Within the confines of the show the Doctor was on trial. At the BBC the show itself was on trial. But on the evening that part eleven of The Trial of a Time Lord was first broadcast on the BBC, the BBC itself was also on trial.
That week a manny had been killed while practising a stunt to perform for The Late, Late Breakfast Show, a programme that shared in the same Saturday-night line-up as Doctor Who. It was immediately cancelled, and in its intended timeslot the BBC showed the film One of Our Dinosuars is Missing - proving that even nine years after The Talons of Weng-Chiang the BBC was still happy for mannys in yellowface to take starring roles in their Saturday night family entertainments.
The manny in the isolation room is another one of Professor Lasky's assistants, who is turning into a plant-based monster by mistaik. Speaking of mistaiks, did the Doctor mean to show the court The Seeds of Doom and put this story on instead?
Mel delivers the first of a number of stagy, even pantomime-level line-readings when she says
"Never mind the Just So stories, that guard looks triggerhappy to me."
There'll be more of this sort of delivery later on in the story and it did Bonnie Langford's reputation no favours with Doctor Who fans.
We get out first proper look at the Vervoids in a scene where we see that they are keeping all the ded mannys in a big pile where they can keep an eye on them. Or whatever the Vervoids have instead of eyes. The design of their costumes remind me of something, but I can't quite think what it is at the moment... never mind, I'm sure it'll come to me.
Mel hears them whispering exposition to each other and, thinking fast, even manages to get a tape recording of their voices - lucky for her the retro technology of the Hyperion Three is exactly like the technology of her home time period. There's just time for Mel to hear
"We must not make animalkind aware of our existence. They still outnumber us. If we are to kill them all, we must hunt them down secretly."
before she gets captured by an unseen manny. The Doctor comes in to find Mel gone, but the tape is still recording so he rewinds it and plays it back.
So for those keeping score that's me watching a recording of the trial where the Doctor is watching a recording of himself listening to a recording of Mel.
From the recording the Doctor deduces where Mel must be, and runs off to "the pulveriser" because it makes perfect sense that the ship would pulverise its dirty towels into fragments and send them floating into space instead of cleaning them in some kind of futuristic washing machine.
A brief scene showing that the Dcotor has smashed up the ship's communications room with an axe is the most unambiguous distortion of the Matrix so far, all attempts at subtlety - both within and without the programme - abandoned at this moment. In the cortroom the Doctor shouts out
"I didn't do that!"
which leads into a reiteration of the points made in part nine that the Doctor must use the Matrix for his defence even though he cannot rely on it to show the truth, and neither the Inquisitor nor (supposedly) the Valeyard believe that the Matrix has been or even can be tampered with. We do at least get a funny line from the Valeyard in response to the Doctor:
"Ridiculous, we all saw you! You're hardly mistakable in that... outfit."
Lol - guilty as charged on that count, Doctor!
Bruchner has decided that to kill the Vervoids and to stop Professor Lasky and Doland making more of them he will have to blow them all up, so he stages a one-manny hijack of the Hyperion Three, going so far as to pew Tonker Travers in the paw to show he means business. He aims the ship at a black hole.
The Doctor tries to come up with plans to recapture the bridge from Bruchner, but Travers says they won't W-word because "it's designed to be hijack proof." I think this is the writers putting in a little joke based on the ironic way certain supposedly "unsinkable" ships inevitably ended up getting sunk.
The ship starts to shake, resulting in the breakage of several coffee cups. I think this is the writers putting in a little reference to the missile attack on the Heart of Gold in The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
Professor Lasky doesn't understand what's going on, so the Doctor spells it out to her:
"Your colleague is aiming the Hyperion Three into the eye of the black hole of Tartarus."
Close-up* on the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!
* Lazy director can't even be bothered with a crash-zoom.
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