4 out of 5

Directed by: Paul Bernard

The season nine closer seems to have been maligned as a silly one, but I’m not clear as to how it’s sillier than most other episodes, really. Pseudo-science and mingling “facts” with the reality of the show have been its bread and butter the entire time; production-cheap concoctions as temporary solves to non-problems have similarly been the m.o. of both Pertwee and The Master during his era. I suppose The Time Monster wears a lot of these tropes as proud badges, and perhaps that’s the offense; it is, admittedly, pretty vague as to what it’s about – my main criticism is that the looming threat of “Kronos,” our titular monster, isn’t really clear at all – but that’s also a pretty average sin on the DW totem pole o’ sins, and it’s more important that director Paul Bernard managed to make every episode of this a good time, despite the script rather hilariously using the same cliffhangers multiple times.

So: The Doctor is too busy to attend some scientific conference regarding the horribly named TOMTIT machine, which is interesting, since it’s a concoction that can apparently enable one to step through time, and why would the doctor care about that?

But who isn’t so busy, and who is interested: The Master, masquerading as… “the professor,” and using his mind games to get the staff on his side and continue their research around TOMTIT and its empowering crystal, which is actually a time-displaced crystal half existing in Atlantis.

I mean, so far, this is pretty genius. It’s a shtick The Master has pulled multiple times already, and in a guise so thin that you can guess it from afar, before the story has done any reveals, and it’s called TOMTIT. I’m reading ‘tit’ there more as the term for an idiot, but it’s funny either way. And yes, that’s an acronym for time something-or-other. That’s part of the genius. Whoever stumbled across that in the writer’s room – script is mainly attributed to Robert Sloman – must’ve been proud of themselves.

There are some fantastic time shenanigans that require the brigadier and crew to walk in slow motion, and The Doctor balances a teacup on top of some spinning doodads, replicating a childhood prank that Gallifreans used to do to mess up time experiments in time school, as one does on Gallifrey. The Master, for his part in time-filling nonsense, ushers in a knight and some cannons from the past to combat the brigadier’s crew – surely the most effective means of slowing them down.

Later, we all travel to Atlantis, and weave some Atlantean lore into that of the DWverse.

Okay, in review – yes, this is all a bit more on the nose silly than even usual, but I maintain that it works especially well because of how it’s balanced: Pertwee, Katy Manning (companion Jo Grant), Richard Delgado (The Master), and Nicholas Courtney (the Brigadier) are all in peak form, and even the side characters this time, excepting maybe some of the Atlanteans, carry a lot of charm and swagger around, particularly Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates. “Peak form” here means a lot of good banter, which necessarily has to carry us through the inevitable downtimes of any six-part serial; Grant in particular acts “between” moments, putting a ton of character into the often thankless companion role – something which was poking around the Sloman’s script, as he was fiddling with feminism, if in a primitive form. It’s… still problematic, but gives Grant and the other females in the script more agency than usual, with the scientists unknowingly assisting The Master part of the charming side characters. And despite the repetitiveness of the story itself, there’s something that happens in each episode that skirts the usual template of just stalling by cat-and-mousing. I mean, that’s still what’s happening, but I can give each part a unique one sentence byline, whereas the average DW serial up ’til now general has more than one part that could be completely bundled with another. That that “something” has a kind of self-aware edge to it is the icing.

With all that justifying praise out of the way, the self-awareness doesn’t fully cover for the story’s crystal MacGuffin never quite making sense, and there are a couple of times Sloman just writes in some timey-wimey catchalls that kill any suspense. Those would be bigger hits if we didn’t have the overwhelming positives mentioned above.