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 from the Doctor’s future that he hasn’t lived to do 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. Like the rest of the trial this story doesn’t quite work, but for a whole host of different reasons to the others. This one is another of those occasional doctorwhodunnits featuring dome weird guest stars and some even weirder monsters that are easily the rudest ever seen in DW (just beating Erato, the Crature from the Pit in the final). As carnivorous planets they’re the sort of monsters that would give DW a bad name anyway, with their sudden ‘gas emissions’ and the fact their foliage is wrapped around some leggings and trainers emblazoned with a very Eartj-bound brand, even if you hadn’t seen their heads which resemble male genitalia sticking out of female genitalia. 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. Everyone might have gotten away with it had this been one of DW’s darker, edgier, maturer stories but instead it’s one of the more childish, with a whole plot centred round walking plants picking people off. To give them credit, though, this is easily Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker’s best script for the series. They ‘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. Mel, too, is about as well catered for as she ever is, the same hyperactive optimistic overgrown toddler she always is but also one 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 and have it seem entirely in character; not many actresses could pull that off.  The guest cast all get distinct identities and something to do as well and there’s a nice sense of tension as the bodies pile up, reducing the suspect list to two (and it’s not the one I was expecting the first time round). Considering how quickly this story was written, at the absolute last minute, it’s highly impressive and professional, give or take the Vervoids. The difficulty is, it’s more Midsummer Murders than Poirot or Sherlock, a cosy one-pipe problem, and if the whole of the Doctor’s trial defence is that he’s relying on how brilliant he is in the future, well, he doesn’t really do a lot does he? The Valeyard picks up instantly on how quickly the Doctor commits genocide by killing off the plants to save a few straggler Humans and compared to other stories that we know he could have used, even if the production team of course didn’t, he really does very little (I mean, saving the world from Davros in ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, 27 planets in ‘Journey’s End’ and Gallifrey itself in ‘Day Of the Doctor’ seem more obvious candidates). The Doctor’s argument? He got involved because somebody ‘asked’. So that’s alright then. Trump will probably try the same argument (although I suspect he’s more Slitheen than Vervoid). The real problem with going small though is that with a whole season built round a ‘trial’, with the Doctor’s life and possibly the series on the line, it needs to epic and spectacular – and this story would feel small-fry even in an ordinary DW series.  

+ 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 6^th 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 7^th 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 6^th 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.    

- We’ve never had sentient plants in DW as such, not even so much as a Triffids, so I can see why the Bakers had a bash at writing them in. Preventing the Vervoids from talking, though probably sensible from a biological point of view, was a blow for the monsters though who never get a chance to put their side across about why they feel the need to destroy humanity. It’s the designers, though, who really dropped the ball: their shuffling gait, the gas pipe placed in a most unfortunate place, the Adidas advertising, the fact they look as if they’ve just wondered in from a Playboy centrefold: the Vervoids rival The Gel Guards, the Ergon, The Fish People, The Myrka, The Bandrils and The Taran Wood Beast as DW’s silliest monster (though I still say The Myrka wins in a close contest).

The Ultimate Foe: Ranking -243

  The Ultimate Foe

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Mel, 29/11/1986-6/12/1986, producer: Joh Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, John Nathan-Turner (uncredited), writers: Robert Holmes, Pip and Jane Baker, Eric Saward (uncredited), director: Chris Clough) 

Rank: 243

'There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality - and other songs. A new singer-songwriter album by The Valeyard featuring all your fave raves'

It's the end #6 - and the moment is so unprepared for nobody making this realised it was the end, including the actor playing the Doctor. In which the Doctor and indeed Doctor Who's trial offer period comes to an end and the final verdict is...mixed. Season 23 is the unluckiest of series. What was meant to be a relaunch, full of everything the series could do best is scuppered at the eleventh hour by production problems, disagreements, walkouts and death. Robert Holmes was all set to write this 2-parter and had the ending for the trial all mapped out, only to get sick with hepatitis midway through this first episode and died soon after. Script editor Eric Saward took over using his notes, wanting to honour his mentor and friend, but had a colossal falling out with producer John Nathan-Turner over his planned ending, something that might have been used as an 'excuse' to end the series - after all, BBC controller Michael Grade had made it clear he didn't need very much of a one to axe it. As things turn out DW will limp on with just the normal Summer break before resuming production but without its star, Colin Baker, ironically pretty much the only person who worked on this story who wasn't trying to leave his job. Michael Grade made it clear that the series would only continue if they got rid of him, a treatment which was wretched and shoddy even if he had been the sole cause of why things had gone wrong. In actual fact Colin is pretty much the only person who comes out of the trial season well, his Doctor given lots of last chances to shine. I have sympathies too with writers Pip and Jane Baker, who had to write the second episode of this story in impossible circumstances, forced to use the characters, sets and even the props already costed and paid for from Holmes' original submitted script. However they weren't even allowed to see it - Eric had taken it with him when he left and threatened to get lawyers involved if there were any signs of plagiarism - in fact, just to make sure, there was a lawyer sitting with the writers and producer in every meeting they had about this story, just to make sure they didn't copy anything by accident. Given all this chaos the wonder isn't that 'The Ultimate Foe' ended up a bit convoluted and hard to follow but that it wasn't actually worse than it was. There's one last great hurrah for the 6th Doctor as he mirrors the 2nd put on trial in 'The war Games' in 1969, reiterating why he does what he does helping other planets and why turning a blind eye to misery is nearly as much of a crime as inflicting it. There's some lovely location filming in the Gladstone Pottery museum in Stoke-On-Trent (the closest DW has ever come to filming in my home town, Stafford) and a clever cliffhanger that really does make it seem as if poor Colin Baker is being swallowed by quicksand. He even had to learn to speak backwards so they could run the film in reverse! We also, finally, get courtroom scenes that actually add to the drama instead of detracting from it. What we don't have is the sense of grandeur we need after following a fourteen episode series arc or indeed a plot that makes a whole lot of sense. While we get the reveal about who The Valeyard, the prosecutor at this trial is, we're not really any closer to understanding his motivations (spoiler: he's a future Doctor turned evil! Kind of like The War Doctor seemed to be when we heard about him but hadn't yet met him and before John Hurt found a way of making him tired, disillusioned and sympathetic rather than plain 'bad'). The Master also has very odd motivations for getting involved: he seems to want to stop the Valeyard killing the Doctor because he wants to do it, but as per usual spends more time talking about it than trying to do it (or, indeed, killing The Valeyard given that theyr'e one and the same). Goodness knows why The Valeyard tries to kill the entire courtoom either as that both blows his cover and makes his prey seem innocent all of a sudden. Or indeed why The Valeyard disguises himself as Mr Popplewick, a creation of Holmes' that he never actually wrote any lines for so because he had to be in the script ends up simply as a 'disguise'. It's a waste of Geoffrey Hughes being easily the best 'celebrity comedian cast against type' of the 6th Doctor era, a cultured Victorian as opposed to his usual scouse slobs (he also voiced Paul in the Yellow Submarine film, whose kind of a halfway house between these two extremes, a cultured Scouser). Poor Bonnie Langford gets lumbered with some truly awful dialogue ('That's it Doc, now you're really dishing the dirt!') - odd given how well Drip 'n' Pain write for her in the 'Vervoids' story. There's an odd about face over what really happened to Peri too, though no explanation as to why the Doctor doesn't just nip back in time from being married to Brian Blessed, a fate noisier at least if not technically worse than death. The whole doesn't quite work then and flops as a big finale tying plot strands together never mind the last hurrah for the 6th Doctor. But then it as never written as those things. It was meant to be a continuation of the show with renewed vigour, a regeneration in fact. sadly it fails at that too but that's more down to BBC interference, backstage politics and bad luck rather than out and out effort or quality. The final verdict then is not guilty, albeit mostly on the grounds of diminished responsibility, with most of the fault lying at the door of Michael Grade whatever he said at the time or since.

Positives + Considering nobody knew it was the 6th Dr's farewell it turns out to be a really good celebration of his Doctor. His regeneration is born for impassioned speech-making and he gets to make quite a few after three stories of being told to be quiet while Colin also gets to show off his full range from humour to tragedy to horror to scientific gobbledegook to petulance to philosophising. We also get to see his Doctor way further out of his depth than normal, still blustering his way through with fake confidence after we can see that it is really a bluff and he's terrified. Some of the acting in this season is variable to say the least but Colin is always the solid reliable centre, this story and 'Varos' in particular proving that he could have been a great Doctor in different circumstances (and, arguably, a different costume). It's a real shame he never got a regeneration story (till Big Finish's excellent 'The Last Adventure', by far the best 'Valeyard' story) but you can also completely understand why Colin didn't ant to work for the company that had just sacked him

Negatives - A lot of fans love Michael Jayston's Valeyard. I'm afraid I'm not one of them. Whatever the plot says he never 'feels' like the Doctor, with none of the fire, emotion, intelligence or curiosity. Even turned evil you would expect the Doctor to be more like the Delgado master: suave, complex and knowing exactly how to work his foe's weakness against themselves. The Valeyard's so see-through a villain I wouldn't trust him to sell me a second-hand Tardis never mind be a court prosecutor openly manipulating evidence. Lynda Bellingham's Inquisitor is something of a disappointment too: her un-named mum in the Bisto gravy adverts gets far more depth.

The Mysterious Planet: Ranking - 245

   The Mysterious Planet

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Peri,  6-27/9/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, Director: showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Nicholas Mallett) 

Rank: 245

Dr: ‘My this courtoom is a large set’
 Valeyard: ‘Well, I’ve had no complaints so far!’
Inquisitor: ‘If I had a case to present against you Doctor would you hold it against me?’
Dr: ‘Not in that outfit inquisitor, nudge nudge wink wink’
Inquisitor: 'Ooh Doctor, you are awful but I have some misgivings about the trial'
Valeyard: 'I think you can gets some tablets to cure those up nowadays inquisitor [Sid James Laugh]'
Dr: ‘I’m flabbergasted! My gast has never been so flabbered!’
Katryca: ‘Can you get back to me please? Aliens today they’re only interested in one thing’
Doctor: ‘I’m quite interested in the other one too’
Katryca: ‘Cheeky! I’ll slap you so hard you’ll regenerate mister’
Dr: ‘Ooh Matron..esque warrior queen!’
Valeyard: ‘Infamy infamy! Ravalox has got it in for me, err I mean The Doctor!’

First an explanatory note: Technically this story’s official title is ‘Trial Of A Timelord episode 1-4’, with the individual story names only ever used in BBC paperwork. That’s how many guidebooks treat it if you’re tyring to cross-check these reviews with others. However reviewing this as one long lumpy four-part story in one go feels wrong and the abuse heaped on this season as a whole makes me sound even grumpier than usual so I’ve stuck with the individual names. After all, they’re quite good ones and most fans know them this way anyway (even if the DVDs and Blu-rays don’t technically call them anything other than ‘Trial Of A Timelord’). 

 
By season 23 Dr Who was on the naughty step. With hindsight not because of anything it had actually done wrong but because the new controller of the BBC didn't like it. Nowadays it seems odd that any one individual had the power to do anything about a guaranteed ratings winner outright, but then Michael Grade didn't directly cancel the show either. Instead he fiddled with the timeslot so people couldn't find it, put Dr Who up against Coronation Street where all programmes traditionally go to die and pointed to a small handful of complaints it was 'too violent'. Most fans were left scratching their heads: in 1985 Dr Who might not have had the ratings of its glory days but it regularly placed in the top 100 programmes for the week and considering the appallingly small amount of money that was spent on it more than recouped it in merchandise (just take the first batch of Dr Who home videos, released from the end of 1983 that were all best sellers despite the first one costing £80 and being ‘Revenge Of the Cybermen’). Had the show lost its core audience? Not gained enough newcomers? Could it be that, as a 1960s programme promoting equality, justice and hope this series just didn’t fit the BBC’s vision of the future in the 1980s when they were making programmes about making moolah and being yuppies? (you can measure Who by what it follows in the ‘family’ slot in any era: in the 1960s it was mostly The Telegoons, 1960s updates of 1950s surrealist Goon humour, in the 1970s it was family favourite The Generation Game with a dash of wise-cracking fox Basil Brush. In this era it’s arrogant know it puppet Roland Rat superstar). Even the privy few who knew what was really going on (Michael Grade just happened to be dating Colin Baker’s ex Lisa Goddard and wanted to give the actor a hard time) didn’t think he’d really do it. The plan was to drop Dr Who quietly, to simply not renew the contract and make only vague mutterings about when it was coming back – only Grade’s masterplan backfired. He misunderstood that Dr Who wasn’t like the BBC’s other programmes, watched when it was on and then forgotten and that there was a growing industry of magazines and fanzines all of whom hung on every last morsel of news. Horrified at the cavalier way they’d been treated producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward ‘accidentally’ leaked their termination notices to the press anonymously who kicked up a huge fuss. Outraged Whovians jammed the BBC switchboards for days leaving complaints that varied from polite Sensorite level to outright screaming Davros. Fan consultant Ian Levine even used his music contacts to put together a charity single ‘Dr In Distress’ using as many popstar Dr Who fans as he could find (including two Moody Blues, the drummer from The Jam, someone from Ultravox and Faith Brown who’d just been in ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’). And like all good tyrants and dictators Michael Grade caved in, claiming that he’d never wanted to cancel the series, honest and was only ‘resting’ it to make it better when it did come back in eighteen months’ time. When it was going to be better by having all the things that was holding it back removed. Like the violence. And the amount of episodes it contained which were cut in half. At no point did anyone ever contemplate giving the series more money. 

 
This left the production team in something of a pickle, like gherkins in a jar. They now had double the time to make half the amount of programmes, after being told to scrap most of what had already been lined up for season 23 (annoyingly the most consistent bunch of scripts the show had had in years – although there’s nothing to say they wouldn’t have been messed up in translation to screen it’s worth perusing the ‘prequels/sequels’ section to see that it was in any case a stronger and much more original run than Colin Baker’s first year as The Doctor). JNT and friends also now had to have everything okayed personally by Grade or the equally Who-hating head of serials Jonathan Powell before he could proceed. Only nobody was telling him what to do: the pair gave contradictory answers to everything. No sooner was Michael Grade demanding they cut all violence and make the series ‘jokey’ then Jonathan Powell was criticising the prospective scripts for being too ‘silly’ and why didn’t they put more realism into them? Feeling as if they were on trial somebody (JNT? Saward? Levine? Glen McCoy the writer of ‘Timelash’ whose the only person to have claimed the idea even if he doesn’t seem to have been considered for either the cancelled or screened season 23 so everyone doubts it?) decided to mirror what was happening in real life with what was happening in the show, putting the Doctor on trial for his life (JNT then added the idea from ‘A Christmas Carol’ that we would see adventures form The Doctor’s past, present and future). After all, it had worked the last time Dr Who had been on trial at the end of 1969, when ‘The War Games’ saw The Doctor exiled to Earth and condemned to lower budgets and higher ratings. As per last time the outward charge was to be ‘interference’ from The Doctor’s own timelord race, but really it was everything The Doctor stood for as a true child of the 1960s: the desire to help people, to overthrow monsters, to keep people safe, to never let anyone suffer if you could do something to put it right, to fight hard for peace. Maybe, by letting The Doctor show what he stood for, he could defend himself against Thatcherist Britain that had no use for values like his and convince a jury of his peers that he was right and they were wrong? Whether by accident or design  its very in keeping where the show started, as a sort of discussion between different age groups about the best way to live your life. The idea was, after hearing stories from his past present and future the Doctor would be found innocent and win the day triumphantly along, hopefully, with the show itself. 

Only there was another problem. Eric felt that if this was to be the death throes of Dr Who then the best person to write for the show was its one time script editor and still well beloved writer Robert Holmes who’d already caused quite a stir with fan favourite story ‘The Caves Of Androzani’. Few people had written more words for The Doctor than him and yet nobody was more critical of what the show had become either – if anyone could steer the ship back on course then it was Bob, who was duly hired to write the first and last parts, that set up the mystery then tied all the loose ends up at the end. Only Bob was poorly, all those years of hard drinking and smoking taking their toll on his liver. Though he’d taken the commission Bob wasn’t really in a position to write it and he certainly wasn’t the right writer for the new-look sanitised funny violence-free series that the BBC seemed to be demanding. Always the trooper he soldiered on with ‘The Mysterious Planet’, turning it into a re-write of sorts of his first Who script ‘The Krotons’ with lots of room to show how the series and society had changed in the interim. His illness meant there were less drafts than usual though, his writing less sharp. Powell savaged the drafts when he got them, attacking all the humour that Holmes had been asked to put in and ripping them to shreds. Holmes then wasted the last few precious months of his life re-writing the story until all the joy was taken out of it, Saward re-writing it further to make it jump through the last few hoops his bosses had given him while everyone else ran around like headless Ergons, with nobody fully in charge because nobody quite knew what to do. At least the story would dovetail into the gripping finale Holmes was being asked to write though, right? Who knows, maybe school bullies Grade and Powell would be beating up on some other poor unsuspecting TV show by then? (Surely that Roland Rat would be out of favour and in need of a kicking by then? Please?) Only Holmes was sicker than he knew. Midway through writing ‘The Ultimate Foe’ he was rushed to Stoke Mandiville hospital, where he died at the horrifically young age of sixty four months before the first episode was due to go out. The Trial was now left without The Doctor’s main defence counsel, the man who knew the character and series better than anybody, with the script editor left to re-write and modify his words while still mourning the death of his friend and without fully knowing what the ending would have been. 

 
That leaves ‘The Mysterious Planet’ as one of the more mysterious Who stories, the only one where the writer died before it was transmitted and so never got the chance to talk about it at length or the trial idea as a whole. Today's story is the first part of that trial, from the 'past' - even though, compared to where we left off before the 18 month hiatus, it’s the 'future'. Confused? me too. This story is a quick jaunt across the planet Ravalox, a ravaged Earth-like planet in the far future. On the one hand it’s an obvious dud, as the audience of loyal Whovians groaned when it went out, with several sticks with which to beat up the show laid out in full view: it uses all the series clichés like a race of savages who turn out to be from our future after a nuclear war (yawn), led by a clumsy robot with walking problems who treats them as his slave race (yikes) while the trial itself was both unclear and deeply annoying, interrupting what little action there was with lots of endless talking. For many fans the worst elements of season twenty-two had been the way The Doctor just wouldn’t shut up and spent too long bickering with the people around him rather than doig things; sticking him in a courtroom drama, that by its own rules has to be static and full of people bickering at each other, just made a bad situation worse. The characters all felt recycled from earlier scripts, the dialogue was mostly lacking Holmes’ dazzling wit and the twist at the end (spoilers but it’s not that much of a twist) is that this planet that’s just like earth used to be is…Earth in the future. Which might just be one of the most obvious twists the show ever did. It’s a series that would ask a lot from the production team to be realised properly on a normal budget. What with its robot-built caves, great wastelands full of extras and indeed the robot itself; on a slashed budget it was asking for trouble and looked as cheap and tacky as Grade and Powell insisted it did all the time, honest. Lots of fans were disappointed and a few more casual ones recognised that we were beaten and went off to watch something else. Maybe even Roland Rat.  

At the same time, though, there’s a great script in here trying to be let out and even in bastardised form it’s still one up on Holmes’ last for ‘The Two Doctors’. One of Homes’ pet peeves was institutionalised learning in classrooms which put people off really learning about things for life, something that had got decidedly worse under Thatcher’s budget cuts that ripped out half the arts and humanities, so the story repeats that plot from ‘The Krotons’, about how an intelligence test saw the brightest and best killed off turned ‘establishment’. Only this time round its ever more deadly because things are worse and the stakes are higher, with teachers who don’t understand what they’re teaching delivering it to pupils. There’s a  wonderfully damning and oh so Holmesian moment when it turns out that this culture has been built on three ‘sacred’ texts that nobody understands anymore: Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ Charles Kingsley’s ‘The Water Babies’ and in one last great gag ‘The Habitats Of The Wild Canadian Goose by H M Stationary Office’ (treated as if it’s the name of an author, rather than public information publishing with the Royals as a figurehead).The joke is that, in this ravaged planet where nobody leaves the tribe, the human slaves don’t even know what water or seas are anymore and knowledge about all of Canada has been lost, never mind its wildlife on the other side of the world. All meaning has been lost because the context has been lost: readers in Melville’s day knew that it wasn’t ‘just’ about a whaler for instance but mankind’s stubbornness in reaching for unobtainable dreams that destroy him in the end. Readers in Kingsley’s day knew that ‘The Water Babies’ was, above all else, a Christian text about a boy turned chimney sweep and used as a robber by a bunch of thugs (one of them played by Bernard Cribbins in the film version – Jon Pertwee is a Scottish lobster, I kid you not!” And a high cockalurum to you if you’ve seen it as its one of my favourite films. No that isn’t as rude as it sounds) who ends up redeemed when he tries to stop the robbery only to die/be reborn in water that turns him ‘clean’ and baptises him into a new person who wakes up in a sort-of Heaven. And everyone knew what geese were. Note that the people in charge don’t understand these books and the people aren’t allowed to read them because they’re ‘sacred’; of all the things Holmes believed in most it was the idea that there was no such thing as high art and culture and that what we created as a species belonged to all of us no matter where on the food chain we were. As much as we’re meant to think that Earth became a hellhole when Drathro came along, really its because the people stopped reading and aspiring to do better.

I like to think, too, that Holmes was getting one last dig in at the new bosses for ‘meddling in things that didn’t concern them’. After all this is the writer who turned most things he hated into Dr Who monsters, from his tax returns (‘The Sunmakers’) to his slight discomfort that his job was getting people to gawp at people the way people did at animals in zoos (‘Carnival Of Monsters’), not to mention the grisliest story about vegetarianism ever made (‘The Two Doctors’). Drathro the robot is a really thick kind of robot. He’s like The Krotons in the sense that he has an oversized head that he doesn’t bother to apply, instead using humans to do the work he can’t do himself because he’s pretty useless. Above all, he takes the smartest and the best of the nation that he himself has trained…and then keeps them for himself, refusing to educate the rest. I’m convinced this is a damning comment from someone who really cared about the nations’ children about what The BBC had turned into by the mid 1980s when everything of use was imported, not made. I grew up as a child in the 1980s and I well remember how bad the programming for children was (I learnt far more from older programmes made in the 1960s and 1970s, including Who, than I ever did from stuff made for me). Surprise surprise, it gets better when Grade quits in 1987.  I think it goes even further than that though: both Grade and Powell are the ‘monsters’ who put The Doctor on trial and already plan to have him executed despite the fact that they lie and make up evidence and cheat and try to paint our hero out as the bad guy while not having the first clue what he stands for. Oddly enough both Grade and Powell approved of the ‘trial’ idea even though, in Homes’ hands at least, the monstrous prosecuting Valeyard and the supposedly but not very neutral Inquisitor are a mouthpiece for his bosses. They shut The Doctor up whenever he’s trying to show what good he can do and what he stands for, ignores all the evidence he gives about what hope and joy he’s brought to the cosmos, criticising him and blaming him every time he points out a fault with the way Ravalox/Earth are being run, they criticise his violence while threatening him with execution. The gall of it: The Doctor waits (im)patiently for justice to be delivered  but it never is, because how could it be when the people in charge are crooked? And how can the people under them grow up anything but crooked with leaders such as these? I’ve never read Holmes’ original ‘Ultimate Foe’ (nobody has, apart from Eric Saward, not even Pip and Jane Baker who were asked to rewrite it) but we do know that he wanted to end the series on a very dark note that was perfectly in keeping with this story, with The Doctor and Valeyard locked in mortal combat falling through time. JNT was probably right to nix it (fearing it would give the bosses an excuse to drop the series altogether) but it makes perfect aesthetic sense based on this story: The Valeyard is a shadow of The Doctor ‘between his 12th and 13th regenerations’ ; it’s how he’ll end up in the future the way the world is shifting, as a cruel corrupt sadistic character because that’s what The BBC is and what they’re turning the viewers into, clones of themselves. It would have pleased Holmes no end that, as it turns out, the ’shadow’ between the 12th and 13th regenerations is considered as being David Tennant turning into Matt Smith at ‘The End Of Time’ (or was till the ‘Timeless Child’ cycle mucked it up anyway) when he has his own moment of prima donna shouting but then does the right thing. Because society had turned the right way by 2010 after all (now 2023 on the other hand…)   

There’s a downside to all this allegorising though; in fact there’s two. One is that there’s no time to tell a ‘proper’ story, one that’s really gripping for people who haven’t got the first clue what it’s really about and on that scale ‘The Mysterious Planet’ is a letdown. ‘The Krotons’ is criticised by many but at least that story is properly scary in places and with characters you care for. Nobody in this story feels real including the robot and there’s no Phillip Madoc in the cast to gee things up, just another of JNT’s bizarre bits of ridiculous stunt casting, as Carry On comedian Joan Sims ends up as the softest warrior Queen ever. Katryca should be like Missy, bonkers and unstoppable and the only person here enough of a threat to Drathro and all his technology defeating him by being in touch with the land and the people. She ought to be properly scary, with the might of humanity behind her. Only she’s a bit like your nan when she gets hangry, not a threat at all once you’ve taken her zimmer frame away. It doesn’t help that the edict from on high says no violence – so we have a warrior Queen who doesn’t do anything except threaten and shout, tackling a robot whose scariest feature is his oversized head holding his oversized ego and a Doctor who can’t practice Venusian karate or get into much of a fight scene (well, only a very timid bit of light strangling). There’s not enough plot to go around either: The Doctor and Peri don’t actively do much except wander in and out of trouble – they don’t get their hands dirty the way they need to. As brilliant as it is to see the 6th Doctor and Peri as actual friends, playing their characters the way they should always have done, as friends who know each other really well and like to tease rather than mortal enemies (a decision not in the script but taken by the actors, who figured there’s no way they’d still be travelling however long it’s been since ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ and still be at each other’s throats) and wonderful as Colin and Nicola are (it can’t have been easy stuck at home with nothing to do with no work booked as they assumed they’d be making more Who; Colin considered it ‘paid paternity leave’ as daughter Lucy had just been born) they don’t get nearly enough to do, just end up in trouble and escape it.

The other is that this allegory is relentlessly sad. We’ve had dark and cynical from Holmes lots of times. Heck ‘The two Doctors’ is as dark a story as any, where everyone is just meat to somebody else and (in stark contrast to the Steven Moffat period) everybody dies (even Jamie in the first draft). But few are as dark as ‘Mysterious’. All that hope in Dre Who, all that belief that things will get better if only we wait and hold on, has been replaced by misery and a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’ That nuclear war that The Doctor’s been fighting since ‘The Daleks’ in 1963 actually happens – not on some distant planet for some life lesson but on this planet. Everything that mankind ever stood for, everything we built up with our bare hands, has been forgotten, reduced to the rubble of a corner of Marble Arch train station in an era when nobody remembers what a train is (if nothing else I love the very British twist that the signifier for a dead Earth is the corner of a small tube station rather than the statue of Liberty as it is in ‘Planet Of The Apes’; of course they completely miss the point when they try this sort of gag again in the even more wretched ‘Orphan 55’), vegetation covering the tracks of everything our species ever did. The people here aren’t free or happy or even educated, they’re just slaves to the machine. All those great works of fiction have been reduced to three that people don’t understand and which most of the population are forbidding from reading anyway. And this time even The Doctor’s not allowed to help (though he does anyway, because he’s The Doctor, even though it feels futile). The best bit of the story by far (though they could have sold even this bit better by keeping up the mystery till later) is when Peri is confronted with the death of her own planet and gets quite tearful thinking about all the possibilities and people that are now lost, that everyone’s struggles to survive counted for nothing in the end. It was all for nothing. The bad guys have finally won. No other Dr Who story makes me quite as depressed as this one – even in darker stories like ‘The Waters Of Mars’ The Doctor learns valuable lessons and even in stories when he regenerates there’s always that wonderful moment when you realise that the story can begin again with new chances (Dr Who is more like ‘The Water Babies’ than fans give that book credit for, actually). 

For most fans the standouts of the story are one last Holmesian double act of opposites in Glitz and Dibber, the first of whom gets to appear in two more stories. Glitz is as big a chancer as they come, he can talk the talk but isn’t so good at walking the walk, neither goody nor hero but someone in the middle doing what he needs to do and trying to survive another day (which is why his sudden conversion to good in ‘The Ultimate Foe’ is so irritating!) If anything Dibber is the more interesting of the two though: he can’t talk the talk at all and has none of his partner’s charm or charisma, regularly picked on because everyone assumes he’s a pushover. But he can walk the walk much better than Glitz, being the hardened one underneath it all the one with the guts to actually kill people if he has to. Glitz doesn’t work in future stories because you can’t have one without the other and honestly I find his reputation amongst fans over-rated, but here they do at least make sense. They’re the only people besides The Doctor and Peri who can see clearly through the lies of this planet (and are, so I reckon, Holmes’ comment on what viewers needed to do to survive the 1980s: pretend to stop being peace loving and go with the flow, waiting your chance till you can put things right). Tony Selby gets all the love for putting more into the script than was really there but for me it’s Glen Murphy’s scowling as Dibber that stands out (it’s his first TV job a year before ‘London’s Burning’ turned him into a big a star as any that launched their careers on Who alongside Pauline Collins and Martin Clunes). Both are a bit off though: for a start its weird that they both talk in cockney, hinting that language has somehow survived the future intact better than, say, structures that have already survived millennia in our tine, when we know how quickly dialogue changes (plus everybody on this planet speaks in The Queens’ English). They’re also both terribly odd characters to write if you’ve been told to cut back on the violence though, gun-slinging mercenaries who shoot to kill, somehow changed into comedy relief. They were, I suspect, much funnier in Holmes’ first draft before Powell made him take all the jokes out but even in the rewrites still steal all the best lines.  No for me the standout is the robot: yes it’s a poor copy of both ‘The Krotons’ and The Giant Robot from, erm, ‘Robot’, with poor actor Roger Brierly, hired for his voice, forced to spend hours in an overdubbing suite because it took all his acting skills not to fall over. It still looks good though, exactly the sort of thing that no other series would offer and is the best acted part besides the regulars. Had director Nicholas Mallett shot it properly, towering over, say, Peri in a dimly lit cave full of huddled quaking extras, then this would be have got people talking about Dr Who again the way they used to. Even shot to look on a par with Colin Baker, in an over-lit room with a few straggling bored extras, though, Drathro still feels like at least a bit of a threat. Shame they had to give him the same vocoder voice effect as ‘Marvin The paranoid Android’ in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To Te Galaxy’ though as it makes it even harder to take him seriously.   

One wise-cracking mercenary and a robot still aren’t enough to save this story, however. There are parts that simply don’t work or tie together, whether because Holmes was too poorly to do them justice or Eric misunderstood them in re-drafting or his bosses made him take them out. The idea of putting The Doctor on trial for things he did from his past present and future is a clever idea on paper but stupid in practice  anyway (it’s there because Dr Who the series was on trial  partly because of what it might become, which is equally stupid). Not Holmes’ fault, but the way he handles this ‘past’ segment doesn’t do the trial idea any favours. This was a chance for The Doctor to do either do something kind that utterly backfires in face or make a mistake that sees him do something truly bad. After all, it has to be something colossal: The Valeyard has his entire lifespan to choose from in submitting evidence; even if he only wants to frame this particular regeneration for whatever reason he could have chosen The Doctor strangling Peri (‘The Twin Dilemma’),  committing genocide on The Cybermen (‘Attack Of the Cybermen’), murdering Shockeye (‘The Two Doctors’) or accidentally letting Earth in on the secrets of time travel by letting H G Wells on board The Tardis and leaving him free to write about what he saw (‘Timelash’ – that last one alone should have been consecutive life sentences). Surely too the biggest charges would be from the days of the 4th Doctor, when he let first The Vardans then Sontarons invade Gallifrey (‘The Invasion Of Time’) or was accidentally responsible for entropy destroying great swathes of the universe (‘Logopolis’). Instead The Valeyard chooses this story. What does The Doctor do that’s so wrong exactly? He kills a robot and frees some slaves. Even in the topsy-turvy muddled morality of the mid-1980s that was a good thing, surely? It’s a problem throughout all four trial stories but particularly this one as it has to set up so much backstory: it’s just not interesting.  Court dramas just aren’t interesting. Every time this story finally gets moving it stops. Holmes (or whoever really wrote the last draft) also uses it as a get out of jail free card too many times. Not enough jeopardy happening in the story with a cliffhanger coming up? Not to worry lets’ have The Valeyard say something incredibly rude and then threaten The Doctor with something new and have quick zoom in on Colin Baker’s face. Honestly by the end of the trial I knew Colin’s face better than my own they use the effect that much. It’s even dafter when we’re meant to get worried about how events on Ravalox might conspire to kill The Doctor…when he’s sitting watching it with us, in the future, from the courtroom! And yet whenever we rejoin the story next week The Doctor doesn’t seem anymore scared. He should be: he knows what a corrupt bunch the timelords can be and what they can do to him (even if its only exile on Earn again that would be even more horrid to this restless crusader than the 3rd Doctor and he would be even more resentful at having his face and character changed than the comparatively humble 2nd). Yet he still bickers his way through this story as if he’s having a bit of a giggle. He needs to be scared. He ought to be fighting (especially in the context that we don’t want our series taken off the air). Instead he seems resigned in a way we’ve never seen him before. Ah well. Twenty-three years wasn’t a bad run. Maybe he’s had his time. 

It’s that feeling of ‘that’ll do’ that’s most damning from first to last. The new theme tune is pretty awful: Dominic Glynn sent in demo tapes oif his synth-heavy compositions to the BBC who passed one to JNT who hired him on the spot even though the composer wasn’t actually ready yet – he had to do it as a rush job in five days, on a spare synth in his girlfriend’s spare bedroom because there wasn’t time to get his full equipment ready and it shows (though its still better than many of the ones to come; it’s a sad fact that the theme tunes has got increasingly worse with every single arrangement since the original and best). The ending is pathetic, something signposted as early as the first few scenes and done without any sense of climax or resolution. Somewhere along the way, by avoiding the twin demands of avoiding violence and avoiding comedy ‘The Mysterious Planet’ ends up falling into the real trap that had been holding Who back, ending up a story of weird looking extras doing incomprehensible things in front of a set that looks as if its falling apart. The result is a story that’s like lots of other Bob Holmes classic without ever coming close to being a Bob Homes classic. This story, more than ever before, needed to be brilliant. It needed fans to fall in love with the series all over again. It needed to wow newcomers into being committed. It needed to sell so many spin-off videos and bits of merchandise that the BBC’s own finance department would find it cheaper to cancel Michael Grade than they did Dr Who. Instead it’s kind of alright. Nothing here soars. The scenes in the wilderness fall flat as a pancake. Drathro still seems like a pale copy of other bigger better robots we’ve had down the years. The’ twist’ of what Ravalox might be is given away so clumsily it’s one of the worst ‘secrets’ in the series. The trial scenes make you reach for the fast forward button, full of plot-numbing exposition the action gets interrupted every time it gets going, the charges against the Doctor seem to change every few episodes  and we have some particularly daft cliffhangers (because if the Doctor is there in the courtroom in the future, safe and well, there can't possibly have been anything that bad happening to him in his past in this story). Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Horndean, Hampshire is one of the most boring places the show’s ever been to – they might as well have filmed it in the gravelly car park. Even indoors the sets are awful (due to a mistake the courtroom was erected in the wrong studio and had to e torn down and rebuilt in a hurry for much smaller specifications. That’s why it looks more bashed and bruised than usual. To think they had eighteen months to prepare for this story!) 

The supporting characters are as one dimensional as any in Dr Who despite being written by one of the best writers of supporting people going, with even as fine an actor as Tom ‘City Of Death’ Chadbon kind of faceless (and clearly hired with a funnier script in mind than this one). I know a lot of fans like them but Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston are awful, bland actors who have all the charisma and power of a gravy boat full of Bisto. If you can’t have actual violence anymore then you should at least be sure that the people in power have violence at their disposal; they come across as substitute teachers no one respects, never mind someone as experienced with tyrants as The Doctor. As for the trial, the worst scenes in Dr Who were always the ones where characters shouted at people while running down a corridor; that problem is ten times worse by sticking everyone in a rigid courtoom set.  With Dr Who on its last legs and its episode count cut in two every story matters and you can’t get away with bland filler stories that don’t quite come off. And that’s what this one is. Honestly had Glenn McCoy’s name been on it rather than Holmes’ most fans wouldn’t have been surprised. The fact its written by our hero, albeit a poorly dying hero, somehow makes it worse. If even the man who lied and breathed this series for so long has given up then maybe so should we? Honestly there are times watching ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’ as a whole when I can’t believe it came back on the air the next year at all; this show feels defeated, like a bouncy puppy that once brought so much joy whimpering in the corner. Even though there are another three years after this one and another fifteen stories to go till the full cancellation in 1989 this right here is the story that killed Dr Who. Because if this had worked and been as great as we were all willing it to be then Dr Who might have run forever. But even when it does get wonderful and amazing and brilliant again in a couple of years’ time people have stopped watching because they tried this story and it failed miserably. And amazingly this season actually gets worse from here. A lot of people responsible for making this monstrosity have taken blame for it down the years but somehow the real villains have escaped: this is all Grade and Powell’s fault. Dr Who was doing great before they interfered. If anyone should be put on charges of interference, it’s them. 

POSITIVES +To think it all started off so very well! Knowing that all eyes would be on the opening scene JNT make sure it was the most expensive shot in the ‘classic’ series ever, costing a whopping £8000 in 1986 money (that’s a tenth of the entire episode budget spent on something that lasts forty seconds), made to be as show-offy as possible, as if to say 'look, Michael Grade's wrong – Dr Who can look fabulous!' Model shots were pretty much all static camera shots in anything in 1986 but here the camera actually pans round the model space station and follows the Tardis as it gets pulled in by a tractor beam and pulled through a doorway. It's a difficult shot to pull off now, never mind back then. In 1986 it looked like magic. Everyone really wanted to prove how good Dr Who could be when it was given love, money and attention and they were right too - for all of three minutes, until the 'Trial' section started in earnest. Of course something had to give to pay for it and that was the fact that it ends up being (sob!) the last ever shot of Dr Who recorded on film inter-spliced with scenes on sets filmed onto videotape (bar the special case of ‘The TV Movie’ in 1996 anyway, which is all on film). From now on everything outside will be filmed on cheaper videotape by the BBC’s outside broadcast units and Dr Who will never look this glossy again till it comes back in 2005. Sadly the scene is itself going to be recycled so many times during this year you’ll soon get sick of it. Even more sadly the very excellent model was lost in a fire along with other exhibits at a Dr Who museum in London.   

NEGATIVES – I know, I know, we’ve mentioned her already but seriously how bad was Joan Sims in this? She’s one of my favourite comediennes (mostly thanks to her radio work) and usually word perfect even when talking rubbish, but she’s clueless in the role of Katryca and nobody stops to put her right. She’s hopelessly wooden, mumbles all her words and doesn’t ‘get’ her character at all, making her cold and conservative rather than passionate and outrageous. She really shouldn’t have been there at all of course. One of the biggest complaints from the DW fanbase, as opposed to Michael Grade, was the producer's love of hiring big names in the acting world and then changing parts to fit them, rather than the other way around. The past two years had given us gun-toting Dalek rebel Rula Lenska, gun-toting Dalek warrior Rodney Bewes and frazzled, violent starship captain Beryl Reid. Somehow Joan Sims as a gun-toting freedom fighter who takes time out from shooting people to engage in comedy banter manages to be worse. If they'd ever filmed 'carry On Doctor Who' as opposed to 'Carry On Doctor', you suspect it would look just like this, only with Sid James in the clashing coat of many colours and Barbara Windsor as Peri in an even lower cut top. Oh and Bernard Bresslaw back as an Ice Warrior, of course.
BEST QUOTE:  ‘Planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, reforms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The way ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ was marketed was a measure of how new-look Dr Who was desperate to seen as child friendly rather than adult and violent. For instance the programme on before the first episode of ‘The Mysteriuous Planet’ was the puppet show ‘Roland Rat – The Series’, about a rodent with an ego the size of a planet who thinks he’s marvellous even though to everyone else he’s basically vermin. Come to think of it, he’s not actually that different in personality to the 6th Doctor (it must be a 1980s thing). Colin Baker filmed some special continuity announcements on the ‘trial’ courtroom set, sort of in character as The Doctor, announcing both Roland (‘Across immeasurable distances in space, through the vast tracts of time, amongst the furthest flung of the galaxies I have met with the strangest creatures in the universe: Daleks, Cybermen, even the dreaded Wogan from the planet Shepherd’s Bush, and long green slimy things with tentacles and stingers and strange orifices that leaked unpleasant liquids and now the slimiest of them all – Roland Rat The Series’, Colin ending it with a bang-on Roland Rat impression) and his own show (‘and now back to BBC One for Dr Who – The series!’) Despite all the fuss about the violence in Dr Who Colin the fires a pistol at Roland’s annoying sidekick Kevin the Gerbil and explodes him to kingdom come (immediately making him a hero to millions). Wendy Richard was guest on the show, good preparation for ruining her career further still in ‘Dimensions In Time’. Copyright reasons means it’s not on the ‘Trial’ DVD set but it is on the season 23 ‘Collection’ blu-ray.  

Season 23 was a surprise choice for a relatively early blu-ray collection, being short and slightly fishy (not unlike its main supporting monster Sil) but in many ways it’s the best one so far stuffed with extras both serious and fun with ten hours of unseen footage that get to the heart of why The Trial Of A Timelord turned out to be a bit of a, well, trial. The trailer, officially known as ‘The Trial’, is the shortest, the most fun and yet most flippant of the lot, with Colin Baker standing in the cock and demanding an end to this travesty and farrago of injustice, etc etc and offering to show the courtroom evidence that The Matrix has been tampered with (using his mobile, which has a screenshot from the 1986 annual on it). It turns out that Colin’s just been booked for a speeding ticket and is duly placed in a cell alongside Nicola Bryant (her crime? Marrying Brian Blessed!) Not exactly Leela returning to Gallifrey or Jo Grant down a Welsh mine type of standard but all great fun  and very in keeping with the earnestness of this often very silly season.

So, you may be thinking, what might the original season 23 have looked like had it not been changed to the postmodernist idea of the show on trial? Frustratingly, rather good: it’s always hard to tell purely from scripts but even acknowledging the odd duff effect that would surely have ended up in there somewhere the five, maybe six scripts ready to go made for one of the most consistently good seasons in years (possibly for a decade). Of course we don’t know for certain what stories would have made the grade of Michael Grade or what order they would have been in as Dr Who was postponed when it was still in a state of flux. There are scripts we know were strong possibilities though and which were all in various stages of progression before being abandoned. As the first stories intended to be made ‘The Nightmare Fair’ and ‘Mission To Magnus’ were all ready to start rolling, others like ‘The Ultimate Evil’ and ‘The Hollows Of Time’ were polished first drafts and only Bob Holmes’ ‘Yellow Fever And How To Cure It’ and ‘Children Of January’ were still at the planning stage and is the least known story of the lot. ‘Children Of January’. ‘Point Of Entry’ was an outside choice: it was being worked on with an eye to either this season or the next, as a backup if one of the other scripts fell though (as happened quite regularly). So far all of these stories have been used in the excellent Big Finish ‘lost stories’ range with the exception of ‘Fever’  and ‘January’, while the first three and most complete of these stories were also published as part of the Target range of books re-written by their authors. 

We know that ‘The Nightmare Fair’ was planned to be first, given that the Doctor claims at the end of ‘Revelation’ that he wanted to take Peri to ‘Bl-‘ – the full word was Blackpool, which got trimmed when the series’ future looked in doubt. A fine return for The Celestial Toymaker, written by former producer Graham Williams whose love for the series shines through, it would have been an explosive opener with Colin Baker squaring up with Michael Gough against a backdrop of Blackpool illuminations and with the Toymaker’s games updated to a 1980s amusement arcade. Inspired by the Dr Who team being invited to turn the Christmas lights on, it belies it’s obvious publicity-grabbing origins to be a really taut and gripping story much recommended in both book and audio form (see ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ for more).       

‘The Ultimate Evil’ by newcomer Wally K Daly is a bit overshadowed, beaten to the Target range by ‘Nightmare Fair’ (in an adaptation by Who director Fiona Cumming) and delayed in the audio lost stories range until 2019 (when Daly adapted it himself), being a more straightforward traditional Who adventure without the attention grab of Blackpool or a returning monster. It’s just as good in its own way, though, with the Doctor again trying to take Peri on holiday and ending up in even more danger on a holiday planet Tranquela that’s fallen under the spell of an alien named the Dwarf Mordent. A sales-monster arms dealer (think Margaret Thatcher’s son in the middle East when this story would have been on air) with a ‘hate gun’, he’s amongst the most Batman of Dr Who villains but there’s a real sense of jeopardy and threat as the Doctor becomes possessed and Peri ends up left for dead (and for much longer than the usual ‘cliffhanger in peril’ scene too). A weird cross between the campness of ‘The Macra Terror’ and the horror of ‘Caves Of Androzani’ it works well as both book and audio but it’s the story that would have been the hardest to pull off on telly without looking a bit, well, silly.

  
We know ‘Mission To Magnus’ would have looked good, given the high standards set by Phillip Martin’s other two stories ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and eventual replacement ‘Mindwarp’. A classic in book form it suffers a bit in the audio adaptation even with Nabil Shaban back as Sil (it is a very visual story after all) but Martin is one of the best 1980s writers and has a lot of fun with Who’s legacy in a way he never did with his other two scripts. Originally this was a story written purely for The Ice Warriors (who would have been making their first appearance on the show since ‘Monster Of Peladon’ in 1974), who finally get to invade the Earth fully and tilt the axis to make everywhere cold enough to take over. As ever with Martin’s work, however, it’s really an extended metaphor for how cold Thatcherist Britain and Reagan America were becoming and how caring so little for each other has left our planet vulnerable to attack from inside forces. The real villain of the piece turns out to be Sil and his fellow businessmen trying to make a profit out of our misery, the Mentor a last minute substitution when the character proved to be so popular with viewers. It’s a typically witty, barbed story perhaps not as strong as ‘Varos’ but had this story gone out in 1985 as planned, when people were actually living this sort of a life, it would have made quite the impact I suspect, especially with non-Who regulars that might have caught it. 

‘Yellow Fever And How To Cure It’ would have been Bob Holmes’ contribution and the only three-part forty-five minute story of the run. A writer who traditionally wrote close to deadlines it seems that Bob never got all that far with this story but he did leave behind an outline that’s quite fascinating and a sequel, of sorts to ‘Terror Of The Autons’: not least the planned return of Bob’s creations The Autons for the first time in fourteen years, working alongside the Rani and The Master who are organising a travelling theatre group that’s a bit like the circus of the original. The story of the season earmarked for overseas filming, we know it would have been shot in America somewhere, possibly New Orleans (though JNT was keen not to have jazz) although the script does specify Peri seeing The Statue of Liberty on the Tardis scanner, only to find out she’s in an alien re-creation, a sort of theme park come memorial garden. She and the Doctor would bump into a bewildered Brigadier there somewhere too in a script that with any other writer’s name attached to it might have been impossibly schmaltzy but with Holmes you’d think would have a dark twist in there somewhere, possibly the yellow fever bit (and if you’re wondering hydration is the official cure in ‘our’ world: maybe in the Whoniverse it would be something more…plasticcy?) Hopefully one day someday someone will finish it. Maybe. 

‘The Hollows Of Time’ would have seen Christopher H Bidmead return to the series with a long awaited follow-up to ‘Frontios’ (and see the review of that story for more). Not much was known about this one until its author extended his first draft into a full audio story for Big Finish in 2010 where it was a revelation. More ‘human’ than Bidmead’s other stories, slower paced and more thoughtful (and less mathematical) than ‘Logopolis’ or ‘Castrovalva’ and less overtly creepy than ‘Frontios’ it’s a character piece that sees The Doctor and Peri trying to piece together hazy memories of an adventure they can’t quite remember. It turns out that The Tractators have invaded a sleepy English village,  but by stealth not by attack. The Doctor knows something is going on but the adults are all in denial; it’s only when Peri helps a boy who has nightmares of giant woodlice that they end up tracking down the Tractators to their source: a Professor Stream whose been playing around with time corridors and let the creepy crawlies through. A tense finale, that couldn’t possibly be as good or as gruesome as it sounds on audio, sees the universe reduced to nothingness as the Tractators tear the Professor apart with gravity before going on their way. The story of the year Mary Whitehouse would have hated, ‘The Hollows Of Time’ might well have got Dr Who cancelled anyway for 18 months but it would have been a memorable way to go out. Recommended. 

We know almost nothing about ‘Children Of January’ by newcomer writer Michael Feeney Callan, except that it would have been the season finale and that it would have featured a new monster race known as the Z’ros, Human-size bees, and the rebel outcasts of a world who were so sick of war that they’d escaped down their own parallel universe. It’s one of those stories that could have gone either way (would the costumes have been as good as the bird-Peri in ‘Varos? Or like the costumes of ‘The Web Planet’?) 

I like to think that room would have been found for Barbara Clegg’s much anticipated return ‘Point Of Entry’ too, a story adapted by Marc Platt for the ‘Lost Stories’ range in 2010. A historical, this story would amazingly have seen playwright Kit Marlowe get his own story before his arch rival William Shakespeare! And quite right too: Marlowe’s a fascinating character part artist, part spy, part drunkard and Clegg/Platt have done their homework, setting the story at a time when he’s trying to write Dr Faustus’ (about a pact with the Devil) when it appears to come true, an alien arriving in search of a lost artefact that seems to have been stolen from the Aztecs (but is actually alien, from a race known as the Omnim). A clever piece about cultural appropriation, with lots of room for period Elizabethan detail, it’s a story that keeps you guessing and takes time out to do some most unexpected things (Peri travels on the astral plane for one cliffhanger: not sure how that would have looked on TV in 1985; like the pink skies of ‘Mindwarp’ maybe?) One of the real highlights of one of Big Finish’s best ranges, which in a parallel universe somewhere where these stories were actually made is surely one of the highlights of one of Who’s best seasons.  

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