Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Written by Robert Sloman
Produced by Barry Letts
Directed by Paul Bernard
You remember in Season Eight when all five stories featured the Master and four out of five featured UNIT (and even the one that didn't at least had a cameo from the Brigadier)? The show has clearly backed off from that level of investment in the Pertwee era format. Sure, we saw the Master pretty recently in "The Sea Devils", but we haven't seen UNIT since "Day of the Daleks", and we haven't seen UNIT and the Master in the same story all season long. The rest has done them good. The script has a certain sense of scale, and finally having all of the UNIT family characters back in the same story underscores this. I think the cast is definitely trying to raise their game for this one, trying to recreate the astounding popularity of last year's "The Daemons".
The thing about "The Daemons", though, is that in addition to being much-loved and well-remembered, it was actually pretty dreadful. I've never really been able to account for its popularity. "The Time Monster" is just like "The Daemons" in a lot of ways, except that it is not very popular. Both stories fetishize the elements of the UNIT family, as if merely putting Pertwee, Manning, Roger Delgado, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin and John Levene in a story together automatically makes it great. All of the characters get to do their signature bits, and there's a UNIT fight scene thrown in at some point, because that is evidently the law. But the story, once again, is incoherent rubbish painfully stretched out to the requisite length by endless tedium. Actually, the tedium hasn't quite set in yet, but just you wait. For now, we have to be content with the fact that the story isn't making much sense.
The Master is posing as Prof. Thascales, conducting time experiments designed to summon Kronos, a chronovore. At this point, we don't know much of anything about who or what Kronos really is, but it has something to do with Atlantis, and the Doctor is clearly rattled. There's some nice tension arising out of this, but little else, and when the plot isn't meandering around stalling for time, it's being pushed along mainly by the fact that the Doctor happens to know things. Again, that's a lot like "The Daemons", where the entire first episode consisted of the Doctor being extremely anxious for reasons he hadn't yet gotten around to explaining.
But already there are worrying signs of arbitrary plotting. One minor character becomes prematurely aged as a result of the side effects of the Master's experiment. Basically, weird stuff just happens with time whenever anyone uses the Master's equipment. I don't mind weird stuff happening, but none of it really relates to the story in any meaningful way. It's just weird stuff happening for its own sake. At this point in the story, it isn't entirely clear that these weird things are arbitrary, but it is starting to look that way.
I told myself I wasn't going to mention this, but I can't help it. In the guise of Prof. Thascales, the Master is using time experiments as a cover for trying to summon this Kronos. He calls his machine TOMTIT, which stands for "Transference of Matter Through Interstitial Time". As demonstrated, it's basically a bulky version of the transporter out of "Star Trek", capable of sending a milk bottle from one room into the next room. The only noteworthy thing about it is that it's called TOMTIT. If I ever get too old to get a surge of juvenile amusement from the acronym TOMTIT, please kill me.
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