Doctor Who – Time Crash – Review

The BBC has announced that this year’s Children in Need has taken in a record-breaking £19. That can’t be bad, can it?

As previously reported, much like two years ago, this year’s Children in Need featured a special mini Doctor Who episode.

Two years ago, the episode was a short post-regenerative sequence between David Tennant and Billie Piper that took place immediately prior to the events of The Christmas Invasion. This year’s mini-episode, Time Crash, inserted a few extra minutes into the concluding scenes of The Last of the Time Lords.

Synopsis

Martha Jones has just departed the TARDIS, and as the Doctor and his newly rebuilt TARDIS depart it experiences the titular time crash. As the Tenth Doctor frantically works his way around the TARDIS console trying to find out what happened, he bumps into the Fifth Doctor working his way around the opposite direction.

Two instances of the TARDIS have collided in time and space because the Tenth Doctor hadn’t fully completed his repairs of the TARDIS after the Master disassembled it. The two Time Lords trade a few barbed remarks, mostly the Tenth critiquing the Fifth and his wearing of a decorative vegetable, while the Fifth spends his time exasperated at this annoying “fan” who has somehow found his way into the TARDIS and has “…changed the desktop theme.” (Will that Joke still be funny when Microsoft Windows is just a stain on the Highway of Unpleasant Memories?)

When the Cloister Bell starts tolling, the Tenth Doctor leaps into action and saves the Universe, or at least a Belgium-sized part of it.

Catastrophe averted, the TARDISes begin to separate and the Fifth Doctor returns to his timeline, but not before the Tenth sums up his love for the old days and his old persona.

With a final warning from the Fifth Doctor about putting up his screens, the episode resumes the final scene from Last of the Time Lords by having the Titanic crash into the TARDIS console room.

Analysis

The are a whole raft of reasons why multi-Doctor stories generally fail. Most of them don’t bear mentioning here except for the “plot overload” aspect. In the Three Doctors and the Five Doctors, the circumstances that bring the Doctors together is a strained plot device that knocks the tried-and-true Doctor Who formula off its tracks.

In much the same way the early Davison years were hampered by too many companions vying for screen time, the Three Doctors and the (deceptively named) Five Doctors had (respectively) three and four lead characters vying for screen time. Ironically, the generally-abysmal Two Doctors is the better of the bunch because it brings together only two Doctors and because the circumstances of their meetings is both integral to the plot and not nearly so contrived as the other stories.

Time Crash can hardly be called an episode. It’s more of a brief vignette, and rather than involve a story, it just taps into the most popular aspect of multi-Doctor stories: the Doctors sniping at each other. This is always a fan favorite because it reflects the often possessive nature about fans’ choice of a favorite Doctor. That said, there’s a lot here to be recommend Time Crash.

One could almost picture David Tennant not being in the episode at all. Instead, it’s not at all hard to imagine writer Steven Moffat standing in Tennant’s place reciting all the lines. The whole thing feels rather like his tribute to a favorite Doctor and the continuity that they all represent. When the Tenth Doctor says to the fifth, “You were my Doctor!”, I can see Moffat’s face regenerating over the top of Tennant’s.

It’s an enjoyable, nostalgic piece you watch for the witty dialogue and on that level, it doesn’t fail.

Much though I normally hate contrived plot-devices, sometimes they can be brilliant. Having the Doctor “regenerate” to cover the change in the lead actor was a brilliant piece of nonsense, but it works famously. Steven Moffat has come damn close by “…short[ing] out the time differential.” This plot contrivance allows Davison’s Doctor to look older than he did at the time of his regeneration into the Sixth Doctor. In just a couple sentences, the door is not only opened to potential future multi-Doctor stories featuring even more decrepit previous Doctors, but goes a long way towards explaining the past multi-Doctor stories, too.

A not-as-welcome plot contrivance was the return of Timey-wimey, Moffat’s non-explanation of related, linear temporal events spread over multiple timelines violating what would appear to be inviolable causality. It worked brilliantly in Blink, but could rapidly bring about enormously illogical plots or plot holes if not tightly reigned-in.

Case-in-point, in Time Crash, the Tenth Doctor brilliantly works out a way to save the day, but the Fifth Doctor recognizes that even he isn’t brilliant enough to have worked out that risky solution in the time available. The explanation: The Fifth Doctor saw the Tenth save the day and remembered it. Now, as the Tenth, he remembers seeing himself saving the day in exactly that fashion, ergo, no one ever actually worked out how to save the day. That only works in timey-wimey world. But does timey-wimey work when the Fifth Doctor seems to know about Linda and her Doctor fans yet the Tenth Doctor didn’t seem to know about them when he met them? Or does it just make your head hurt like it does mine?

Still, I didn’t have high-hopes for Time Crash, but in the end, I enjoyed it immensely. I hope they don’t forget about it when the DVDs are released.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Doctor Who, Dr Who, Review, Television, UK, Video