Doctor Who: The Time Monster

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The Time Monster is the fifth and final serial of Doctor Who Season 9, originally broadcast in six episodes from 20 May to 24 June 1972. It was written by Robert Sloman and directed by Paul Bernard. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Roger Delgado as the Master.

At a research institute the Master, posing as Professor Thascalos, uses the TOMTIT experiment to meddle with time, creating freezes and visitors from other eras while he seeks to summon Kronos, a powerful Chronovore linked to ancient Atlantis. The Doctor and Jo, backed by UNIT, race to contain the growing chaos as a duel of TARDISes begins and a desperate “time ram” is considered.

Episode 1

At the Newton Institute, a gleaming experiment called TOMTIT (Transmission of Matter through Interstitial Time) prepares for its first full run. The Doctor arrives with Jo and UNIT to observe, suspicious of the project lead, a suave “Professor Thascalos” whom he recognises under the beard and charm: the Master. Dr Ruth Ingram and her eager assistant Stuart Hyde talk waveforms and interstices while the Master quietly swaps components for something far more dangerous.

When TOMTIT fires, time wrinkles. A medieval knight flickers on a modern road; clocks run molten; a technician ages and then snaps back like elastic. The Doctor throws together a crude time sensor and hears a deeper rhythm in the oscillation: something being called. UNIT seals the building as the Master coaxes the apparatus to higher power, citing “earth-shaking breakthroughs.” Outside, the Brigadier fields frantic calls about a vanished train that arrives before it departs.

Inside, Stuart is blasted by a secondary pulse and crumples, shock-white and old. The Doctor stabilises him with a humming probe and warns that the machine is opening a door, not merely peeking through it. In a second test the air grows razor-cold, a robed figure steps straight out of antiquity, and the Master smiles: he has summoned a High Priest of Atlantis.

Episode 2

The newcomer names himself Krasis and kneels not to Thascalos but to a crystal sigil the Master presents: a shard tied to Kronos, the Chronovore. With Krasis as guide, the Master tunes TOMTIT to draw power from beyond time, and the lab goes mad: Stuart yo-yos between child and elder, phones ring before they’re dialled, and a Roundhead skirmisher staggers through the car park.

The Doctor moderates the chaos with countersignals and gets Stuart mostly restored, but he can’t stop the Master using TOMTIT as a beacon. Kronos’s presence brushes the room like wings on glass; the building shakes, windows spider. On the coast, a lost warplane roars into the present, drops a bomb that never lands, and blinks away. The Brigadier orders a cordon; Benton and Yates wrangle civilians who keep meeting their past selves.

The Master completes a key swap, pockets the crystal, and vanishes into his TARDIS hidden in a storeroom. The Doctor bolts for his own ship, Jo at his heels. TOMTIT, left humming, keeps leaking time. In the console room, the Doctor explains the stakes: Kronos feeds on duration itself. If the Master gains full control, history is cattle. He locks a pursuit course. Somewhere in the vortex, a laugh answers him.

Episode 3

The TARDISes duel in the time stream like fencers: the Master throws temporal eddies that slow UNIT to treacle at the Institute; the Doctor counters with jolts that snap minutes back into place. He warns Jo about a last resort called a time ram: two TARDISes colliding head-on to mutual annihilation. The Master opens a viewscreen, jeers about “old houses and older gods,” and breaks away toward a fixed point he calls Atlantis.

On Earth, Ruth and Stuart jury-rig TOMTIT into a crude stabiliser that buys the Brigadier room to move again; he drives for the lab just as a hoplite strides through a hedge and vanishes, baffled and angry. In the vortex, the Master hurls a slow-time shell that crawls up the Doctor’s hull; the Doctor outruns it by pushing the ship “forward” inside itself, a paradox he shrugs through with twinkling confidence.

Jo refuses to be left behind and braces by the console as the Master dives into the past. The Doctor follows, warning that Atlantis is not myth but memory: and that Kronos once answered its priests. He lands in a sun-bright city of pillars and fish-scale mosaics. In the high temple, the Master steps from his box with courtly bows and a promise to restore lost glory.

Episode 4

Atlantis breathes incense and politics. King Dalios, old and sharp, distrusts wonders; Queen Galleia, brilliant and proud, warms to the Master’s flattery. Krasis calls him chosen of the gods and points to the sacred crystal that focuses Kronos’s favour. The Master whispers of prosperity and power; Dalios hears chains. The Doctor and Jo are seized, then released to debate in the throne room.

He warns that Kronos cannot be bargained with; the Master argues that only weak men fear strong tools. Galleia banishes Jo to the temple cells and demands proof. The Master arranges spectacle: a bull-headed champion, the Minotaur, drives the Doctor into a labyrinth of mirrors. He survives by quick feet and a cape, subduing the beast without killing it, and wins Dalios’s respect. That earns him one audience too many.

The Master engineers a coup with Galleia’s unwitting aid, declares Dalios obsolete, and seizes the sacred crystal under Krasis’s chant. Jo slips her bonds, whispers courage to frightened handmaids, and scavenges tools while guards jostle to pick the winning side. In the temple, the Master aligns the crystal the way TOMTIT taught him. The air dims. A shadow with wings and eyes like falling clocks leans into the world. Kronos is listening.

Episode 5

All restraint tears. The Master feeds the crystal a precise cadence; Kronos descends as a cyclone of white light. Columns shear, banners whip to ash, and courtiers drop to their knees or run. Dalios confronts Galleia with bitter kindness and falls, a casualty of politics more than gods. The Doctor reaches the altar and yanks the crystal askew; Kronos shrieks and withdraws, leaving wreckage and a Master incandescent with fury.

He tightens his grip, arrests the Doctor and Jo, and promises to pluck Kronos like a harp once the “meddlers” are out of the way. Jo mouths “trust me” as soldiers drag them apart. Outside, Atlantis fractures: loyalists rally, slaves flee, and Krasis rings bronze bowls until his hands bleed. The Master resets the crystal to full invocation, this time to harvest Kronos rather than host him.

The Doctor is hauled before Galleia and pleads from the heart, not the stars, that she has been used. She wavers, then orders his release a breath too late. Kronos arrives in full, free of leashes, and the city begins to die: walls folding like paper, seas pouring through streets. The Master bolts for his TARDIS with the crystal; the Doctor dives for his, Jo on his heels, as Atlantis drowns in light.

Episode 6

The chase ends where time has no measure: the white, roaring nowhere that is Kronos’s domain. The Master drags the Doctor’s TARDIS alongside and demands a surrender, threatening a time ram. The Doctor, voice steady, offers it first: total mutual destruction to spare creation the Master’s victory. Jo, pale, whispers “do it” if he must. Kronos appears, now vast and curious, a being outside morality that feeds on instants as a whale does plankton.

The Doctor argues for mercy; the Master argues for mastery. Kronos plucks both TARDISes like toys, freezes the ram, and judges. The Doctor and Jo are released unharmed to a floating “garden” of stillness. The Master writhes in a loop of his own ambitions until Jo, heartsore, asks that he be spared. Kronos, amused by compassion, lets him go. The Master grins, salutes, and flees into the vortex.

Back on Earth, Ruth and Stuart shut TOMTIT down with a clonk; time-slips flatten; the knight never appears; the bomb never almost falls. At UNIT, the Brigadier demands a report that makes sense and gets tea instead. Benton blinks, the only man who remembers being younger than his boots. The Doctor looks at the sky, thoughtful. Power asked for worship; Atlantis obliged. This time, mercy answered back.

Themes

Big, brazen, and a little bonkers, The Time Monster blends lab-coat sci-fi with mythic spectacle. It lacks the sleek urgency of Day of the Daleks and the maritime punch of The Sea Devils, and it doesn’t reach the eerie cohesion of The Dæmons or the white-knuckle intensity of Inferno.

Yet its imagination (TOMTIT, Kronos, and a TARDIS-within-TARDIS showdown) keeps it lively. As a season capstone it lands mid-tier for the Third Doctor: uneven but memorable, buoyed by Jon Pertwee’s moral steel and Roger Delgado’s purring menace.

Threaded through the era’s tapestry, it extends the Master arc from Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Dæmons, and The Sea Devils, leaving him free to scheme again in Frontier in Space. Its occult-meets-science tone nods back to The Dæmons, while the Atlantis strand echoes the series’ earlier foray in The Underwater Menace.

Most of all, its Time Lord tinkering and TARDIS brinkmanship foreshadow the cosmic reset of The Three Doctors, which loosens the Doctor’s exile and opens the road toward later high points like Planet of the Daleks and the ecological reckoning of The Green Death.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Third Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Third Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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