The Dog Report

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

Mel has woken up a super-grumpy POV monster, and the first thing it does is POV-attack a manny.

When Professor Lasky's assistants, Bruchner and Doland, go to the hydroponic centre they find all of their secret pods are empty. They obviously know more about what is going on from the way they say

Doland: "Some fool must have introduced high intensity light into the centre."

Bruchner: "We're confronted with a catastrophe and that's your reaction? Don't you realise what's been unleashed?"

A catastrophe? That sounds great! Meanwhile, the security officer Mr Rudge is more concerned about who is in the "isolation room" and has been breaking all their plates.

Some aliens chat to the Doctor about their concerns over mannys mining on their planet, with one describing mannys as "going through the universe like a plague of interplanetary locusts." The Valeyard interrupts this conversation to claim it is irrelevant, but the Doctor counters that something important just happened if the Valeyard had been paying attention. The Inquisitor asks

"Gentlemen, is this case to be resolved with a battle of words or to be conducted via the Matrix?"

I mean... surely it's both? Arguments by the prosecution and defendant have to be required in order to contextualise why and how the Matrix evidence supports their case, right? Otherwise none of these interruptions should be permitted... oh. Maybe she has a point after all?

One of the aliens gets poisoned and goes

except when the Doctor removes his helmet it turns out he is really a manny.

The Valeyard demands to know how the Doctor knew he wasn't an alien, and accuses the Doctor of "editing the Matrix" (something he is supposed to believe is impossible, so this is actually a big clue to him being the baddy behind everything). The Doctor demonstrates how he knew by replaying an earlier scene where the real aliens had to use a translator to be understood by mannys, while the fake alien didn't need one.

This is a rare use of the trial setting to do something that an ordinary story couldn't do by having a detective replay the discovery of a clue to show off his own cleverness (though the same effect could have been achieved for the viewers at home by making use of a flashback), which only goes to show that Pip and Jane Baker, writers of this section of The Trial of a Time Lord, understood their brief and made best use of the format out of any of the season's writers.

Professor Lasky, Bruchner and Doland argue about what they should do next, with Bruchner saying:

"Can't you accept we're on the brink of disaster?"

Cla... no, wait, that's a completely different Doctor Who episode he's just dropped the title of. We see a bit more of their differing personalities in this scene, with Bruchner seemingly being the only one with a conscience. (Maybe that's because he used to be a policemanny, in Softly Softly: Task Force?)

They are unaware that they are being observed by the POV monster, although we get our first sight of it - in accordance with tradition, this isn't a full view but rather one where it is in shadow and partially concealed.

The POV monster next goes after the old manny, who is about to have some sleeps. It must still be really grumpy from having been woken up, and sees this as a form of poetic justice.

The Doctor and Mel finally decide to investigate the mysterious isolation room after they see Lasky come out of it. It has been too conspicuously featured during this episode - with multiple (seemingly unrelated) scenes taking place just outside it - for them to ignore it forever. Or, to put it another way, it must have something to do with the plot under the law of conservation of narrative details.

Inside is a secret pod-like chamber in which a manny is having some sleeps. The Doctor and Mel wake her up - oh noes! Have they learned nothing from the end of part nine cliffhanger?

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 7

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 do 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: