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YMMV / Doctor Who S19 E7 "Time-Flight"

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the way the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa seem to get over Adric's death rather quickly, not to mention spending most of the story (and subsequent stories) acting like Adric was never part of their lives, really a case of Forgotten Fallen Friend? Or is it simply that the memory of what happened to him is so painful that the only way they can cope is to avoid talking about him as much as possible?
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • The entire fallout of Adric's death from the previous story is condensed into a minute-long scene where the TARDIS crew briefly mourns his death, and then the Doctor says they must carry on in his honour. After this, no more tears are shed for the boy and, apart from the brief encounter with an apparition of Adric later, the three of them continue on without even acknowledging him.
    • And speaking of non-acknowledgment of a character's death, Nyssa doesn't show much emotion to meeting the Master again, even though he killed her father Tremas and is still wearing his body. She mentions at one point about how he killed Tremas, but apart from that seeing her father's face again being worn by his killer hardly elicits any emotional trauma.
  • Condemned by History: Part One was the most-watched episode of John Nathan-Turner's entire tenure, and the last time the series would have more than ten million viewers until "Rose". In the Doctor Who Magazine end-of-year poll this story ranked fourth, ahead of both "Castrovalva" and "Kinda", both now well-regarded stories. But by the 90s and into the 00s, it was regularly voted as one of the five worst serials in the entire history of the show. In more recent years, critical opinion has softened somewhat, appreciating it for the sort of mad premise only Doctor Who could do - Concorde getting stuck in the Jurassic because of aliens - but criticism is still leveled at the flat direction, dodgy effects, and the Master's "Kalid" disguise, which is both racist and utterly pointless.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The Doctor uses his UNIT credentials and ponders that the Brigadier is probably a general by now. In the original script for "Battlefield", that did come to pass.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • A Concorde taking off from a prehistoric landscape and travelling through time would have been a difficult enough effect to pull off for a theatrical film at the time, let alone a story produced at the end of the season when the money's running out. As you can probably imagine, the effect is none too convincing, even if they did at least try to use footage of real Concordes where they could.
    • The Plasmatons look like even worse versions of Omega's gel guards from back in "The Three Doctors".
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan dealing with the aftermath of Adric's death could have been explored in much greater detail than it was here. Later expanded universe stories would address this by having the trauma of Adric's death play a much bigger role in the Doctor's relationship with his companions.

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