Day 336 — December 2nd 2021
The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Three and Four
The Trial of a Time Lord — Part Three
People moan about the Trial subplot which runs through all of the episodes this series — cutting back to find Doctor Who and the Valeyard bickering in the courtroom. I think I quite like it, though, and this episode is the best example so far because it starts to introduce the idea that what we’re watching has been specifically edited. Of course it does bed the question of why the Valeyard chose to show this particular adventure if the High Council needed to avoid being implicated in the events on Ravalox, but hey I can go along with it all the same.
I think it’s also clear that the production office is using the format to have a jab at the BBC’s ‘Sixth Floor’ who critisised the programme the previous season and made an attempt to pull the plug. There’s moments in this episode which feel like specific rebuttals to some of the claims that were made in the press about the show’s failings;
The Valeyard: ‘I too find it repugnant to witness, my lady, but the Doctor has a well-known predilection for violence.’
Doctor Who: ‘That is a foul slur! I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m not given to violence as the Valeyard here suggests. Occasionally I might have to resort to a modicum
of force…’
The Inquisitor: ‘Valeyard, I would appreciate it if these brutal and repetitious scenes are reduced to a minimum.’
The Valeyard: ‘My lady, it is certainly not my wish to cause you any unnecessary affront, but the accused offences are such that a certain amount of graphic detail is unavoidable.’
Part of me feels like I should be sat here saying that this kind of ‘on the nose’ stuff spoils things and doesn’t work, but actually I’m finding it a lot of fun! I wonder if it helps that this story feels so much more like the kind of Doctor Who they were making a decade or so earlier, so I’m enjoying the whole thing a lot more?
I’m also a big fan of the Court Room set, although I gather it’s not popular generally with fandom. I once spent ages trying to work out all the angles and designs to build a scale model for my Doctor Who action figures but I didn’t get very far. For all I often complain about Gallifreyan sets looking a bit naff, there’s something about this set which really works for me, and there’s some lovely production shots of it which showcase the size of it far better than comes across on screen.
I can’t complain massively, though, because the direction in this story is pretty decent on the whole. It’s the first of three outings for Nicholas Mallett on the series, and he’s even managed to make some of the videotaped location work look good in this episode. There’s an especially nice close up of Colin Baker where the light is just right — several of the scenes here seem to have been shot as the sun was beginning to set, and it adds some much needed depth to the shots.
6/10
The Trial of a Time Lord — Part Four
I sometimes worry that I must sound like a complete hypocrite when writing this blog, because the things that I’ll criticise one story for are the same things I’ll use to praise another. In this case it’s the deaths of Katryca and Broken Tooth at the hands of Drathro. I complained in Attack of the Cybermen and Revelation of the Daleks that the guest cast were killed off so early (and, in fairness, because their storylines went nowhere, which isn’t so much the case here). But this pair are killed off less than three minutes into this episode and it’s the most incredible thing ever! They’ve stormed the ‘castle’ thinking that the robot is dead only to discover their hubris and pay the ultimate price! In this instance it does everything to raise the stakes and make Drathro surprisingly scary.
I also wonder if it’s because the image of their faces, with the dark black lines drawn across them is one of the images that helped to solidify my love of Doctor Who? I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I credit the 2005 series with turning me from being someone who’d seen the odd episode here and there into a card-carrying Fan. But it’s not only the series which I can thank for that. In the summer of 2005 I bought a copy of Justin Richards’ Doctor Who: The Legend Continues from the BBC Shop in Norwich. God I used to pour over the pages of that book. I used to use it to choose which stories I wanted to track down on VHS because the wait for a DVD copy was too unbearable.
And The Trial of a Time Lord was right up the top of the list. After all it was the single longest story in the programme’s history, which is the kind of thing that’s important when you’re starting out on the show! Not only that, the images in the book which accompanied this story were properly captivating. At the bottom of Page 343 there’s a shot of these two characters being killed which for whatever reason properly stuck in my head. Watching that moment play out on screen brings all those feelings of newly discovering the show right back, and I can’t help but love it.
Even though they’re killed off in the opening few minutes, there’s plenty of other stuff to enjoy as the story goes on. I think this is probably the best single episode for Colin so far (if not the best Colin episode, if that makes sense?). He’s given so much good material to work with and he really rises to it. There’s a whole confrontation in the courtroom between him and the Valeyard which is properly electric. It shows just what Colin’s Doctor Who has needed all along — a slightly theatrical villain to really sink his teeth into. It gives him the chance to go big and over-play some of the lines and it works perfectly.
It helps that all that shouting and bravado is offset by some lovely intimate stuff elsewhere in the episode. He gets to have a wonderful moment with Drathro where he tries to convince the robot that the humans should be allowed to live even when the machine has been switched off;
Doctor Who: ‘If you could understand one tenth of what life was about, you’d want me to save those people out there.’
Drathro: ‘Why? I have said that without me they have no purpose.’
Doctor Who: ‘Everything in life has its purpose, Drathro. Every creature plays its part. But the purpose of life is too big to be knowable. A million computers couldn’t solve that one.’
Between this moment and the speech in Part One about matter being reformed into new patterns I feel like Robert Holmes has finally clicked how to make this incarnation work. He’s at his very best when being a bit philosophical and poetic, and Colin really plays those scenes beautifully.
I’m going with another 7/10 for this one. For those of you breaking this up into four individual stories instead of one long one that makes The Mysterious Planet the highest-rated Colin story so far, with an average of 7/10 across the four episodes.
