?

• Keith Drinkel, who appears in this serial, later played Henry Hallam in the Big Finish Productions audio play Catch-1782.
• A novelisation of this serial, written by Peter Grimwade, was published by Target Books in January 1983.
• Time-Flight was released on DVD in a double-pack with Arc of Infinity on 6 August 2007.

Plot

The Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan, still mourning Adric, arrive at Heathrow and learn a Concorde has vanished. They board another Concorde with the TARDIS and fly the same landing path, but the Doctor realises they have travelled through a time corridor to 140 million years in the past, where a psychokinetic field projects an illusion of Heathrow. The missing Concorde's crew and passengers are enslaved by Plasmatons under the mystic Kalid, forced to break into a central chamber. Professor Hayter sees through the illusion and informs the Doctor. Nyssa and Tegan enter the chamber and briefly interrupt the power source, causing Kalid's disguise to falter and revealing him as the Master. The Master explains he was trapped in Earth's past after their last encounter, his TARDIS damaged, and sought the Citadel's power source to repair it. He takes the Doctor's TARDIS to materialise in the central chamber.

Production

The Concorde used was G-BOAC, the flagship of the BA fleet; its registry appears on the radar screen in the ATC scenes. The other registry, G-BAVF, belonged to a Beechcraft 58 twin-engined light executive aircraft, not a Concorde. Peter Davison called Time-Flight the biggest disappointment from his time on the series, stating it was a very good story but the production ran out of money, filming the prehistoric landscape in Studio 8 with a model Concorde and monsters made of bits of foam. To hide the Master's involvement, the first episode credited Anthony Ainley as Kalid under the anagram 'Leon Ny Taiy' instead of as the Master. Matthew Waterhouse's contract extended into filming, allowing Adric's illusory appearance in Part Two. Tegan's apparent departure was planned as a season-ending cliffhanger; she returned in the next story's second episode.