N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

Oh dear – and it was all going so well.

“Well, that’s not exactly Terminal Three …”

Tegan, Time-Flight: Part One

As someone who spent a fair amount of time passing through Heathrow in the 80’s I can tell you just how dreary a place it was.

For the scenes at London’s busiest airport to be the most visually interesting thing in a story that takes Concorde back to the time of the dinosaurs tells you just how spectacularly drab and grey this all is.

Why on Earth is the Master disguised as Kalid! (I was tempted to say ‘looking like Fu Manchu in a fat suit’ but I’d be mixing up my racist tropes there.) For whose benefit is the disguise? For a Time Lord renowned for his convoluted scheming this one will take some beating. Even now, I’m still entirely not sure what the plan was, but it doesn’t seem to merit the Doctor’s gloomy ‘it means the Master has finally defeated me’ at the end of Part Three.

After the shocks of … well, Earthshock, so little time is given to the grief over Adric that you wonder if the Doctor had sneakily placed his fingers on Nyssa and Tegan’s temples off-screen so that they wouldn’t discuss it again. If they hadn’t hallucinated him on the way to the citadel in Part Two, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d forgotten Adric had ever existed.

Captain Stapley may well give it the good old British try but there’s just no saving Time-Flight. I’m always up for a silly idea done well (or at least with enough chutzpah for me not to care too much) and Concorde travelling through time is certainly a big old check in the silly idea column. But done well? Sadly no.

What a terribly disappointing way to end a great season.