Mindwarp: Ranking - 185

 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 5^th 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 6^th 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 5^th 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 6^th 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.

NEGATIVES - Poor Peri. Shortly after the production team kill her off with a big send off we think they wouldn’t possibly dare to try they have second thoughts and undo it, wimping out on one of their bravest decisions. Nicola Bryant is always good but she's brilliant here, chilling when Kiv takes her over and takes away all her distinctive features like her hair and her voice to make her like everyone else (oh no, they 1980sd her!) It’s such a sad and undeserving exit though: Peri was always an unlucky companion, forever exploited by those around her – including her stepdad in debut ‘Planet Of Fire’, so it’s hinted, which was why she joined the Tardis in the first place. So many lecherous monsters have tried and failed to get ‘inside’ her that it’s sad to see someone finally do it, even if they’re after her body for different reasons and consider it ugly; nevertheless the ending is still uncomfortably like a ‘rape’ scene, or at any rate as close to one as they can allow on children’s telly. Just watch it back with the silliness of ‘Morbius’: this conversion is real, there’s nothing of Peri left in that body at all and that’s scarier than any gratuitous violence could ever be. It’s a tragedy of huge proportions that the Doctor doesn’t at least try (and fail) to go back and save her. It’s perhaps the most colossal misjudgement from a production team who made lots of wrong decisions in 1986 who just wanted a big talking point and weren’t much fussed how they got it. If Peri had to die then she deserved to do it standing up to one of the aliens who were always invading her personal space in time and space and maybe even saving the Doctor, repaying what he did for her in ‘The Caves Of Androzani’. Just think what a moving story that could have been in a season where at last the Doctor and companion have moved on from distrust to being friends (with the actors figuring that if they’d been travelling eighteen months off screen they had to be friends by now because if they’d carried on the way they were before much longer they’d have strangled each other! They should have been allowed to play it this way from the beginning, as friends who like teasing each other and know each other’s weaknesses, rather than mortal enemies putting up with each other).

BEST QUOTE: The Inquisitor: ‘Gentleman, may I remind you, this is a court of law, not a debating society for maladjusted, psychotic sociopaths?!’

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 5^th Doctor) meets her older self (having returned to Earth and married her high school sweetheart) and the 6^th Doctor meets her middle self (busy recording a podcast about being a ‘Warrior Queen’ to King Yrcanos!) The 6^th 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!

‘Reunion’ (1992) features one of those possible Peris, a ‘brief encounter’ short story from Dr Who Magazine (issue #191) by David Carroll. In this version it’s the 7^th Doctor who visits Peri twenty years after ‘Mindwarp’, disguised as one of her guards. She recognises him straight away and her first words are ‘Well, at least you got rid of that awful coat!’ The Doctor also meets one of her two daughters. Interestingly his Peri can remember the events of ‘Mindwarp’ where a gloating Doctor chained her to a rock (tampered evidence surely?) and Peri comments that her abiding memory of the Doctor was of him ‘running away’. She claims to have outgrown her petty need for revenge and feels nothing, shooing him out, but as the Doctor leaves he spots her crying. The saddest of the many variations on this list.
‘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 6^th 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 7^th 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 6^th 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 6^th 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 6^th 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.     
‘Sil And The Devil Seeds Of Androdor’ (2019) is an independent unofficial film made by Reeltime Pictures – normally we wouldn’t include it for that reason but it is written by Phillip Morris and does star Nabil Shaban as Sil and Christopher Ryan as Kiv (as well as Sophie Aldred, but playing a different character to Ace, Mistress Na – Sil’s green and slimy girlfriend!) Like many an indie fan film it’s stagey and talky and clearly low budget(there’s only one real set, a courtroom)  but the words still sparkle and Nabil looks and sounds amazingly ‘right’ in a close-as-they-can-get recreation of his costume. Once seen enver forgotten, it’s nicely topical, with digs at all sorts of things from corrupt big businesses to Brexit to Donald Trump! A bit of trivia: Nabil was at The National Mining Museum when Jeremy Corbyn, then still labour leader, turned up for a press soundbite and slipped him the DVD as a bit of promotion: there are indeed pictures of Corbyn gamely holding the set up for the cameras! Out on DVD and blu-ray, with a novelisation available too.  

‘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’

 

Terror Of The Vervoids: Ranking - 224

 Terror Of The Vervoids

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Mel, 1-22/11/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: John Nathan-Turner (uncredited), writers: Pip 'n' Jane Baker, director: Chris Clough)

'I think we should go back to our 'roots' on this series of Dr Who...Oh that's what you've included in the script eh? Great...wait, walking plants wasn't quite what I meant!'

Ranking: 224

 

 

On the day that Trump gets indicted it seems apt to have a story where a brash man with no taste in clothes is put on trial for mass genocide, although I suspect the Doctor’s arguments about false evidence and tampering from the prosecution will stand up in court better than the orange menace’s. Yes, it’s the Trial of a Timelord part three, this time the defence which has been submitted by The Doctor from his future that he hasn’t lived through yet – and no, I don’t know how that works either (I would suggest if you ever end up in court not relying on the defence ‘I’m going to do better in the future’ because I don’t think it works at all on Earth). Nor can I explain how the Doctor ends up walking off at the end of the trial with the companion he’s never met before this future scenario, Melanie Bush. Nor why the production team thought they could a) get away with that name and b) get Bonnie Langford back in her immediate post-Violet Elizabeth Bott days in to play her (she doesn’t quite play the same character and doesn’t quite scream and scream until she’s sick,  but you sense it’s c lose-run thing at times).

 Remember, beyond the central character this is a series on trial for its life, with Michael ‘Valeyard’ Grade ready to axe it at the least excuse. More than ever before, Dr Who needs to prove that it’s a proper candidate in the ratings, that it can go toe to toe with the best dramas on offer in 1986, most of all that it’s a show to be taken seriously. This is not the time to go hire that sort of an actress  - the sort of person you assume was born with neon leg warmers and a chirpy false smile - to play this sort of a companion. Then again, this is not the time to turn to a pair of writers who’s standing with the fans was dubious at best and who’s last big success was getting on for forty years ago. Or to have some of the shoddiest sets ever seen in the series. Or to have the sort of monster that would never ever work in a quadzillion years with all the budget in the world: a walking plant. Not in a JFK conspiracy sense either, I really do mean a walking plant. 

The Vervoids are easily the rudest ever seen in Dr Who (just beating Erato, the Creature from the Pit in the final), resembling male genetalia poking out of female genetalia, with a gas pipe placed in a most unfortunate position. If Dr Who ever did a porno film (wait they did, with Zygons, erm if they ever did a second one…) then the Vervoids are first in the queue. They’d definitely win the ‘playalien’ centrefold commission. They’re the sort of things that you feel are surely there as a prank, at just the time when Who ought to be taken seriously and were Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker a different pair of writers, given that the basic description is in the script, I’d assume they were there for a bet or a prank or a risqué joke - but as they’re the most ‘establishment’ writers the series ever had it’s probably a design miscommunication. They are, apparently, meant to resemble tulips which they sort of do, but you have to question just how much action anyone in the production team was getting that everyone signed off on this and let it through. It’s not just the heads, though goodness knows they’re bad enough: they’re a curious and biologically unlikely mix of maple and ivy, a race of plants that seem to buy their trousers from sports shops, are one of those rare monsters not seen since the 1960s that come with their own  evolutionary unlikely zips (and remember TV reception was murkier back then so nobody was expected to see things like that in Who’s early days – Verity Lambert would have redone the whole lot if she’d seen HD coming) and they walk with a shuffling gait that makes them the easiest of monsters to escape from, despite an attempt to hire dancers to make them more graceful (many of them Bonnie Langford’s friends, which gave her the giggles throughout the making of this story).In pure looks the Vervoids rival The Gel Guards, the Ergon, The Fish People, The Myrka, The Bandrils and The Taran Wood Beast as Dr Who’s silliest monster (though I still say The Myrka wins in a close contest). They’re still looking silly though, daft enough to make you wet your plants.

Even if you try to wipe the look of them from your head and are somehow brave enough to buy or borrow the Target novelisation (when people who glance at the front cover might get the wrong idea, especially back then when Dr Who books tended to be kept in the children’s department) The Vervoids are a stupid idea. We’ve only ever had one sentient plant in Dr Who and the Krynoids are very different to the Vervoids, a more plausible sort of weed that grew from seed-pods and took over the nutrients on Earth, accidentally causing a few infected people to turn green and fall over. There’s a sort of logic to them, that they are only doing what all life does – try to grow until someone like The Doctor comes along and prunes them. The Vervoids are test-tubes (well, Demeter seed but it’s much the same thing) babies who’ve been genetically spliced and altered into becoming ‘real’ people. They can walk, talk (after a fashion) and can even turn door-handles and start showers, growing arms with stamen-like hands to do so. Despite the fact that they’re newborns who have never learned how to use their appendages because they’ve never needed them before. Then there are the voices: we don’t know what sentient plants might sound like but I doubt few people would have guessed this array of accents: some Geordie, some Brummie, some Scouse (they could have at least have come from Chelsea, given the flower festival). They’re an evolutionary cul-de-sac all round even before scientists like Professor Lasky and her cronies start tampering with them though: they have lungs to talk yet still use photosynthesis, are allergic to Oxygen yet stay fresh without the need for drink and yet somehow create gas without consuming any liquids, while their roots seem to have evolved into what look like shoes. Alien killer plants can work but the writers just haven’t thought their world or their monsters through at all. The inspiration apparently came when the Bakers heard a documentary on how plants and animals share DNA strands, specifically the one that creates hormones (which might also explain why they turned out Who’s horniest monsters) and a discussion of whether plants can have ‘feelings’ (I asked my houseplant about it had died of boredom by being made to watch this story. Pip ‘n’ Jane can’t have been listening too hard because, erm, that’s not how it works. Every living thing has certain DNA in common with each other but a small strand causes a lot of differences and having one that can take on a humanoid shape when plants aren’t made to walk or think or live or even breathe like we do is just silly. Especially walk: The Doctor speaks at one point about how a hydroponic chamber can cause hallucinations and I thought the first time round watching this story that has to be the explanation: a mass hallucination. Because these plants don’t shuffle like the Krynoids, they actually walk, one of the silliest sights in all of Who and one, remember, that could have been vetoed at any stage without immensely affecting the story at all. ‘Vervain’, incidentally, means ‘weedy plant’ which sums them up quite well. Even I reckon I could probably escape from one of these without much difficulty and when even I can defeat a Dr Who monster that’s a sign a design is in trouble.

In any other era it might not have mattered (Whovians have long since learned to look past the low budget monsters), but remember this is the year after the hiatus, when Michael Grade had attacked Dr Who partly because he thought its monsters were ‘silly’. The fact that he considered this season and this story in particular an ‘improvement’ on previous ones goes a long way to show you why no one should ever believe a word Grade says and yet this is was utterly the wrong time to do this. The same goes for all sorts of mistakes in this show. Bonnie is actually a fine actress. Considering this is the first television she’s done since she was tiny (after years on the stage) she’s surprisingly good at times. We know from Billie Piper that sticking someone in a box and assuming them to be awful at a particular type of acting isn’t fair. Had the right character come along to test her and show what she could do, had the director taken her by the hand and talked her through how to do it (Bonnie naturally has a tendency to ‘emote’ her lines, as if delivering them to the back of an auditorium) we might yet have had a brilliant companion. That’s what Russell T davies did with Catherine Tate, ignoring everything that had made her famous and building on the parts of her ‘character’ that he liked, making Donna as feisty and funny as the characters in her show but also sweeter and warmer, filling in the gaps with real personality. Bonnie is just asked to play herself, even though that’s exactly what she was singing up to get away from. Certainly Bonnie was up for it, eager to do ‘straight’ drama to get away from her reputation (a series of cruel contraceptive adverts ran suggesting the world might have been a better place without red-headed chirpy brats being born to the world) and enough of a fan of the show to want to get involved (it helped that she shared an agent with Colin Baker). But producer John Nathan-Turner wasn’t interested in revitalising her career. In a bit of a panic over the hiatus and pleasing his BBC bosses he fell back on the only things he knew anything about, publicity. He reckoned by hiring a big name Bonnie’s fans were sure to tune in and watch, even though Bonnie wasn’t the sort of performer to have ‘those’ sorts of fans and the sort of fans she did have would not be watching Dr Who. He wasn’t interested in who her character might be (although he did write a full synopsis, most of which wasn’t used, giving her the background of being a computer programmer from peas Pottage, skills Mel will use in Russell T Davies’ comeback and a few spin-off works but never on TV). Even the synopsis describes Mel as ‘fascinating, scintillating – and irritating’. If even the producer don’t like her, what chance to the viewers have?

That’s a sign in itself of what the real trouble is: behind-the-scenes the production team are collapsing. You never ever get a producer writing a character synopsis – that’s the work of the script editor. After all he’s the one who’s going to have to live with this character across successive stories, work out their character ‘arc’ and where the stories change them and work out just what the series needs at its heart. The script editor in this era is Eric Saward and he already feels at war with JNT: he didn’t approve of casting Peter Davison, seems to have hated Colin Baker (without actually saying anything to his face) and was appalled at some of JNT’s behaviour (basically that JNT was more interested in attending conventions and big name pantomimes using Dr Who cast members than he was with stories and day to day production). Saward, though, is not the sort of person to say any of this directly: he was aware that he was a junior writer who maybe got promoted too quick and till now he’s had just enough sway over his own stories to strike an uneasy truce (it doesn’t help that JNT, notoriously thin-skinned, often fired people for disagreeing with him). By now though he’s four years into a job and watching his show get attacked for the sort of decisions his producer is making and feels he’s earned more respect. The producer reckons that a time of crisis is not the time to rock the boat. Their uneasy working relationship finally comes to a crescendo about here. Saward’s favourite writer was Robert Holmes: he stood for everything Saward wanted in the show, bite wit and imagination that pushed the series to its limits. JNT always disliked working with people who’d been on the show before and treated Homes with disdain, ridiculing ‘The Mysterious Planet’ (admittedly not one of his best). JNT’s preferred writers were Pip ‘n’ Jane: safe reliable hands who could scripts in on budget and on time. 

Luckily for Eric, the Bakers were away just when JNT might have asked them to write the season’s all important finale: after writing a Dr Who ‘Choose Your Own Adventure' they’d taken a two month holiday in Spain (maybe they thought it looked nice on ‘The Two Doctors’) and back in those pre-email or mobile phone days nobody could get in touch with them. So Holmes got the job, against JNT’s better wishes, while Saward moved on to the penultimate slots. The original plan was to have two two-part stories where ‘Vervoids’ went. One was by Sexton Blake writer Jack Trevor who’s story ‘The Second Coming’ sounds a bit like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ turned out to be. Saward began to get a bit worried about how it might turn out however, when the central image Trevor passed on was a lonely old man trapped inside a gasometer. It might have worked in another era with les riding on it, but this maybe wasn’t the year for such a big experiment. That story should have led into a piece by a new writer, David Halliwell, ‘Attack Of The Mind’. A traditional Dr Who tale of ‘beauty and the beast’ and looks being less important than character, it featured the pretty but cruel ‘Penelopes’ at war with rat-like but sweet ‘Freds’, using hallucinations to make them turn mad and look like the baddies. It’s probably a mercy we didn’t get that one – what worked well in the 1960s (it’s as theme that crops up a lot, especially ‘Galaxy 4’ and ‘The Savages’) it would have been laughed off the screen for being too simple in the 1980s. Then, at Ian Levine’s suggestion, Saward commissioned ‘Sapphire and Steel’ writer P J Hammond who came up with ‘Paradise 5’, the only one of these stories to be made as a Big Finish ‘Lost story’ (adapted for Peri rather than Mel). It’s rather good, a claustrophobic tale of another leisure centre where rather more happens more sensibly than ‘Vervoids’ but JNT, suspicious of people with more TV experience than him, stopped it going any further. Beginning to panic as deadlines loomed, Saward contacted his predecessor Christopher H Bidmead who’s always been happy to write for the show and would surely understand the limitations and deadlines. Bidmead came up with a four-part story named ‘Pinacotheca’ which sounds right down my street, a sort of cross between ‘The Space Museum’ ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Joy To the World’ about a museum where all things existed in balance and could be visited with the right key, but when one of them collapses things begin to go wrong. Bidmead, aware of the problems that had happened, worked closely with Saward, sending him regular updates and keeping him aware of all the changes but Eric didn’t like this story either, feeling it too slow and without the action he always preferred. Only he took a month umming and ahhing to reject it, distracted by the fact that Holmes’ health was failing fast and it was becoming clear that the finale was in jeopardy. JNT thought he had the perfect solution to their problems when he bumped into Pip ‘n’ Jane by chance in a lift in the BBC and pleaded with them to write a story at short notice without consulting Saward first. The script editor had found working with them on ‘Mark Of The Rani’ a miserable experience and fought against it but without any alternative got back behind his typewriter and gritted his teeth. You might well ask why Saward didn’t write a story himself given that’s what script editors traditionally tended to do on Who when stories fell through: JNT wouldn’t let him seems to be the quickest answer.

It was then, in quick succession, that Holmes died and JNT hired Bonnie Langford. Saward didn’t officially quit his job but when Starburst Magazine  (America’s equivalent to the UK’s ‘TV Zone’, but less fun and even more opinionated) called up to ask the script editor’s feelings about the new series and caught him in a low mood. Asked to defend some decisions Saward considered stupid, the script editor let fly all those pent up feelings he’d been keeping: JNT only cared about the money, he didn’t care about the scripts, his idea of talent was Drip ‘n’ Pain not Robert Holmes and Bonnie Langford and his big casting decisions for the past two Doctors and new companion were dumb (Nicola Bryant and the Davison companions seem to have spared his wrath, but everyone else was fair game). For all his faults (Saward had a point with most of his comments) JNT was a loyal soul who would do anything for a friend but handled having enemies badly and seeing the script editor he’d plucked from relative obscurity turn on him was too much to bear. JNT went into a sulk, at just the time the show needed him most, abandoning Saward’s partly re-written Holmes finale and doubling down on his decisions and hiring Pip and Jane to not only write ‘Vervoids’ (with a basic idea of a Whodunnit on a spaceship suggested by Saward) but the replacement finale too, going so far as to bring lawyers in for writer discussions so he could ‘prove’ they didn’t lift bits from Holmes’ or Saward’s ideas.

Given all the behind-the-scenes difficulties, then, it’s a wonder ‘Vervoids’ isn’t worse. Pip and Jane wrote an episode a week, dropping them off at TV centre themselves rather than entrust them to the post (as if these scripts fell through there was no time for any replacement). They had no time for re-writes and the director was at work on episode one before seeing the rest of the story. Often that shows: it’s a story that feels rushed, implausible, full of red herrings that don’t go anywhere and plotholes that should have gone somewhere. It’s also recycled heavily. Pip and Jane weren’t big on scifi and had never seen the show before ‘Mark’ but clearly they’ve been doing some research since then as this script is like a Who’s Who Of Dr Who at times: There are the ‘Krynoids’ from ‘Seeds Of Doom’ of course. There’s the setting of ‘The Leisure Hive’ (plus ‘Orphan 55’ to come) and the same ‘fake’ front of a complex intended for pleasure that ends up with people running for their life. Though there are no plants in ‘Hive’ the Argolins are similar, with ‘leaf’ type appendages that turn brown and fall off when they get too old (just as the Vervoids do when accelerated through time). The two stories even end up sharing an actor, David Allister, who was Stimson in that and Brucher in this. Then there’s the ‘Whodunnit murder mystery angle of ‘Robots Of Death’, with people in a self-contained ship who can’t escape picked off one by one (and in the future ‘Unicorn and The Wasp’ won’t be just like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, it will be a murder mystery with Agatha Christie in it). Compared to all three of these stories (though not the wretched ‘Orphan 55’) ‘Vervoids’ is a failure: The Krynoids feel like a plausible potential threat in a true scifi mould rather than some people in silly costumes that represent an evolutionary impossibility. And something’s really gone wrong when Kyrnoids are the more sensible monster! ‘The Leisure Hive’ feels like a real world and The Argolins real people, with the murderer killing through the more plausible research into aging rather than plants. ‘The Robots Of Death’, like all the best murder mysteries, makes sense when you go back and watch it again knowing who the killer is (mostly anyway). In ‘The Vervoids’ the murder mystery angle is a total washout and feels as if the Bakers changed their mind partway through without the time to go back and change things. Here’s a big spoiler who the murderer is if you want to look away now: it’s Doland, Professor Lasky’s assistant, who creates the Vervoids to make cheap slave labour and kills anyone who tries to stop him. Which makes sense of some of the details (his attempt on Mel’s life when she’s close to uncovering the truth, the ‘accidental’ infection of fellow assistant Ruth, possibly the undercover cop Hallet, not that there’s any sign in the script that Doland has been rumbled) but not all (why does Doland electrocute Commander Edwards before he’s even tested his Vervoids out yet?) It speaks volumes that the revelation in the last episode took everyone working on this story – there was even an unofficial betting scheme going on - by surprise: some suspected Brucher (who does, after all, hold up a seemingly un-hijackable ship so easily), some Professor Lasky herself (she was due to make lots of Vervoid money and why else would they hire someone of the calibre of Honor Blackman for a relative bit part?), some the stewardess Janet (named perhaps for Janet Fielding) who is the typical ‘person without apparent motive but lots of opportunity’ that always tends to do the deadly deed in these sorts of things. Some even reckoned Mel couldn’t possibly be that relentlessly chirpy for real and had to have a darker side, but nope: it’s the person everyone least suspected. Precisely because he had the least to gain and the least opportunity. As a Whodunnit, as a Who story about a new and original world, as a pure monster story with an engaging threat, ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ is a failure on all three counts. Throw in the ridiculous of the trial setup (if The Doctor is free to have future adventures then it’s obvious he’ll be acquitted, so all tension is gone) and (spoilers) The Doctor destroying them in an act of genocide/pesticide because they’re a ‘pest’ because they would take over the rest of the universe is out of keeping both for the rest of this story and the fact The Doctor is currently on trial for his life and defending himself by sharing an event that’s supposed to put him in a good light (if he really wanted an example from his future that put him in a good light with the timelords we know now he could have chosen ‘The World Enough and Time’ ‘The End Of Time’ or ‘Hell Bent’. The Doctor’s argument? He got involved because somebody ‘asked’. So that’s alright then. Trump will probably try the same argument. Although thinking about it I suspect he’s more Slitheen than Vervoid. The final sentence seems obvious. Throw away the key!

And yet ‘Vervoids’ isn’t utterly hopeless. The speed at which they’ve been forced to write means there’s less times for re-writing and more time for first instinct and the Bakers feel like the sort of writers who get worse with each draft, not better. There are no single scenes quite as cringeworthy as the ones in their two Rani stories and without Kate O’Mara overpowering everyone else this story has more of an ensemble feel. There are moments when this story is as watchable as anything in the ‘Trial’ season (the lack of actual trial scenes interrupting the action helps – partly due to time and partly because Saward used to write those). Perhaps because of how weather-worn the plot is ‘Vervoids’ ends up feeling more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than any of the other three. The Bakers’ dialogue sounds horribly overblown and theatrical when handed to most of this cast (especially poor Bonnie, who wants so hard to get away from this sort of thing) but it works well with Colin Baker’s Doctor at his most brash and pontificating. The writers ‘get’ the sixth Doctor and how his ego-trips and desire to be the focal point in every room is really defensive bluster for how unsure he feels and with this story coming from his ‘future’ he’s mellowed a lot since we first met him, Colin Baker nailing the subtle changes in the script. He works in a Whodunnit too. The 4^th Doctor in ‘Robots Of Death’ became a suspect for being so alien and distant, an obvious likely killer arriving from the outside, but the 6^th Doctor even more so: he’s always there, in the middle of the action (in a coat not exactly made for hiding), pausing to give long speeches rather than running away. Mel brings out his paternal side too and their banter is far more believable and gentler than the bickering that poor Peri had to put up with. Colin himself feels like the only person actually enjoying himself in this story, perhaps because he’s the only person pleased to be back at work and eagerly looking forward to many more years like this (tragically, without knowing it, this is his last story as filmed – all because Michael Grade married his ex). Baker the actor belongs in this story, right on the line between adult violence and childish pantomime, and the Bakers the writers know this well, using him better than most. It helps that JNT, unofficial script editor for this story and the next one clearly enjoys his company on the page more than Saward did too, always trying to push him off to the sides. There’s an alternate parallel universe where Michael Grade got sacked from the BBC canteen for stealing the sausages and Colin was always allowed to be this Doctor from the very beginning, beating Tom’s long stint in the role because he loved it so much and no one wanted him to leave. Even Bonnie isn’t that bad half the time, with Mel proactive in a way we hadn’t seen a companion since Romana and while she’s the same hyperactive optimistic overgrown toddler she always will be, here she’s also quite ‘Rose’ like, someone who cares for and is open-minded to all the aliens she meets and loyal to the Doctor to a fault. She even gets her definitive moment as early as her first episode when she screams at just the right pitch for the musical ‘sting’ at the end of the first cliffhanger (it’s in ‘F’) and have it seem entirely in character; not many actresses could pull that off (just try imagining the director asking that of Sophie Aldred or Janet Fielding with a straight face). 

When The Doctor and Mel are together on screen ‘Vervoids’ works. It’s only when the rest of the cast turn up things go wrong. Even ignoring the Vervoids (if you can) The Mogarians are some of the most inept and undeveloped races in the series. Apparently this is their ship but they can’t breathe Oxygen. Yet The Humans (who are the interlopers) stroll around in oxygen filled rooms while they walk around with gas masks on. You only need to look at the reaction to getting people to wear masks during covid (still an ongoing pandemic, by the way) to save their own lives to know that this sort of service seems unlikely, to save the least. The characters we meet are all caricatures too: either scheming or mad or possibly both. Professor Lasky is maybe the worst of all: during the course of this story we only ever see her at the gym or reading Agatha Christie novels in a meta injoke that just doesn’t work; we never see her supposed passion for her scientific creations. While she must also be mighty fond of showering and have a whacking suitcase that’s bigger on the inside given that she is at the gym multiple times with multiple changes of clothes when this story allegedly takes place in a single day. You wonder why Honor Blackman ever took this script, given that she has no moments to shine, some awful dialogue and absolutely no character growth whatsoever. Even ‘The Avengers’, the emptiest most soul-less TV show of the 1960s, gave her more to do than this. The characters also all talk like posh middle class lecturers who want to impress everyone with their knowledge, all the time – a problem of all Pip ‘n’ Jane stories but especially here without The Rani taking most of the dialogue. For The Doctor it’s natural, at a stretch Professor Lasky too, but her more working class assistants? The stewardess? The monsters? Bonnie Langford??? Not likely. People have stopped watching Dr Who mostly because Michael Grade keeps messing around with the schedule but partly because it’s remained a bit posh and middle class in an era that was tough and gritty. Viewers just didn’t feel represented by this show any more. This story’s the poshest the series has been since the first Romana was acting like a princess at a time when this show needs to connect with people more than ever.

The other difficulty too is, it’s more Midsummer Murders than Poirot or Sherlock, a cosy one-pipe problem, without many suspects to choose from and it’s a story that makes less sense when you know who did it than it did when you were watching it unfold. The whole point of murder mysteries is to see if the audience can solve the crime, but that’s impossible – not least because the means (the Vervoids) don’t even exist when Doland first kills off-screen.  The story’s big ‘clue’, which turns out to be a red herring, is that investigator Hallet forgets to turn his Magarian translator circuit on, but there are all sorts of alternative explanations for this, from faulty equipment to a Magarian doing his best to learn the Human language. Doland’s plan also seems to involve knowing that Brucher is going to go conveniently mad and fly into a black hole as cover, even though madness is hard to predict even a thousand years into the future and it’s not the easiest or most obvious means of destroying a spaceship.  It really is extraordinarily lucky that Morgar happens to be full of the only substance that accelerates Vervoid growth, with no thought given to vionesium and how it might be harvested or where it grows beyond the fact that it exists. And if the whole of the Doctor’s trial defence is that he’s relying on how brilliant he is in the future, on how much he uses his brains to save people, well, he doesn’t really do a lot does he? He doesn’t stop the bodies piling up, he effectively works out who the killer is when there’s not many people left (and where is everybody else by the way? Of all the stories to start reducing money by not having extras a luxury cruise spaceship open to the public is not the time).

The result, then, is a story that could have been good and in a few places is (the moment Mel seems like the obvious candidate and she gets quite scared, or the moment she gets put in the composter – and not for the reasons you might think either). But ‘Vervoids’ needs pruning, a whole different monster, a better bunch of suspects, less am-dram acting and a much happier behind-the-scenes atmosphere to truly work. This series desperately needs a story to be big and bold and spectacular – and instead it gets another one full of people flailing around not sure what they’re doing (all except the star, who’s the one who gets the axe). A lot of people think this is the best of the four trial stories. I’m not sure I agree as the dialogue really is tin poor at times and the Vervoids are a disaster, but at least these are the sort of mistakes fans are used to putting up with and less obvious than the all-round clumsy feel and Sylvia Sims casting of ‘Planet’, the Valeyard tampering that wrecked ‘Mindwarp’ and the ‘making it up as we go along’ feel of ‘Ultimate Foe’. There’s a proper ending and everything, where the bad guys lose and the good guys win (not something necessarily true of any of the others, especially what happens to poor Peri and the awkward ending to the season finale) – something we sadly don’t always get in real life (edit: I can’t believe Trump not only remained free but ended up president again. In fact, I don’t believe it. Let’s hope if Dr Who comes back on the air we get a story about scifi technology by greedy billionaires being used to exploit dangerous alien political systems where Davros gets elected head of Skaro again). For that alone ‘Vervoids’ deserves credit. Just watch it with your eyes closed. And the sound down for the most part.   

POSITIVES + This is the last story Colin Baker filmed in the role of the Doctor for television (this story being broadcast before but made after ‘The Ultimate Foe’) and as with so many of his stories he’s the best thing here by miles. He’s softened his Doctor from mean bully to tetchy and twitchy and he’s always doing something highly watchable that isn’t in the script, be it striding across a room to rolling his eyes to the comedy of pretending to follow Mel’s exercise bike regime to pulling the multiple faces needed in the endlessly repetitive ‘Trial’ cliffhangers. By now the 6th Doctor feels like a seasoned traveller with all the tough edges knocked off him, a benevolent Uncle with a hatred for injustice rather than an angry young man who loves clashing with others for the sake of it in everything from arguments to that sodding coat. His Doctor works a lot better with Mel’s than the 7th Dr’s character too I think – she needs a larger than life protective soul to bounce off, not an odd mysterious eccentric playing the spoons. In other words, while BBC controller Michael Grade was arguably right that some things had to change to make the series better in this era, the star was even more arguably the part that was working, at least by the end. Thankfully the Big Finish range of 6th Doctor series finally makes good on this most maligned of Doctors, returning to this later softer side and adding multiple years, several new companions and a lot more gentleness to his character.    

NEGATIVES – Most of the mistakes in ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ can be excused by the behind-the-scenes dramas. Wonky script? It’s not all the writer’s fault, there was a deadline. Bad ham acting? The actors had less time to learn the words. Even the music can be excused as Malcolm Clarke is officially the last composer to use the Radiophonic Workshop, in the process of being dismantled. But the one person who had the usual amount of allotted time was the set designer. The spaceship is one of the most badly made in the show’s history and sadly we see a lot of it (given that the location budget has all been handled over to Foe’). The script makes big play of this being a ‘banana boat in space, a wonderful idea that should have given lots of room for imaginative design. The space age gym consists of a solitary exercise bike. We’d never had a futuristic gym on Dr Who before and for this story 9set a thousand years after transmission) you’d think that would be a golden opportunity to come up with all sorts of exotic exciting things (especially for non-humanoid aliens) but no, this looks like the cheap sort behind some industrial complex with peeling paint. The rooms are all so badly built this is one of the three occasions when you can actually see a set wobble (it’s when The Doctor picks up an axe in episode two). If I’d paid good money for a trip like this I’d demand my money back, even before  I was at risk of being Vervoided to death.

BEST QUOTE: Travers: ‘How long have you known this woman?’ Dr: ‘Time is a comparative concept, Commodore’. Mel: ‘Not now, Doctor. Just answer the question!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In a nice bit of cross-over promotion The Doctor talks about how he’d much rather be on the planet Pyro Shaka – which Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker had just written in their ‘Make Your Own Adventure’ book ‘Race Against Time’, written before their Spanish holiday and published in between the broadcast of episode two and three of ‘Vervoids’ (1986). Pip ‘n’ Jane’s ‘talents’ work better on paper than they do on TV and this is actually one of the better in the ‘choose your own ending’ series of six (though Phillip ‘Mindwarp’ Martin’ and William ‘Galaxy 4’ Emms’ are best). There’s a tribe of aliens known as the Shikari, who are based on a real African tribe with almost no differences, who live on the planet and help The Doctor in his quest to find an antidote for the latest bonkers Rani plan: covering The Earth with slime. Some would say Thames Water beat her to it…

 ‘Business Unusual’ (1997) is a 6^th Doctor ‘Past Adventures’ novel by Gary Russell that finally tells the story of how the Doctor first met Mel. It’s probably not what you think. The Tardis lands in Brighton in 1989 and a nostalgic Doctor thinks about calling on the Brigadier. Only when he goes to track him down he finds that no one has seen him for days; the last thing anybody remembers was him telling his friends and family he was going to snoop around a suspicious new company known as Senenet that have taken the video gaming industry by storm. The Doctor knows almost nothing about computer games but he’d heard good things about a certain computer programmer from Peas Pottage so goes to ask for her help, even though she doesn’t know him yet. It seems unlikely that the Brig, of all people should be on the trail of shoot-em-up games and in retrospect this early post-TV Movie story seems far more in keeping with the ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ series than Dr Who than the series proper, well written but pitched about thirty years younger than the other books in the run without the usual sex or violence (which is a relief to be honest, though I also miss the deeper philosophy of the other releases around it). Like many a Gary Russell novel there are more continuity references than you could shake a perigosto stick at. Chief amongst them for fans are the 6^th Doctor meeting the Brig at all (the only ‘classic’ incarnation not to meet him give or take the 1^st where Nick Courtney’s other role as Bret Vyon in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ shows us what it might have been like) and the ending where The Doctor invites Mel on board and she looks to a now-rescued Brigadier for help: he gives her a crash course in what’s in store for her (and includes a reference to regeneration, which is why Mel is so unfazed when it happens for real in ‘Time and The Rani’!)   

‘The Wrong Doctors’ (2017) is the Big Finish version of how The 6^th Doctor and Mel met – twice! The Doctor knows that Mel is his future companion and the one he has when he regenerates but has been putting off the inevitable for as long as possible a la ‘The End Of Time’. After losing audio companion Evelyn he’s in contemplative mood though and decides that this incarnation has had enough and to get it over with, travelling to Peas Pottage and wondering how he can explain the fact that Mel knows him in his future. Only he’s already there – a later Doctor from the ‘Trial’ era has turned up with a later Mel. There’s an interruption when an iguanodon is run over by a car (no, seriously), there’s a time portal in the nearby woods and a hungry Baryonyx dinosaur that’s got loose. Introductions are the last thing this quartet need to worry about now and there’s a confusing middle and a bonkers end that involved the Blinovitch limitation effect and the older Doctor re-creating the Mel he knew in the Tardis (so the one running around with the 7^th Doctor is really a copy!) Exhausting, but fun. 

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