The Trial of a Time Lord (Mindwarp)

GORDON’S ALIVE, IT’S BRIAN BLESSED! Playing a warrior king on Thoros Beta (home planet of the slug-like alien Sil, from Vengeance on Varos), Brian Blessed is the beacon of fun and enthusiasm in this otherwise shoddy story. I can barely remember what else happens, something about a scientist experimenting on the humanoid locals, looking for a suitable body donor for Sil’s boss, Lord Kiv, before he dies, and the Time Lords ultimately having to step in and stop it. What happened to non-interference, eh?

Part 1 uses funky video colouring to make this scene look like an alien planet… or an Andy Warhol painting.

Amongst all the lunacy is Peri being recruited as a serving wench for all of five minutes, a strange mutated wolfman, and the Doctor losing his marbles… but actually it’s all a ruse! OR IS IT? It’s a pretty poor ruse, as Peri’s mind gets wiped and the Time Lords kill her. OR DO THEY? Etcetera, etcetera. What the hell is going on?!

Sil’s head prosthetic has improved since his last appearance, but the character is superfluous this time. His gurgling laugh is as distinctive as ever, though.

Where the previous story worked perfectly well without the courtroom framing device, the four parts of Mindwarp seem intertwined with what’s happening there. The Doctor’s amnesia prevents him from setting the record straight, so we have to take the story at face value. Either that, or the amnesia is just an excuse for poor characterisation. The Doctor is a thoroughly detestable character in this story, reverting back to his cowardly ways from The Twin Dilemma.

Brian Blessed basically dominates every scene with his presence, for better or worse.

Ultimately, though, Mindwarp is just boring. Really boring, aimless, witless, silly and without merit. The only excuse I can give it is that perhaps it’s unfair to judge until the full story is revealed and it’s building up to something special in the trial, but I’m not hopeful of that. And if this really is the end of poor Perpugilliam, it’s the worst exit a main character could ever hope for.

Kiv’s mind is transferred to Peri’s brain, shortly before she’s killed in an attack. Is this really the end of her?

Although he’s certainly the best thing in it, not even Brian Blessed can save this one, and that’s thoroughly damning!

The Trial of a Time Lord (The Mysterious Planet)

Sometimes you need to take a break to recharge your creative batteries. After more than twenty years on the air, Doctor Who takes its first “hiatus”, coming back fresh after an eighteen month gap. Colin Baker returns, along with his scary smiling face in the title sequence, but the music has been changed to a more subdued and bassy version of the theme. Season 23 has one further change: the entire season is one story arc, encompassing multiple stories that tie into a narrative framing device, namely a courtroom trial. The Doctor is facing charges from his own people, for meddling in the affairs of others. Past attempts to bring together multiple writers’ stories into an arc have not been successful, so I remain sceptical for now.

The Time Lord courtroom. Surely putting the screen BEHIND everyone is just going to cause neck aches, no?

Things certainly get off to a good start, as the story opens with the single most ambitious visual effect the show has ever attempted so far. A fantastically complex motion-controlled sequence sees a Time Lord space vessel pull the Doctor’s Tardis into its glowing tractor beam hatch, the camera swerving and swooping around to cinematically capture the event. It’s seriously impressive. Sadly, that’s where most of the budget went, as the rest of the story is set within the usual low-budget BBC sets or out in a forest, and film has been swapped for cheaper outdoor video again. Oh well!

The incredible opening sequence is not just technically accomplished, it’s superbly composed too.

The courtroom side of the story has the Doctor face off against his prosecutor, the Valeyard. As you would expect, he doesn’t take the situation seriously, and gets increasingly irrate. This is actually quite a suitable situation for this version of the Doctor and provides some comedic moments (“I object!” “What now?” “Yes, now!”) and some epic rants. All the while, the court is watching one of the Doctor’s adventures on the screen, set on a mysterious planet that closely resembles Earth…

Seeing the remains of Marble Arch underground station, Peri is understandably upset at seeing what Earth will eventually become. The Doctor merely sees it as a statistic. All worlds come to an end eventually.

Well, it’s two billion years in the future and Earth isn’t where it’s supposed to be; in fact, the Doctor confuses it for planet Ravolox. Something is going on here but it’s a mystery for another time. The story features a fairly typical social dichotomy setup, with a primitive tribe above ground and the technologically advanced society sealed below. In a classic role reversal, the poor humans down there are slaves to their robot “god” and the Doctor has to lecture it about the value of life, which it obviously fails to grasp.

The Doctor confronts the robot, Drathro.

There are certain similarities with Robert Holmes’ first Doctor Who script, The Krotons, which is fitting as this was his last one before he sadly died the following year. He has undoubtedly made some of the best contributions to this show over the years, and this remains evident even in his final story. Take the two mercenaries, Glitz and Dibber. Another writer might have ignored any characterisation of two fairly inconsequential characters, but Holmes fleshes out his villains with quirks, gives them humour and personality that breathes such fun into their scenes that I was actually glad that they got away at the end.

Glitz and Dibber plan to breach the control room.

Where the writing kind of fails is where it uses wishy washy space terms without much thought. Glitz and Dibber are from “the constellation of Andromeda”, apparently. Now, let’s ignore for a moment the fact that you can’t strictly be “from” a constellation, since it’s merely a representation of many stellar bodies as seen from Earth; one such body would be the Andromeda galaxy, which is such an astronomical distance from our own that it renders any interest in Earth trivial. These two characters noticing that Earth is a couple of lightyears off of its position is, to put this into perspective, like somebody in Australia noticing that a grain of sand on Brighton beach has moved a couple of millimetres to the left. A couple of lightyears isn’t even as far as Earth’s nearest star, Promixa Centauri! Where is this mysterious planet getting its sunlight from?!

Anyway, niggles aside, I thought the Mysterious Planet was rather good. I’m certainly intrigued by the courtroom side of things, but I found the actual story presented to be strong in its own right. We’re off to a good start, let’s hope it continues.

Revelation of the Daleks

It’s another Something of the Daleks story. Occasionally, these can be really good. Lately, however, this has become a less frequent occurrence. Davros returns, having escaped from the explosion in Resurrection of the Daleks, and does his usual routine of frothing at the mouth while yelling about his great plans to build the ultimate master race, etcetera, etcetera. Davros is definitely an iconic villain (particularly here, where for the most part he appears as a severed head attached to a machine), but this whole leader of the Daleks thing is getting tiresome now. When the ‘true’ Daleks return and arrest him, I thought that was a genuinely good moment and a simple but effective way to bring him down.

The head of Davros. I have to admit, that’s a lot of trouble to go to on the off chance that you might be assassinated.

Severed heads and violent stabbings are combined with some misplaced comedy to create a distinctly mixed tone here. The low point has to be the DJ; what on Earth were they thinking with him? “He’s just so ker-azy, man!”, whooping and hollering as he destroys Daleks with a laser powered by rock and roll or something. And then steps out like a fool and gets shot. Dear me.

No. Just no.

That said, none of the action is particularly good. They try to do an action-packed assassination attempt in Davros’ lab, complete with limbs being blown off, but a BBC TV studio and some weak video effects just can’t do that sort of sequence justice. Good effort, but no. That’s not to mention the mixed quality of acting. Clive Swift is a good comedy actor, but he’s just a bit weird and creepy in this. Jenny Tomasin is unwatchably awful and cringeworthy in every scene. The romantic interest subplot is inconsequential. Elsewhere, I sort of enjoyed the scenes with Kara and Vogel, but their motives are a bit foggy.

The creepy human-Dalek hybrid head. The see-through Dalek is cool but… why build a see-through Dalek?

There isn’t much left to enjoy, really. Orcini, the ‘honorable’ assassin is a kind of cool character. Tranquil Repose is an interesting place where they preserve you in death but what they’re producing is suitably icky. The part where the Doctor finds his future memorial stone is quite creepy, but not enough is done with that because it turns out to be a set-up to snare the Doctor. And speaking of which, I don’t actually know why Davros wanted to bring him there; that seems awfully irresponsible! Overall, this was a mess. Maybe the show should have gone on some sort of hiatus for a year and a half…

Timelash

Pulled into a time warp, the Tardis arrives on planet Karfel during a particularly nasty dictatorship, a looming war with a neighbouring planet, and rebellion bubbling beneath the surface. Apparently, the Doctor has visited this world before with Jo Grant during his third incarnation, but this was not from any televised adventure. It’s useful only in the sense the bad guys recognise who he is, which I suppose makes a change from the normal routine of capturing the intruders and having them explain themselves.

The timelash is so horrific and deadly, it can only be thwarted by a rope.

There are a couple of cool things in Timelash. Firstly, there’s Borad, the mysterious ruler. It’s a well-worn trope of hiding behind a false persona, but I liked the idea of him using a robot dummy to talk to his people, and I especially like the awesome make-up they used to make Borad’s face. The half-human/half-rubber-lizard prosthetic is genuinely impressive (and horrific!) to me now; I can only imagine what it must have been like for viewers in 1985. Secondly, there’s some interesting use of time effects. The Doctor’s double-image bluff is intriguing, and there’s the burning android that gets sent back in time one hour, which hints at the sort of non-linear storytelling that Doctor Who doesn’t do very often, probably because serials have to be painfully linear when they’re spread over several weeks. Sadly, this doesn’t have much bearing on the plot.

Okay, three good things. The time accelerator deathray is very cool. Flop!

And the plot is not all that. The rebel uprising is kinda boring and the time portal to the past is silly. It’s made out to be some horrible fate worse than death… but actually you just wind up in Scotland with H.G. Wells? Speaking of, the whole Wells thing is a cute twist, but the character is awful, or at least the actor is. This is a particular shame since most of the supporting cast are also awful. Poor performances all round, with one or two exceptions. And Peri is perhaps at her most useless here, serving as little more than the damsel in distress and screaming a lot. The best performance is from the Doctor as he frustratingly (and meticulously) chews out his companions for getting in the way, in a scene that appears to have been written to fill the remaining ten minutes, despite the implied urgency of the situation. I mean, it’s quite funny, but what the hell?

Herbert looks like a young Michael McIntyre. That’s right, try to unsee that now!

The ending, then, is just one massive cop-out, as the Doctor steers the Tardis into the incoming missile and is presumed dead, only to miraculously survive the explosion. I’m sorry, but “oh, it’s complicated, I’ll tell you about it some other time” is the absolute worst bottom-of-the-barrel writing imaginable. Shameful stuff.

Borad, in all his marvellously hideous glory.

The Two Doctors

Oh my giddy aunt! What the bloody hell did I just watch? You might think, from the name, that The Two Doctors would be a team-up of Time Lords on a lighthearted adventure against some iconic bad-dudes, particularly with the inclusion of Patrick Troughton as the jolly and childish second Doctor. What I didn’t expect was this utterly bizarre trip through cannibalism, torture and some the darkest and weirdest themes Doctor Who has ever tackled. Was this even considered a kids’ show by this point? The decline into dark themes has been gradual, I admit, but this is a world away from the sort of story The Five Doctors was, just a year or so prior.

Dastari and Chessene try to discover the secret of Time Lord symbiotic nuclei.

Things start off strangely in the second Doctor’s Tardis. Now, it’s great to see Frazer Hines back as Jamie, one of the longest-serving companions, but it is quite obvious that he’s nearly twenty years older. Even Patrick Troughton’s wig is now grey, and in addition to the clearly modern design of the control room, it suggests this version of the Doctor is set along some parallel timeline in which he never regenerated. He’s even on a mission for the Time Lords, which did not happen in the original timeline, and moreover the sixth Doctor has no memory of this adventure. But this is all completely ignored, and we’re supposed to accept that this all happened in the past (presumably between the points where Victoria left and Zoe joined). I gather there are some woolly ‘fanon’ explanations around for this, but it’s difficult to accept at face value.

The black-and-white opening catches you off-guard, before the colour (and wrinkles) return to their faces.

I like Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, and he’s still a pleasure to watch here, but it’s just not the sort of story that suits him. I won’t even get into the bizarre restaurant scene towards the end, because I’m not entirely sure I didn’t just dream the whole thing. Remarkably, though the villains of the piece are the Sontarans, the scariest villain here is undoubtedly the cannibal chef, Shockeye. I have to give credit to the performance; his heavy breathing and leering gaze as he eyes up his prey and sharpens his blades is truly unsettling. The script is dripping with descriptive prose about tearing tender human flesh from the bone and so on, it’s hard to believe that Robert Holmes wrote this as a vegetarian; it comes across more like he was just really hungry. Well, intentionally or not, he’s created one of the scariest villains in Doctor Who, ever.

Dressed for dinner, the Androgum-mutated Doctor and the chef head into town to sample the local cuisine.

Almost everything about this story has a wicked tone, from the computer that tries to casually murder them on the space station, to the repeated capture of the heroes. Poor Peri is attacked by Jamie, chased through the Spanish heat and knocked unconscious by Shockeye, is literally seconds away from having her throat cut, and goes through the whole ordeal in a skimpy little outfit. Jamie doesn’t fare much better; in fact no-one really comes away well. The poor lady of the villa gets casually offed in seconds, the truck driver is killed and so is Oscar the restaurateur when Shockeye stabs him. Yes, this is a Doctor Who story where a cannibal goes around bludgeoning an elderly woman and stabbing people. What the actual flip?

Peri and Jamie meet in less than ideal conditions. In fact, I think he tries to hump her.

And it’s another story where the Doctor blithely goes along with it. He puts Peri in danger repeatedly (the bit where he tells her to go into the dangerous house on her own is almost laughable; it’s like a horror parody), and he once again has little regard for life as he kills Shockeye with some cyanide(!!!). Although I can’t say he didn’t have it coming, did we really need the Doctor to offer another witty quip afterwards?

Continuing the theme of grotesque deaths, Stike the Sontaran gets burned by acid and then blown up.

Frankly, this is one of the strangest pieces of television entertainment I think I have ever watched. While there is an interesting central plot, lots of it is just weird tangential filler (possibly because the runtime is 50% longer than the current norm) and it’s just filled with really dark humour and unsettling scenes throughout. I can’t say it’s entirely without merit, because I’m all for pushing boundaries and trying new things, and I would much rather it be bizarrely interesting and darkly comic than, I dunno, boring and bland. But, just, wow. I’m lost for words. And I really fancy a shepherd’s pie.

The Mark of the Rani

The Rani is name of a Time Lord (er, Time Lady?) who has travelled to the 19th century industrial revolution era to steal brain chemicals from the local miners, resulting in the poor humans becoming aggressively violent. So, it’s another historical episode with an alien incursion to deal with… and, do you know what? I thought it was fairly good!

The Master watches as the Rani examines her captive. These two should team up more often.

When the Master turns up on the scene, the dynamic changes for the better. Here we have a (seemingly indestructible) villain stumbling into a scenario without a plan of action, who almost immediately develops one, and it’s totally bonkers (“I shall rule the world by kicking Earth’s industry up a gear while controlling everyone’s mind!!”). He and the Rani work well together as characters, bickering and distrusting one another, leading to some great scenes. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Peri are well-established bickerers themselves, but there are hints of a stronger relationship developing, albeit slowly.

Luke, turned into a tree, helps Peri to not turn into a tree. Yeah, I know, right?

The Doctor’s quite tolerable in this. Since his first appearance, he’s mellowed out loads. He’s still something of an anti-hero at times, socially awkward and big-headed, but he gets some excellent lines now. I laughed when he implied he was a scarecrow.

The Rani’s Tardis looks so cool!

I almost burst out laughing when the Doctor gets himself stuck between his two captors who have both stepped on mines that turn them into trees. It’s such a ridiculous idea but it’s completely confident that you’ll just go along with it. So too with the growing dinosaur embryo thrown in at the end, as the Rani’s Tardis goes spiralling out of the galaxy. Incidentally, for the short amount of time the other Tardis is seen, it’s extremely well-realised. It absolutely looks like a “next generation” Tardis control room. Those spinning loops on the console are really cool. I think the Doctor should consider an upgrade.

So, it’s a bit daft and light-hearted, but it’s good fun. And it’s set “oop north”, which makes a change!

Vengeance on Varos

Vengeance on Varos is probably one of the grimmest Doctor Who stories so far. Much like The Sun Makers, it pushes contemporary concepts to farcical extremes to create a darkly comic dystopian future. In this case, it’s a society that oppresses its people while publicly televising torture and death for their entertainment, dangling the carrot of freedom in front of them by letting them vote on their governor’s policies. I suppose it’s also a commentary on reality TV, albeit a bit before its time.

The Chief Officer and Sil plot to extort underpriced ore from Varos.

The plot is kept simple, but is punctuated by some distinctive imagery. The slug-like alien, Sil, and his evil gurgling laugh is particularly memorable. Quillam’s scarred face, Peri growing feathers over her skin, the Doctor being subjected to heat exhaustion, an acid bath and a gallows. It’s almost relentlessly bleak.

Furries around the world drool as Peri is nearly turned into a bird creature.

It has some comedic elements, some of which work as satire, like the couple watching and commenting on the TV at home, while some of it feels very badly judged in tone. The Doctor is supposed to care about life, but he has no problem with causing a few deaths here. Firstly, the security guard who gets zapped by the torture beam that he intentionally sets up as a trap, and later the two who get knocked into the acid vat. This wouldn’t be so bad, but the Doctor then makes a witty quip afterwards (“you’ll forgive me if I don’t join you”) – he’s not James bloody Bond! He hasn’t got the dress sense, for a start.

I couldn’t help but think of The Truman Show as the TV cameras are getting the best angle of the Doctor struggling for his life in the Punishment Dome.

The Governor is the sympathetic character, bravely going against the grain of the public vote, and is generally likable even when he’s giving questionable orders in the line of duty. No-one is a saint, there are only shades of grey. The Doctor continues to improve as a character I can actually care about, which I guess means he just needed a decent script, and on the whole I did enjoy this one a lot.

Attack of the Cybermen

As a rule, I now expect the worst from a Cybermen story. Ever since Revenge of the Cybermen, they’ve been terrible villains. The voices, the design, their mannerisms, all were handled much better back in the black-and-white era (the last such appearance being The Invasion). Well, Attack of the Cybermen doesn’t depict them any better, but I was surprised at the attempts to bring back some of that old Cybermen magic by referencing their original story, amongst other things.

The Doctor and Peri search for the source of the distress signal.

There aren’t many shows that run long enough to be able to revisit “future events” once that fictional date rolls around for real. I’d almost completely forgotten that The Tenth Planet was set in 1986, and so the Earth will very shortly experience the arrival of planet Mondas in the sky. This is what the future Cybermen are trying to prevent, having encountered a time machine of their own, by destroying the Earth before it destroys what was once their home. If nothing else, that’s a pretty cool concept.

The Cybermen only appear strong when they exert force on somebody. Here, Lytton’s wrists are crushed and bleeding.

Elsewhere, this story seems intent on tickling the nostalgia glands with a few winks and nods. The Tardis lands in the original junkyard from An Unearthly Child (complete with I.M. Foreman signage), and the Doctor finally “fixes” his chameleon circuit, allowing the Tardis to change into different forms (although this fix does not seem to last long). I liked these references.

The Cryons remind me of the Sensorites. I think it’s the beard around the base of the mask, the bulbous head and the plain jumpsuit uniforms.

There is plenty I didn’t like, though. The blippy-bloppy electronic music is almost uniformly awful throughout. Lytton (who returns from Resurrection of the Daleks) is a decent enough character, but his gang of villains is annoying. Peri is reaching almost unwatchable levels of bad at the moment; her acting is awful, so forced and melodramatic. The Cryons are an interesting sort of race, but their costumes and masks are… not so good. Every time the Cybermen attack, I have to laugh at how rubbish they look, swinging their arms around, throwing the Doctor across the set unconvincingly. And just HOW did they get inside the Tardis? Did the Doctor just leave the door open? And the ending is rushed to the point where it stretches logic to quite some length.

I’m sorry, do you have an appointment?

On the other hand, I liked the crazy zombie Cybermen smashing through the windows and grabbing people. I liked how one of the them exploded after being shot through the mouth. I liked seeing the humans trapped in the machinery being converted into Cybermen (that’s a first, isn’t it?). I think this story is novel enough to earn a passing grade, despite its problems. And, actually, the Doctor himself has at least mellowed out a bit, and shows some redeeming characteristics towards the end. He’s a charmless, arrogant so-and-so the rest of the time, but hey, it’s a start!

The Twin Dilemma

First impressions are important, and the sixth Doctor makes a bad one. To be fair, a post-regenerated Doctor is always a bit skittish, but never have I witnessed one behave quite so lamentably. He flits between a self-obsessed, arrogant psychopath who quotes poetry, and a whimpering coward who pleads for his life. It’s as if the producers have taken the hero out of the show and replaced him with a sidekick.

I suppose if your intention is to make the character unlikeable, having him try to kill the companion is as good a method as any. The bigger question is why would you want to do that?

It’s difficult to talk about the rest of the story because the Doctor’s new mental state dominates everything that happens. Their getaway to Titan 3 leads them to an old friend of the Doctor’s, a kidnapping of two genius twins and an alien slug’s plot to infest the universe with his eggs, but the whole time, the Doctor is either hamming it up, being condescending, arrogant or frightened.

Nobody’s dress sense comes off well here, but who am I to question the fashion of the future?

There is some cool science to this, namely using complex equations to generate enormous energy to move planets around a solar system, but at the heart of it are two very annoying kids. Now, kids in TV and film are difficult to portray well at the best of times, but when they have to cast twins, that’s even harder (I like to call it the Weasley Problem). They can’t act, their lines are flat and unconvincing, and those haircuts are atrocious. Meanwhile, Peri’s performance is one of unconvincing melodrama, and she is far more forgiving of the Doctor than somebody who has only known him for one adventure ought to be. Their new friend Hugo is barely convincing as a human being, never mind a worthwhile character. Azmael is okay as the elderly Time Lord with a troubled conscience, but none of the extended cast are anything special.

Romulus and Remus, the twins. But what’s the dilemma?

So, there’s not a lot to like. The aliens look goofy, their slug-like leader Mestor more so. They somehow break into the Tardis in part 4… um, isn’t that supposed to be impossible? It amounts to nothing anyway, they just stand around in there until the Doctor kicks them out. Mestor’s powers of mind control are rather over-the-top and cartoon-like, and his motives are similarly vague. A complex villain he is not.

One good facet that has carried over is the horrible melting death of the villain. I never tire of seeing that.

The Doctor is quite explicit in pointing out that his less likable attributes will settle down, and I’m a forgiving type, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. To play devil’s advocate, there’s nothing particularly wrong with having an arrogant self-important lead character, but it’s a position that needs to be earned, not by simply saying “like it or not”, and that’s something that remains to be seen.

The Caves of Androzani

It’s been a while since Robert Holmes wrote a Doctor Who script; it’s almost like he’d been saving this one up. It’s an uncharacteristically sophisticated story, mature and quite dark, dealing with themes of corporate corruption, terrorism, betrayal, greed, violence and sacrifice.

The unnecessary monster. Seriously, what was the point of this thing?

That being the case, the silly-looking man-in-a-rubber-suit monster is rather perfunctory. The story doesn’t need the added threat of a creature when the various sides are already ruthlessly butchering each other. Caves of Androzani doesn’t pull any punches; it’s violent when it needs to be, and its large cast of characters are largely dead by the end. If anything, the story is a little too complicated – with everyone backstabbing each other, it took me a while to work out what was going on!

Morgus “witnesses” the president’s death in an unfortunate lift “accident”.

At the heart of the story is Sharaz Jek, who is using his supply of spectrox drug to seek revenge on the man who left him horribly scarred. It would have been more effective if we never got to see his face, just the reaction to it – no amount of makeup can match one’s imagination, after all. Jek is quite a dramatic character, very intense and threatening but, like all good villains, he has a tender side, and seems to develop affection towards Peri, although I’m not quite sure why; did I miss something?

In these tenderer moments, he’s like a clown in bondage gear. Now there’s a chilling thought.

Caves of Androzani is also well made, with some interesting camera angles. I suspect some of it must have been shot handheld to get the dramatic close-ups and awkward angles that you don’t usually see in a video production. The androids’ thermal vision is also a good-looking visual effect, and the Doctor’s two visible hearts a nice touch of detail. Another nice detail is that we finally learn what the Doctor’s piece of celery is for! Poison detection, Gallifrey style. It didn’t save him from the spectrox spores, though.

The stand-out moment for me is during the ship’s descent towards Androzani Minor. Davison’s Doctor is desperate, panic-stricken and clearly over his head, but pulls off a miraculous turnaround.

This was a very good ending for the fifth Doctor, and a thorough test bed for his best qualities to shine through. It’s a shame that this version comes to an end, but I will have some more to say on the fifth Doctor’s character and adventures shortly.

Moments before “death”, the Doctor remembers his former companions. You just can’t get rid of that kid Adric, can you?