Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Nine

So... Peri is dead and the Matrix has been tampered with to incriminate the Doctor. Doubtless, now that we are more than halfway through the story, the Doctor will be looking for a way to exonerate himself and at the same time bring the true culprits to justice. To do this he will need to investigate the Matrix and find out who had the means and opportunity to set all of this up, and the motive to frame the Doctor for the crimes he is accused of.

Not really, what he'll actually do is attempt to clear his name by using the Matrix (despite knowing full well by now that it cannot be relied upon to show the truth) to show the Inquisitor a Doctor Who story from "the future."

Valeyard: "The future? Is it going to be the Doctor's defence that he improves?"

Doctor: "Precisely."

When the production team came up with the idea of using the basic plot structure from A Christmas Carol as the structure for The Trial of a Time Lord* I'm not sure they entirely thought through all of the implications for how the 'Christmas future' bit would work - not just being set in the future (which Doctor Who does all the time) but in the Doctor's own future, which hasn't happened to him yet, which therefore means he'll be seeing things he hasn't even done yet. Does this then mean that when he does do them he has to do what he did when he saw what he would do, or can he do things differently and thus change the future that he saw back when he was seeing it?

I somehow doubt that the writers even thought about this enough to become as confused about it as I am now.

The Doctor's story is set in the year 2986, a suspiciously exact 1,000 years in the future of when Trial of a Time Lord was made, on the spaceship Hyperion Three - named after the Investigator's spaceship in The Mutants perhaps? The first scene we see on board the Hyperion Three is before the TARDIS has even arrived, although the question of how this footage could have been captured for the Matrix is of secondary importance to all the questions that arise over the fact that, being set in the Doctor's own personal future, none of this has happened to him yet. Chief among these questions being: if the Doctor can use the Matrix to see his own personal future, why didn't he just use it to find out what will happen at the end of Trial of a Time Lord?

The first character we meet is Professor Lasky, played by Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman. We also meet some other characters but who cares about them; they're nothing to do with cats.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor is with a new Companion, Mel (Bonnie "Mel" Langford), who he has picked up at some point in between the end of Trial of a Time Lord and this bit of Trial of a Time Lord. Confused cat is confused. Mel is making the Doctor do exercise, because the production team is having a go at Colin Baker er, no, that would actually seem to be the only justification for this bit:

Mel: "It's your waistline I'm concerned about."

She also gives him "carrot juice" to nom, which he does not like. I am forced to conclude that the only reason he let her in the TARDIS in the first place is because he looked into the future and saw that he had to.

They receive a mayday message from the Hyperion Three and the TARDIS materialises there. While it is not yet as blatantly obvious as it will later become that this story is a pastiche of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, we get an early hint from the Doctor's line

"Let's exercise the grey cells for once, shall we, rather than the muscles."

The Doctor also says that he can "sense" that "there's evil in this place." While this is not a wholly new Time Lord ability being displayed by the Doctor, it is rarely seen - he says something similar upon first arriving in The War Machines. The Doctor and Mel go out and get captured by some security mannys.

They are taken to the bridge where the Doctor recognises the manny in charge as being "Captain Tonker Travers," although he insists he has been promoted to "Commodore." This is a bit like when the Doctor met Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in The Invasion only to find he had been promoted to Brigadier since the Doctor last met him, except that we have never actually seen Tonker Travers before. He must have met him before in a story that hasn't been made yet. Mew. Travers says

"Of all the places in this infinite universe, you have to turn up on my ship."

which is an amateur-hour misquoting of Casablanca... unless, of course, he's quoting accurately from one of the many remakes of that film made between now and 2986? We get some hints about the Doctor's previous meeting with Travers from their dialogue:

Travers: "On the previous occasion that the Doctor's path crossed mine, I found myself involved in a web of mayhem and intrigue."

Doctor: "I saved your ship though, Commodore."

Travers: "Yes, you did. Though whether it would have been at risk without your intervention is another matter."

So we can see why the Doctor didn't choose that story to show the court, then.

Mel goes to the ship's incredibly futuristic space gymnasium, where the technology is so advanced that it looks like gym apparatus from the 1980s. After Mel ignores Professor Lasky and her assistant acting suspiciously right next to her, an unseen character gives her a clue (Lionel Blair?) and then disappears mysteriously. If Mel was a PC in a tabletop RPG, this would be a clear example of the GM having had enough of her player's bullshit.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is on the pull... or possibly just trying to get some clues from Janet (dammit!) the stewardess. Mr Rudge, the ship's chief of security, tells the Doctor that he's "due to retire after this voyage," which is as good a way of indicating that he won't be surviving to the end of the story as if he had kiffed Avon... though not nearly as much fun, lol.

There's an emergency in the waste disposal room, which Travers summarises for us:

"Whoever's been dumped in there has been pulverised into fragments and sent floating into space, and in my book that's murder."

I didn't think anything had a chance of matching BRIAN BLESSED'S "I AM A MAN OF ACTION, NOT REASON!" for best line of the story, but that is certainly a contender.

As Mel goes off alone to investigate the ship's "hydroponics centre" for clues, the Doctor in the courtroom interrupts the story - which was otherwise at risk of setting a record for the longest uninterrupted section of trial evidence - to claim that it has been changed:

"I can't explain, but I have a feeling I am being manipulated, that the evidence is being distorted."

The Inquisitor doesn't believe him, and says

"Doctor, either you continue with your submission or I must consider the evidence for the defence to be concluded."

which seems a rather arbitrary ruling, but does at least raise the stakes for the Doctor - he must now put himself in the paws of what the Matrix will show, even though he knows that an unknown adversary is capable of changing it. It's contrived, but at least it's dramatic.

Mel meets Mr Edwardes, played by Simon "Inspector Kite in The Bill" Slater. I know he didn't start playing Inspector Kite until a year after this was made, but I think that, since it is set in the future, he must have been in The Bill by then. Colin Baker (1997), Lynda Bellingham (2004) and Michael Jayston (2000 and 2006) all certainly had.

Edwardes offers to accompany Mel into the hydroponics centre. He says

"Now I'll go first. We don't want you breaking your neck. At least, not until..."

We'll never know when he did want Mel to break her neck, because at this point he gets electriced.

Crash-zoom to the Doctor's... wait, the Doctor isn't even in this scene!

It doesn't even crash-zoom to Mel's face. Instead, Mel screams really loudly and shrilly, and her screams wake up something that was having nice sleeps inside one of the hydroponic centre's secret pods.

I bet it'll be really grumpy.

* As Doctor Who Superfan Ian Levine said on the Trials and Tribulations DVD documentary:

"And the idea was the Christmas Carol idea of Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas future, and Eric [Saward] was very taken with this."

The Bill, seasons two and three

The Bill returned for a second run of 12 episodes in 1985. Retaining the same hourlong format and post-watershed timeslot, the only clue that gives away that this was a different production block being a change in the regular cast line up.

The most obvious absence was PC Dave Litten (Gary Olsen), one of the main characters in the first season but now relegated to only a single guest appearance. Some new regular characters were introduced, including PCs Pete Muswell, Abe Lyttleton and Nick Shaw, with Muswell seemingly taking Litten's role as the PC who is a little bit dodgy. Actually that's an understatement - Muswell is several steps beyond Litten, being an unapologetic racist whose attitudes go unchallenged by his colleagues simply because they were so prevalent at the time. He also has a (topical, in 1985) backstory about having policed at the 1984 miner's strike, making lots of money from overtime and enjoying himself at the same time. Muswell and Lyttleton would only appear in season two, departing between seasons just as mysteriosuly as they arrived.

Overall the second season isn't as good as the first, with some episodes that struggled to make full use of the runtime, and which had to be padded out with unrelated B-plots that never quite joined up with the main plots in a satisfactory way. It still contains some really good episodes, including one of the best Bill stories evar, Ringer.

This was an episode about a serious car crash and the ensuing investigation that made excellent use of the regulars at all ranks and disciplines of the Sun Hill police force, from the PCs on the scene of the accident, to Mr Brownlow coordinating the response, to the CID team detecting who was responsible. It culminates with the second guest apearance from DS "Tommy" Burnside (Chris Ellison) when he unexpectedly turns up undercover, having been independently investigating the same criminals. This is a wonderfully put together piece of TV drama, and might well be The Bill's finest hour - certainly it's the best single episode of the early years.

After season two there was a gap of almost two years before the third season was shown on ITV in 1987. This season - another 12 programmes in the same format as the first two seasons - is remarkable for being script edited by Chris Boucher, the same role as he played throughout all four seasons of Blakes 7. It's therefore surprising that this season didn't end on a fantastic cliffhanger.

Once again there was turnover amongst the regulars. Perhaps the main new addition to the cast was Inspector Kite, who seemed to be there to be an antagonist for Sgt Cryer - outranking him but lacking his years of practical experience, they had very different approaches to policing that naturally brought them into conflict.

But Kite would last only the one season, so with hindsight it is fair to say that the more significant development was that PC Tony Stamp (Graham Cole) would finally get recognised as a named character with an occasional line all to himself, instead of just being the silent PC in the background he had been up until now.

Another noteworthy change in the series setup that would have long-lasting implications was that this is the point when PC Jim Carver (our original POV character back in the pilot, though now well-established as part of the ensemble cast) moved from the uniform branch to CID, where he would stay for many years to become one of the show's iconic detective constables. It does have to be said that this is quite a change for the character, going by his characterisation as established in his earliest episodes. In his attitude towards the CID he now seems more like Dave Litten was in the first season, so perhaps Carver took on some of his characteristics in the absence of Gary Olsen?

The pacing issues seen in season two seemed to continue through season three, though it did go out on a high with the last two being among its best. The standout episode of the season is Overnight Stay, which sees most of the cast guarding a jury overnight in a hotel, and makes great use of the setting to put our regulars in unfamiliar situations and combinations, and tells a distinctively different type of story as a result.

These episodes were also the last chance for the writers and producers to make use of post-watershed levels of nudity and violence, since after season three came the change of format - arguably the biggest single change in The Bill's 26-year history - when it moved to a half-hour timeslot at 8pm.

Just as significant in its own way as the format change at marking the end of an era, the end of season three also saw the departure of DI Roy Galloway (John Salthouse), a mainstay of the series and easily one of the most memorable and significant characters throughout the first three seasons.

At least we still have many more episodes ahead of us with Ted Roach and Sgt Cryer, my other favourite regulars. And you don't need to be a Detective Inspector to know who the perfect replacement for Roy Galloway would be, to be Frank...

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eight

"Is Peri dead?"

"No."

So much for that cliffhanger. The Inquisitor once again stands in for the viewer when she asks

"Then what was the point of showing that last sequence?"

and when she then says

"I thought it was somewhat gratuitous."

The plot starts treading water (something we cats hate) with the Doctor and Crozier spouting more technobabble about Lord Kiv's brain transplant. Crozier wants to put the brain into another body, and is clearly eyeing up the Doctor (naughty Crozier!) which is just putting the plot back to the state it was in a couple of episodes ago.

Imprisoned with King Yrcanos, Peri says 

"I just want to be back in my own time with people I love."

This seems like it has come out of nowhere, and is a somewhat contrived way of starting the ensuing dialogue between them, but I think we can let the writer off in this case because Nicola Bryant and BRIAN BLESSED transcend the script with their performances.

Yrcanos: "WHAT IS THAT? LOVE?"

Peri: "Well, it's when you care for someone or something more than yourself, I guess."

Dorf: "More than yourself?"

Peri: "Well, I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes more than life."

Yrcanos: "I CARE NOTHING FOR MINE."

Peri: "How can you say that, Yrcanos?"

Yrcanos: "WELL, ON MY PLANET OF KRONTEP, WHEN WE DIE, OUR SPIRIT IS RETURNED TO LIFE TO BE BORN IN A MORE NOBLE WARRIOR."

Peri: "Until what? Where do you end after all your brave deaths?"

Yrcanos: "YOU BECOME A KING! ME, AFTER MY NEXT DEATH I JOIN THE OTHER KINGS ON VERDUNA, THE HOME OF THE GODS."

Peri: "To do what?"

Yrcanos: "WHY TO FIGHT! WHAT ELSE?"

Thank Hoff that BRIAN BLESSED is in this, the story would be so much less bearable without him.

Between scenes Crozier has had to rule out the Doctor - magnificent head or no - as a suitable body for Kiv, and wants to consider Peri instead. The Doctor tries to dissuade him with the most unconvincing counterargument:

"Peri? Ah, quite unsuitable. Female. Silly. Oh... flibbertigibbet. Hopeless."

Crozier sees through this and observes "you have strong feelings for the woman." He offers to let Peri off the hook if the Doctor can find a better candidate.

The Doctor is obviously behaving a lot more like his proper character than he was back in part six, considering that he is now showing any concern for Peri whatsoever, but the damage has been done and the question that hangs over all the Doctor's subsequent actions in this story is why he didn't do any of them sooner. Alas it's not a question we're ever going to get a satisfactory answer to.

The Doctor goes to rescue Yrcanos and Dorf. Yrcanos shouts made-up swearwords at the Doctor until he is let out and the guard captain put in the cell in his place.

"HIS NAME IS DORF AND YOU ARE SCUM."

"No, actually I am known as the Doctor, and there's no need to thank me for helping you to escape. Come along."

Kiv and Sil meet with some silly-looking squeaky aliens in a scene that only exists to give them something to so in this episode.

Yrcanos wants to know why the Doctor released him.

Doctor: "I need your help to defeat the Mentors."

Yrcanos: "THAT I UNDERSTAND, BUT YOU ARE MY SWORN ENEMY. I HAVE VOWED TO KILL YOU!"

Doctor: "Yes, yes, well, we can deal with all that later. At the moment, we need each other."

Dorf: "He has a point."

Yrcanos: "EVERYONE HAS A POINT, NOWADAYS. I AM A MAN OF ACTION, NOT REASON!"

LOL! This story has more than its fair share of problems, but it has to be said that that is a great line.

Once again the Doctor stops Yrcanos from running in and pewing all the baddys with his pewpewpew gun, the Doctor saying he doesn't want Yrcanos to cause "a bloodbath." This lends credence to my theory about why he warned the baddys about Yrcanos back in part six, and perhaps the Matrix merely distorted that scene to make it look like the Doctor suddenly decided to side with the baddys for no reason. Again, we'll never know the truth for certain, thanks to a combination of the Doctor's very convenient amnesia in the courtroom and a lack of any later explanations about which scenes the Matrix distorted and how exactly it changed them.

"YOU THINK LIKE A WARRIOR BUT YOU DO NOT ACT LIKE ONE, IT'S MOST PERPLEXING."

Insightful dialogue like this from Yrcanos hints at a much better version of this story that we could maybe have gotten, if only its script flaws had been ironed out before recording. Even as it is, it still shows a much better understanding of the Doctor's character than Steven Moffat would later manage, with rubbish like "To the people of the gamma forests, the word 'Doctor' means 'mighty warrior.'" Mew.

The Doctor and Yrcanos attempt a 'prisoner transfer from cell block 1138' plan to rescue the other prisoners, which leads into a komedy scene with an unnamed Mentor who is obsessed with everyone being quiet, and is therefore the polar opposite to Yrcanos.

Mentor: “Oh, thank you.”

Yrcanos: “FOR YOUR LIFE? IT WAS NOTHING.”

Mentor: “No, for not shouting.”

and then

Yrcanos: “VAROONIK! WE'LL RELEASE THE SLAVES, AND THEN ON TO DEATH! VAROONIK!"

Doctor: “I'm sorry about the noise. He does so enjoy his work."

Mentor: "Just go. Just go!"

There's a sudden, immediate change of tone as this punchline crashes into the following scene, where Crozier has Peri bound and gagged on an operating table.

In the chaos following the releasing of the slaves, the Doctor gets separated from Yrcanos and the other rebels. The TARDIS appears next to him in a white light, and he walks backwards into it as though hypno-eyesed. We then see the TARDIS travelling into the space station from the beginning of part one, a neat way of showing how this fits into the overall story's timeline as well as an excuse to reuse the expensive SFX once more.

In the courtroom the Inquisitor gives the exposition about how the High Council of the Time Lords ordered that the Doctor be taken "out of time" and the prevention of "the consequence of Crozier's experiment." In doing so she comes across as just as much of an antagonist as the Valeyard, not an impartial party, being fully aware of what the Matrix is about to show next. (How the Matrix can have recorded what happened next after both the Doctor and the TARDIS have been removed to the trial is not explained, and a writer who was paying attention to his own writing might have used that as a way of hinting that what we see next is not really real.)

Crozier does a proper mad scientist rant as he explains to Sil that he has copied the "contents" of Kiv's mind into Peri's body, without actually transplanting the brain. The question of why he didn't do this before is not asked, so we can only conclude that he only just thought of doing it since the start of the episode. Except that he then says that

"This is what I wanted to achieve from the very beginning."

Yrcanos is trapped in a time bubble by the Time Lords. In the courtroom, the Doctor challenges the High Council with interfering. Isn't that exactly what they are accusing him of? It's always projection with baddys, isn't it, mew?

Inquisitor: "They're caught in a time bubble. Everything must be perfect before they drive home their final attack."

Doctor: "You're using Yrcanos as an assassin."

Inquisitor: "It was judged by the High Council as the most acceptable way, and Yrcanos will never know that he was used."

Doctor: "And so they took it upon themselves to act like second-rate gods?"

All very dramatic, except... isn't this exactly what Yrcanos would have done anyway? And then the only reason for delaying Yrcanos's attack seems to have been to give Sil time to do the punchline about Kiv being in Peri's body:

"I wish you could have found a more attractive one."

This line comes at the end of an otherwise really dramatic scene that shows us Peri is dead and Kiv is in her body, well acted by Nicola Bryant (as Kiv) and Patrick Ryecart. Tonally the end of this episode is all over the place. Come to think of it, the rest of Mindfuck isn't exactly very tonally consistent either.

Yrcanos charges in and does a Big No. And when BRIAN BLESSED does a Big No, it's a really Big

"NO!"

He pewpewpews everyone in the room, although the screen fades to white before we actually see anyone get pewed, thus leaving it to our imaginations. This is way more restrained than the writer has been at any point in the story up until now.

In the courtroom, the Inquisitor and the Valeyard team up to try and blame the Doctor for forcing the Time Lords to interfere. The Doctor remains defiant:

"No, I was taken out of time for another reason, and I have every intention of finding out what it is!"

Despite the camera already showing the Doctor in close up, it crash-zooms to even closer up: cliffhanger!

The Mindfuck section of The Trial of a Time Lord is one of the most confusing of all Doctor Who stories, and the most baffling thing about it is why they decided to make it that way. To purposefully misdirect the audience is one thing, but when you do so you put an expectation in the viewers' minds that everything will be paid off and explained eventually - and this never does so.

Not only is a full explanation still withheld from us by the end of part eight, it won't even be forthcoming by the final end of the season. This is a breach of trust between the makers of the show and their audience, and it means that however many points these episodes might otherwise have in their favour they can never quite make up for this underlying shortfall.

The mind that is being fucked with in the title of this section of Trial of a Time Lord isn't the Doctor's, or Peri's, or even Kiv's... it's the viewer's.

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 6

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Seven

Peri saves the Doctor, who runs away so that Yrcanos is left behind with Peri, whom he picks up... not in that way, naughty reader!

In the courtroom, the Doctor is now claiming to have partial recall of the events instead of either total amnesia or fully remembering them:

"I can recall some of it. Bits of it are beginning to bob back into my mind."

The Valeyard speaks for all of us when he says 

The Doctor once again insists that the Matrix is not showing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or as he puts it:

"The events took place, but not quite as we've seen them."

Yrcanos, Eckerry Dorf and Peri team up and go looking for other resistance fighters to team up with, although Yrcanos is convinced that they will find him and then make him their leader.

"ROM BROM SAVALOONA. YES. YES. THEIR FOOTSTEPS ARE GUIDED TOWARDS ME. THAT IS THEIR DESTINY... AND MINE."

Peri pets Dorf as she discusses with Yrcanos his belief in destiny versus her belief in "blind chance." This is a nice, quiet scene (well, as quiet as any scene can be that has BRIAN BLESSED in it) that adds to our experience of all three characters, unlike the following scene where the Doctor assists Crozier in transplanting Lord Kiv's brain into a new body. This consists of the Doctor and Crozier shouting a lot of technobabble and meaningless numbers at each other, and a pointless fake-out that Kiv has died for a few seconds before it turns out he's alive really.

Crozier says that

"As from today, Doctor, I can put any brain in any body, anywhere."

but the story frames this advancement of medical science as though it were a bad thing, being as it is done by the baddys for the benefit of the baddys, and the Doctor looks sad at the news.

It's not all bad, however, because this scene does in fact include the best moment of the entire season, when Kiv goes into "cardiac arrest" and Crozier insists on finishing his cup of tea before moving to help him. This shows more clearly than any of his dialogue that Crozier is a mad scientist who is only interested in his research and discoveries, he is not the sort of doctor who cares about helping anybody.

Yrcanos, Peri and Dorf get captured by some rebels and soon team up with them. Yrcanos takes charge, just as he said he would, and there is even a pretty good comic moment:

Dorf: "I have seen him inspire disheartened rabble into acts of heroism."

Peri: "But how many of them survived, huh?"

Yrcanos: "AH, THAT'S A MINOR CONSIDERATION WHEN THERE IS GLORY TO BE HAD!"

This is turning out to be an episode with some wit, which is good because it helps disguise the fact that the plot is not really progressing much through these scenes. The rebels' previous leader says

"Alright, King Yrcanos of the Krontep, we'll fight."

to which Yrcanos replies

"VAROONIK!"

We soon get an example of Yrcanos's leadership in the field:

Rebel: "I'll scout ahead."

Yrcanos: "WE'LL ALL SCOUT AHEAD."

As they all charge forward as best they can in the cramped studio tunnels, he provides the template for all subsequent Klingons in the various Star Trek spinoff series:

"THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR BATTLE. A GREAT DAY TO DIE!"

It's not just that one line (though it is the clincher), at other points he also rejects spying and ambush as tactics, and refuses to retreat even when that would be sensible. Yes, Star Trek took a lot from BRIAN BLESSED here. Perhaps they shouldn't have, mew?

Dorf manages to persuade Yrcanos to call off the attack, leading to a great line from the king that is both witty and characterful:

"YOU ARE A GREAT DOG OF WAR... I MEAN, A GREAT WARRIOR, WHOSE ADVICE I TRUST AND VALUE. OH VERY WELL, TODAY PRUDENCE SHALL BE OUR WATCHWORD. TOMORROW, I SHALL SOAK THE LAND IN BLOOD!"

It's too late, though, and the baddys spring an ambush on them.

They try to fight or, in Peri's case, to run away, and they all get pewpewpewed by the baddys.

This seems like a perfect place for the cliffhanger, but instead it goes back to the courtroom for one more short scene. The episode ends on an exchange between the Doctor and the Valeyard:

Doctor: "I am not responsible for that!"

Valeyard: "In your mind, perhaps not. But in reality it is somewhat different, Doctor."

It cuts back to the Doctor after the Valeyard's final word, and he is already in such a close up that there's no more room for a crash-zoom.

I suspect the director may have made a terrible mistaik here. This was probably supposed to be a crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger, but it isn't.

Gladiators (2024)

An early contender for TV show of the year is the BBC's reboot of Gladiators. It was campy and enormously fun; perfect entertainment for a Saturday night.

Before it started I wouldn't have expected any of the new generation of Gladiators to be able to compete (in terms of iconic status, I mean, because obviously they'd be able to compete physically) with the classic Gladiators such as Wolf and Panther, but I am happy to have been completely wrong about this - already there are multiple new Gladiators who are smash hits.

Whoever it was that decided to put Giant as the first face you see in the title sequence made one of the most genius decisions that has ever been made in TV history, letting viewers know what they're in for from the first seconds.

Along with Giant, the other giant Gladiator is Bionic, who is well-named because he's a machine (metaphorically speaking, I don't think he's a robot really) at games such as Duel and Collision. Fury and Apollo are both also forces to be reckoned with in the games, though of the two Apollo is the harder for viewers to take seriously because his haircut makes him look like he's Peter Serafinowicz playing a Gladiator in a sketch.

They are just some the 'Face' Gladiators who always show good sportsmannyship with the contenders afterwards.

In contrast there are also 'Heel' Gladiators; the baddys who are there to be bad sports, bend or break the rules, and get booed by the crowd. Wolf was the obvious template that all other such Gladiators are merely following. Sabre is one of the more subtle examples of a Heel, being overly competitive with the contenders and sulking when defeated by them, and Diamond looked to be mining a similar vein.

Then there are the outright panto baddys. From the very beginning it was obvious that the chief amongst these was Viper. He's actually a bit rubbish when on his own (e.g. Duel, where he is 'easy mode' for the contenders) but then he fits in well in games where there are multiple Gladiators, like Collision and Gauntlet, since there he can be the one who cheats while the other Gladiators play the game properly.

Last, but definitely not least, is the star of the show, and easily the best of the new Gladiators (in terms of how much fun he is to watch), Legend. His gimmick is that he has an enormous ego (almost as large as a cat's!) and whenever he's on screen he tries to make the show all about him, leading to some hilarious post-game interviews with the hosts. He's also genuinely skilled at Hang Tough, so is by no means a joke Gladiator there to be easy for the contestants to beat.

Aside from all new Gladiators, there's a new commentator, new hosts and a new refereeing team as well. The new head referee, Mark Clattenburg, is no John Anderson, even though he has adopted his catchphrases as if they were his own. Big John Anderson would never have stood for his ajudications getting booed by the crowd, the way most of Clattenburg's seemed to.

The decision to make a clean break from the 1990s series in terms of on-screen personnel might have been a wise one, since the last time Gladiators returned (on Sky in 2008) it was much too beholden to the past, so their new Gladiators never escaped the Shadow (and the Wolf and the Saracen and the Hunter) of the originals.

But the format itself is about as faithful to the original ITV series as it could be, only updated to modern standards of TV production and attitudes to health and safety. Each programme begins and ends with the iconic theme song, and the best-remembered of the games returned in mostly unchanged form - Hang Tough, The Wall, Powerball, Gauntlet and, of course, Duel.

Gauntlet has perhaps changed the most, and not necessarily for the better, with contenders facing only four Gladiators instead of five. This might very well be to make it safer for the contenders, but as a side-effect it makes the game much too easy and almost every single contender made it through with loads of time to spare.

This wasn't the only flaw in the show, since we also saw too many contenders beat The Wall by way of sacrificing a shoe to the purrsuing Gladiator, and in The Edge (the riskiest looking game by miles - and the one that seemed to result in the most injuries to contenders and Gladiators alike) too many points were available, which meant that one game could swing the results of a whole show by itself. Some rules were changed in the semi-finals, and it would be interesting to see if this was planned or if the producers realised their mistaiks and this was them doing what they could to course-correct mid-season? I suppose we will see what, if any, changes are made for the next season.

Whether they do or they don't, these are minor quibbles only. I can't wait for the series to return.

Did they get Little Alex Horne in from Taskmaster to write their Gladiator facts?

Gladiators is Serious Business to some mannys:

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Six

BRIAN BLESSED saves the day when King Yrcanos goes on the rampage. He is careful not to hurt any of the mannys, but he does break a lot of things while shouting a lot. On his way out, he puts on his samurai-style helmet and seems to salute Sil.

"ROM BROM SSSSS. SABALOOMA."

I don't know what that means and neither, I suspect, does anybody else. The Doctor and Peri escape with him, and he tells them

"SORCERERS! EVIL DEMONS! SOUL STEALERS! THEY HAVE MY ECKERRY DORF IN A DUNGEON SOMEWHERE. WE MUST RELEASE HIM, OR DIE IN THE ATTEMPT! WERE YOU CAPTURED BY THE SLUGS WHO RULE THIS BALL OF MUD AND WATER?"

Peri does her best to get a word in, but she has no chance up against BRIAN BLESSED in full flow.

"WE MUST FIND SOME WEAPONS. SOME OF THOSE THAT TURN ONES' ENEMIES TO SLIME. WE MUST KILL ALL WHO STAND BETWEEN US AND VICTORY. WE'LL GRRRRRIND EVERY LAST SLUG BENEATH OUR FEET, YES?"

He picks her up at one point. Finally he gets around to introducing himself.

"RRRRRSSSSS! I AM YRCANOS, KING OF THE KRONTEP, LORD OF THE VINGTEN, CONQUEROR OF THE TONGKOMP EMPIRE! BUT YOU NO DOUBT KNOW THIS?"

He then has a little perv over Peri - a positively mild one by Sawardian standards - when he finds out she is not "PROMISED" to the Doctor.

In the courtroom, the Doctor admits that he cannot remember anything that happened after he was electriced. The Valeyard doesn't believe him, and says

"Then you're in for a surprise, aren't you, my dear Doctor? An exceedingly nasty one, if your memory is as fallible as you pretend."

The Doctor's laser-guided amnesia is a tired old trope, but it is necessary for the plot - if the Doctor cannot recall the actions of his past self, he cannot justify those actions to the court, which enables the writer to keep the past-Doctor's motivations unclear to the audience. Unfortunately, writer Philip Martin went too far and also kept those motivations secret from the actors, the rest of the production team, and possibly even himself.

Lord Kiv sets Sil to recapture the Doctor, telling him he only has one day and then he's off the case. Yrcanos takes the Doctor and Peri with him to try to rescue prisoners and steal weapons from the Mentors.

Peri: "That includes me, huh?"

Yrcanos: "ON MY PLANET OF KRONTEP, A WARRIOR QUEEN FIGHTS ALONGSIDE HER KING."

Peri: "We're not on your planet."

Yrcanos: "IT DOESN'T MATTER, THE RULE STILL APPLIES."

LOL. The Doctor warns the baddys of Yrcanos's attack, forcing Yrcanos and Peri to run away to avoid being captured - at least I think that's what happens, this scene is very confusingly directed. Peri attempts to pew Sil before running away, so all the mannys have to stand still so they don't get in the way of the special effect explosion going off.

The Doctor seeming to side with the baddys seems as out of character for him as anything since The Invasion of Time, but at least there we eventually got a full and satisfactory explanation of his actions. In the paws of a more skilled writer or script editor, the future-Doctor in the courtroom would have been able to explain his actions to the court (and thus the viewers at home) while his past self continued to act like a baddy. But we don't get that here, so the reason the Doctor teams up with Sil goes unexplained. His line to Sil

"I'm no hero."

feels like it should have been a nod and a wink to the audience that the Doctor is attempting "some trickery" (as Sil suspects), but it isn't played that way, nor is the courtroom Doctor able to claim that it was. Instead he tentatively puts it forward as a theory for his actions:

"No, there's something wrong. Of course! Sil was right! It was a ploy to fool the Mentors, yes... clever old me. Let the Matrix show what it will: a clever ploy. You'll see."

This scene also introduces the important concept to the plot that "the Matrix of Time cannot lie," a fact which all the Time Lords - the Doctor included, for now - accept as a self-evident truth.

Yrcanos meets the weredoggy and it turns out that he is the Eckerry Dorf that he mentioned earlier. He must have been Yrcanos's doggy, and Yrcanos is horrified that he has been turned part manny - a terrible fate for any doggy. Yrcanos rescues him and says

"WE WILL KILL THE SORCERERS. I SWEAR BY THE GREAT JEWELLED SWORD OF KRONTEP, YOU WILL BE REVENGED! COME."

Peri meets Matrona and gets a job W-wording for her. Oh noes! But even through a cunning disguise the Doctor recognises Peri straight away and denounces her. Again it is not made clear why the Doctor did this. Just as earlier he might have denounced Yrcanos to prevent a fight breaking out in which many mannys might have died, here he might have denounced Peri to save her from the terrible fate of doing W-word. But none of this is ever really clarified, so it looks as though the Doctor is just being a baddy for the lols.

In the courtroom, the Doctor claims

"I remember now. The ploy was to remove us both from the heart of the Mentor's control section. I gambled that after I'd helped them fix the cerebral transference unit, they might trust me to question Peri alone."

Valeyard: "To what end?"

Doctor: "Escape, I should imagine."

By saying "I should imagine" the Doctor gives away that he doesn't really remember what happened, he is just imagining what might have been his motivation for acting the way the Matrix showed.

Just when we think things are beginning to be cleared up, with the courtroom Doctor asserting that he was indeed only pretending to be a baddy, the scene where the past-Doctor interrogates Peri only confuses things further. He whispers to her that

"I'm your friend, you know that."

and

"I'm here to help you."

but then he appears to go on to interrogate her for real, even saying "Confess!" like he's a member of the Spanish Inquisition.

The courtroom Doctor asserts that

"It was never like that."

The Valeyard counters this by once again saying that "as we all know, the Matrix never lies," which the Inquisitor backs him up on. The Doctor quietly says

"I wonder."

as Colin Baker subtly shows the Doctor beginning to doubt this article of Time Lord faith. This is one of the better moments of the episode, and hints at a much better story than the one we're actually getting.

The Doctor and Peri are walking along with some of the Mentors' henchmannys when Yrcanos and Eckerry Dorf attack them. Yrcanos says

"NOW, DOCTOR, IT IS YOUR TURN TO DIE."

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

This might have been a more effective crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger if the light levels hadn't been so low, so that we could see the Doctor's expression better (although we know that it is just going to be the same "oh noes!" expression that Colin Baker uses for all his crash-zoom-to-face cliffhangers), and it's not often you'll hear me complain that the light levels are too low in 1980s Doctor Who. It's this messed-up story; it does things to your cat brain. No wonder this part of Trial of a Time Lord is known as Mindfuck, mew!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 5

How It Started vs. How It's Going: Harvest of Kairos Edition

How It Started vs. How It's Going: Logopolis Edition

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Five

The spaceship model shot from the start of part one was obviously too expensive to only use once, so we see it again to open this second section of The Trial of a Time Lord. Just as the first four parts together were sometimes called by the name "The Mysterious Planet" (used as the title for the Target novelisation written by - who else? - Terrance Dicks), parts five to eight have the collective name "Mindfuck." We shall soon see why.

The Doctor is still calling the Valeyard "pathetic and juvenile" names, here "the Brickyard." The Inquisitor gets in a much wittier insult against both of them when she says

"Gentlemen, may I remind you this is a court of law, not a debating society for maladjusted, psychotic sociopaths."

The Valeyard calls the Inquisitor "Sagacity" which I think must be her first name.

Using the cutting-edge technology of its day (somebody in the BBC's SFX department must have recently had a birthday), the TARDIS materialises on a planet with a green sky, a pink sea, and a great big planet in the background. The Doctor and Peri have hardly come out when the Doctor in the courtroom objects to having to watch this "inconsequential silliness." I think the writer of the courtroom scenes didn't get on with the writer of the scenes set on the planet, because here they're basically accusing him of wasting our time with these inoffensive establishing shots. And the writer of the trial scenes is on very thin ice when accusing anybody else of wasting time!

Peri complains about having been perved on at the last planet they visited, by a "dirty old Warlord." It seems that, in a universe script-edited by Eric Saward, Peri can even get sexually harassed off screen and between stories. They go into a cave to look for signs of technologically advanced beings (e.g. cats) and within seconds Peri gets attacked by a monster. Trying to help her, the Doctor accidentally pews the monster with the pewpewpew gun he conveniently had in his paw.

The intrusions upon the action by the trial scenes have been a frequent source of irritation ever since part one, but for a nice change we get an interruption that adds something to the situation by allowing the Doctor to explicitly clarify that he pewed the monster by mistaik:

Valeyard: "Another death, Doctor?"

Doctor: "The seedy phaser discharged accidentally. Rerun the struggle, see for yourself."

Valeyard: "No need. There are clearer examples of your guilt to come."

With the production team feeling that their show was on trial just as much as the Doctor, this is obviously an attempt to clear themselves of charges that the character of the Doctor was becoming too violent, something that had been a problem in the previous season, with the 'acid bath' scene in Vengeance on Varos often singled out as one of the most egregious examples. The writer of said Vengeance on Varos was Philip Martin, who was also the writer of this episode, so we can maybe see why he felt the need to put in this disclaimer.

The Doctor and Peri get captured by some mannys, and the Doctor pretends to know the chief scientist here, a manny called Crozier. When the captain of the mannys (he isn't given a name, but he must be in charge because he's the only one with a speaking part) grows suspicious, they run away. Next they meet a weredoggy, who might be a manny that has been made up to look a bit like a doggy or could be a doggy that is being played by a manny. Confused cat is confused. The weredoggy is also confused, first trying to nom Peri but then asking her to help him. Peri describes him as "a Wolfman."

Not this Wolfman, sadly, or the Doctor and Peri could have solved the rest of this plot in about five minutes by getting him to help them with Wolf Power!

They see some aliens, one of whom is Sil. Sil is a returning alien from Vengeance on Varos, and is thus the first* returning baddy we have seen in Trial of a Time Lord. The Doctor acts like a massive yacht to Peri by not telling her that they were on Sil's home planet, and then he jokingly describes Sil as "your friend" - Philip Martin presumably missed the memo that the Doctor and Peri were supposed to like each other more in this season, and that the Doctor shouldn't be written in such a way as to make the audience hate him. These were both serious failings of earlier in Colin Baker's era, now in real danger of being repeated again here.

Things take a turn for the better when we see...

BRIAN BLESSED!

Audiences only familiar with BRIAN BLESSED's acting in sci-fi TV shows and films (including Space 1999, Flash Gordon, The Phantom Menace and, of course, Blakes 7) could be forgiven for thinking that he always gave the same sort of performance in everything he did - that being a larger than life, shouty performance; the embodiment of "DID SOMEBODY ORDER A LARGE HAM?!"

To think this would be to forget two of BRIAN BLESSED's three iconic, career-defining roles (the third being Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon, which... yes, does mostly fall into being exactly that sort of performance). The first of these was Augustus Caesar in I Claudius, where his acting had so much more depth than the line "IS THERE ANYBODY IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER?!" would suggest, culminating in one of the finest death scenes evar.

The second of BRIAN BLESSED's greatest performances was given in a TV series broadcast in the same year as Trial of a Time Lord, finishing less than a month before season 23 began on the BBC. This was ITV's John Silver's Return to Treasure Island, in which BRIAN BLESSED played Long John Silver as a boisterous, shouty manny, it's true, but one who was also capable of great subtlety, guile, and quiet menace when it was called for. Co-starring along with Christopher "Bellboy" Guard across all 10 parts of that series, if you watched it and then went straight into watching his episodes of Trial of a Time Lord you might well be left wondering what became of that BRIAN BLESSED.

As King Yrcanos, BRIAN BLESSED's first words are

"BLOOD! DEATH! TERROR! KILL! STREGONE!"

which I think tells us all we need to know about what we're in for (except, perhaps, why he speaks Italian). Yrcanos is attached to a machine by Crozier, played by Patrick Ryecart. Ryecart is a fine actor with a considerable range, having played everything from Romeo in the BBC's Romeo and Juliet to Captain Duff in The High Life. So in many ways he is too good to be in this rubbish, and like CHAAAAADBON in the earlier parts, his attempt at putting some character into his, er, character is doomed to suffer from the need to edit the story to fit in all the courtroom interruptions.

The machine is supposed to "pacify" Yrcanos, but instead it just makes him go a bit sleepy. Yrcanos calls Crozier "SCUM!" or possibly he is just sleepily misquoting the infamous "You rebel scum!" line from the then-recent film Return of the Jedi. BRIAN BLESSED being a big fan of Star Wars, as we know.

While Crozier and his mannys are away talking to Sil, and Sil's boss "Lord Kiv" (Christopher "Mike from The Young Ones" Ryan), the Doctor and Peri get into the laboratory and meet King Yrcanos. The Doctor is messing about with some buttons on the machine when Sil comes in and captures them. Crozier and Sil do not believe the Doctor when he tells them the monster attacked them, so Sil orders the Doctor to be put into the machine that King Yrcanos was in earlier. Crozier turns it on and the machine electrics him.

Crash-zoom to the Doctor's face: cliffhanger!

This is one of the better crash-zoom to face endings, since at least this time the action doesn't pause for long enough to give the camera time to dramatically zoom in while Colin Baker makes a face. On the other paw, the way it is framed, with the Doctor writhing in pain right into the cut to the end credits, makes this one of the nastiest and most violent cliffhangers we've seen for a while. Philip Martin definitely missed the memo about toning down the brutality after the criticisms of season 22.

Or who knows? Maybe this is fine.

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 4

* Because Drathro reusing some plot elements from The Krotons doesn't count, unless it turns out this means he is a Kroton really - if this fact was later confirmed in a Big Finish story or spinoff novel, please let me know in the comments so that I can have a good lol.

The Bill, season one

I always think of The Bill as a quintessentially 1990s series, but it began here with a 1983 pilot followed up by a first full season of 11 episodes in 1984.

The pilot, called Woodentop, and the first few episodes focused on the character of probationary (rookie) PC Carver, played by Mark Wingett, as our POV character, but it soon opened up into a fully ensemble cast series. That said, if there is one breakout character from the first season it is surely Superstar DI Roy Galloway, as played by John Salthouse, though he was played by Robert Pugh in the pilot - a recasting which was by far the most distinctive change between pilot and series due to how much of a dominating presence Salthouse would be in the show's early years.

Galloway comes across a maverick detective who doesn't play by the rules, the sort who could easily have been the lead character if this was a stereotypical detective series. But that's not The Bill, so Galloway also has an additional layer whereby he has a competitive nature that pits his "superstars" in the detective branch against the uniformed "woodentops," yet is prepared to set this rivalry aside when it is the right thing to do.

This means Galloway's most interesting dynamic relating to the other police characters is with Sgt Bob Cryer (Eric Richard), where we quickly see the deep friendship and mutual respect underneath their jokes and jibes at each other. Sgt Cryer is, of course, an institution of The Bill even without Galloway (outlasting the DI in the show by many years) as one of its most familiar faces throughout its '90s heyday and all the way until 2001.

Other long-running regulars introduced in these earliest episodes include PC Reg Hollis (Jeff Stewart), WPC Ackland (Trudie Goodwin), DS Ted Roach (Tony Scannell) and even Chief Superintendent Brownlow (Peter Ellis), who began his trademark complaining about overtime as early as the end of this season.

Brownlow is not the only one to appear fully-formed, with Sgt Cryer and Reg Hollis fitting into their assigned roles in life from the start, while other characters are yet to settle into the positions they would occupy into and through the 1990s era - Ackland is not yet a Sgt, and Carver is yet to become a DC and form his iconic partnership with Tosh Lines.

Though we are still a good way from his becoming a regular, there's a memorable one-off appearance for a certain DS Burnside (Christopher Ellison), who fills an antagonistic role as a detective from a different jurisdiction from our regulars of Sun Hill. Burnside isn 't quite the character he would later become, but Ellison makes the most of his limited screen time to make an impression - presumably on the makers of the show as much as the viewers.

On the subject of guest actors, we see it is as early as this first season that The Bill began its long trend of featuring before-they-were-famous actors, here with Sean Bean in a minor role as a gang member involved in an armed robbery. He's not even the main gang member, with fewer lines and screen time than his partner.

The theme tune is an element that is not quite there yet. It's recognisably "The Bill" but not the arrangement we know and love from the later years - this version has a funky middle section, perhaps a consequence of needing a longer end credits sequence for a longer episode duration.

While the series would later find a home in the prime time, pre-watershed slot of 8pm, these early episodes went out post-watershed, and as a result were allowed to contain real swearing, plus some nudity and graphic violence, including that of a dead body seen in the pilot.

The tone of the show varies episode to episode, from the grim and gritty (such as the episode Clutching at Straws with a plot inclusing a "child molestor"/"nonce," as well as domestic abuse and suicide) to those bordering on outright comedic - my favourite of the season is Burning the Books, which contains elements of farce as Galloway pursues a truckload of illegal pornography, unaware that it is parked outside the Sun Hill police station virtually under his nose - a lot of the humour arises from the fact that viewers are made aware of this early on, so that we can appreciate the dramatic irony. As well as a tightly-written script, this episode also features Brian "Travis" Croucher as a used car dealer, and James "Herod Agrippa" Faulkner as a "bent brief" (corrupt solicitor), the first of many whom the real criminals of The Bill always manage to have on standby.

This episode, along with several others in the season, was directed by the show's first director, Peter Cregeen. He would later go on to become Head of Series at the BBC, where he would cancel Doctor Who in 1989, after its 26th season, thus succeeding where Jonathan Powell and Michael "is a cunt" Grade had failed before him. Ironically The Bill would also be cancelled after running for 26 years.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Four

CHAAAAADBON turns out to be a goody after all when he shoots Grell intead of the Doctor. This ought to be an emotional moment, and CHAAAAADBON tries to play it as though it is, but he and Grell have had so little character development and screentime that it is wasted upon us viewers.

Katryca and her mannys get into "the Immortal's castle" to see that the Immortal is still alive. Well, the clue's in the name, I suppose. Mew.

Drathro kills Katryca and Broken Tooth in a needlessly gory way that fully justifies the Inquisitor's complaints in the previous episode about excessive violence and "graphic detail."

All sense that the plot is rapidly building to a dramatic climax goes out the window like Hitler escaping from Danger 5 when it cuts back to the courtroom so that the Doctor can suddenly go on a rant about the Valeyard.

Doctor: "I always thought 'Valeyard' meant 'learned court prosecutor.'"

Valeyard: "And so it does."

Doctor: "Not in your case, sir. Your points of law are spurious, your evidence weak verging on the irrelevant, and your reasoning quite unsound. In fact, your point of view belongs in quite another place. Perhaps the mantle of 'Valeyard' was a mistake. I would therefore suggest that you change it for the garment of quite another sort of yard, that of the Knackers' Yard!"

The Inquisitor then says "I tire of this empty banter" even though it was her who paused the trial in the first place - this strongly points to this scene being a hastily written bit of padding that adds nothing to the story, except that the Doctor said "knackers" lol.

A second scene of Glitz and Dibber is bleeped, not because Glitz is foul-mouthed but because the High Council of Time Lords have ordered him censored. This bit is essentially to remind viewers of what we learned from the similar scene in part three, and it suffers from exactly the same problem - that there was no good reason for the Valeyard to include it as part of his evidence except to give the Doctor a hint about the secret and sinister goings on.

Drathro has a very low opinion of mannys and refers to them as "work units" which, aside from being a callback to Robert Holmes's 1977 story The Sun Makers (in which the baddy also called mannys "work units"), indicates that Drathro needs the mannys to do all the W-word because, unlike him, they have opposable thumbs. Sounds familiar. Nevertheless, calling them 'W-word units' seems particularly lacking in tact or discretion. What's wrong with calling them mannys, or perhaps 'thumbs'?

Drathro won't let the Doctor shut him down and would prefer to explode and kill all the mannys as well. The Doctor tries to talk Drathro into seeing that mannys are of more value than robots like him, but he is no Captain Kirk so he does not succeed. The Doctor's appeals to Drathro's conscience fail because he does not have one, and the Doctor's increasingly exaggerated claims about what will happen when Drathro explodes fall on deaf ears:

Doctor: "Some people think it might cause a chain reaction which could roll on until all matter in the galaxy is exhausted. Is that what you want?"

Drathro: "It is no longer of concern to me."

Doctor: "Others believe an explosion might cause dimensional transference, which would threaten the stability of the entire universe."

It is unclear if the Doctor is supposed to be bluffing here, but if he is then he has clearly taken the wrong approach and should have tried to fool Drathro into thinking he was saving him instead of shutting him down, a bit like the plan he tried with Omega.

Glitz, Dibber, CHAAAAADBON and Peri arrive, thanks to Dibber shooting a hole through the wall. Balazar gets gunged with a face full of noms, in a poorly-timed attempt at a komedy moment. Glitz does what didn't occur to the Doctor to do and tricks Drathro into thinking they will save him by giving him the black light wot he claims they have on their spaceship, Dibber backing him up with the line

"Oh, the black light? Yeah, we've got so much of that sometimes we can hardly see."

That's how you do a komedy moment, Balazar. A witty line that also contributes to the plot.

Glitz insists that Drathro takes "the secrets" with him, which Drathro has in a pawy pawbag. The Doctor says

"Strange how low cunning succeeds where intelligent reasoning fails."

but the Doctor has on many, many occasions proved himself capable of both (including earlier in this very story), so it is only by writing him out of character that we get Glitz and Dibber becoming the heroes in this situation. Robert Holmes often gave the impression of being fond of his double act characters, for instance by giving them a lot of the best dialogue even in stories with Tom Baker in them, but never to the extent of letting them overshadow the Doctor at climactic moments. That was far more common in stories by Eric Saward, the script editor of Trial of a Time Lord, so I think I can detect his meddling with this bit.

With Glitz and Dibber taking Drathro away, the Doctor is able to shut him down so that he explodes more safely, and when he explodes (quite a good special effect, to give it its due) he lands on top of the secrets, squashing them. Glitz and Dibber are seemingly left with no prize, except they realise they can steal and sell the metal from the black light converter, which was made out of "the hardest known metal in the galaxy." This resembles the ending of an episodes of Blakes 7, except with Glitz and Dibber instead of Avon and Vila making the best out of a heist gone awry.

The Doctor and Peri say goodbye to Balazar and CHAAAAADBON (the Doctor even gives CHAAAAADBON a manly handshake - naughty Doctor!) almost like the traditional ending to a Doctor Who story after the day has been saved. Except this time:

"But there are still one or two questions that have to be answered, like who moved this planet two light years off its original course, and what was in that box that Glitz and Dibber were so interested in?"

the Doctor asks these questions rhetorically of Peri, and the viewer, to make it clear to us that this story is not yet concluded. And the traditional final joke - in this case Peri laughing at Balazar calling the Doctor "old one" like he did at their first meeting - isn't followed by the end credits, but by a transition back to the courtroom.

The Doctor claims "to have saved the entire universe" there, which means either he wasn't bluffing about the danger posed by Drathro's explosion - implying certain horrifying things about the health & safety environment in the constellation of Andromeda - or else he is trying out his bluff on the Time Lords. Neither the Valeyard nor the Inquisitor are impressed, and the Valeyard hasn't finished his prosecution. He says:

"The most damning is still to come. And when I have finished, this court will demand your life!"

Crash-zoom to the Doctor's face: cliffhanger!

Jayston does his best, but this is basically just a retread of the ending of the first part, so is pretty underwhelming as cliffhangers go.

Linking the stories in this season, or making them all just parts of one larger story, was a good idea in principle - one used repeatedly by the 21st century revival of the series, for better or worse - but the mistaik came in having the framing story of the trial intrude so much into the substories. Not only did they mess with the pacing - breaking up scenes of rising excitement with static, talky scenes - they nomed into the screen time of the "Mysterious Planet" plot and never let it stand on its own.

The subplots with minor characters suffered the most from this, ensuring viewers had no real emotional connection with the likes of CHAAAAADBON and Grell, Tandrell and Humker, or Balazar and Broken Tooth. These script problems might have been fixed had Robert Holmes been given the time to improve them in later drafts, or if the show's script editor had been any good at his job, but neither was to be. Still, with the next episode pawing over to a new writer, a new director and a new guest cast for a new substory, hopefully The Trial of a Time Lord will only improve from here on...

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 3