These archived essays were written by your editors in a younger and more innocent time and place. We present them as a time capsule of a sillier day, and one in which it seemed as though Doctor Who‘s final days on TV had been and gone…
It is well known that the best way to watch Dimensions In Time, the charity skit produced for 1993’s Children In Need appeal, is without a single coherent thought in your head. The plot is so contrived that it makes no sense whatsoever, and fans have spent many years attempting to ignore its bid for canonicity. Unfortunately, Comic Relief’s Curse of Fatal Death was so excellent that everyone wants it to be part of Doctor Who’s official canon – which means that, out of fairness, DiT really should be too. This has caused many grown men to cry. As ever, The Millennium Effect is happy to provide a solution, and presented below are two vital plot points that the original scripts failed to elaborate upon. Prepare to be enlightened…
The Rani’s time trap.
At first glance, it seems that all she has done is fragment the time stream, causing occasional time jumps. However, given that the incarnations of the Doctor also change at these points, her plan was obviously far more advanced. The third Doctor was the original kidnappee, after the Rani stole his TARDIS and set up a force field around the East End, trapping the Doctor for good. Over time, various traffic-induced accidents led to the loss of a few regenerations, meaning that, when time “jumps a track”, the Doctor’s body is dated accordingly. The Rani set her time loop in action shortly after the Doctor’s sixth regeneration, and the Doctor starts running as soon as he realises that the time jumps might enable him to find the TARDIS before the Rani captures it. At the end of the adventure, the final [un-seen] time jump restores the Doctor to his third incarnation, and the forty years that the Doctor spent in the Queen Vic are erased from history. This also explains why the third Doctor is so fed up and uninterested during the action, having not yet come to terms with (his incarnation’s second!) imprisonment. The fourth Doctor’s message is sent from the “correct” time line, warning the third Doctor of the Rani’s plan. The seventh Doctor’s arrival in the TARDIS is actually a time blip for the audience, as this scene takes place after the third Doctor and Victoria attempt to escape in the ship (hence the seventh’s surprise at materialising in 1973. He is still caught in her web…)
The companions.
It is blatantly obvious that every companion in DiT shares the same memory and mind. It does not take a genius, then, to work out that none of them are who they seem. Shortly after visiting Exillon with Sarah-Jane, the third Doctor took a string of TARDIS voyages on his own, picking up a Kamelion-like toy on his travels. Before he had time to read the instruction manual and learn the joys of psychokinetics, they were both trapped by the Rani in East London. The android, being (like Kamelion) a sensitive thing, picks up on the Doctor’s thoughts, and transforms itself into the images of prospective companions (it’s a good guesser). The fifth Doctor pretends not to notice when a frumpy single mother appears next to Peri, and the android turns into Romana and legs it at the Doctor’s request. The single mother is, of course, a shape-shifting agent of the Rani’s (trying to be Nyssa). It is this nasty android that appears as Liz Shaw, Mike Yates, the Brigadier and Victoria, before the Doctor tricks it into becoming K9 – a machine devoid of emotion, and therefore with no desire to kill the Doctor. This explains how K9 is able to recite the Rani’s countdown, and why he disappears with the Rani’s TARDIS.
Hopefully this will help you to come to terms with Dimensions In Time in one of two ways. Either you can keep your copy, finally able to understand the plot you could never crack, or you can destroy it and never look back, content that the adventure never happened. Sadly, there are still a vast amount of glitches that have defied explanation…
- The Rani’s TARDIS materialises – apparently stationary – in space, right next to a time hole with tremendous sucking power. Hmmm.
- Since when has the Rani favoured neon ceilings, plush carpets and traveling companions?
- The severed heads of the first and second Doctors fly around her console room, much to her delight. Are we witnessing a day-dream, or something? We can only hope.
- The Rani’s Master Plan seems to involve controlling evolution by collecting genetic data from every race in the universe. (Surely all she needed to do was collect a pot’s worth of primal slime and then control it’s conditions? What exactly does she plan on doing with all those aliens inside her TARDIS, besides letting them run around after the Doctor when her trap fails?) At the same time, she intends to drive the Doctor insane by trapping his various incarnations in a forty-year time loop surrounding London’s East End. However, she seems pretty narked when he susses what she’s done, and moves in after him with a bunch of nasty monsters (all of which the Doctor had defeated before. This may explain the alien’s motives in wanting him dead, but not the Rani’s belief that they’ll be of any use). The viewer is also left wondering how much faith the Rani had in her own plan – why didn’t she leave the Doctor to his death, not check up on him every five minutes? And what has he done to piss her off so much, anyway?
- Given that the fourth Doctor has never had the privilege of meeting his other selves, what makes him think that they have ignored his advice in the past? (And don’t believe the theory that his DiT appearance is set after a multiple Doctor yarn that has yet to be written. It’s blatantly balls. We want answers, not excuses!).
- Just where exactly is he sitting? Either it is the TARDIS’ psychedelic chamber, a groovy communications room (such as the one from which the Master joined the Doctor’s trial), or a trap created by the Rani (it could be the “evil” that the Doctor refers to – those Lego trees do look pretty lethal).
- Why does he need a cheap microphone to contact his other selves, when the rest of them just squint?
- Why?
- When time jumps occur, why does the location change?
- Mel comments that flares are back without knowing that it isn’t the 70s.
- Susan has forgotten that her grandfather (and herself, presumably) can regenerate.
- The East End locals cannot see the host of alien monsters chasing the Doctor, and, according to the fifth Doctor, can’t see the Time Lord and co. either. But they can.
- The fifth Doctor tries running back to the TARDIS – despite it being in a different time stream. (Was he hoping to “ride” a time jump?)
- The Rani wants to take the Doctor and friends on “a very long journey”. Why, then, did she not capture him in the same way as she picked up the Cyberman and the Gallifreyan Chancellor (who can’t have wanted to hide in pink roundels… perhaps they too took part in a jolly run-around first?) And if she wants to whisk him away with her, why does she spend most of Part One talking as if she wants him dead?
- What the hell does Liz Shaw think she’s playing at?
- For how many years has Bessie been parked behind the Queen Vic?
- The Rani doesn’t seem to mind when residents of London steal her prisoners (perhaps she can’t see them).
- If two “time brains” is all it takes to overload the Rani’s computer, why didn’t it pop when she collected two early incarnations of the Doctor? Or was that why she let them buzz around the console room?
- Why has she kept clones of so many aliens when all she needs is their genetic data? Just how big is her TARDIS?
- How is Sil able to float?
- Why would she transfer a time tunnel to Greenwich? Why not Birmingham? Or Norfolk?
- Why??
- When the time tunnel sucks in the Rani’s TARDIS, what causes the first and second Doctor’s heads to float back out? Are they still spinning around out there?
- And just how did the Rani escape from the Tetraps, anyway?
