Colin Baker's finest hour (well... finest 24 minutes) as the Doctor begins with the arrival of James Bree as the Keeper of the Matrix, the only manny to remember the Doctor's first trial by the Time Lords.
The Doctor is back to using insulting nicknames for the Valeyard, calling him "the Railyard." Moving from the lowbrow to the highbrow in the same speech, he then compares him to "Ananias, Baron Munchausen, and every other famous liar."
The Inquisitor has brought in the Keeper of the Matrix to prove that the Matrix cannot have been tampered with as the Doctor claims, but the Doctor quickly seizes upon what he says in his testimony as evidence that "the Matrix can be physically penetrated." Oo-er.
It has been a while since we have seen the very expensive space station, so we go back to see a cut down version of the same SFX sequence (I'm only surprised they didn't show the whole thing again) except that this time the light beam brings in two boxes, not one TARDIS.
Glitz gets out of one, and Mel is inside the other. They don't look very comfortable - certainly not bigger on the inside than they are on the outside! But you know the rules: if a cat fits, a cat sits. Glitz says
"Dibber? What's happened to your voice, lad?"
Bonnie Langford gives the second of her most panto-level line readings when she replies:
"I'm not Dibber. Neither am I a lad."
They enter the courtroom, surprising everybody there.
The Master appears on their TV screen, leading to the Doctor saying
"Oh no, now I really am finished!"
lol. The Master, after establishing that he is speaking to them "from within the Matrix (proof, if proof be need be, that not only qualified people can enter here)," says that he has sent Glitz and Mel to be witnesses on the Doctor's behalf. The Inquisitor says
"The Doctor may, in his defence, call witnesses to rebut your evidence, after which you may cross-examine them. That is the procedure, Valeyard."
which adds even more credence to the theory that the Time Lords are making up the rules as they go along, if even the Valeyard has to be told what their procedure is.
Glitz starts to give the explanation missing from the Mysterious Planet section, about what the secrets were that Drathro was protecting and which Glitz and Dibber were so interested in stealing - secrets that the Valeyard had so clumsily drawn attention to by ham-fistedly bun-censoring it. These were taken from the Matrix. The Valeyard accuses Glitz of lying, to which the Doctor responds
"I don't think so, Stackyard."
It also comes out that the Earth was moved "billions of miles across space" (as the Master puts it, perhaps because by now they have realised that sounds a lot more impressive than "a couple of light years" when talking about astronomical distances) by order of the High Council of Time Lords.
This is quite a stagy scene so far, in which Glitz and Mel in particular can both at times be seen standing around waiting patiently for their next cues to come up. But it's all worth it for the speech that the Doctor now gives, one of the defining moments of the sixth Doctor (and in a good way, not in a strangling-Peri way):
"In all my travellings throughout the universe I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here. The oldest civilisation: decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core, ha! Power-mad conspirators... Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen... they're still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power, that's what it takes to be really corrupt!"
This is a direct continuation and logical extension of writer Robert Holmes's first Time Lord-centred story, The Deadly Assassin, the first to suggest the Hofflike Time Lords are really an insular civilisation in a state of decline, with their great power used only for self-preservation. One could therefore see this episode as the climax of a long story arc that began with The Deadly Assassin and which continued through the intervening Gallifrey-set stories (The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity, The Five Doctors) with each one revealing more aspects of the messed up society of the Time Lords. How appropriate it is that the Master, who was present for the start of this conflict, is here again at its end.
The stakes get even higher as the Master reveals the Valeyard's role in the High Council's plan:
"They made a deal with the Valeyard, or as I've always known him, the Doctor, to adjust the evidence. In return for which, he was promised the remainder of the Doctor's regenerations."
I love this revelation, especially the amount of ambiguity that is squeezed into the Master's few words of explanation about what he means by "the Doctor":
"There is some evil in all of us, Doctor, even you. The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation."
It is strange to think that we are now well past the "twelfth incarnation" of the Doctor on television in our time, but that must have still seemed very distant in 1986. The Valeyard responds to this by running away.
The Doctor chases him, but he has escaped into the Matrix using "the seventh door." The Keeper lets the Doctor and Glitz in to follow the Valeyard, warning them "the Matrix is a micro-universe." If the parallels to The Deadly Assassin hadn't been apparent before, they are about to become blindingly obvious.
Appearing in the Matrix, which looks like a Victorian edition of The Great Pottery Throw Down, the Doctor hears the Valeyard doing an evil laugh, and some other lolrandom sound effects so that we know we are in a place of illusions. For some reason the Doctor decides to look for the Valeyard in a barrel, which a manny tries to drag him into so that he gets wet. Oh noes!
Back in the courtroom, the Master tells the Inquisitor about which parts of the Matrix evidence had been altered by the Valeyard, including that Peri is alive, "as a queen, set up on high by that warmongering fool Yrcanos." This is an odd way of phrasing it, which we should try to remember when the time comes for the Inquisitor to pass this news on to the Doctor.
The Master explains his interest in the trial, hoping that one version of the Doctor will destroy the other. This leads to another quite extraorinarily panto line reading from Bonnie Langford:
"How utterly evil!"
In the Matrix, the Doctor and Glitz meet Mr Popplewick, looking a lot like Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov in the BBC's War & Peace - which is a good thing to look like if you want to beat the shit out of Colin Baker. This encounter with Victorian bureaucracy confuses Glitz, but the Doctor explains that the Valeyard wants to "humiliate" him before he kills him.
The second Mr Popplewick they meet wants the Doctor to sign a consent form:
"The corridors in this factory are very long and dark. Should you unexpectedly die, our blessed proprietor, Mr J J Chambers, insists he inherits your remaining lives."
The Doctor agrees to sign while saying
"Obviously the Valeyard doesn't trust the High Council to honour their side of the bargain."
Mr Popplewick sends the Doctor to a waiting room, which turns out to be a beach. He hears the Valeyard doing another evil laugh, and then lots of mannys' paws come out from under the sand to grab him. The Doctor tries to escape by using the old classic
"This is an illusion. I deny it!"
The paws try to drag him under the sand, and the Doctor tries to help them by shoogling himself under. The unseen Valeyard says
"Goodbye, Doctor."
Crash cut (not a zoom) to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!
