Imagining a Timelash prequel

You know that would work for the next third doctor boxset

It's not a well-beloved story to say the least. You can tell by the sheer dearth of replies here. Still, I think The Mutants beats it for probably one of the worst stories of classic Who. Tear out all the bickering and you'd have a standard "Thwart the evil overlord" tale featuring a historical domain character; Bloodtide seems almost a reaction to Timelash in that respect. Most of the early Evelyn stories are reactions to how the Sixth Doctor's stories were told on television versus how they could have been told.

Okay, okay, I'll admit both have equally bad problems with padding (the cave wanderings and the TARDIS scenes, respectively). The villains of each are excellent, the makeup and performance for the Borad is stunning and the Marshall is the kind of bad guy that makes you grit your teeth and fume. Both have rather interesting premises too: the life-cycle of an alien world is jeopardised by human colonisation attempts and the Doctor returns to a formerly visited world to discover things have deteriorated rapidly in his absence. Their executions just needed a bit more work. Timelash suffered from some really bad characterisations as well as a wealth of padding and The Mutants has a lot of scenes that go on well past their natural length along with fairly one-dimensional characters.

I've actually tried editing these two stories and The Space Pirates (which strikes me as a bit of a misstep too) down to half their length and The Mutants for me is still a fairly dull story at three episodes, while Timelash actually makes a fairly decent twenty-five minute two-parter with all the guff removed and scenes swapped around.

It's not the worst Doctor Who I have ever encountered, not by a long shot but I do think it's down there somewhere. It's been beaten by others, which shall remain nameless in case a vengeful spirit of the forums swoops down and feeds me to his carrion birds. 

EDIT: Oh, and I will admit that the cliffhanger with the missiles firing off, the warrior blasted off into space and Jo Grant about to be blown out into space is pretty awesome.

It certainly has novelty, but I struggle with the characters because they feel a little too much like functionaries of the plot. He's the token rebel, he's the token warrior, he's the token scientist, it's very difficult to find something interesting about them. Nevertheless, he's a damn good script editor our Terrance Dicks. He's probably one of the reasons why many Third Doctor stories feel so watchable and why later Target novelisations of struggling stories like Meglos or The Invasion of Timeseem to do a lot better in print, even in their highly abridged forms.

Do you mean the mutants "The Mutants" or the pepperpots and sarong-wearers "The Mutants"?
Such distinctions are of vital importance to fandom at large.


Are they? You may be right, but I'm not seeing that. Care to elucidate?

The Jon Pertwee Mutants of much colour, strobe lighting, chromakey and location footage. The original Dalek serial was what originally got me back into Doctor Who over a decade ago, I daren't besmirch it for a moment.

Sure. It's just a running theory of mine, it's very likely that they weren't actively going out of their way to try and one up the televised stories.

- The Apocalypse Element more or less follows the same format of Attack of the Cybermen with Etra Prime/Earth soon giving way to Gallifrey/Telos at the story's midpoint with the Doctor sealed away for the second half trapped with the Eye of Harmony/locked into the makeshift jail cell with Flast. Both are rather action orientated tales and even have a returning adversary (and locale) via the Daleks and the Cybermen.

- Bloodtide feels a little bit like what Timelash tried to do in part by putting a historical domain character into a wholly fictional tale that helps strengthen their place in history (i.e. Charles Darwin and the Silurians vs. H.G. Wells and the Karfelons). It can also be seen as Jonathan Morris's attempt at doing something similar to The Mark of the Rani, but the connection there is tenuous at best.

- Project: Twilight deals head on with the kind of violence you'd see in Season 22 in general with exploding bodies, savaged corpses, burnings, gunshot wounds, grotesque mutilations, etc. If you were to pin a specific story to this one, I'd wager Revelation of the Daleks would make a good fit.

- The Sandman deals with an apparently evil Doctor in the same way Mindwarp tried to do, only with the clarification as to what was real and what a distortion of the truth. A lot of it is the Doctor bluffing not only just the enemy, but also his current companion and the listener as well.