For surprisingly the first time, I must apologise for some of the quotes here. The intent might not be the worst yet but the choices of phrase definitely are.

As Miles and Wood point out in About Time, with Season 19, Doctor Who took the Triangle timeslot and, with ‘Time-Flight’, seems to take that to heart (3). Certainly, the only explanation for the bland opening sentence (4) is that transatlantic travel is so exotic that it provides a hook in itself. The early paragraphs double down on this with lots of detail about Concorde.  Oddly to me, the focus of these details is not the experience of flying by Concorde (5) but rather of actually flying Concorde (6). This might make sense, however, in light of the Triangle connection, which itself focused on a ferry crew. It’s possible though that the glamour for an 80s audience in fact lay in working in such an environment rather than in being wealthy enough to be a passenger, and the far from attractive roll call of passengers, a ‘Blue-rinsed American matrons, a pop star and his manager, financiers’ (7), suggests this might at least have been how Grimwade saw it. Contrasting that tawdry clientele, Concorde itself, described through Tegan’s eyes, dazzles even those as well travelled as her (8), a ‘graceful’, ‘elegant’, powerful ‘wild creature’, the taming of which by its pilots confers on them a masterful air that commands admiration (9).

    Jim Sangster has a not unreasonable and more cynical reading of Grimwade’s opening, suggesting it was a way to dump ‘all of the extra research’ he’d done (10). That cynicism feels a good fit Target’s newfound strategy with this release – this, according to Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial is the first hardback to substantially precede its paperback and sets the precedent until 1988 (11). Assuming this wasn’t for the benefit of libraries, and the fact the fact they made one exception for the release of The Five Doctors alongside its TV broadcast would suggest it wasn’t, this feels like either an attempt to rinse the keenest fans regardless of the loss of a more casual market or a realisation that that casual market had by now dissipated and they may as well milk the remaining fans as dry as possible. Either way, the range seems to be doubling down on a readership it assumes is locked in and Grimwade could be said to be delivering a book to suit.

    There aren’t even any little bits of tidying up that offer something to comment on in even the slimmest of Dicks novelisations. Hoping to find out how the Master survived Castrovalva? Tough (12). Why the Master was disguised as Kalid? There’s a hint the form was in some way ‘a focus for the minds of the evil Xeraphin’ (13) but not why they might be so responsive to a large, grotesque parody of an east Asian wizard. What caused the dissolution of the Kalid disguise? Perhaps Nyssa and Tegan’s ‘incursion into the Sanctum’ (14), though I’m not 100% sure. It even raises new questions, such as why briefly appearing before the Doctor in this disguise before melting ‘had humiliated his rival’.

    Where Grimwade does add a bit of extra detail, as with Tegan’s remaining on Earth at the end of the story, things become actively confusing. Nyssa and Tegan share a ‘sentimental tête-à-tête’ (15) – for all of three lines – following the latter’s ‘pang of nostalgia’ (16) at seeing planes taking off at an airport and then, as Nyssa and the Doctor prepare to depart and he wonders ‘Where's Tegan?’ (17), Tegan is shown looking at a departure board and feeling ‘sentimental’ despite her best efforts and seemingly deciding to prioritise her ‘career’ and ‘exciting future’ (18). It’s not clear whether her sentimental pangs are brought on by air travel or life in the Tardis, but either way it feels like the book is establishing that Tegan thinks she should stay on Earth and the Doctor is assuming she’s still travelling with him. Come the closing paragraphs, the Doctor’s taking off without her, admittedly under pressure from an irate constable, and Tegan’s watching him disappear whilst wishing ‘she hadn't dithered in the Terminal building’ (19). There is honestly no transition, a fact that’s all the odder considering a perfect insight into Tegan’s final decision is actually given (20) but in Chapter Two.

    The final bit of this drum to bang is the way Grimwade manages to offer even less reflection upon the death of Adric than he did on TV. The Tardis crew are, admittedly, said to be ‘upset’ (21), Tegan and Nyssa especially so (22) as they realise how little they’d actually got to know him (23). When later confronted by a phantom Adric, ‘the girls’ are also said to suffer ‘Grief, uncertainty, longing’ and ‘distress’ (24) but then press on and that’s that. What’s odd with all three of these abscesses is that they feel so much easier to fill in prose than in a TV script. Around each of them, Grimwade is exploiting the novelisations ability to offer up interior monologue, the reader is actually privy to Tegan and Nyssa’s feelings about Adric, to Tegan’s reflections on her fledgling career, to the Master’s self-rationalising Kalid, but it’s utterly uninformative.

    To be fair on Grimwade, he might have felt these would have been unnecessary digressions hampering the pace of the story to no avail. Especially regarding Adric’s death, given Earthshock wasn’t even yet published, he might have felt dealing with its ending was even less important than it was on TV. Were any of that the case, and he were beholden to his own Hulkean graph plotting pagecount against TV runtime, something went very wrong. The third broadcast episode, the one which, according to Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles, ‘should have been the guts of the plot’ (25) – and that ‘should have’ tells you how well it went on TV – all gets squeezed, as Jason A Miller points out, ‘into a single chapter’ (26). That’s not actually as bad as I’m making it sound – Parts Three and Four each get about 25 pages while Parts One and Two each get about 30 so Grimwade doesn’t actually start desperately cutting the story to the bones as he realises he’s running out of pages. However, these very uneven chapters do have an odd effect; as the book goes on and on, the chapters get longer and longer making you feel, if like me you prefer to break between chapters, increasingly like you’re being held hostage. That might very much be a personal take, but it doesn’t speak of a novelisation sculpted to pacy perfection.

    The one possibly interesting aspect to Time-Flight is Grimwade’s very particular idea of how the Doctor functions. Where other stories have presented the character appearing initially comical to others, here he’s viewed with downright contempt. Airport controller Douglas Sheard takes against him on sight (27) and maintains a ‘withering scepticism’ (28) in the face of his explanations of the Concorde’s disappearance, even trying to simply ignore him (29). The Concorde crew make even less effort to hide their initial disdain, their ‘mocking smiles’ (30) perfectly visible to the Doctor, and become ‘almost hostile’ the moment things get serious, viewing his ‘time-warp nonsense’ a dangerous distraction (31). Even more damning is how, the moment they think they’ve returned to Heathrow, they just feel ‘quite sorry’ for him (32) – they think he’s such a clown, they can’t even stay angry at him.

    In some ways, this is simply a by-product of the shorthand Grimwade employs to get the Doctor quickly into the story. Thanks to the Doctor name-dropping UNIT, the airport and Sir John Sudbury are put in contact with each other just in time for the Doctor to be placed in charge of the situation. Where this goes beyond mere plot-wrangling, though, is how obsequious Grimwade makes all the figures of airport authority. Duty officer Andrews, who’s been briefly ‘icily polite’ (33) then quickly pretty hostile (34), suddenly views the Doctor as an ‘important person’ (35) and becomes ‘rather more courteous’ (36), for which the prose mocks him as ‘pompous’. Similarly, Sheard’s manner on the phone with Sir John is described as oily (37). It feels as though Grimwade is inviting the readers to deride these airport personnel for kowtowing to the hierarchy despite their clear lack of faith in the instructions passed down. In that context, the Doctor’s message to Sudbury,  giving simply his name ‘as mysteriously as if he were James Bond himself’ (38), makes the Doctor complicit in this hollow power play, unconcerned that his authority comes from nothing but his connections.

    This ties in with a general sense of fragility in the Doctor’s confrontation with the Master: when the latter suggests Tegan and Nyssa might be dead, the Doctor has to fight back ‘a feeling of panic’ (39); when the Xeraphin ask for help, the Doctor has ‘never felt more impotent’ (40); when the Tardis crew get trapped and the Master transmits the Xeraphin sarcophagus, the Doctor is ‘abject with despair’ (41). That last example goes quite a bit further actually: having decided ‘the Master has finally defeated me’ – and that’s the bit that seems to upset him rather than what the Master might now do with the Xeraphin – he becomes ‘profoundly depressed’ (42). Tegan and Nyssa are the ones who make an effort do something about the situation while he can’t even be bothered to notice what they’re doing, never mind join in. Once there’s hope, he does at least have the decency to feel ‘ashamed that he had been willing to give up so easily’ (43). It’s reminiscent of how quickly he was deflated by the revelation of the Master’s presence, only feeling ‘his self-confidence returning’ on realising the Master’s stranded himself (44). As with his authority coming only from connections, it seems the Doctor’s ability to take on the Master comes from his friends’ persistent efforts and the Master’s consistent ineptitude.

    In fact the Doctor does eventually win over the Concorde crew through his actions. Though Grimwade oddly omits Stapley’s line about developing ‘a very healthy respect for the Doctor’ (45), they do concede that he’s not ‘such a fool as he appeared’ (46), discover that, given a chance, he can command ‘their attention’ (47) and are even defensive of him in the face of Professor Hayter’s dismissive attitude, not only ‘irritated’ by the professor’s ‘scepticism’ but thinking the Doctor’s explanations, presumably obviously enough to be clear to all but the most pig-headed, ‘made good sense’ (48) – needless to say, the Doctor’s explanations are no more transparently sensible than they were in Heathrow.

    He also eventually wins over Professor Hayter, but that’s where things really fall apart. The fact that Hayter’s something of a bully (49) who relishes putting others ‘in [their] place’ (50) sets his conversion up as the climax of this stand regarding the Doctor’s authority. It’s also promising that he seems to value doers, such as a Concorde pilot, over, as he sees it, often ‘woefully inadequate qualifications’ (51) – the Doctor generally succeeds through applied rather than academic means. Worrying, however, is the suggestion that Professor Hayter is ‘narrow-minded’ because he’s a scientist (52) and the way ‘unscientific’ is used by both Hayter (53) and earlier on Sheard (54) as a way to dismiss out of hand anything they don’t personally understand. While Sheard will by the end of the story become the butt of the joke for remaining unchanged (55), Hayter, also witnessing a Tardis dematerialise (56), has his eyes opened to such an extent that he’s ‘prepared to believe almost everything’ (57), which hardly sounds any better than Sheard’s refusal to believe anything.

    Hayter’s moment of conversion is altogether odd: his insistence on hallucinations and miasmas (58) is clearly not convincing even to himself – he’s described as gawping ‘like an elderly goldfish’ and stammering ‘weakly’ – but the thing that really seems to break him is the Doctor’s attack on ‘his academic integrity’ (59) which, as far as I can work out, involves reworking a bit of Descartes and using Hayter’s university town to brand him primitive (60). ‘Darlington Man’ as a play on the likes of Lindow Man, suggesting Hayter’s some early specimen of human, is clear enough; the ‘academic integrity’ bit makes me wonder if it’s somehow also being derogatory about Darlington university but I can’t quite see how that would work as those place names are literally just about where the bodies are found, so maybe just saying he’s a fossil is adequate academic assault. Still difficult to see how it undermines his integrity, though, especially as Hayter’s immediate reaction to opening his mind to the events around him is to dream not of the advances he could help bring to humanity but of ‘honorary degrees, lecture tours ...’ (61).

    Threatening to perhaps give some meaning to any of the above is the moment when the Doctor mentions, without evidence, that a pillar’s bigger on the inside and suddenly Hayter ‘all but genuflected’ (62). This worshipful act (63) indicates the moment a man the Doctor has branded a ‘Doubting Thomas’ (64) comes to believe and echoes the earlier description of Roger Scobie’s mockery of the Doctor as ‘sheer devilment’ (65) – challenging the Doctor is to be seduced by Satan, crediting him is to recognise the miraculous. Unfortunately, it also contradicts the moment when Stapley, starting to sense things might indeed be turning strange, ‘prayed for a simple explanation’(65) – where Hayter’s religious moment is an act of surrender to the Doctor’s explanation of events, Stapley’s is a last desperate stab at resisting it.

    That contradiction, however, might be for the best because the alternative would set up not only a tension between science and religion but also between western and eastern faiths. Where Hayter’s reaction to the Doctor was a gesture of traditionally Catholic worship, the Doctor’s reaction to Kalid, who at least in speech resembles ‘a muezzin summoning the faithful to prayer’ (67), is to bow ironically (68). Now, whether the bowing is actually supposed to be a reflection of how you’d worship in a mosque or not isn’t massively clear in itself – it is, I’ll be honest, far from as loaded a description as genuflection and would equally apply to, say, worship in a synagogue – but it does tie in with a wider streak of anti-orientalism (and I’ve chosen the imperial-era term orientalism here because it feels like exactly where Grimwade’s coming from) in Time-Flight that serves to poison the whole endeavour.

    Some of this anti-orientalism, admittedly, just feels a bit clumsy, as when all the talk of the Indian rope trick sets up the description of the hypnotised airline crew and passengers as ‘like the spectators of the Indian mesmerist’ (69), a turn of phrase that would probably not stick out were their identification as ‘victims’ of the Master written in such a way as to suggest spectators of the rope trick were similarly victims. Similar is Tegan’s reference to her experience in the Tardis in Logopolis as a Chinese puzzle (70), which feels like a very tenuous description for effectively being lost in a maze (71) and makes you wonder where Grimwade’s oriental obsession is coming from.

    More problematic is the comment that Kalid’s height was ‘remarkable’ ‘for a Chinaman’ (72) – the term may be excused by the time of writing but the observation, delivered not from the perspective of any character whose own narrow experience could offer an explanation but by the omniscient eye of the narration, is awkward.

    Ensuring all these moments are cast in the worst possible light, however, is the description of Kalid as ‘no ordinary man […], with his yellow oriental face, bloated like the body of a drowned dog and gangrenous with age and excess’ (73). As with the first example, it’s just possible to read this as clumsy phrasing – the elision of ‘no ordinary man’ with ‘oriental face’ seems accidental with his bloated features actually being what makes him unusual; his yellowness might be more a reflection of his diseased appearance, though an idiosyncratic choice of colour for gangrene; and the ‘excess’ that’s ravaged his features may not be leaning into old-fashioned stereotypes of over-indulged Asian rulers and may be designed to indicate Kalid’s specific debaucheries – but the sheer volume and density of grotesque and outdated descriptors coupled with the tone of utter disgust make it difficult to have any faith in such a reading.

    And, once you’ve read this bit, it’s difficult to give anything in Time-Flight the benefit of the doubt. Everything becomes tainted by the idea that Grimwade sees the battle between light and dark as like the battle between East and West and that the Doctor, with his pretension to James Bond and his chums in the right places, is just the sort of shining beacon we need to save us from the rationality that stops us recognising our enemies as the foreign, mystic evil they really are. I never thought I’d crave Dicks for a more progressive view of the world but thank God he’s back next book.