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

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

The day is saved when it turns out Balazar knows one of the tribesmannys, and he gets them to pewpewpew the robot instead.

The Inquisitor complains about the violence she is being forced to watch, but the Valeyard claims that "a certain amount of graphic detail is unavoidable." Is this Robert Holmes having a bit of fun at the expense of the Mary Whitehouse types, i.e. the sort of viewer who complained that the previous season, his own The Two Doctors included, was too violent?

The Doctor, Peri, Balazar, Glitz and Dibber are all captured by the tribesmannys and taken back to the village. The Doctor tells Queen Katryca the truth about Drathro and the black light converter, but because she has already been told so many lies by Glitz (and, we are given to infer, other "star travellers" before him) she does not believe the Doctor's story either.

Imprisoned again, Glitz says to the Doctor

"You're the Time Lord, haven't you got a rring you can rrub? A magic lamp?"

which is a none too subtle way of reminding us that Glitz knows something about the Time Lords already - at least enough to have seen Genesis of the Daleks at any rate. Glitz confirms that this planet is Earth, and that it was moved out of position "only by a couple of light years" in order that the rescue ship sent for Drathro and "the Sleepers" should miss their target. This begins to unravel the mystery of Ravolox, although it does not explain how the Earth or the Solar System could be mistaiken for anything other than what it is at the scale at which star systems operate at.

The robot hulks through the wall and captures the Doctor.

Back (or should that be forward?) in the courtroom the Doctor calls the Valyard more names, this time "the Farmyard" and "the Scrapyard," but this scene also contains some useful exposition about how the trial can watch scenes that the Doctor is not in, so long as "they are within the collection range of a TARDIS." The Valeyard reveals that the Doctor's TARDIS has been fitted with a "new surveillance system" (or "bugged" as the Doctor puts it), which explains why all of the trial evidence must come from a point after the bugging began. This may explain why the Doctor chooses the story he does for his defence, rather than simply bunging on a classic story or two that would be certain to get him off. The Inquisitor dismisses this as "an unimportant issue" but I think this is one of the subtler moments in the story.

Queen Katryca and her mannys pewpewpew the robot, and are convinced that they have killed the Immortal. As the queen plots to plunder "the Immortal's castle" her dialogue gets increasingly theatrical, reminding me of Irongron and the medieval mannys from The Time Warrior.

"It is ours now. All the tools and metal. All the strange materials that bend and do not break. All the mysteries and treasures of our ancient forefathers that we shall learn to use again. Do you not agree? Then let us... attack!"

I'm not the only one reminded of season 11, since when the Doctor wakes up he does a Jon Pertwee impression and says

"Oh, my head hurts abominably, Sarah Jane."

Katryca's dialogue continues to get even more exaggerated and flowery once they go underground:

Katryca: "We have no need for indecision in the tribe of the Free. Long we have waited for this moment. The Immortal is dead, and we shall plunder his castle. The spoils of triumph are ours. Now think, which is the way?"

Balazar: "This way."

Broken Tooth: "This way."

Katryca: "Am I to be surrounded by fools? We go forward. Forward, I say! I have read it in the flames many times... we go... forward!"

Perhaps this is meant to be a symptom of her increasing megalomania, a trait often possessed by Robert Holmes's baddys.

Glitz and Dibber, meanwhile, continue to play the double-act komic relief:

Glitz: "Do I look like a philanthropist?"

Dibber: "Well, how do I know? I've never seen one."

Glitz: "A philanthropist, my son, is someone who gives away all their grotzits out of the simple goodness of their heart."

Dibber: "Oh, you mean they're stupid? Oh yeah, you probably do look like one, then."

While not the worst material, it does feel a bit forced, rather than seeming to arise naturally out of the plot. Similarly, there is a very clunky bit of plot introduced when Glitz's dialogue is suddenly bleeped out midway through a sentence to Dibber:

"Whatever you do, don't open your big pie-hole and let him know that we're after the stuff..."

It then cuts to the courtroom.

Valeyard: "The remainder of that evidence has been excised, my lady."

Inquisitor: "Excised? Why?"

Valeyard: "By order of the High Council."

This is obviously included to let the Doctor, and the more astute of us cats watching at home, know that there is something suspicious going on here, but it is a bit of a plot hole - there is nothing vital to the Valeyard's case in this scene, so why show it to the courtroom at all, with or without the censored part? It's not an insurmountable plot hole - it could be an early hint that the Valeyard does not have total control of the Matrix, but this is a plot thread that will never be properly resolved or explained (like so much of Trial of a Time Lord), perhaps due to the clusterfuck surrounding the writing of the final episodes - which we shall reach in due course.

The Doctor and Peri have also gone underground, and they meet up with CHAAAAADBON, who hasn't done much this episode except have Grell make insinuations at him. He makes up for this by getting in on the cliffhanger, pointing his crossbow at the Doctor and firing it.

Crash-zoom to... wait, this one doesn't end with a crash-zoom! Surely this can only be so there is no mistaiking that the crossbow has definitely been fired. A clever bit of foreshadowing for Colin Baker's fate at the end of the season.