It's not often we get the goodys doing a classic slow-cutting through a door, I haven't seen one of those since Ambassadors OF DEATH. By the time they get the door to the bridge opened, the Vervoids have already gassed Bruchner with their "marsh gas" powers that they happen to have. This prevents the Doctor or any of the mannys from going in, but not the aliens.
The aliens get the ship back under control, and then turn out to be baddys in league with Mr Rudge. This twist shows the difference between this section of The Trial of a Time Lord and the earlier two sections, in that while they suffered from being squeezed into their four episodes along with the courtroom scenes, this needed to be padded out with an extra subplot to fill four parts.
An unseen attacker throws something wet in the faces of the aliens on the bridge, and naturally enough this causes them to go
Mel, Doland and Janet find their bodies and then convince Mr Rudge that their hijack has failed (except as a means of making the episode a bit longer). Doland disarms Rudge, who runs away to get killed by the Vervoids. The Doctor takes the pewpewpew gun, which seems out of character for him. Even Mel, who hasn't even met the Doctor yet, is surprised by how out of character this is and she asks him:
Mel: "A phaser? You?"Doctor: "Exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures."
He hints to her that he is setting a trap for the murderer, and needs the pewpewpew gun for that.
Doland tries to trick the Doctor to get his paws on the pewpewpew gun, but when he does the Doctor has already borked it. The Doctor explains how he knew it was Doland:
Doctor: "It wasn't difficult to pinpoint you. The first murder could only have been carried out by someone with access to this unit. The second needed poison. Even the abortive attempt on Mel's life could only have been committed by someone who could go unchallenged into the isolation room and get the anaesthetic."Doland: "All this could have applied to Lasky."Doctor: "No. Not the Mogarians. She was a hostage when they were slaughtered."
Doland reveals his motive to be "avarice." He wants to use the Vervoids as slave labour on Earth instead of robots. Good news for the robots I suppose. Doland gets captured by Tonker Travers when he tries to run away, but he then gets rescued by the Vervoids who kill his guard.
This 'rescue' lasts only a few seconds, because then the Vervoids surround and kill Doland.
The Doctor has deduced why the Vervoids want to kill them all, because they are made from plants while the Doctor, the mannys and the aliens are all "animal-kind." Mel says
"Doctor, if you're right, then coexistence with the Vervoids is an impossibility."
Tonker Travers asks the Doctor for his "undivided commitment" in helping them fight the Vervoids, which causes the Doctor in the courtroom to stop the Matrix to say
"And there you have it: the direct request. I did not meddle; I was presented with an appeal. And not just from anybody, but from the man in whom authority was vested."
This seems a very late stage in the story for the Doctor to make this point in his defence. Why didn't he say something like this when the TARDIS first received the mayday call, or even when Tonker Travers first asked for his help when the mystery started happening?
It doesn't really matter, because the whole basis of the Doctor's defence doesn't make any sense - how can even a Time Lord defend himself against accusations of meddling in the past by saying he won't meddle in the future? Terror of the Vervoids would have made for a perfectly serviceable story (if hardly a classic) outside the confines of the trial story, but these episodes would have been better spent on the Doctor attempting to unravel the mysteries inherent to the trial itself: Why prosecute him in this way, and why now? Who is the Valeyard, and what is his motivation? How was the supposedly infallible Matrix made to lie, and by whom? The Doctor's defence does nothing to answer these questions, nor even make any progress towards answering them. As part of the trial, the whole four episodes are nothing but padding.
Professor Lasky tries to reason with the Vervoids without using the line 'No, stop, I created you,' but they kill her anyway. The Doctor and Mel find the big pile of ded bodies, a perfect visual metaphor for the unnecessarily high body count of this story.
It turns out that exactly the thing the Doctor needs to defeat the Vervoids is on board the ship: "vionesium," which is "a substance similar to magnesium." Tonker Travers lets the Doctor have all the vionesium he wants, which for some reason come in small globes that makes them look suspiciously like grenades.
The Doctor and Mel throw their vionesium bombs at the Vervoids, which go all brown and turn into a big pile of leaves. To be fair to this story, some of the effects in this bit are quite good, with one of the Vervoids changing colour in real time under a lighting effect. Then in the next scene the Doctor and Mel are getting into the TARDIS, after saying goodbye to Tonker Travers and Janet.
This is an incredibly contrived ending which comes out of nowhere, with everything that happens after Lasky was killed coming across as having been written in a hurry, or as an afterthought, as though the writers lost interest after the (quite clever) exposing of the murderer. Or maybe we could put the blame on the laziness of the director, who couldn't give a shit about pacing the story properly if it kept him away from the BBC bar? More likely it's some combination of both, but I fear this is one crime that will remain unsolved.
Anyway, speaking of contrived...
Back in the courtroom, the Inquisitor and Valeyard decide that the Doctor must be charged with killing the Vervoids under "article seven of Gallifreyan law." As established all the way back in part one, they are allowed to do this because article one of Gallifreyan law states that the charges being brought against the accused can be whatever the plot needs them to be at any given moment, especially when a cliffhanger is coming up. The Valeyard puts it this way:
"Article seven permits no exceptions. The Doctor has destroyed a complete species. The charge must now be genocide!"
Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!
Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 8
Oh, and I've remembered what the Vervoids remind me of:
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