I was beginning to fear you had lost yourself.
Season Twenty-three almost wasn’t to be. In February, 1985, midway through the airing of Season Twenty-two, news broke that the BBC had pulled the plug on the forthcoming season, then already in preparation, owing as much to budget woes as to a general sense of dissatisfaction with the show’s direction and popular reception. Not until December of the same year did Doctor Who get a new lease on life, with the BBC green-lighting a truncated Season Twenty-three consisting of fourteen twenty-five minute episodes stitched together under a single framing narrative, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” putting the Sixth Doctor (and the show itself) in the dock for crimes real and imagined.
The brainchild of longtime script editor Eric Saward, this series of four linked stories—”The Mysterious Planet,” “Mindwarp,” “Terror of the Vervoids,” and “The Ultimate Foe”—presents heretofore unseen events in the Doctor’s past and future as evidence in his trial, with far heavier narrative connections between the parts, written by different authors, than seen in the last thematically linked season, Season Sixteen’s Key to Time arc. The stakes could not be higher, either for the Doctor or for Doctor Who, with nearly eighteen months elapsing since the last time the Doctor appeared on televisions in the UK, in “Revelation of the Daleks” in late March, 1985. Significantly, no repeats of earlier episodes had occurred since then either, the last rerun being “The Five Doctors” in August 1984, this absence itself telling of the series’ regard (or lack thereof) at Television Centre.
Mindful of the need to get it right, producer John Nathan-Turner and Saward turn to veteran hand Robert Holmes for the first four episodes, “The Mysterious Planet” (Series Production Code 7A), returning the Sixth Doctor to the air on September 6, 1986, with a jaunty, revised opening theme. (Of note, the story is presented week-to-week under the rubric “The Trial of a Time Lord,” but most critical discourse has, broadly, settled on addressing the sub-stories by their working titles, corresponding to how the components were commissioned.) After an elaborate effects shot showing the TARDIS being drawn into a space station, Holmes wastes no time establishing the trial framing device, with the Doctor immediately confronting the Valeyard (Michael Jayston), prosecuting the charges against him for the benefit of a panel of Time Lords, presided over by the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham).
The Doctor’s crimes? “Conduct unbecoming a Time Lord” and “transgressing the First Law,” that broad Gallifreyan prohibition against “meddling” in the affairs of other peoples. For those paying attention at home, Holmes takes care to note that the Doctor has been on trial for the same charges before—resolved in the conclusion of “The War Games” which saw the Second Doctor sentenced to exile on Earth after a forced regeneration—and also that the Doctor has been stripped of his title as Lord President, last referenced in “The Five Doctors” and originally established in “The Invasion of Time” some eight years prior. Nathan-Turner and Saward here unravel awkward, narrative-constraining continuity while still referencing it, not unlike having K-9 get wet and short out whenever his ray gun snout would resolve a plot too quickly.
The framing narrative, with a jury of Time Lords watching the Doctor’s adventures on screen just like the audience at home, continues the metatextual self-referential tendency of Season Twenty-two; watching the watchers makes up much of the narrative heft of “Vengeance on Varos” and, to a lesser extent, “Revelation of the Daleks,” with “The Mysterious Planet” pausing the action frequently for the Doctor, the Inquisitor, and the Valeyard to comment incredulously on what has just been seen. The Valeyard explains the footage as deriving from the Matrix, that storehouse of all Time Lord knowledge, fed by the Doctor’s own experiences; a surreptitious surveillance device installed in every TARDIS, including the old Mark 40s, apparently, psychically records other moments outside those witnessed by Time Lords—a rather huge alteration to the Doctor Who canon, with potential ramifications for all future stories and also calling into question many outcomes of past stories, but a change necessary for the frame device to function.
And where do the Doctor’s “criminal” activities take place for this initial segment of his trial? Oh, just a barren little planet called Ravelox, in the Stellian Galaxy, devastated by a fireball that Gallifreyan records contend wiped out all life. Ravelox also happens to be known by a different name as well: Earth…
The Doctor’s curiosity draws him and Peri to Ravelox some two million years in the future, where they stumble upon the remains of a civilization in the form of a subterranean railway station, replete with a sign bearing a London Regional Transport logo from Marble Arch, a coincidence so great that the Doctor can only assume Earth has been moved “a couple of light years” out of place somehow. The supposedly lifeless planet contains two warring groups of human survivors of the cataclysm that scorched the surface five hundred years prior, one led by the “Immortal” and its followers hiding in secret passages connected to London Underground tunnels, another living off the land, revering a solar power conversion tower as a totem pole. The latter band captures Peri, who, in shock at seeing her home planet destroyed, refuses to follow the Doctor into hermetically sealed tunnels leading off the station platform. Just as well, since minions of the Immortal apprehend the Doctor for the crime of water theft after he hefts a jug of the precious fluid he finds in the surprisingly well-lit and maintained complex.
Oh, and there’s a pair of intergalactic con-men lurking about as well, Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby) and Dibber (Glen Murphy), seeking to destroy the solar collector in order to power down a robot guarding information they wish to purloin. Their slick talk is no match for Katryca (Joan Sims), leader of the totemic tribe, the Free, who have dealt with many visitors from space seeking to take or otherwise tamper with their sacred tower, and once she adds their weapons to her store, she prepares to fight against the Immortal. Where Holmes-ian world building can often fall into a narrative jumble, over-egging the story custard, as recently seen in the jam-packed “The Two Doctors,” here the sense of mystery and wonder compounds rather than confuses, at least initially. The first episode cliffhanger, with the Valeyard calling for the death of the Doctor for his interference with the people of the “UK Habitat,” comes as the least interesting shock in the preceding twenty-five minutes.
For all the ruined and barren worlds the Doctor has visited over nearly a hundred and fifty stories, seldom is that post-apocalyptic planet Earth, which is almost always seen in its idyllic past, well-known present, or glossy near-future. One has to go back to the Fourth Doctor in “The Ark in Space” and “The Sontaran Experiment” for a glimpse of our home planet in a devastated state, and before that all the way to the Second Doctor in “The Ice Warriors.” It’s a rich vein to mine for story ideas, and even after the rather sudden revelation of Ravelox being Earth—no last scene appearance by the Statue of Liberty here—the ways in which common objects like Tube signs and books acquire new meanings (Mo By Dick by Melville and UK Habitats of the Canadian Goose by H.M. Stationery Office being sacred texts) keep the viewer engrossed in the wonder of how Earth came to be “The Mysterious Planet” on the screen.
Holmes adds layers of complication even as he slowly doles out answers, with the Immortal—an L3 robot from Andromeda named Drathro (Roger Brierley)—taking an interest in the Doctor just before he’s stoned to death, assuming him to be a long-delayed envoy from home come to check on the dead members of the original expedition to Earth entombed in the tunnels. Exposition on the way to the Immortal’s lair explains how the two smartest youths from the Underground People are plucked from each generation, reputedly to be eaten by their unseen leader, who appeared right after the fireball to save them. Instead, they become the the robot’s assistants, this generation’s crop being Tandrell (Sion Tudor Owen) and Humker (Billy McColl), a state of affairs that calls back to “The Krotons,” who harvest intelligence to power their spaceship. The “black light” converter aerial powering the robot and the tunnels, the very same device worshipped by the Free as a totem, has begun to fail, and successive waves of Drathro’s chosen have made no progress in fixing it. The Doctor agrees to look into the situation, albeit under duress, a decision the Valeyard uses to further his case against the traditionally too-helpful Time Lord.
Glitz, Dibber, and Peri manage to escape captivity and destroy the totem, whilst the Doctor, simultaneously, wriggles out of the inflexibly programmed Drathro’s grasp; he is aided in part by Merdeen (Tom Chadbon), an Underground guard who has been secretly sending people to the surface to save them from the robot’s harsh policy of culling the excess population. Holmes interweaves these already bursting threads with moments of courtroom drama, as the Doctor interrupts, the Valeyard crows, and the Inquisitor overrules. Director Nicholas Mallett makes frequent abrupt cuts between the three plot locales—Peri and Glitz outdoors amongst the Free; the Doctor in bright underground corridors; and the stage-lit Inquisition chamber—leading to rather jarring pacing and frenetic viewpoint shifts, particularly given the subtle yet constant changes in lighting and film source quality between location and studio shooting.
Just as events seem to be moving along under their own momentum—with Katryca and the Free invading the tunnels after they destroy a service robot dispatched by Drathro to retrieve the Doctor, believing they have killed the Immortal instead—Holmes introduces an interesting twist. The Valeyard skips over “testimony” from Glitz and Dibber discussing the information they hope to retrieve from Drathro. The Inquisitor objects, but the Valeyard insists that the High Council has ordered that information sealed as “against the public interest” to be made known. The tendency with framing devices is that they become mere shells to string together otherwise disconnected sequences, but Holmes, Nathan-Turner, and Saward take pains to keep “The Trial of a Time Lord” very much in the foreground rather than subservient to the stories on offer.
Enough court procedurals have graced British televisions by 1986 that viewers must feel at home with the banter between the criminal in the dock, the barrister prosecuting on behalf of the High Council, and the judge trying to ensure decorum, such that initially the Valeyard’s harsh demeanor and strong rhetoric seem in keeping with the job’s demands. Even though the Sixth Doctor, representing himself, is no Rumpole, between the audience’s inherent sympathy to the Doctor and the increasing evidence of the Valeyard’s misrepresentation of events, compounded by the excision of what the audience surmises to be key testimony, it’s quickly obvious that something untoward is afoot.
Holmes and Mallett give the audience the chance to figure it out in a “censored” scene, where Glitz explains to Dibber the significance of the information held by the “Sleepers” from Andromeda that the L3 robot guards:
Glitz: The Sleepers found a way into the [censored], the biggest net of information in the universe.
The audio muffling is just incomplete enough that viewers can infer “Matrix” from the phonemes at the start and finish of the excised word, which the Valeyard himself referred to as “the repository of all knowledge” earlier in the story. Without the benefit of rewinding, perhaps fewer viewers at the time are able to figure out the clue than modern audiences, but it remains a nice gesture to let viewers feel clever, gaining knowledge even the Doctor lacks. There’s something rotten in the state of Gallifrey…
Rather than concluding the action on a high note, though, Holmes instead has the Doctor debate Drathro as to the inherent value of life. The destruction of the black light converter has triggered a catastrophic collapse of the energy system that promises to destroy the tunnel complex—and, for good measure, quite possibly the entire galaxy as well, just to up the ante a bit—but to shut it down would result in Drathro’s deactivation. The logic of such a decision does not compute for the big tin can, who sees “organics” as having purpose only so long as they serve its continued existence; without Drathro, they have no purpose and thus no value, so they need not be spared the explosion. Glitz, Dibber, Peri, and Merdeen force their way into the chamber just as the sophomoric argument peters out, with the two ruffians convincing the robot that they have plenty of black light energy to spare in their spaceship, allowing the Doctor to control the explosion by, um, pressing down two plungers, limiting the damage to one room instead of a galaxy, with the side effect of melting Drathro, along with the sought-after cache of secrets.
The build-up of the mystery of “The Mysterious Planet,” particularly the secrets held by the robot from Andromeda, comes to no real resolution, which can be understood given that it forms but four episodes of a fourteen episode story, with the promise that fuller revelations are on offer in the succeeding ten parts. But the feeling remains that something is missing, that the story in the frame just fizzles out. The development of the culture of the Free and the Underground Dwellers comes to naught, just set dressing, with Katryca and one of her tribe, Broken Tooth (David Rodigan), sacrificed as useless victims to a bloody, burned demise that shows the series has not taken the critiques surrounding the increasing violence and gore of the past several seasons to heart. Their deaths make up a great part of the Valeyard’s charge that the Doctor’s meddling cost lives that would have been spared had he not intervened, the little detail of Glitz and Dibber blowing up the power conversion tower to initiate a galaxy-threatening kaboom being somewhat glossed over.
One wonders whether Holmes intends the Doctor’s parting words in the courtroom after the Valeyard’s presentation of “The Mysterious Planet” to be quite so cutting:
The Doctor: Well, if the rest of his presentation is as riveting as the first little epic, wake me when it’s finished.
The events on Earth wrap up in the tidy, pithy manner the audience has become resigned to after twenty-two seasons of Doctor Who, with a resolution that just sort of happens and a climactic explosion that provides far more smoke than fire. It’s the specificity of the setting, a post-apocalyptic Earth with mundane items from our present serving as sacred icons in the future, that gives “The Mysterious Planet” any real interest at all, differentiating it from other stories of the Doctor showing up and saving the day from the problem he sort of caused. With no real effort spent exploring that key concept, the story ultimately becomes somewhat forgettable.
The same cannot be said for Tony Selby’s Sabalom Glitz. Doctor Who has a proud tradition of larger-than-life, sartorially resplendent, intergalactic ne’er-do-wells, from Milo Clancey in “The Space Pirates” and Vorg and Shirna in “Carnival of Monsters” through to Garron and Unstoffe in “The Ribos Operation” and Grugger and Brotadac from “Meglos.” Glitz proudly ascends to that pantheon. It’s not a role calling for subtlety in presentation, even as Glitz must employ linguistic legerdemain, and Selby ably comes across as someone less sly than he thinks he is, taking his frequent failures as personal affronts rather than the inevitable outcome of his approach. Glitz’s sense of undeserved superiority oozes from every line Selby delivers, and the fact that Glitz and Dibber escape at the end, albeit without the secrets from the Matrix, goes a long way towards tying the events of “The Mysterious Planet” into the Doctor’s overarching trial.
Likewise, both Michael Jayston as the Valeyard and Lynda Bellingham as the Inquisitor provide highly caricatured yet still effective portrayals of the zealous prosecutor and the duty-bound, independent-minded judge so beloved of British courtroom dramas. Jayston in particular seems to have been instructed to go for the Doctor’s jugular from the get-go, with unconcealed venom in his excoriations of the Time Lord’s benevolent behavior—notwithstanding that Gallifrey has tended to honor the “First Law” of non-intervention in the breach since 1963. Indeed, as recently as “The Two Doctors,” we see the Time Lords, ostensibly at the direction of the High Council, sending the Doctor off on a mission very much intended to interfere in the course of events. As for Bellingham, she manages to keep the Inquisitor studiously neutral in manner and voice, despite the script tilting in the Doctor’s favor during the verbal sparring between him and the Valeyard. As recurring characters for the entirety of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” casting these parts correctly goes a long way towards keeping the audience as interested in the frame device as in the action on the courtroom view screen.
Nicola Bryant, sadly, has begun her slow descent towards leaving, with Peri being written off at the end of the next four episode block. The youthful American botanist-in-training helps link several key scenes, but Bryant’s dialogue does not amount to much beyond pleas to leave before things get bad and excoriations to help the Doctor once they do, suffering in between that most common companion malady of being held captive. Bryant’s rapport with Colin Baker seems as solid as ever even after the hiatus, and it’s distressing to see her time on the series winding down without the character ever really getting a chance to hold its own.
The Sixth Doctor, too, has begun his swan song, with Colin Baker entering his final season as everyone’s favorite Time Lord, but unlike Bryant, he does not know it at the time of shooting. The prickly, quick to anger temperament Baker brings to the role serves him well in the courtroom scenes of “The Mysterious Planet,” with umbrage flying at every perceived slight. The Sixth Doctor’s rather juvenile insults of the Valeyard—the “Boatyard,” the “Graveyard,” the “Farmyard”—owe what power they have to Baker’s performance and the ease with which he lets the name-calling fly, and on the strength of it, a longer, more deliberate focus on the proceedings themselves might actually have worked, particularly given the relative weakness of the story that constitutes as the Valeyard’s first bit of evidence.
Taken as part of a whole, “The Mysterious Planet” serves as a solid if unsatisfying introduction to “The Trial of a Time Lord,” establishing the court proceedings and hinting just enough at the conspiracy behind them with sufficient substance to keep viewers intrigued. All the Lord President’s Men this is not, however, and the vacillation between prioritizing the interconnected court sequences and providing the events on Ravelox/Earth space to stand on their own means that neither the frame device nor the embedded story can shine. The decision to keep the entire season under the umbrella title makes sense, then, helping to paper over the short shrift given to Holmes’ story, which exists mostly to establish that there are secrets that Gallifrey wishes suppressed, of such import that they are willing to sacrifice the Doctor to keep them hidden. Doctor Who, after eighteen months out of the public eye, needs a big success, and while the story of “The Mysterious Planet” doesn’t quite deliver on its own, it does set up a bona fide mystery, one that will take ten more episodes to unspool.
(Details surrounding the “cancellation” and eventual remounting of Season Twenty-Three sourced from Howe & Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, BBC, 1998.)
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Post 149 of the Doctor Who Project