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

Part

So Robert Holmes went

before he could finish his script for the final instalment of this fourteen-part epic. His protégé, script editor Eric Saward, finished it, but the producer John Nathan-Turner rejected this script because of the cliffhanger ending that Holmes and Saward had put in. It seems very likely this would have involved a crash-zoom to the Doctor's face, but we'll never know because it was never made. Instead JN-T turned to Pip and Jane Baker (the writers of parts nine to twelve) to write an alternative part fourteen with a happy ending, with the side effect that the plot crashed between two very different writing styles between the penultimate and ultimate episodes.

This is immediately obvious from the first moments of the final part - the Bakers, having no idea how Holmes and Saward intended to resolve the cliffhanger to part thirteen, had to make up a solution of their own. Glitz runs over and tries to save the Doctor from disappearing under the quicksand, but fails.

The Doctor then pops back up, perfectly alright again. The justification for this seems to be that this was an illusion, which is a dangerous precedent to set (for the viewers, if not the Doctor) because it means that it is harder for us to accept later threats to the Doctor as being genuine when the plot requires them to be.

The Valeyard appears to talk to the Doctor, all the while teleporting around like a second-rate Tim the Enchanter. He explains, in a roundabout, overly verbose kind of way, that he wants to kill the Doctor because this will free him of the good side of his personality. A cleverer writer would have made use of this motivation later on in the plot, by (for example) having the Doctor's conscience burden the Valeyard at a crucial moment and interfere with his evil plans, but the Bakers seem to have forgotten they introduced this trait for him by the time they wrote the climax.

The Valeyard vanishes and the Doctor and Glitz have to run away from "asphyxiating nerve gas." The Doctor claims

"This is in deadly earnest."

so apparently we are supposed to take this threat seriously. Glitz, like the viewer, cannot tell the real threats apart from the illusions. I can't blame him - this seems more than a little arbitrary to me.

The Doctor and Glitz make their way to a hut on the beach, which turns out to be the Master's TARDIS.

The Master hypno-eyeses the Doctor with a flashing light and some noises. He sends the Doctor out into the Victorian-era location of the Valeyard's "Fantasy Factory" base to act as bait. When the Valeyard comes out the Master attempts to pewpewpew him, but he has a forcefield that deflects the Master's pews. The Valeyard shouts at him

"You really are a second rate adversary."

and then returns fire by throwing explosive feathers at him. The Master and Glitz run away while the Valeyard does an evil lol.

The Doctor snaps out of his hypno-eyesed state when he hears Mel's voice. Mel takes the Doctor back to the trial room, where there is a subtle wrongness to the way Mel and the Inquisitor speak to him - staying too still, or pausing just slightly too long before speaking. This is either a very clever way of indication that this is all an illusion of the Matrix, or else yet another example of the director not being very good at his job.

They replay a short excerpt from the end of Terror of the Vervoids, which Mel says is an accurate depiction of what happened. The Inquisitor then finds the Doctor guilty of "genocide" and insists that

"Your life is therefore forfeit."

The camera then pulls back to show the Inquisitor and Mel watching the courtroom from another version of the courtroom. While this is easily the best twist of the episode, it is responsible for the many subsequent theories that this courtroom could be another illusory one in turn, and that therefore every adventure the Doctor has from this point on still takes place within the Matrix. Perhaps the Time Lords should have named their Matrix after a different film?

Mel takes the key to the Matrix from the Keeper and runs for the seventh door. The Doctor, meanwhile, is on an old cart being taken through the dimly lit Victorian streets by some Gallifreyan guards. It's a good thing we've already seen that this isn't real, or else this would have been a massive giveaway. The big question now is why the Doctor hasn't noticed yet, but of course he has and is only playing along. When Mel comes to 'save' the Doctor - with her most panto line-reading yet

"Never mind the Sydney Carton heroics, you're not signing on as a martyr yet."

the cart vanishes and he tumbles to the ground. Instead of being grateful for Mel's rescue, he is grumpy.

Back in his TARDIS, the Master attempts to hypno-eyes Glitz, and when that doesn't W-word he instead bribes Glitz with a large chest full of prop pirate treasure - it's super effective!

Now in the Valeyard's base, the Doctor and Mel search for clues. Mel opens the door to the waiting room, but instead of being teleported to a beach she instead sees a dragon who breathes fire at her. Naturally, this bit was my friend Dragon's favourite bit in the whole story, and I also enjoyed it for the odd way it foreshadows Mel's final story the following year.

Glitz captures Mr Popplewick and brings him into the room. Popplewick directs the Doctor and Mel to where "Mr J J Chambers" is to be found "across the courtyard." Once they have gone, Popplewick paws over the Matrix secrets to Glitz. He then attempts to shoot Glitz with a gun, but Glitz has already stolen the bullet. The Master arrives and points a gun of his own at Glitz, and takes him (still carrying the secrets) back to his TARDIS. This short scene of all these baddys double-crossing each other is almost too good to belong in this episode.

The Doctor pulls the Mr Popplewick disguise off to reveal he is really the Valeyard using an old-school mask like the Master used to back forward in the UNIT era.

"The performance was too grotesque to be real. I have never been able to resist a touch of the Grand Guignol."

Mel opens the Valeyard's cupboard to reveal

"A megabyte modem!"

With such power the Valeyard can connect to the internets! He will be unstoppable!

The Valeyard's plan is revealed. He wants to assassinate the Time Lords attending the Doctor's trial by firing a "particle disseminator" (a pewpewpew gun) through his modem to the courtroom. The Doctor sends Mel to warn them while the Valeyard does another evil lol.

In the courtroom the Time Lords are concerned with the news they've just heard, that "the High Council has been deposed." The Master attempts a coup by holding the Matrix hostage. He makes a speech that is somewhat reminiscent of his universal ultimatum from Logopolis:

"What I have to impart is of vital importance to all of you. Now that Gallifrey is collapsing into chaos, none of you will be needed. Your office will be abolished. Only I can impose order. I have control of the Matrix. To disregard my commands will be to invite summary execution."

His plan is then immediately defeated by the Valeyard because he booby-trapped the Matrix secrets that they stole, which now activates and hits the Master and Glitz with some kind of effect that makes them go all slow-motion and black and white. So it seems the Valeyard was correct to call the Master "a second rate adversary" since he can defeat the Master without even being there.

The Valeyard taunts the Doctor:

"There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality."

At least I think that's a taunt, I don't really know what it means, mew. I like the sound of the word "catharsis" though.

Mel bursts into the courtroom and warns them of the danger. The guards run away while the Time Lords, encumbered by their costumes, just have to duck as the Matrix TV screen explodes and lets some dangerous SFX into the room. The Doctor manages to break the Valeyard's modem - oh noes! How will he post his important opinions on who is best out of Blake and Tarrant now? The Doctor and the Valeyard run away from the "feedback" (the manifest form of a thousand angy cats telling him his opinions are this: wrong) but the Valeyard is caught by the SFX and pewed.

The Doctor escapes back to the trial room where he is presumably just as guilty of genocide as he was in the fake courtroom earlier.

Doctor: "Now, let me see, where were we? I was about to be sentenced, I believe?"

Inquisitor: "All charges against you are dismissed, Doctor."

Phew, thank goodness for Gallifreyan make-it-up-as-you-go-along Law! The Inquisitor also tells the Doctor that

"The young woman, Miss Perpugilliam Brown, is alive and well and living as a warrior queen with King Yrcanos."

This is not quite what the Master told her in the previous episode, which was that Peri had been made a queen by King Yrcanos - not that she was a warrior, nor that she was with Yrcanos. Though if he offered, I can't imagine her turning down BRIAN BLESSED, can you?

The Doctor suggests that the Inquisitor should stand to be the next President of the Time Lords, no doubt thinking her flexible attitude towards law and order makes her eminently qualified for the job. The Doctor and Mel then head off to the TARDIS for the traditional quick exit now that the story's over - except, of course, that Mel didn't arrive by TARDIS, and in fact the Doctor hasn't even met her yet.

You might think this impending temporal paradox might worry the Doctor, but he is more concerned with Mel putting him "back" on the exercise and diet plan we saw him on at the start of Terror of the Vervoids - though this isn't really "back" on it for him, since he won't have started it yet. Mew. The Doctor's last lines are him complaining about carrot juice. There's a good chance this is what brings on his next regeneration...

Back in the courtroom, the Keeper of the Matrix has also regenerated - into the Valeyard! He turns to camera and does an evil lol for our benefit. The Bakers snuck in a cliffhanger after all.

The considerable problems encountered by the production team when making The Trial of a Time Lord - not least the death of Robert Holmes and the resignation of Eric Saward - go a long way to explaining the problems that we viewers can see on screen when we watch it. But arguably the story was flawed from its conception, especially the "Christmas Future" segment which required much more careful pawing in order for it to make sense as part of the overall trial story.

The other segments were hardly free of issues - The Mysterious Planet had a glaring plot hole that betrayed the fact that Robert Holmes was no longer around to fix it in another draft, and Mindfuck suffered from the gaping flaw that we in the audience lost our connection to the Doctor's motivations for more than a whole episode, without even a satisfying payoff to justify it.

The story suffered throughout from mediocre direction and a lack of ambition in the smaller things that undercut what would otherwise have been the show's most ambitious story since the 1960s - as exemplified by the majestic opening model shot cutting to a dull beige interior set.

And yet, in spite of all its many flaws (and in some cases actually because of them, varoonik), The Trial of a Time Lord is a tremendously enjoyable story to watch - a colourful, fun, silly, messy romp; a pantomime across time and space, if you will. I mean, a story that contains both the lines

"I AM A MAN OF ACTION, NOT REASON!"

and

"Whoever's been dumped in there has been pulverised into fragments and sent floating into space, and in my book that's murder."

can hardly be all bad, can it?

It may be the longest (which ought to mean best) story the series ever attempted, but the decision to split it into four identifiable parts means it need never be a burdensome time commitment - one can dip into it for an episode or two and simply bask in whatever nonsense one sees unfolding on screen. In that respect the story it most closely resembles might be The Time Monster, only with a less good Master.

On the subject of the Master - the Valeyard ends up here becoming a much better Master than we have seen since the glory days of Roger Delgado - even being revealed as the Doctor's dark side, a long since abandoned possible origin for the Master. Michael Jayston does his best to make the character stand out, especially once he gets the chance to be out of the courtroom in the final two parts, but really the only reason he isn't the Master is so that we can have the twist where he turns out to be an evil Doctor. It's easy to see why the Valeyard never returned - the universe simply has no need for two characters who are both the hero's shadow, metaphorically or literally, or both.

I have made repeated reference to the make-it-up-as-they-go-along nature of Gallifreyan Law in these reviews. I think the reason this is so obvious - more so than in the other times the Doctor ended up being tried by the Time Lords - is due to the trial format and courtroom setup on this occasion being so close to that of a real British courtoom trial - judge, jury, prosecutor, defendant in the dock, prosecution evidence followed by defence evidence, witnesses, and so on. The result is an uncanny valley effect where the audience - familiar with real life courtroom procedure, if only from other TV shows - feels cheated when it then proceeds to make up its own rules, which wouldn't be the case if the trial was wholly alien from the very beginning. The trial at the end of The War Games being the purrfect example of the latter.

And given the central importance of the trial to the story - the clue is in the name - it is surprising to me that the makers did not get David Fisher in to be one of the writers. Fisher wrote for the series back during Tom Baker's era, but he also had considerable experience as a prolific writer for the 1970s TV series Crown Court - a show entirely concerned with courtroom trials. Why not at least get him involved for the structure and writing of the courtroom scenes?

We can see in The Trial of a Time Lord the forerunner of many of the tropes that would go on to be common in the 2005 revival series of Doctor Who. Most obviously, it is almost impossible to imagine the new series without some sort of overarching plot arc running across an entire season. But digging a little deeper, we can see more things in common - the arc being forced to intrude into stories that don't need its presence, making them worse than if they had been allowed to stand alone; the build up to a grand finale that is then written in a hurry so that it all unravels like a load of bollocks (I told him that was a mixed metaphor and he would insist -ed); and the chickening out of killing off Companions after saying they have been/will be. Even an insistence on spending the budget on impressive bits of SFX because the showrunner producer is embarassed by the show's reputation for being unable to compete with glossy American sci-fi can be traced to here.

At least in Trial of a Time Lord the Doctor acting out of character can be explained away as the Matrix lying to us.

Finally, I must say something about the controversy that surrounds The Trial of a Time Lord's cliffhangers. Contrary to poular belief, not every episode ends with a crash-zoom to the Doctor's face. In fact, only eight of the 14 episodes end in this way, which is only just more than half. Of course, of the other six, three feature close ups of the Doctor's face (four if we count the Valeyard as the Doctor) without a zoom, which means it feels like it happens more than it does. Only parts three and nine are completely free of this repeated phenomenon, so it is no wonder the story has the reputation it does, but there is actually more variety there than you might expect.

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

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!

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

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:

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

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.

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."

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