“I was trying to help.” —The Doctor
Story
The TARDIS is pulled into a giant space station where the Doctor (arriving alone) finds himself being tried once again for interfering in the affairs of other world. The prosecutor, called the Valeyard, wants him sentenced to death, arguing that the sentence of exile imposed the last time was far too lenient. As part of the prosecution’s case, the Valeyard puts up one of the Doctor’s recent adventures on a courtroom screen— the trial is just a frame for an entirely different story.
On the courtroom screen, the Doctor and Peri arrive on the planet Ravalox, which the Doctor wants to investigate because of the unusual coincidence that it has exactly the same mass, orbital period, day length, and axial tilt as the Earth, plus it was supposed to have been destroyed by solar flares 500 years previously but instead still has life on it. They soon discover that Ravalox in fact is the Earth— two million years in the future, and moved light years from its proper position in space. Investigating further, the Doctor finds an underground civilization ruled by an “L3 Robot” called Drathro, living in what used to be the London subway system. The underground facility can only support 500 people and when the population grows above that, the extras are culled— i.e. executed— to keep the number sustainable. Drathro is well aware that the solar flares only affected part of the surface, rather than destroying the whole, and that there are plenty of supplies up there— for that matter, the whole underground population could easily leave— but the robot was programmed to maintain an underground survival base and that’s what it’s going to do.
The head guard working for Drathro has been secretly sending people who were supposed to be culled out onto the surface, and apparently others before him have done the same because there’s a primitive society living in a village on the surface, who know that underground dwellers come to join them now and again— and also know that space travelers sometimes come down looking for a way into the underground system, where there’s something very valuable hidden. The latest two are a professional crook called Sabalom Glitz and his henchman/partner Dibber. Exactly what it is that Glitz wants to steal from the robot’s headquarters underground the Doctor never finds out— at the end of the story, he points out to Peri the unanswered questions: what was Glitz trying to steal, and who moved Earth out of its proper position?
Back in the courtroom, we might have learned the answers in scenes the Doctor didn’t witness at the time, but whenever Glitz said anything about it, his words were bleeped out “by order of the High Council of Time Lords” since apparently the answers involve something the High Council wants kept secret. The judge in the courtroom is frustrated by this censorship and we’re left with the impression the Valeyard and the High Council might have some ulterior motive in staging this trial, though we don’t yet know what— the trial is still going on as this first story ends.
Review
Doctor Who came back from its 18-month hiatus near-fatally wounded. In an interview on the DVD for this story, script editor Eric Saward points out the problem: “We’d been canceled, and no one told us what we’d done wrong, or gave us any guidance on what they wanted us to do to fix it.” As I discussed a few posts ago when talking about the hiatus announcement, the BBC’s stated reasons for it were unconvincing and several contradictory theories circulated among fans and commentators. It’s easy enough now to look back with hindsight and say “Season 22 was just awful” but the thing to remember is that the ratings were still good, and no fans were complaining at the time.
But by the time the show returned, that had changed. Fan fury at the hiatus initially focused on the BBC higher-ups but after a while the fans (in these pre-Internet days communicating in local fan clubs, cons, and photocopied fanzines) started to take a second look at the season, to conclude that the series had brought its troubles on itself. Producer JN-T came in for increasing criticism and a lot of fans started to blame him for the problems, something that would only get worse when the Classic series was finally canceled outright. JN-T, ever the showman, had been the first Producer of the series to make himself a personality at fan conventions and that now made him a target— and he didn’t help himself by responding to criticism by digging in his heels and saying fans had always complained “It’s not as good as it used to be” so their opinions didn’t matter. As I’ve mentioned before in this series, I personally think more blame for the quality problems belongs to Eric Saward, but overall its a complicated question best left for another time.
The present point is that by the time it returned for season 23, Doctor Who had lost both its standing as a British Institution and the goodwill of its fans. JN-T and Saward both knew the show had to come back with something strong, unusual, and attention-grabbing. At some point they had the idea: Doctor Who is on trial— let’s put the Doctor on trial. Every story this season is going to be framed by the trial sequences, and the whole season is presented as a single serial: The Trial of a Time Lord is the only title that appears onscreen, with 14 episodes. JN-T quickly went on the publicity circuit to point out that the series was going to beat the previous record for the longest serial, the Hartnell-era Dalek Masterplan (12 episodes).
It was a risky move, and perhaps deserves credit on go-big-or-go-home terms. Using the show itself to essentially address its critics could easily backfire. Unfortunately, it neither backfires nor even fires. It just doesn’t work very well. Constantly interrupting the main story to return to the trial prevents us from really losing ourselves in the adventure. Just when we might be getting into it, we get a reminder we’re seeing it at one remove— a problem than gets worse when key dialog gets bleeped out as part of the trial storyline. Meanwhile the trial itself is completely static. It makes no progress as a story in its own right: each time we cut back to it, the Doctor insults the Valeyard, the Valeyard repeats that the Doctor was clearly interfering with events on Ravalox/Earth, and the judge asks “Is this evidence relevant? Can’t you just show us the parts that matter for the charges?” It’s a dangerous thing to let a character onscreen point out the obvious flaw in a framing story like this: it actually makes no sense to show a complete, well-edited story as evidence in a trial.
Looking past the trial to the story itself: it’s a lot better than most of what we saw last season, though that’s only faint praise. The Mysterious Planet was written by the great Robert Holmes, in what would sadly be his last contribution to Dr Who. Already seriously ill, Holmes would pass away not long after writing this story. Eric Saward had intended him to write the closing story of the season as well as the opening, which is why events on Ravalox raise questions about what the Valeyard is really up to: Holmes was setting up the ending. He died before writing that ending and someone else had to do it. More on that when we get to it.
Meanwhile, I think Colin Baker hits the nail on the head in another interview on the DVD for this story: because of his illness, Holmes was writing well below his usual standard— but he was still writing better than anyone else (on Dr Who) was doing at the time. The pair of Glitz and Dibber are a classic Holmes double-act, and if they’re nowhere near as memorable as Jago and Litefoot (not to mention they’re less likable, since Glitz and Dibber are villains) they still have a lot of great lines between them. Drathro the robot is an interesting character: he’s the main villain of the piece but you can’t help but feel a little sympathy for him. He was programmed to run an underground survival base— is it really his fault that no one thought to program an exit condition? On the other hand, at the climax of the story the robot is given more conventional villainous motivations: with a power malfunction about to destroy everything, the Doctor tries to talk Drathro in letting him shut everything down, but the robot refuses because “the work units only exist to serve me. If I cease, they have no motive.” The Doctor correctly diagnoses the megalomania of the robot’s position, but it would have been more interesting if Drathro had simply been unable to conceive of what the Doctor was suggesting.
The Doctor’s relationship with Peri is much better in this story, and that’s partly due to actors Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, who were determined to show that their relationship had progressed during the 18 months we weren’t watching them. All last season, they argued and sniped at each other constantly as part of the Doctor’s new abrasive personality. Here, they’re given dialog that could easily go the same way, but they play it with smiles for each other that show they both know its just friendly banter. The writing gives them some help with this goal— there are fewer of the arguing (or bantering) lines overall. The Doctor in general comes across as far nicer: he’s made a definite move in the direction of the character arc originally intended for the Sixth Doctor (he was supposed to begin genuinely unstable and gradually recover his “true” Doctor personality— here, he has done so). The violence of Eric Saward’s former desire to make the Doctor into a gun-totin’ action hero is entirely gone. The Doctor backslides a bit into his more abrasive self when insulting the Valeyard, but I suppose you could say he’s got an excuse there.
Robert Holmes skill at inserting humor into his scripts is very much in evidence. At one point Glitz tells Dibber about the diagnosis he once got from a psychologist. “That sounds more like an insult than a diagnosis,” Dibber observes. “Yes,” Glitz agrees. “In fairness, I had just tried to kill him.” Later when Dibber is unfamiliar with the word “philanthropist,” Glitz explains and Dibber nods wisely. “I see: it means ‘stupid.'” Down in the underground, the respected intellectual of the people is “the Reader”— the only one able to read the sacred ancient texts. They have three: “Mo Bai Dick” about a great white sea god, filled with many mysterious and symbolic passages, “The Water Babies” (the Reader has nothing to say about it) and, most mysterious of all the ancient texts, “The UK Habitats of the Canadian Goose” by the greatest of all ancient sages, “HM Stationery-Office.”
The world of the story is vintage Dr Who. You could easily imagine Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker having this very adventure, with just a few adjustments for their versions of the character. The primitive surface villagers determined to execute any “star travelers” who arrive on their world, the underground with its guards determined to cull anyone “extra”— both societies remind us of worlds we’ve seen before in Doctor Who, and that’s a good thing. More so than in last season’s The Two Doctors, Robert Holmes brings to the story a real sense of continuity, not in “permanent celebration mode” over Dr Who’s past but rather in knowing what kind of universe Dr Who moves in, and what kind of stories happen there.
The production values of the story are also quite good. The opening scene of the TARDIS being pulled into the Time Lord’s space station is one of the most impressive effects Classic ever did (they managed to get the use of the only motion-control camera then available in the UK— that’s the same kind of set-up that, in pre-CGI days, was used for the effects in Star Wars and other big-budget sci-fi movies). The result wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of the new series. The courtroom set is less impressive, but Ravalox looks very good as well— the primitive surface village looks completely authentic (they were shooting on location somewhere, and for all I know it may be an actual “living museum” replica of an iron-age village). The underground sets are more generic (although the bit that still looks like a ruined part of London’s Marble Arch station is very good) but the design of Drathro is very nice.
The end result is a mixed bag: The Mysterious Planet could be a refreshing return to form for Dr Who, but The Trial of a Time Lord undermines it badly. And it must be admitted, the reverse is true: The Mysterious Planet is not the right story to go with the Trial. The Doctor has gone to far darker places in his adventures, and had far darker outcomes, than this essentially cheery tale. It doesn’t fit with a situation in which the Doctor has a potential death sentence hanging over him— though in the end that’s also a flaw with the Trial story rather than the adventure itself.
Trivia point: We’re told during the story that “Valeyard” is a title that means “learned prosecutor.” For years fans assumed this was a real title from the Middle Ages or somewhere. In fact it’s fictional— whether Holmes or Saward made it up is unclear, but one of them did.
Next Week:
“The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp.” Four episodes.
