“Gentlemen, may I remind you this is a court of law, not a debating society for maladjusted, psychotic sociopaths.”
[WARNING: this post includes complete spoilers about the ending of the story]
Story
The Inquisitor is clearly getting impatient with the Doctor and the Valeyard trading insults, as the above quote shows, but even so the trial continues. The Valeyard introduces into evidence the events the Doctor was involved in at the moment he was called away to stand trial.
The TARDIS arrives on the garishly-colored planet Thoros Beta, home to the sluglike “Mentors”— the species to which Sil, the villain of Vengeance on Varos, belongs. Sil himself is on hand, along with the Mentors’ leader, Kiv. The mentors control a greed-based empire and use captured humans from the neighboring planet, Thoros Alpha, as slaves, but even worse is afoot: they’re paying a human scientist, Crozier, to perform horrible experiments reminiscent of HG Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau on the Alphan slaves as well as humanoids captured from other planets. Crozier’s goal is to perfect the technique of brain transplants, to save the life of Kiv who is dying from a mutation that’s causing his brain to enlarge.
Among the prisoners due for experimentation is Yrcanos, a warrior king from a primitive planet played by Brian Blessed in his inimitable bombastic style (the director told him to play the part exactly like Vultan from Flash Gordon, and he does), who soon joins forces with the Doctor and Peri after rescuing the Doctor from one of Crozier’s experiments. At the trial, the Doctor has no memory of events after being subjected to the machine, and is shocked when his on-screen self switches sides and betrays Peri and Yrcanos. Without any memory, he can only assure the court it must have been a ploy to trick the bad guys, while the Valeyard gleefully suggests it reveals the Doctor’s true colors— selfish and cowardly, ready to abandon his friends the moment his irresponsible adventures turn dangerous. Events on screen seem to bear out the Valeyard’s accusation, until the Doctor (at the trial) begins to suspect the evidence has been tampered with.
While the Doctor helps the bad guys, Peri and Yrcanos join up with a resistance movement of escaped Alphan slaves. Yrcanos develops a crush on Peri and vows to make her his queen. When they’re recaptured, Crozier decides to transplant Kiv’s brain into Peri’s body, and the Doctor switches sides again and helps Yrcanos escape. But as they race to rescue Peri, that’s the moment when the Time Lords yank the Doctor away to stand trial and as a result, Yrcanos is too late: Peri is killed, and when he arrives to see that Kiv is now in Peri’s body, Yrcanos in a final rage opens fire and kills everyone in sight.
Back at the trial, the Doctor is stunned to learn what happened to Peri, and enraged at what the Time Lords have done. The Valeyard shifts blame for Peri’s death to the Doctor, saying it was his fault the situation arose in the first place, and the Inquisitor seems to agree, defending the High Council’s timing and saying they had to arrange matters that way because Crozier’s experiment threatened the natural order of life throughout the universe so Yrcanos had to be maneuvered into the rage that would lead him to destroy it all— and it was all the Doctor’s fault because without him helping Crozier earlier, his experiments would never have succeeded.
But the Doctor insists something else is going on, and ends the story vowing to find out what it is.
Review
Mindwarp was written by Philip Martin, who also wrote last season’s Vengeance on Varos, and like the former story it is Dr Who at its most bleak and cynical: moods that really don’t suit the series at all. In fact despite some garish colors and some rather clunky attempts at humor (a friend of Yrcanos who’s been turned into a werewolf-like creature is subjected to a lot of dog-based campy jokes) this is an even more relentlessly grim story than Varos— and that’s even before we get to the most shocking ending a Classic Dr Who serial ever presented.
I don’t much care for this story, if you haven’t already guessed, but I think the strength of the downer ending is a point in its favor: more on that below. First, some problems: the world-building is far less well done than in Martin’s last effort, and several plot-critical issues and characters get overlooked, or at best mentioned only barely, before turning into dramatic turning point later. It’s possible that this happened because of scenes in Martin’s original script getting cut to make room for the trial scenes but I don’t know. Certainly one aspect of the story got a completely different spin in the trial versus Martin’s original idea (see below). Whatever the cause, it’s a problem for the story.
The trial itself remains a problem, even more so than last week. We’re still getting pulled out of the story we’re watching to watch the static trial scenes commenting on it, and it gets even worse this time as the Doctor begins to suspect the evidence has been altered. How can we lose ourselves in this adventure when not only does it pause every few minutes, but during the pauses we’re being told we may not even be seeing the real story? Unreliable narrators can be useful things in certain kinds of story, but the adventure on screen isn’t one of them, and the trial itself just isn’t enough of a story to let that be our dramatic focus. It’s still just a frame.
The issue of “tampered evidence” ended up changing Martin’s story. As Colin Baker tells it, he went to director Ron Jones, after reading the script, and asked for some guidance on his performance. He told Jones there were three possibilities: 1. the Doctor’s behavior really was a ploy to fool the bad guys, 2. Crozier’s machine had affected his mind, 3. it wasn’t what really happened. Baker would play the scenes differently for each of the three possibilities. Jones didn’t know which was intended, and so asked Eric Saward who said he also didn’t know and told them to ask Philip Martin. For some reason Baker and Jones couldn’t contact Martin and so decided between them to play the scenes according to option 3— making the Doctor an outright villain during that part of the story, because this was what the Valeyard had faked up rather than what the Doctor really did. In fact, Martin had intended option 2.
Final complaint: the villain, Sil. As I mentioned in discussing Vengeance on Varos, John Nathan-Turner was convinced that Sil was such a wonderful villain, he was destined to finally replace the Daleks as the most popular and recurring of the Doctor’s adversaries. I don’t think anyone else would have gone that far, but I’ve heard plenty of reviewers and other series actors praise the character as a terrific villain. So it must be purely a personal preference: but I hate Sil, and not in the way you’re supposed to enjoy hating a villain. As the cliche goes, villains are characters you “love to hate” and you should really enjoy their time onstage, performing their villainy. Not Sil, at least not for me. As far as I’m concerned, having Sil onstage is about as enjoyable as having a wad of mucus oozing down your television screen. Fortunately it appears that he dies along with everyone else at the end of the story, and whether he did or not, he never reappeared in Dr Who after this story.
Not Peri Any More
And that brings us to the shocking ending, where Peri becomes only the third or fourth companion of the Doctor to leave the series by dying (depending on whether you count Sara Kingdom in The Dalek Masterplan)— and in perhaps the most horrific way a companion could die.
If we imagine a companion might die, we imagine it would be in a heroic sacrifice of some kind— exactly how Katarina, Sara, and Adric died, along with the great majority of other allies of the Doctor who’s died over the history of the series. Along the way they’ve almost constantly been in peril from alien monsters and threatening villains with their horrible deathtraps— and while those things are suspenseful and make fine cliffhangers, the one thing that could never happen is for a companion to die like that.
Until Peri. Everything about her end is designed to violate our expectations about how things happen in a Dr Who adventure. We’re in the climax of the story. Crozier’s minions strap Peri down to a surgical bed, we know what he plans for her, she’s struggling and screaming just like many companions before her in similar peril. We cut to the Doctor racing to the rescue, freeing Yrcanos. We cut back to Crozier preparing to start the surgery. Back to the Doctor running down a corridor toward the lab. Will he be in time? Of course he will. It’s suspenseful but we know how this ends. Then suddenly he freezes, trapped in a strange beam of light. The TARDIS appears, he’s pulled into it, and it dematerializes. We cut back to Crozier’s lab. Peri wakes up— but she’s not Peri. It’s Kiv waking up with her face.
Peri is dead— and it even happened offscreen. Like the Doctor as he watches from the courtroom, we’re just stunned. No. It can’t have happened like that. Some final twist will undo it. It has to. And then Yrcanos arrives, too late, realizes what happens, and the story ends with him opening fire on the lab, screaming in rage, the guards open fire on him, and the picture fades out.
Doctor Who had never done anything like that before— or since. It raises the stakes for every moment of peril in the series from here on— we just can’t be confident any more that our heroes will always escape, or at least be granted a satisfying heroic ending. Looking ahead, it won’t take the series long to backpedal and undermine the ending, but that doesn’t change the impact of the story as we see it. Whatever else you may like or dislike about Mindwarp, that ending sticks.
Next Week:
“Terror of the Vervoids,” 4 episodes.
