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
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