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
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