Rate and Discuss: Timelash

[SiHart]

Mailyn, you are requested to rate and discuss Timelash!

[Rob McCow]

Simultaneously awful and brilliant, Timelash is a text book exercise in how to get everything wrong.

Not everything about it is awful, but the few decent elements, such as the Borad make-up, are dragged down by everything else.

But really, it's the set design that is the most unforgivable element of the show. Ghastly flat white panels everywhere make it look like a cheap gameshow and that's before they actually enter the Timelash. It doesn't look like any kind of any world, or anything apart from a studio with a few walls stuck up and lit harshly. It drains every scene of it's energy and when you combine that with the wide range of acting styles on display, all of them ghastly, you get a program where every single moment looks rubbish.

On the other hand it's fairly entertaining to watch, though I couldn't really tell you why.

So there's a couple of The Sins of Timelash - what are you favourites?

[Anthony Williams]

I love this story. Why? Well, you'll have to wait for You and Who 2 to come out to find out!

[SiHart]

Plug, plug!

[Rob McCow]

All of these lines of dialogue are amazingly appalling, brilliantly bad and courageously crap. Actually, putting them all together as above makes for an interesting little poem (with some slight adjustment):

Save your breath for the Timelash, Doctor.
Most people depart with a scream.
Choose your next words carefully, Doctor.
The waves of time wash us all clean.
Then I'm afraid we are at war.
What all 500 of us?
Back from where you came, spirit of the glass.
To be perfectly frank, Herbert, neat blood brings me out in a rash.
Avaunt thee, foul fanged fiend;
As powerful
As a burnt out
Android.

[Andrew Curnow]

There are so many good ideas in Timelash, it's a shame that almost all of them are badly-handled or misjudged or just poorly realised.

-It's a rare classic series Celebrity Historical. But whereas The Unquiet Dead treats Charles Dickens with respect and as a real person, Timelash treats H G Wells as an idiot and even saves his name for a cheap 'end joke' even though I can't believe any viewers hadn't already worked it out.

-The 'lash itself. The moment near the start of part 2 where the Doctor goes into the timelash should be awesome - imagine an effects triumph, a swirling crazy maelstrom of storming time winds, the hideous shrieks of eternity... and then picture our hero bravely entering it, relying just on a length of rope and some new friends. Brilliant. Unfortunately, it's just the Doctor on an awfully cheap set, which is directed so flatly that it makes it even worse. Plus the script forgets to tell us why he's doing it beforehand.

-A dull citadel with no reflective surfaces is a nicely 'fairy-tale' idea, which I rather like and which could have worked well... but it looks like the production team just focussed on DULL.

And yet, I find it quite watchable - albeit with the same old 'season 22 must try harder' feeling. At the time it was a real shame, being the first new story to start after the cancellation announcement, and it's not easy to point at it and cry in outrage, "Why are you cancelling this?!"

On the plus side, the Borad is great, and there's a lovely moment where Denis Carey's revealed to be an android, plus I rather like the blue-faced oddly-spoken androids, who are eerily impersonatable!