Day 335 — December 1st 2021
The Trial of a Time Lord Parts One and Two
The Trial of a Time Lord — Part One
I told myself this morning that I wasn’t allowed to go on about that opening shot of the episode, where we go for a tour of the Time Lord space station and watch as the TARDIS is drawn in through a beam of light. It’s too much of an easy thing to latch on to for this episode, and has been praised to death over and over down the years. I decided to focus on something else instead.
But bloody hell, it’s an incredible sequence, innit? Certainly the best model work of the 1980s, and very much a contender for the best model shot in all of Doctor Who. The models themselves are gorgeous — and huge, the station had a diameter of around five feet — but everything about the opening is so well executed. This feels like the programme storming back onto TV after an 18 month break and making a real statement about being back, and better than ever. Does the rest of the episode hold up to that promise, though? Well… no, let’s be honest. That opening shot is stunning. It looks expensive, abs you can see every penny rendered on screen. After that, I think anything would have looked cheap by comparison.
One of the decisions taken when this series went into production was to drop film for for location material, and to switch to making them on videotape like all the studio stuff. It makes sense; film was significantly more expensive (so dropping it means there’s more money to spend elsewhere), and you get the awkward jarring whenever you cut between location and studio and the formats change. It’s also 1986, and we’re getting to a point where audiences just aren’t going to go along with that mixed format stuff any more. So all things considered, I can absolutely understand why they made the decision to go fully video.
Unfortunately, video automatically looks a lot cheaper than film material. Regular readers will know how often I wish the entire series had been shot on film from Day One, and I think it’s telling that the vast majority of my favourite shots during this marathon have all been on film.
It’s a noticeable change as soon as we move the the surface of Ravalox, and while the location is pretty (all that mist especially), I can’t help but thinking it lacks the richness it would have had on film. Everything just looks that little bit flatter, and where I felt film helped to mute the colours of Colin’s coat and make him fit in with the world a little more, the combination of video and daylight brings the colours right out — I don’t think it’s ever looked more eye popping! This episode also introduces a new waistcoat as part of the costume, and it has to be said that it also adds to the effect of things looking a little cheaper this year.
Still, for all my moaning about the format, the scenes of Doctor Who and Peri exploring on Ravalox are lovely. It feels like they’ve been written specifically to counter all the problems I had with their partnership in the opening episode of Revelation. I can’t imagine the version of Doctor Who we get here — listening to Peri, complimenting her intelligence, making little jokes and waving his umbrella around playfully — ever commenting on his companion’s weight. This is the first time it’s ever felt like the two of them might have any genuine affection for each other, and it’s the first time I’ve ever understood why Peri might choose to stay with him.
In fairness, he does still abandon her when she decides that she’s too uncomfortable to remain here, but I suspect the same might have been true if any incarnation. Once some mystery has piqued their interest there’s nothing in the universe which can stop them from exploring. And it has to be said that the speech in which Doctor Who tries to put things into perspective for her is probably the best material Colin’s ever had to work with;
Doctor Who: ‘You’ve been travelling with me long enough to know that none of this really matters. Not to you. Your world is safe.’
Peri: ‘This is still my world, whatever the period, and I care about it. And all you do is talk about it as though we’re in a planetarium.’
Doctor Who: ‘I’m sorry. But look at it this way. Planets come and go, stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, reforms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal.’
There’s other areas of the script which really work for me, too. I could go on about loving Sabalom Glitz all day long (and I’m sure he’ll get his moment in the sun before this story’s through), but the thing which has really caught my imagination in this episode is Katryca revealing that she’s not the leader of some simple band of primitives, but rather perfectly capable of holding her own;
Katryca: ‘I am an old woman, Sabalom Glitz. You are not the first to visit my village from another world. On each and every occasion, they have all wanted to dismantle the great totem.’
Glitz: ‘In that case, you understand the urgency…’
Katryca: ‘And on each and every occasion, they have all had a different reason.’
Glitz: ‘Let me assure you, my credentials are bona fide and completely in order…’
Katryca: ‘Ah yes, The guns. They all had similar credentials.’
Glitz’s bafflement afterwards as he wonders how he’s ended up locked in a cell without his gun really makes the whole thing work for me. The casting of Joan Sims plays well into this, too, because I don’t think you expect her to be as capable as she is here.
All things considered it’s a good start to the new season, and one of the strongest Colin Baker episodes so far, with a 7/10.
A quick note about how I’m classing this series for the purposes of rating all the stories. I tend to class The Trial of a Time Lord as a single 14-part story, because that’s what the credits says it is. So when it comes to putting it in a big list of how all the stories stack up against each other that’s how it’ll be classed. That said, I know some people favour counting this as four individual stories with linking elements, so I’ll provide the average score for each ‘segment’ separately. Feel free to make your own graphs.
The Trial of a Time Lord — Part Two
Ohh, this is so much more like it. Having trudged my way through the last season genuinely wondering what the point was with watching these stories, it’s so nice to just sit back and enjoy an episode of Doctor Who again. I’m giving this one an 8/10, because for the first time in ages it just feels like the series I know and love, and it’s nice to be back on form.
One of the key things for me in this episode is the humour, which oozes out of every scene. I think you can hear Robert Holmes enjoying himself as he writes the script, and he’s clearly having fun with each and every one of the characters. It’s also the most fun Nicola Bryant has ever been allowed to have in the series, and I found myself proper hooting at her descriptions of marriage;
Glitz: ‘Obviously she’s a romantic at heart.’
Peri: ‘Well, so am I, but not romantic enough to want more that one husband.’
Dibber: ‘Where we come from, a woman can have as many as six.’
Peri: ‘Oh, it’s very similar on my planet, except we usually have them one
at a time.’
God it’s good to watch Peri engaging with some characters and having a bit of a laugh in the face of danger. It feels like the only thing she was allowed to do in Season Twenty-Two was whine and act as an object for Doctor Who to hurl insults at. I think it’s telling that Bryant’s performance feels so much more assured in this story, too. Even her accent feels stronger, and I can only assume she was practicing it during the 18 month gap in production.
I told you I’d get around to praising Sabalom Glitz and I think this is the perfect moment to do it, because he’s also responsible for a lot of the comedy gold in this episode;
Glitz: ‘If we can persuade Katryca’s people to drive a shaft into the centre, we can fill them with gas.’
Peri: ‘You’d kill them? The people Katryca calls underground dwellers? That would be mass murder.’
Glitz: ‘I’m sure my conscience will prick a little, but where money is concerned, that doesn’t usually last long.’
Glitz doesn’t often get held up as one of Robert Holmes’ greatest characters but I think he probably is; certainly up there with the likes of Jago and Litefoot, and I’d even go so far as to say that on the evidence of these two episodes alone he’s probably even better than those characters, who are only as rich in my head as they are because I’ve heard so many of the audios they star in 30 years later. It baffles me that Glitz never came back in Big Finish, and I can only assume Toby Selby said no to reprising the character. He’s a big part of what makes it work, so the thought of recasting is out of the question to my mind.
There’s something else this story is doing so far which is making it stand out for me — the robots have both had proper ‘reveal’ shots! Hooray! I feel like I’ve been complaining for months about monsters and villains just wandering into the back of a shot, but here for the first time in ages both the L3 and L1 robots get proper moments of being revealed to the audience for the first time. In the case of the L1 robot in this episode we get to watch a screen slowly rise to reveal it ready for action, and for the L3 there’s a great panning round of the camera in Part One. I wouldn’t say that this story has the most notable direction, but it’s certainly gotten the basics right, and a proper moment for the monster’s first appearance certainly counts as the basics!
The other thing which stands out as being very well done here is insults. I complained that Doctor Who making jabs at Peri’s weight were totally inappropriate during Revelation of the Daleks, and I stand by that. In this episode we get Katryca calling Glitz ‘fat one’, but here it works and is funny! I think that has a lot to do with the fact that neither of these characters are supposed to be our heroes, or friends with each other. Later in the episode, Doctor Who refers to Drathro’s companions as ‘Humbug’ and ‘Handbag’ because he’s forgotten their names, and that got a decent laugh from me, too.
I’ve often thought of Robert Holmes’ final few episodes for the series as being a bit naff, an ignoble end for the man who once ruled the series, but on the strength of this episode, he still had it right to the end. Now fingers crossed the rest of the story can keep up this quality…
