“There is nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality!” —The Valeyard
[WARNING: complete spoilers in this post]
Story
Picking up where we left off, the Doctor is facing the new charge of genocide and has no more evidence left to offer. He can’t prove his assertion that the evidence from the Matrix was tampered with, something even he had previously believed impossible. Just then two surprise witnesses appear: new companion Mel, who can testify about what really happened aboard the Hyperion, and Sabalom Glitz (from the earlier story The Mysterious Planet) who can fill in the dialog that was “bleeped out” when we saw that adventure before. Who brought them to the courtroom? The Doctor’s old enemy, the Master, who now appears on the screen, speaking from within the Matrix itself and so proving that it can, in fact, be tampered with.
The Master’s been watching the trial all along, and finding it very amusing, and while he’d gladly see the Doctor executed he considers the Valeyard a greater danger. The Master reveals that Glitz was working for him on Ravalox (which, you’ll recall, turned out to be the Earth mysteriously moved out of its proper place in the galaxy). The “sleepers” had found a way to hack into the Matrix and had stolen all the technology and secrets of the Time Lords, and were going to deliver it to their home civilization. To prevent this without being seen to act, the High Council of Time Lords moved Earth’s whole solar system to a new location so the sleeper’s rescue ship couldn’t find them. In doing so they accidentally caused the solar flares that destroyed most of the life on Earth. When the Doctor arrived on “Ravalox,” the High Council knew he was bound to stumble on the truth, so they conspired with the Valeyard to trump up this trial in order to prevent the court from learning their guilt in causing the destruction. (We learn that the Inquisitor, and the jurors who’ve been sitting in the background throughout the trial season, are part of Gallifrey’s equivalent of an independent judiciary, with the power to remove the High Council from power if they’d learned the truth.)
The Master drops the bombshell that the Valeyard is a version of the Doctor himself: everyone has both good an evil inside them, and the Valeyard is an amalgamation of all the Doctor’s evil impulses, drawn from “between his twelfth and final regenerations.” Presumably (though this is never explained) the High Council somehow reached into the Doctor’s time line to create this being, giving themselves a co-conspirator with all the Doctor’s abilities but none of his conscience. They’ve promised the Valeyard that when the Doctor is executed, they’ll give the Valeyard all his remaining regenerations, so he will become a fully living being, free at last from the Doctor’s morality.
His identity revealed, the Valeyard flees into the Matrix and the Doctor follows. We last entered the Matrix in the Tom Baker era The Deadly Assassin and, like then, it’s a dreamscape created by the mental energy of those within it. The Doctor finds himself in a pseudo-Victorian landscape, trying to work his way past layers of bureaucracy to reach his enemy, who in this dreamworld is the head of “The Fantasy Factory.” (The dreamscape the Valeyard created points clearly to the fact that whatever else he may be, he is indeed the Doctor— who has always leaned toward the “steampunk” in his sense of style.)
Meanwhile the Master and Glitz are still trying to get the Matrix data, now in possession of the Valeyard, as well as trying to maneuver the Doctor and the Valeyard into a confrontation that will lead to their mutual destruction. News arrives in the courtroom that there’s been a coup on Gallifrey: the High Council has been deposed and rebels are now in control, and this appears to have been the Master’s primary plan: while the High Council and the Valeyard were focused on framing the Doctor, the Master’s allies have been staging their coup and the Master expects to soon be ruler of Gallifrey.
At the same time, the Doctor and Mel discover what the High Council and the Valeyard have really been up to: the Valeyard has constructed a weapon inside the Matrix that will, at the right moment, kill all the members of the court watching the screens, thus ending the court’s legal threat to the High Council.
It all gets sorted out in the end: the Master and Glitz are caught in a booby trap when they try to access the stolen Matrix data, the Doctor stops the weapon from killing the Court and it instead kills the Valeyard (or so it seems), and the Court is left to dismiss all charges against the Doctor and get on with the business of dealing with the rebellion and, presumably, prosecuting the High Council. The Doctor and Mel head back to the TARDIS and depart, with Mel vowing to make the Doctor get back on the exercycle and drink more carrot juice.
Review
That was a very long summary for a very short (2-episode) story. But as you can gather from reading it, there’s so much information spilled that it’s hard to summarize it, and just giving a no-spoilers blurb wouldn’t help much since most of what I want to say about it depends on your knowing what was in it— and I know that some of you following these posts aren’t actually watching the episodes as we go along.
The Ultimate Foe is not so much a story in its own right as the conclusion to the trial scenes throughout the whole season. It’s the equivalent of the scene in a classic whodunnit in which the detective lays out the explanation for everything that’s happened in the story to that point. As such, episode 1 of the two-parter actually plays quite well, and the best plot twists of the story are those the Master lays out in his speech from the Matrix screen. Eric Saward and Robert Holmes co-plotted the trial story, and the plan was always to have Holmes write the first adventure of the season, and the concluding 2-parter. So it is only the events of The Mysterious Planet that play into the resolution of the mystery: the intervening two stories don’t come up (and so it appears Mel only arrives in the courtroom because she’s the current companion and has to be there).
Episode 2 of the story, though, severely falls apart. All the added twists— the Master’s unclear scheme, the news of a coup on Gallifrey, the Valeyard’s weapon in the matrix, and all the back-and-forth chasing about in the episode just turn the whole thing into a scrambled mess.
Episode 1 was co-written by Robert Holmes and Eric Saward (credited to Holmes alone), in Holmes’ final contribution to Dr Who. Holmes fell ill and died before getting to episode 2, and Saward wrote the script for episode 2 himself, following the plan he and Holmes had worked out, but for complicated reasons (see below under “Meltdown”) his script couldn’t be used and John Nathan-Turner turned the job over to Pip and Jane Baker.
If you’ve been reading these posts, you know I’m no fan of the Bakers. But I don’t want to place blame where it isn’t deserved: Pip and Jane were put into an impossible situation here, and I don’t think the best writers who ever lived could have avoided turning episode 2 (or episode 14 of the “Trial” story) into a shambles. Due to legalities (again, see below) they weren’t allowed to use anything of either Saward’s episode 2 script, or even anything of Holmes’ and Saward’s planning for the final episode. In fact they weren’t allowed to even know what had been planned. In an extraordinary scene, when JN-T met with Pip and Jane to discuss the episode, a BBC lawyer was present to make sure he didn’t let slip anything he wasn’t allowed to tell them— and to warn them off if any story idea they proposed even accidentally came too near to what was originally planned.
So let that sink in: the Bakers were tasked with writing the final chapter of a complex mystery, without knowing what the original authors intended nor even being allowed to use the “correct” ending if they came up with it on their own.
But blame is a separate question from quality, and what’s on the screen still falls into two crystal-clear halves: a first episode that’s actually pretty decent, and a second episode that just falls to bits. Pip and Jane don’t escape all blame for the problems of episode 2, either. It’s full of the kind of cringeworthy dialog that only they can produce: the quote at the top of the page (which does not sound any better in context) is only the most famous of a whole series of wincing lines in the episode. There are turns in the story that just don’t make sense, such as when the Valeyard tries to trick the Doctor into thinking he’s left the Matrix and returned to the courtroom— but still leaves the Victorian setting outside the room. Did the Valeyard think the Doctor wouldn’t notice? It turns out the Doctor wasn’t fooled but when he boasts to Mel about his clever deduction in realizing the court wasn’t real, he doesn’t even mention the fact that a completely illusory dreamscape was still sitting right outside the door. At one point Mel opens a panel to reveal a steampunk mass of Victorian tubes and valves and instantly recognizes it as a “megabyte modem.” Huh? Being kept in the dark about the original story plan doesn’t excuse the Bakers for coming up with that.
So it’s half a satisfying end to the Trial of A Time Lord— one good episode, one awful one, with the awful one sadly being the actual finale. Nothing is known of Holmes and Saward’s plan except that it was to end on a cliffhanger with the Doctor and the Valeyard both trapped inside the Matrix, apparently forever. Maybe whatever else they planned for the finale wouldn’t have been all that great— but given what we did see on the screens, I do so wish we’d had the chance to find out.
Peri Brown and the Fate Worse than Death
Two stories ago Dr Who gave us one of the most shocking and dramatic twists ever, in the death of Peri at the hands of mad scientist Crozier, having her mind destroyed and replaced with that of Kiv.The Ultimate Foe backpedals, revealing along the way that this was part of the record that the Valeyard tampered with: in fact Peri was still alive, and living as a warrior queen married to King Yrcanos. To sell it, a couple of frames from Mindwarp get flashed on the screen that try to show a seemingly romantic moment between the two of them (in the original context, it was something completely different).
Both Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant (and, I’ll add, myself) think this was a huge mistake. While King Yrcanos in that story had formed a crush on Peri, there was no trace of anything similar from her. During the story she does gain a tolerant attitude toward his over-the-top bluster, but ending up married to him? No trace of it. Philip Martin had no such plans in writing the story (his orders from JN-T were to kill Peri off), and Nicola Bryant was very pleased that her character departed in such a dramatic way. Colin Baker blames himself: during shooting of The Ultimate Foe he casually asked JN-T at one point if Peri was really dead, and it was evidently JN-T’s idea to stick the extra dialog into the story as an answer.
Baker and Bryant both regard it as an open question whether this would actually be a happy ending for Peri’s character. “I leave it to you to decide if being married to Brian Blessed is a fate worse than being turned into a giant slug,” Baker remarks.
Still, it’s canonical so we’re stuck with it. Or are we? In the run-up to the 50th anniversary, we got a short film giving us the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration into the War Doctor. In that short, Eight names the companions he had in the series (still ongoing) of audio dramas produced by Big Finish, thereby establishing that the Big Finish Eighth Doctor line is also canonical. Does the same go for Big Finish’s stories featuring previous Doctors? They’re generally well respected, they were full cast dramas usually with the original actors rather than tie-in novels, and they kept Dr Who alive during the Dark Years between Classic and the new series.
The Sixth Doctor has enjoyed a long and successful run in the Big Finish series, which is also ongoing. In it, he was able to complete the character arc always planned for his Doctor but which he never got the chance to follow through in the main series— and according to that series, following the trial the Doctor promptly traveled to Yrcanos’ planet and rescued Peri. Peri Brown and the Sixth Doctor continue to travel together in the audio adventures to this day, and both Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are proud of the work they’ve done in that series— which wouldn’t have been possible if not for the last minute backpedal concerning Peri’s “death” in Mindwarp.
So— you choose.
Meltdown Behind the Scenes
After its 18-month hiatus, Dr Who came back to the air under a serious and ongoing threat, and tensions between JN-T and Eric Saward ran high. Ostensibly, the show was put on hiatus in order to be retooled and revamped— but no guidance whatsoever had come down to the production office from those on high who ordered the hiatus. So what were they supposed to do? Both Saward and JN-T considered resigning— not in protest but out of loyalty to the show, if the higher-ups wanted to bring in a new creative team for the revamping. But they got no indication that was the answer either.
In fact, as came out later, the whole “revamp the show” claim was a deliberate scam. The two execs responsible, Jonathan Powell and Michael Grade, admitted (much) later that their intention was to cancel Dr Who outright. They called it an 18-month hiatus with the idea that this would quiet fan protest, while at the same time they were so confident no one really liked Dr Who that they figured no one would notice when, without fanfare, it simply failed to come back after the 18 months. “We could have revitalized Dr Who,” Powell admits in one interview, “but we didn’t care.” He didn’t mean that as an apology. In a 2002 interview, at a point in time when he had already been proved wrong due to the fact that home video releases of the Classic series had become the BBC’s most profitable property, indeed so successful that the wheels had started turning in bringing the series back, Michael Grade was still clinging to the delusion that he was right: “The press thought there was a big outcry, they didn’t realize it was the three nutters who liked the show holed up in their parents’ attics writing a thousand letters each.” (I don’t often feel like punching people in the face, but if I ever meet Michael Grade in person he’d better wear a hockey mask: it’s not his opinion, it’s the smug sneer with which he delivers it, at a time when he had already been proved egregiously wrong.)
In the event, the outcry was so great and so sustained that they had no choice but to bring back the series as promised— for a few years, until they finally gave it the chop once and for all— but with no indication whatsoever of how they wanted it changed, JN-T and Saward had little choice but to go on as they had been. But creative differences between the two became explosive under the pressure they felt from above.
Eric Saward had cultivated a friendship with Robert Holmes, after finally managing to bring him back (over JN-T’s protests) to writing for Dr Who. By all accounts, Saward saw Holmes as something of a mentor. When Holmes was hospitalized while writing The Ultimate Foe, Saward delayed as long as possible, hoping Holmes would recover. Finally he went to visit Holmes in the hospital, hoping to work with him on finishing the story. As Saward tells it, they talked over story ideas for some time, when suddenly Holmes asked, “I’m sorry, but who are you again?”
At that point Saward realized Holmes wasn’t coming back. With JN-T’s permission he wrote the final episode himself, getting news along the way that Robert Holmes had died.
JN-T objected to the cliffhanger ending Saward and Holmes had plotted, thinking it would give the BBC the excuse to cancel the show, seeing it as an ending to the Doctor’s adventures once and for all. Saward replied that Powell and Grade clearly could care less what was happening in the show and would cancel it or not regardless of the ending. JN-T finally put his foot down and insisted the ending be changed to one that saw the Doctor exonerated and returned to his travels.
Perhaps Saward was particularly stubborn because of his emotions over Holmes’ recent death, but when JN-T overrode him, he resigned as script editor. Because he still had copyright over the script he’d written for the final episode, he formally (and legally) prohibited the series from using any part of it unless they kept the originally planned ending. That was the reason for the directive to Pip and Jane Baker that they couldn’t even be allowed to know anything about the original plans.
The fallout didn’t end there. Still fuming, Eric Saward granted a “tell-all” interview to Starlog magazine, in which he aired every grievance and dispute he’d ever had with JN-T and his approach to Dr Who. Saward has later regretted the tone, which was very much a result of the heat of the moment. The interview gave fans, already complaining about the slide in quality of the show, the ammunition to make JN-T the designated villain for their complaints (as I’ve said before, from all I’ve seen I think it was Saward himself who deserves more of that blame— although JN-T definitely comes in for a share) and it cost the show a lot of the fan support it would have needed to survive the axe that Powell and Grade were holding over it.
Among Saward’s complaints in the interview, he criticized JN-T’s habit of “stunt casting” big name (for the BBC) actors in the series regardless of whether they were right for the part, and he specifically criticized Colin Baker as the Doctor. And that, perhaps, contributed to the last fallout of the meltdown:
The End of the Sixth Doctor
A few weeks after season 23 ended, the directive came down to JN-T from on high: Colin Baker was fired. It was unprecedented for the higher-ups at the BBC to involve themselves in casting decisions for particular series, but there it was. JN-T maybe could have fought it, but he knew neither he nor Dr Who had any bankable credit with the BBC at that point.
Colin Baker describes hearing the news as like taking a punch to the gut. He was— and remains to this day— very loyal to the show (see above about his audio adventures as the Sixth Doctor where, among other things, he gets to show how much better liked his Doctor would be if he’d had the chance to complete the multi-season character arc originally planned).
After firing him, Jonathan Powell contacted him to appear in one more episode— not even one story, just one episode— to do a proper regeneration scene, but Baker quite reasonably told him where he could stick that idea. (He was more tactful than that, by every account, but I doubt the sentiment was much different.)
As a result, the Sixth Doctor’s era ends with him departing the courtroom with a companion the Doctor hasn’t technically met yet. Plans to address this in the opener of the next season obviously never came to pass.
And the last words of the Sixth Doctor are woefully undramatic: “Carrot juice! Carrot juice! Carrot juice!”
The Ultimate Foe was, as it turned out, the BBC.
Next Week:
“Time and the Rani,” 4 episodes. New Doctor, new season. New hope?
