Mindwarp
(Season 23, Dr 6 with Peri, 4-25/10/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Phillip Martin, director: Ron Jones)
'You are being prosecuted for a crime you were about to commit but hadn't committed yet – how will you plead once you commit it? What do you mean you don’t know?! That’s not going to help my report on the future crowding of timelord prisons is it? And don’t think you can get away with regenerating in there either – you don’t know what consecutive life sentences mean until you have a timelord prisoner! Besides, you know you’re going to get parole in your future for regenerating into a well-behaved timelord, that’s how the Gallifreyan justice system works…'
Ranking: 185
Power mad, greedy, ruthless, slimy, reptilian, oblivious to the needs of their people, wrinkly, green and with an irritating laugh, Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister had a real impact on how Dr Who dictator profit-obsessed monsters were depicted on screen. Yes, its Sil's second appearance and while it’s not as good as the first 'Vengeance on Varos' or the Sil story lost when an entire season was scrapped following the cancellation 'Mission to Magnus' (well worth tracking down the novel or the Big Finish audio by the way) this last minute replacement story still demonstrates why Phillip Martin was one of the best writers on Who in the 1980s. There’s a certain wit and intelligence you get here that lets Colin Baker's pompous Doctor soar as he pits his wits against an opponent every bit as egocentric and intelligent as him but with no hearts compared to his two). Sil is a glorious creation, the sort of monster that was perfect for the time and could never work in any other era, the Dr Who equivalent of Star Trek's Ferengis but created first (by a couple of years – something was in the air!), a yuppie who looks as slimy and horrible on the outside as they seem on the inside. And unlike some Dr Who monsters the acting is more than good enough to match the script: Nabil Shaban is often named as Dr Who doing its part for disabled actors, but what they don’t often mention is that he’s one of the best actors in Who, period and he breathes more life into this role than all the other villains the 6th Doctor meets put together. Giving Sil that slimy laugh and the detail that his translation circuit doesn’t work properly so he pronounces words wrong makes him seem more ‘real’ somehow, a person to be pitied as well as feared. Because in the 1980s it was somehow easier to do both.
Here’s the thing: ‘Mindwarp’ is in many ways as 1980s a serial as you can get. The seas and skies of Thoros-Alpha are painted bright colours like the sort you might see on tracksuits (it’s the lurid cover to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Dirty Work’ from 1984 come alive), the extras all come with big hair and shoulder pads (unless going for the near-skinhead look) and the bad guys all seem to have a little something of the famous faces of the day, the tough-talking Thatchers and Reagans who show no mercy or pity. Only at the same time it’s hard not to pity the cold and lonely people in this story who have missed out on all the fundamental parts of human nature that make life living, the long list the 5th Doctor gave us in ‘Earthshock’ about a well cooked meal or watching a sunset (green in this planet’s case) or better yet love. Now Dr Who is a very 1960s baby, built on the certainties of free speech and equality, so it feels particularly lost in this era of Garm-eat-Garm and one of the reasons it got taken off the air was that it didn’t seem to match the real world the viewers at home were watching: it was too safe, too cosy, too peace-loving in a world that seemed to be at constant war with itself. The best stories from the era don’t ignore that idea of a changing time though but lean into it heavily; Phillip Martin, more than anybody, uses this idea to his advantage, having The Doctor himself walk around feeling lost and powerless in the face of a world he doesn’t understand and doesn’t belong in, vainly trying to put it right and finding that it’s too powerful for him. Last time around in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ Martin sharpened his knives for video nasties, treating the violence as both the cause and a solution to a world gone wrong, as it made people cruel and selfish, obsessed with their own agendas. While it’s a story about the dangers of what you see re-enacted on the telly it’s also very much a story that points its finger directly at the government of the day and the way that attitude of only thinking about yourself came from the top. Originally the idea was to offer more of the same with ‘Mission To Magnus’, a similarly brutal story involving Sil and The Ice Warriors (Martin’s favourite ‘classic’ monster), which made similar points but based on the idea of corporate greed with two reptile races slugging it out against each other to be top, well, slug. This time around he’s under strict instructions to tone down the violence because BBC controller Michael Grade doesn’t like it (completely missing the whole point in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ that martin hates it) so has to come up with a different angle at the last minute. ‘Mindwarp’ really isn’t that different though, it’s just that the antagonist is slightly different (the bankers propping up the politicians and keeping them in power) and the violence comes in a different shade, a shade of money-green (perhaps the reason why Sil’s subtly changed colour from brown since last time). The sister to Varos’ Thoras-Beta, this is a world where people fight to become top dog not through fighting each other in person but in the markets, a story full of people trying to make a ‘killing’ in the markets, manipulating economics for their own selfish ends. Nobody dies directly in this story in quite the same way (well - spoilers - only Peri as our representative of what the 1980s are doing to our average person on the street and we’ll come back to her later as it’s a big part of the story) but they still die horrible deaths all the same, with ordinary people treated like cattle, the powers-that-be having no interest in their well being at all as long as they still keep raking in the moolah. Even the local samurai force, made up of warrior Royals no less, are shown to be simpletons who can be made to start wars on behalf of the people really in control of this planet. And for once even the Doctor can’t stop it.
You see, this is a rare
story where The Doctor comes out worse and is found wanting. It is, out of the
four trial stories, the only one that makes good use of the trial format by
making it seem as if the show is on trial rather than The Doctor. He’s clearly
not built for this world and is found wanting, his 1960s ideals not a match for
this world: he’s let people down, he ‘interfered' by offering up a big old
dollop of that 1960s idealism that made life seem as if it could be better and
where are we now? on the scrapheap, trying to scratch a living trying to earn a
liveable wage with multiple jobs while our bosses sit around being as opposite
to the 1960s dream as its possible to get. The Doctor doesn’t belong in this
world because Dr Who doesn’t belong in this world, it’s an anachronism that
even The 6th Doctor’s very
1980s dress sense can’t hide. Lock him u and throw away the key, case closed.
Except martin’s too much of a Dr Who fan to do that outright. Somewhere deep
down he still believes in the themes of equality and peace however unrealistic
and so The Doctor is shown as someone who is about to do good before his own
people fish him out of time abruptly to await trial (just like the eighteen-month
cancellation that so came without earning martin had a script all ready to go).
All three writing teams treat the trial in slightly different ways, with Holmes
seeing it as a good old fashioned plot twist to be explained later, probably by
him (though sadly that didn’t happen given his untimely death midway through
writing the finale (‘The Ultimate Foe’) and Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker as a bit of
colour, but otherwise business as usual. Only Martin treats it as a real
travesty of justice, a farrago etc etc, because it’s the timelords themselves
who cause things to go wrong in this story by not understanding the bigger
picture of what he was trying to do (I love the way the timelords are so thick
and out of touch they don’t understand the concept that anyone would lie to
tell the truth, their crime being too distant while putting The Doctor on trial
for ‘interfering’). It isn’t The Doctor, spreading 1960s love and hope to the
universe, that needs to be on trial but the people in charge who allowed the
1980s concepts of greed and war to go unpunished. ‘It’s not fair!’ screams
Martin, with the hero put on trial for the crimes of the baddy, a theme that
crops up a lot in his work (such as his breakthrough hit ‘gangsters’, full of actually
very modern scenes of a white racist comedian talking about how ‘lucky’ all the
people who come here taking our jobs are, juxtaposed with them getting beaten
up whole trying to scratch out a living, a real life scenario uncomfortably close
to both of his Who stories when you get down to it).
The poor Doctor’s not
been given a proper chance to put things right, we haven’t seen the end of his
story arc yet, of how things work out. Is the doctor mad, bad, traumatised or
faking it? Is he a coward acting 'bad'
and on Sil’s side because he's scared of losing his life to Kiv’s implant the
way the prosecution argue? And if people say he’s lost his way, well, that’s
either depending how you look at it a bit of 1980s brainwashing from the people
who make this show who’ve begun to believe a little of this era’s messages too
(Crozier’s machine which leaves The Doctor acting crazed). Or just maybe it’s a
bit of acting to fool the baddies into thinking The Doctor is ‘one of them’
allowing him to work from the inside, part of a ruse to save the day, which
gets thwarted only by the timelords taking him out of time and putting him on
trial? (If so then that’s the wickedest thing the timelords could ever have
done to him, not least because it costs his companion her life – maybe – but
the Doctor doesn’t seem to hold it against them, even in the future when his
memory must have returned).Or is it all an outright lie (with the Valeyard back
in the courtroom acting as the prosecution and faking evidence against The
Doctor). even though tampering with the Matrix is thought to be impossible?
(The one way Gallifrey’s Matrix really isn’t like the internet, where people
change everything all the time). The fan jury is still out on what exactly was
going on in this episode when the timelords took the Doctor out of time and
Colin Baker himself says he hadn’t got a clue what was real and what wasn’t –
while the writer and script editor couldn’t agree when he asked them either! A
ruse coupled with two bits of tampered evidence is my theory for what that’s
worth: we’ve seen this generation of the Doctor act cowardly before but only
after regeneration trauma and it’s hard to see what he would have gained from a
ruse, especially as Peri was the obvious next person to use as a donor (this
Doctor is many things but, past his first story, never that callous; still you
can see why the production team are playing up the fact that with this
particular regeneration we just don’t know and why it’s the sixth Doctor they
finally put on trial for his behaviour, much more believably than any of the
others). It seems likely that two scenes at least were tweaked by the Valeyard:
the scene of The Doctor ‘interrogating’ Peri by the rocks – in Brighton, about
a mile away from JNT’s house where Peri’s end-of-character party took place - after
which she’s ‘mysteriously’ freed and somehow knows to start a revolution with
Yrcanos almost as if The Doctor told her to and the scene of the Doctor being a
big wet drip afraid the Crozier machine will be used on him) So in other words
Peri died without thinking that The Doctor had abandoned her, despite what a
lot of the Big Finish and books hint at later. This could all have been saved
if we’d just flat out been told somewhere down the line though. Much as I admire the ambiguity leaving it up
to the viewer (this is, after all, a story all about working things out for
yourself and believing no one) I do wish there’d been some resolution to all this,
a final scene that discussed what was and wasn’t real because without it this
all feels a bit flat.
After all, there’s so
much here to relish with a world that feels far more ‘real’ than any other we
visit year or indeed in Colin’s run, sister planet Thoros-Beta aside. Like many
of the best Dr Whos this is hugely imaginative story, set on not one but two
twin worlds that feel as if they existed long before the Tardis landed there.
The script includes so many great details, such as the three ‘seas’ named like
our moons, ‘the sea of turmoil’ ‘the sea of despair and longing’ and ‘the sea
of sorrows’, greeted by The mentors as a bad omen (as in ‘we left the swamps
for this?! Dry land sucks!’) Like most of the best Dr Whos it’s not just detail:
for all its pretty colours this world feels not unlike our planet at the time
the episode went on the air too, driven by greed and dodgy dealings behind the
scenes. Where Phillip Martin excels is in giving us extreme characters painted
in very broad strokes and then just when we think we know them their
personalities evolve slowly and subtly, revealing hidden depths. This is, after
all, a story about turning from one person into another, of being transformed into
something you’re not – an idea that
works brilliantly with the 1980s metaphors, perhaps less so with the rather
obvious theme of werewolves! Peri also finds this out to her cost when she’s
chosen as a donor for a Mentor slug, our very 1960s peace and love kid despite
coming from the 1980s (she’s a botany student, practically the era’s equivalent
of flower power), turned into a ruthless 1980s killing machine with a temper
like everyone else, just like we all were in Thatcherist Britain if we wanted to
survive in a world that was all about
survival of the fittest. It’s something that comes with pain, as everyone
pretty much in this story (except maybe The Valeyard) finds that things aren’t
what they seem; we’re a bit earlier in the lexicon for the term ‘fake news’ but
that’s what this story is. You can’t truest anything you hear, not the slugs whispering
in your era, not your government urging you to revolt, not the evidence in a
trial used against you. The joy in this story is watching people who seem so
sure of their truth and set in their ways discovering they’ve been manipulated
and lied to, which happens again and again. Everyone here is a victim: the
mercenaries hired to fight a war that actually harms them, the scientists whose
weapons are used in ways they never imagined, Sil whose just trying to get
people’s attention, The Old Mentor that no one listens to and whose had enough,
Kiv whose bullied into living a bit longer by taking over a humanoid body (I
love the idea that body parts are the new status symbols on this planet,
something that’s both perfect for the plot and cleverly explains the fact that the other
Mentors don’t look like each other because there just aren’t other actors
around with Nabil’s capabilities and the same disabilities). Even The Doctor to an extent who goes from
being quietly sure that justice will prevail at his trial (as he is during ‘The
Mysterious Planet’) to finding out that The Valeyard really does want him dead
and the Inquisitor isn’t going to stop it), walking into this story with the
certainty he can solve anything and being whisked away before he has a chance
to put it right.
What I love most about Martin’s
work is that there’s no often no one obvious person at fault: his worlds are
full of the most awful people but they’ve been made that way by the system,
their worst crime being struggling to get by and survive and trying not think
about how their survival means death for everyone else. For the timelords are
the real baddies in this story, the shadowy people pulling strings behind the
scenes: everyone on Thoros-Beta are kind of pitiable, even the character who
was seen to be the arch manipulator last story out now we get to see the
context and precisely how he ended up that way. In ‘Vengeance On Varos’ Sil was
as nasty as nasty could be, a slimeball who left a literal trace of slime,
repellent, manipulative, egotistical, as close to evil as any being in Dr Who
can be without a redeeming bone in his body (and not just because he’s an invertebrate).
In ‘Mindwarp’ though you get to see more of his own kind and realise that he’s
just the baby Mentor trying to make waves in a world full of people who’ve been
manipulating him all his life. Sil goes from being the thing from your
nightmares to a real figure of pity, forever ignored and manipulated in turn, someone craving attention and to be invited to
sit at the big boy’s party. On this planet’s twin Thoros-Beta Sil was an Alpha
who came to take over, but on Thoros-Alpha he’s in a world of alpha males (and
they are all males it seems till Peri comes along, which raises all sorts of
questions about how this planet breeds) and no one special. What’s more his
beloved and distinctly beige leader Kiv, the sort of Grand Nagus of the planet
to his Ferengi-like people, finds him really irritating, with Christopher Ryan
the second member of ‘The Young Ones’ to make an appearance (I like to think
Alexei Sayle talked on set about what a great time he had making ‘Revelation Of
The Daleks’). Kiv’s every bit as horrible, but in a weary resigned way as if
he’s acting that way because that’s how the world works (while Sil gets a kick
out of what he does).He’s not at all like Sil, world weary and ready to die,
but accidentally causes the plot by being bullied into taking another body
against his will (the ultimate extension of 1980s corporate greed with the idea
that the rich are more entitled to the poor’s body than they are: seriously
it’s not that much of a stretch given the feeling of the day). I like to think,
too, that if Sil is meant to be Margaret Thatcher in the original then his
bigger and older Mentor from a twin planet has to be Ronald Reagan!
And then there’s Yrcanos,
played in a shouty way by the world’s shoutiest actor Brian Blessed in a part
written with him in mind. There’s no subtlety about this warrior King
whatsoever for the first three episodes – the sort of man who can’t even walk
through a door quietly - and you know exactly what you’re getting: someone who
gets off on being a bully and shouting at people. I mean, for a kick off he’s a
warrior and in Dr Who that’s a no-no for everyone up to and sometimes including
UNIT. Aha you think, so he’s the real baddy in this world…except bit by bit you
learn more about him you realise that he, too, is a victim. Yrcanos isn’t the
only person on this world who turned out this way: everyone in his race is just
like him, all jockeying for position as top dog. It’s relentless – a world
where everyone thinks they can solve everything by shouting at it and who think
they’re invincible. Watch the last episode though when it all starts going
wrong, with Yrcanos learning of the death of his friend Dorf (yet another in
Who’s long line of werewolves). He’s distraught, not just at losing someone
close to him but because he’s experiencing feelings he never had to think
about. He’s been trained for war yet nobody told him about death. What’s more
he’s just found out that he’s been used, encouraged to start a rebellion not
for moral reasons like he’s been told or because its better for his own people
but because the Mentors make more money that way. He reminds me of the yuppies,
the high-fliers who were encouraged to make a lot of money by their bosses and
live their dream who don’t realise that their share prices can go down as well
as up and that when they end up on the scrapyard everyone will treat them the
way they treated everyone else. I do wonder too if it’s a reference to all the
tinpot dictatorships that Britain helped in the Thatcher age in return for
money: all it needs is for Sil to have a son called Mark lost in the deserts of
Thoros-Beta to make the comparison complete. Suddenly Brian stops acting like
Flash Gordon (Peri’s alive!) and ends up acting like Augustus (his character in
‘I Claudius’, perhaps his only role on TV that actually is acting not just
‘being Brian Blessed’) because ‘Peri’s Dead’!, thoughtful and retrospectively
wise. The ending, at least until John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward re-wrote
it, has Yrcanos making one last great stand against the ‘system’ in a cathartic
cacophony of bullets that kill everyone in sight, possibly including himself.
‘But what else was going to happen when you create a world of alpha males?’
asks the writer desperately, tired of a world that could be so much better if
only we’d been kind and if only we hadn’t been fooled into believing a pack of
lies. Sadly the botched ending doesn’t make enough of it but I’d like to think
the original point that got a bit lost was this: that money doesn’t make you happy,
even though people tell you it does. For The mentors and Kontrap warriors all it’s
the root of all their misery, while Kiv at the point of death realises he can’t
take his money with him and that time and what you do with it are far more
precious. That’s a great moral for a Dr Who story, as all these characters come
to this same truth in their very different ways; I just wish more of that had
been clearer on screen.
Poor Peri, of course, pays
the ultimate price of being ‘transformed’ during the course of the story, despite
being the most innocent person here, the unluckiest of all companions in so
many ways having a sad end either losing her life, losing her hair or losing
her marbles and given a fate worse than death by marrying Brian Blessed depending
who you ask (the novelisation has the ‘happiest’ if most unlikely ending – Peri
and Yrcanos move to Earth where she ends up his manager as he becomes a
universe-famous pro wrestler!) Her death feels fated in some ways though if
only because she’s ‘us’, the ordinary person in the street just trying to keep
their head above water who couldn’t care less about turning a profit or being
embroiled in a war. This just as she was becoming a ‘person’ again, with a character
all of own (as she only has when written for by Homes or Martin), with a
delightful turn in sarcasm unique to her (‘Let’s rest first and then march, there’s
a good warlord’ says Peri, neatly putting down the alphiest male on Thoros
Alpha). Why are there so many different endings? Well, Nicola Bryant was ready
to do other things after three years on the show (one of those years with no
work, though she still had a wage being under contract) but didn’t want a
‘soppy ending’ wehere she got married to someone. John Nathan-Turner remembered
the ‘Earthshock’ ripples of
publicity that had happened by killing off Adric and asked her if she fancied
the same thing: Nicola said it sounded a good way to go, imagining maybe saving
The Doctor (which would only have been neat given the way the 5th
Doctor saved her life in ‘The Caves Of Androzani’). Phillip Martin was asked to
write this into his story, talking later about how awkward he found it trying
to make polite conversation with Nicola Bryant on set after working out lots of
wicked ways to kill her character off the night before! The end was meant to be
final: Peri dies directly because of politics (very symbolic) and also because
of the tragedy of the timelords whisking The Doctor out of time when surely,
surely he had a plan? Nicola left the show thinking that’s that and then JNT
had another thought. Wasn’t this exactly the sort of violence he’d been asked
to step away from? And wasn’t Peri’s death likely to upset children all over
again, at just the point when he needed everyone to be happy with this series?
So he hastily concocted a new ending: it turned out that the timelords had been
lying and Peri survived after all. Phew! Cue a sudden flurry of activity in the
post-production suite as he asks for any footage of Peri with Yrcanos, finding
a scene of them not exactly gazing in each other’s eyes (it’s a scene that’s
already been used of Peri being sarcastic, although to be fair that might just
be Peri’s love language anyway based on past episodes) and covering it with
pink hearts. Yeurrrrch. It’s a colossal mis-step: most fans, especially, young
fans, in the audience would have been far happier with Peri dying than all that
thought of kissing. It also raises the very obvious plothole of why The Doctor
doesn’t simply come back for Peri after his trial is over, something they have
a go at explaining a few times in spin-off books and audio adventures but never
fully successfully.
That’s the reason
‘Mindwarp’ doesn’t score higher all round in fact: annoyingly for a story that’s
all about the danger of manipulation this one was messed around with like few
before it, with the writer driven up the wall by the changes the producer and
script editor created. Back when this story was commissioned they pleaded with
him to make this story lighter and less violent so Martin complied, writing
what was a really funny barbed commentary with lots of funny moments (most of
them at poor Sil’s expense). They nearly all got taken out even though it was
exactly what he’d been asked for and replaced by scenes that are either pure
padding (there’s a plot involving revels, who arrive out of nowhere midway
through and don’t do anything which the writer says he didn’t write a word of)
or, ironically enough, violence. Had Martin been left alone to write his story
without interference then I really do think ‘Mindwarp’ could have been one of
the great ones; instead it’s merely an average story with good bits in it. The
other problem is the acting: it’s one thing writing a single character to act
like Brian Blessed but quite another when a young and largely inexperienced
cast are thrown into a room with him and asked to keep up. Everyone in this
room tries to match him for power, even when it’s obvious they can’t: Nabil is
great as always, finding new ways to play Sil now he’s the fall guy, but
everyone else thinks this is a loud and shouty story when really it’s a subtle
one, right up to and including the regulars, with the 6th Doctor at
his shoutiest and Nicola Bryant throwing
all caution to the wind as she becomes more of a match for Yrcanos than an
opposite. Some of the acting is really poor indeed: the young guards are
clearly here fresh out of drama school and hating every second (Dr Who really
wasn’t popular in 1986), Trevor Laird is awful as Frax even though his turn as
Martha’s dad in the 2007 series of Who shows how good he can be when he’s
enthused, while some of the main cat
should know better too (Kiv is a pale copy of Sil in more ways than just the
costume and shows just how great Nabil is as an actor: you can’t help but feel
that Christopher Ryan simply didn’t get what this part was supposed to be,
given his excellent turn as a Sontaron in ‘Stratagem’ twenty odd years later;
or perhaps it was that really uncomfortable costume and the marsh minnows he
was made to eat?) It makes for a very noisy story where subtlety goes out the
window unless you’re really paying attention and/or reading the novelisation.
It doesn’t help that everything in this story till midway through episode four
is designed to be ‘big’: the bright colours, the action sequences, the sets
(Nicola found out that the door to the laboratory cost more than she did and
joked about it between takes as well as aiming a few kicks at it!) There are no
small moments in this story till right at the finish where people have time to
pause and reflect on their actions. The danger of ‘Mindwarp’ is that, especially
if watching this in the era it first went out, you’re so convinced by the
recreations of 1980s thinking that you miss the message about how we got here
and the hints at how to get out, by caring and understanding that everyone is fighting
a battle you can’t see. Yes, even the bullies who look like slugs and stole
your pocket money.
In other words, this is a
great story but only if you overcome a lot of things that get in the way of
telling it: the acting, the script editing (this is Sward’s last work on the
show after one row with JNT and a
damning interview in ‘Starburst’ magazine too many to repair their bridges), the
shouting, the constant barrage of noise, the ambiguity as to what’s going on
and the trial sections that keep interrupting the flow and are even more irritating
here than in the stories before and after it. As ever the trial idea was
misguided: with everyone against it from the people in charge of making it on
down these stories need to rush out your television and grab the viewer by the
lapels and not let go, demanding that they tune in next week to see how things
turn out. Of all the writers on the series in the 1980s Martin is better at
this than anybody: just look at the cliffhangers, all of which are superb bits
of drama that really up the stakes and are designed to be talked about around
the water-cooler the next day (or marsh minnow vending machine if you prefer).
Only every time the story gets going we’re back in a court drama, the most static
type of drama going (because characters are in the dock and can’t go anywhere)
and the word play based around ‘Valeyard’ ‘Bone Yard’ ‘Knacker’s Yard’ ‘Fort
Boyard’ (I might have made one of those up I dunno, I always whizz through
these bits) becomes tiring the first time they do it, never mind the twelfth. This
week’s trial logic that surely even the timelords can’t possibly sanction
without an outcry: putting someone on trial for something he hasn’t finished
doing yet! These sections, most of them written by the script editor and clumsily
inserted in, are simply embarrassing and so repetitive: The Valeyard says something
smarmy, The Doctor gets on his high horse, The Inquisitor tells everyone to
shush and runs off to make some Bisto gravy (oh wait, no, sorry that was an
advert break starring Lynda Bellingham in her most famous role; usually I don’t
have a problem seeing actors and actresses in different things as, let’s face
it, that’s their job but this one tough because to Bellingham plays a timelord
with near-enough super powers and a busy housewife with two kids in exactly the
same way and its distracting). Bisto
gravy is a neat metaphor for this story actually: the ‘pure’ flavour in this
story is great and powerfully strong but
it’s been watered down so much by the end product you can barely taste it. And
yes, this is very much an end ‘product’, with one eye too many on trying to make
Dr Who commercial and sellable, with big name guest stars and big high set
pieces that don’t enhance the storytelling but get in its way. It speaks volumes
of how much the people in charge of this story didn’t understand it that JNT
seriously tried to get a sweet manufacturers involved with making ‘marsh
minnows’ for real…as a spin off from a show that’s all about the dangers of capitalism
(they didn’t bite. Perhaps because the ‘real’ marsh minnows are peaches covered
in green food dye that made the actors ill and gave them the runs, a deal Sil
himself would have been proud of if it had worked).
The bottom line: this
story is clearly not as good as ‘Varos’, the sort of story you could only realm
tell successfully once. I think on balance ‘Mission To Magnus’ is a better story too and
one that would have made so many of these points even better (after all, if you
have to believe that the Doctor is good or evil then why not have a monster
that can go either way too? The Ice Warriors are born for this. And who is more
‘cold’ to suffering that benefits their kind than an Ice warrior?)For all that
though, for all the neglect this story got in being made (and yes ironically it’s
a story about the dangers of neglect too, with most of Sil’s cruel acts a clear
sign of somebody trying to get attention) there are lots of things to love about
it: the rich characters, the tapestry of a world that’s so real and so similar
to ours, even the shock ending in an ‘I can’t believe they just did that’ sort
of a way. By far and away the best section of the ‘Trial’ season (anyone who
tells you it’s the simpler ‘Vervoids’ simply doesn’t get what this story was
trying to say and how brave it is), written and (occasionally) acted with heart
and soul and with some brilliant ideas propelling it, this is exactly what Dr
Who should have been doing in any year but particularly this one with all eyes
staring at the show. It’s odd, after 23 years of being so sure, to see the
people making Dr Who seem so confused about what this show is and what it’s for
when the answers are right there in the scripts being made by the people who
still care for it, The Doctor turned patient. There’s really nothing much about
this story (or indeed ‘Magnus’, the one it replaced) that needed fixing at all despite
what producer, script editor, Michael Grade and The Inquisitor seem to think:
Dr Who is in rude health, if only everyone would improve their bedside manner, back
off and let the patient breathe!
POSITIVES +Thoros Beta looks
stunning: pink skies, green seas, purple rocks…its only missing the shoulder
pads and it would be the most 1980s planet ever, totally fitting for a story
that more than any outside ‘The Happiness Patrol’ is about everything that’s
going wrong with society in the money-grabbing 1980s. Take a look at that shot
of sister planet Thoros Alpha hanging in the sky with Saturn-like rings, an
absolutely astonishing effect by 1986 standards they’d struggle to do as well
with today. How did they do this when the season eighteen months before we were
still using painted backdrops? Well, not for the first or last time DW was the
guinea pig for a new bit of computer technology, HARRY a new branch of Quantam’s
Paintbox programme that allowed you to take parts of a filmed image away and
replace it with other bits stored on file. Why is this different? Well you can
mix the foreground and backgrounds up more easily than before, as opposed to
simply cutting the screen down the middle and having effects only on the left
or the right. You can also more easily tweak things that are already there and ‘real’,
such as dying the sea pink. They’ll use this new toy a lot for the rest of this
and the following season and then promptly forget about. They never used it as
well as here, in its debut story though: it looks amazing and very modern. Of
course, in this story you can’t have any nice things left alone: they also use
this technique the ‘wrong’ way, on Yrcanos’ march which turns him into a ‘ghost’
with a ripple effect and makes it look as if you’re watching a football action
replay that’s gone wrong.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The mystery
of what happened to Peri after she was taken out of time was continued in the
Big Finish audio ‘Peri and The Piscon Paradox (2011), part of the fifth season
of the rollercoaster ride that is the ‘Companion Chronicles’ series. This one
is a mid-tier adventure: it’s great that Peri gets so much extra attention at
last and Nev Fountain understands her character as well as any writer, while
the get-out clause for the contradictions in her farewell are very clever.
However the unlikely scenario isn’t any more plausible or suitable than
‘Mindwarp’ and the fishy Piscons are just a less memorable variant of Sil. It’s
a tale of three Peris, technically, as her younger self (still travelling with
the 5th Doctor) meets her older self (having returned to Earth and
married her high school sweetheart) and the 6th Doctor meets her
middle self (busy recording a podcast about being a ‘Warrior Queen’ to King
Yrcanos!) The 6th Doctor is worried that Peri doesn’t remember him
past the events of ‘Planet Of Fire’ and that there might be a split in her
timelines somewhere. Finally he tracks down the break: when Zarl, the Piscon,
tried to steal the Earth’s water in Los Angeles in 2009. It all seems to be
solved ()eventually, due to a ruse of one lot of Peris and Doctors thinking
they’ve shot the other) and then a timelord appears in the Tardis apologising
for Peri’s treatment during the Doctor’s trial with the news that she really
did die on Thoras Beta during ‘Mindwarp’ but has been granted a reprieve and
brought back to life so now there are multiple versions of her, one with
Yrcanos’ babies and another who could have any life she pleases as long as her
memories are wiped. Peri, remembering how happy her elder self seemed, chooses
the version with her childhood sweetheart and lives happily, if confusingly,
ever after (for there are lots of other variants out there too). Awww!
‘The Age Of Chaos’ (1994)
is one of the few complete graphic novels of Who that tell a full story and a
good one too, written by none other than Colin Baker himself. The 6th
Doctor can’t undo the events of ‘Mindwarp’ but he can look in on Peri from time
to time and visit her growing brood of children and grandchildren on Krontep.
One particular visit is less than happy though: an outbreak of civil war has
made the planet a dangerous place. He discovers the Nahrung, an ancient race
that feeds off pain, are responsible and cause trouble by shape-shifting to be
the locals. One tries to take over the Doctor and is defeated by the timelord’s
biology, as the Doctor stops one of his hearts temporarily (but not the other).
Colin’s a good storyteller, I wish he’d write a few more adventures (he did
write a trio for Dr Who Magazine’s ‘Brief Encounters’ slot and ‘The Wings Of A
Butterfly’ one of Big Finish’s best short trips).
‘Bad Therapy’ (1994)
features another, New Adventures novel #57 by Matthew Jones which as Peri (now
re-named Queen Gwilliam) mixed up with the 7th Doctor and Chris in
mourning after the shock death of fellow companion Roz in previous book ‘So
Vile A Sin’ (although delays at the publishers meant Russell’ T’s ‘Damaged
Goods’ came out in between the two, out of sequence). They get mixed up in
different incidents in London’s West End in the 1950s, full of crime and
racketeering, before Peri literally falls to Earth and gives the Doctor a peace
of her mind: she spent a quarter century married to Yrcanos and found it
miserable, blaming the Doctor for abandoning her. It’s a very odd book, full of
all the things the papers say Russell invented and brought to show (gay sex and
lots of it) but the plot itself is decent and the character set pieces in
between are well worth reading – especially Peri’s.
‘The Widow’s Assassin’
(2014), number #192 in Big Finish’s main range, offers up what happened to one
of those various Peris (take your pick which one!) The 6th Doctor
returns some time after the events of ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ trying to track her
down and finds a much older Peri as Yrcanos’ warrior queen. She’s angry with
him at first, cold about the way she felt abandoned (and additionally angry at
the events of spectrox poisoning in ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ leaving her sterile, though that’s hardly the
Doctor’s fault) and even sentences him to give years in her prisons, before
slowly defrosting when she hears his tale of fabricated evidence and
remembering all the good times they used to have. Usually in the Dr-Peri
pairings Colin Baker gets to boss Nicola Bryant around but for one story it’s
very much the other way round and Nicola clearly relishes it! In context the 6th
Doctor’s just lost his audio companion Flip and is feeling guilty and
remorseful – you feel quite sorry for him by the end of this story and it’s the
closest the 6th Doctor comes to losing his bounce and smugness. It’s
a great character piece with Nev Fountain really capturing the pair’s love-hate
dynamic, although the story goes downhill sharply when other aliens turn
up.
‘The Eternal Mystery’
(2022) then did much the same but with visuals, as an extra/trailer for the
season 22 blu-ray box set. Yes, season 22 weirdly, not 23 like you’d expect.
Weird. Anyway the camera pulls back on a very luxurious looking Krontep (a
planet that looks far lusher than anything the show could manage for real back
in the 1980s) before pulling up to a cloaked figure apparently worshipping at a
statue of Brian Blessed’s feet in the by-now familiar sight of Cardiff’s
‘Temple Of Peace’ building which has been in so many modern adventures. A young
palace guard named Rex storms in and demands the interloper faces him and it
turns out (not really much of a spoiler) it’s Peri! ‘What do you know of the
warrior queen?’ are her first words on screen in nearly thirty years as the
shocked guard stutters: ‘That she was mightier than the King, ruled with both
steel and compassion and that she brought peace and prosperity to our people’.
The legend is that Peri vanished when Yrcanos died, back when Rex was a child,
an ‘eternal mystery’ something that tickles Peri greatly. She says she comes
back every year to ‘remember’ and ‘keep an eye on you lot’ thanks to a ‘magic
door’ that can only be the Tardis, but that her people no longer need a
‘figurehead’ the way they once did. It’s lovely to have Nicola Bryant back
again and she acts her socks off, even if Pete McTighe’s dialogue isn’t up to
the best trailers in the range.
Previous ‘The Mysterious Planet’ next ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’
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