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
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."
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