I endeavour to maintain a certain continuity.
Continuity stands as the primary problem with Doctor Who by its twenty-third season. Long-time producer John Nathan-Turner and equally long-serving script editor Eric Saward take pains to ensure that the Doctor’s weekly adventures not only reflect an awareness of the Time Lord’s nearly 150 prior stories but also refer to them whenever possible, rewarding those devoted viewers who will surely complain should a relevant canonical aside be skipped—or worse, be misconstrued. But those fans with knowledge of the Doctor’s entire history make up a steadily dwindling percentage of the possible audience, and more casual viewers, those vital to the series’ continued success, often feel like they’re entering a conversation they don’t fully comprehend when a call-back to a prior story occurs, especially when it’s not entirely germane to the events on offer.
Sometimes, however, there’s not enough continuity. The decision to present Season Twenty-three as a single fourteen episode story, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” comprised of four tightly interwoven sub-stories, to which Philip Martin’s “Mindwarp” (Story Production Code 7B) contributes episodes five through eight, highlights this dilemma. Viewers who do not watch from the beginning of the story arc need on-ramps to clarify what they might have missed; in theory, the fact that the sub-stories mostly stand on their own should limit what might be missed. Yet Martin’s entry picks up from the events of the first four episodes, “The Mysterious Planet,” with the scantest of recaps, scarcely addressing the most significant plot point introduced by writer Robert Holmes, that of a possible conspiracy on Gallifrey involving the Matrix. “Mindwarp” just assumes that viewers remember that subterfuge, or indeed even why the Doctor is in the dock at all, fighting for his life against the Valeyard (Michael Jayston), jumping headlong instead into the prosecutor’s next piece of evidence in the trial without dwelling on or developing the overall framing device tying the fourteen episodes together.
Doctor Who, it must be noted, has a history of long stories that can confuse viewers jumping in mid-stream—six episodes stories being fairly frequent through to the first half of Tom Baker’s run and the epic “The Daleks’ Master Plan” clocking in at a whopping twelve (or thirteen) episodes—none of which take pains to catch tardy audience members up to speed beyond the traditional cliffhanger reprises. Too, addressing “The Trial of a Time Lord” as its constituent parts is a more recent phenomenon, not in keeping with the experience of the audience at the time, but the lack of an extended recap of the end of “The Mysterious Planet” to start episode five, as would happen in any other story between parts, bespeaks the production team themselves treating the segments as separate narrative entities at the time. For a series attempting to stay alive, then, the lack of emphasis on engaging more casual viewers, perhaps even tuning in just because they saw Brian Blessed’s name in that week’s Radio Times listing for Doctor Who, suggests an overall blindness to the needs of less-than-rabid fans—a failing that has contributed mightily to the series being in its currently precarious state.
“Mindwarp” proper, the “evidence” being shown to the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) and the panel of Time Lords overseeing the Doctor’s trial for incessant interference with other culture and peoples, follows the Doctor and Peri as they land on the pink-tinted planet Thoros-Beta, the source of high-tech weaponry found on a backwater planet. The Doctor seeks to investigate this meddling in the development of a less advanced civilization—the same crime, the Valeyard eagerly notes, of which he himself is accused. Martin immediately leans into the conceit of the story being presented in a courtroom as evidence, with the Inquisitor wondering just why an introductory scene of our time travellers bantering about the TARDIS materializing in water is vital to the trial, leading to events skipping forward, something many a viewer, anxious to get to the action, has doubtless wanted as well.
The Doctor, in that “irrelevant” prologue scene, indicates that they have come to Thoros-Beta because of information received from a “Warlord of Thordon” as he was dying, pointing directly to an off-screen adventure to which the audience is not privy, in effect creating continuity unknown to all viewers, whether they are brand new or have hidden behind the couch since 1963. It’s a contextualized continuity reference, though, lacking the dissonant effect canonical name drops often engender. But the same cannot be said for the main revelation of the first episode, as the news that Thoros-Beta is also home to an oleaginous former foe of the Doctor lands with a thud…
Created by Martin in “Vengeance on Varos,” the avaricious Sil, played with gusto by Nabil Shaban, makes what should be a welcome reappearance after a bravura debut some six stories earlier. Indeed, slug-like Mentor Sil is the most interesting and well realized alien antagonist on Doctor Who in years, and yet the initial encounter between him, the Doctor, and Peri comes across flatly. Martin is far from the first writer to believe viewers remember everything about their pet creations, and no time is spent on reestablishing Sil’s prior connection to the Doctor beyond a throwaway line mentioning Varos. Even upon initially seeing Sil from afar, Peri just makes a wan comment about having almost been turned into a bird by him, the Doctor cracks wise about how much he saved in bird feed, and they get on with exploring the caverns immediately off the beach where they landed.
With his typical luck, the Doctor has arrived precisely at the location of a neurological laboratory, set up by human scientist Crozier (Patrick Ryecart) to save the life of Kiv (Christopher Ryan), a mutant Mentor whose increased brain size has led to “mega-profits” that, naturally, place him as the leader of all Mentors. That same brain threatens to grow out of his skull, so Crozier seeks to transfer it into a donor, but the recipient’s mind must be pacified first to enable the swap. An earlier attack on the Doctor and Peri by one of Crozier’s experimental subjects suggests that the pacification treatment is failing, which bodes ill for Kiv’s survival. To learn the details of this attack, Sil orders the Doctor hooked up to the mind control machinery, but the intervention of another subject, King Yrcanos (Brian Blessed), interrupts the process, destroying the lab for good measure and causing sufficient commotion for him, the Doctor, and Peri to escape.
But escape, it seems, is not on the Doctor’s mind. He alerts guards to the barbarian king’s plan to free his people from Crozier’s experiments, starts to work with the neuroscientist to repair the damaged machinery, and reveals Peri to the Mentors after she has eluded capture. This perfidy makes up the basis of the Valeyard’s accusations in this segment of the trial: the Doctor seeks to save his own life at the expense of others, his companion included. But the Doctor has no knowledge of these events when confronted with them in the courtroom, possibly connected to the disorientation he feels from having been “removed from time” to bring him to the trial, or even a continued side effect from Crozier’s machine. The audience suspects foul play, because the Doctor certainly could not act this way. Could he?
Martin then skips ahead in the courtroom to the Doctor interrogating Peri, which the Time Lord claims was part of a ruse to work with her to escape. The Matrix, however, shows the Doctor tormenting Peri as she is chained to rocks, awaiting the tide to come in on the Sea of Sorrows. A triumphant Valeyard proclaims, “As we all know, the Matrix never lies.” A key moment from “The Mysterious Planet,” where two ruffians discuss the Matrix being broken into, discernible only faintly through audio censoring and then only by attentive audience members, suggests that the repository of all Gallifreyan knowledge, fed directly by the experiences of Time Lords themselves, could indeed be fallible, or at least corruptible. Without that key bit of information, only subtly referred to at the beginning of this story, the audience has no reason to doubt the primacy of the Matrix, which the Doctor himself can hardly refute. Martin plays this subterfuge too close to the vest, the commitment to the Doctor suffering from amnesia overriding the far more interesting tale of the Doctor unravelling the mystery first introduced in “The Mysterious Planet” and barely hinted at here.
A long sequence of events then plays out, surrounding an operation to transfer Kiv’s mind into that of another mutant, atavistic Mentor, as well as Yrcanos leading a failed rebellion against the Mentors, showing the results of the Doctor’s supposed treachery, interspersed with him insisting in the courtroom that none of it is his fault, including the apparent deaths of Yrcanos and, shockingly, Peri. “The events took place but not quite as we’ve seen them,” the Doctor insists, as he begins to get bits of his memory back, and once more the vaguely post-modern notion of the need to interpret events on screen beyond their surface presentation, of just how much truth there can be in an image, comes into play, first introduced into Doctor Who by Martin himself in “Vengeance on Varos” and reinforced in the past several stories.
Something happens to shift the Doctor’s behavior back to “normal” while he is sharing “marsh minnows” with Sil, a change in attitude that receives no elucidation in the story itself. He conspires to free Yrcanos—like Peri, stunned, but not killed—and then disables the mental implants that subdue the minds of the Mentors’ slaves, causing chaos throughout the complex. Intending to use the commotion to free Peri, who is being prepared as the next host for Kiv’s mind, the Time Lords instead pull the Doctor out of the action, materializing the TARDIS and drawing him into it. Upon seeing this event on the screen, the Doctor finally regains his memory.
Without the Doctor’s intervention, Crozier transfers Kiv’s mental energy into Peri’s brain, erasing her personality and making possible the infinite existence of minds, upending, according to the Inquisitor, “the whole course of natural evolution throughout the universe.” This the Time Lords cannot countenance, leading them to take control of Yrcanos, somehow. They turn him into an assassin, and he kills Peri/Kiv, Crozier, Sil, and everyone else involved in the experiments on Gallifrey’s orders. Or so the Matrix says.
It’s a daring moment. Seldom does the Doctor fail, and rarer still does a companion die. The Valeyard insists that the Doctor is responsible, even though the Time Lords removed him from the equation, claiming, “your negligence had made it impossible for her to live.” It all hinges on whether the Doctor truly acted in the craven fashion shown to the audience in the initial three episodes of “Mindwarp,” leading to a Rashomon-like situation: which story is real? It’s an unfair question, though, because the audience isn’t being given an alternative narrative to weigh against the Valeyard’s version, as would be found in a more traditional legal drama. Martin has removed the Doctor’s agency via his amnesia and apparent treachery. There is no case for the defense. As a stand-alone story, the audience not knowing whether to believe the Doctor has become a turncoat or is running a long-con (as in “The Invasion of Time“) can work to remarkable effect, but the presence of the trial framing device disrupts expectations, and narrative payoffs, while simultaneously making the events being shown on the (courtroom) screen somewhat superfluous.
The performance of the guest cast, however, cannot be seen as superfluous in the least. Brian Blessed’s Yrcanos, King of the Krontep, Lord of the Vingten, Conqueror of the Tonkonp Empire, provides reason enough for “Mindwarp” to have been produced. There’s not a hint of guile or irony in his barbaric yawps; Blessed brings the nobly simple warrior to life as fully as he did Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon. He takes over every scene in which he appears, his fellow cast members often seemingly as in awe of his performance as the audience at home. Nabil Shaban likewise charms as Sil, carrying on his smarmy, self-interested portrayal of the greedy grub from “Vengeance on Varos,” a presentation that stands out further with the appearance of additional Mentors on the screen. They’re not all quite so craven as Sil, marking him out as unique even amongst his hyper-capitalistic species. Comment must also be made of a quite diverse supporting cast, with several actors of color with speaking parts, including Trevor Laird as head guard Frax and Alibe Parsons as Crozier’s assistant Matrona Kani. It’s still a rare enough occurrence on Doctor Who in 1986 to merit mention.
“Mindwarp” provides Nicola Bryant’s last speaking role on Doctor Who, with Peri being written out (and written over, it seems) as the story concludes. Though Peri has a reasonably long run for a companion—eleven stories, equal to Adric and on par with Turlough’s ten and Nyssa’s thirteen—it never feels as though we actually get to know the character, who suffers through far more moments of being captured than most of the Doctor’s assistants and an egregious number of proposals, indecent and otherwise, from aliens interested in her, ah, companionship. When writers give Bryant an opportunity to shine, though, she makes the most of it, and Martin provides some reflective scenes where Peri tries to explain love and tenderness to Yrcanos, and she also gets to extend her acting chops through being “possessed” by Kiv, inevitably a source of good lines on Doctor Who. Still, Bryant, and Peri, deserve a fuller send-off than the shock “death” of the character that forms the conclusion of the story.
As with Bryant, Colin Baker gets to act against type when the Sixth Doctor turns into a complete cad. For an audience that still remembers the mania of the Sixth Doctor’s immediate post-regeneration trauma, the ease with which Baker can turn the Time Lord into a traitor goes some distance toward making the volte-face at least vaguely plausible. Baker does his best to compete with Blessed, the former’s deadpan delivery and utter sangfroid in the face of the latter’s unhinged ebullience making for a delightful bit of interplay. But Martin, as noted, hamstrings the Doctor in “Mindwarp,” and one senses that Baker himself wants the Doctor to do more. His resulting unease in the witness box sells a sense of significance as to the stakes of the story.
Having seen Peri’s death on screen at the very end of episode eight, the Doctor finally makes a stand:
Doctor: No, I was taken out of time for another reason, and I have every intention of finding out what it is.
As the midpoint of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” as opposed to the end of “Mindwarp,” the Doctor’s much-belated decision to actively participate in unravelling the mystery surrounding the Matrix marks the moment where the trial narrative should become the predominant story being told. Like “The Mysterious Planet” before it, the trial is the “real” story being told in “Mindwarp,” and yet the viewer feels shortchanged. There’s no resolution offered here before the tale shifts to yet another adventure being presented as “evidence” next week. This sense of narrative frustration represents a fundamental shortcoming of the decision to cast the entirety of Season Twenty-three as a series of linked stories. Even some slight attempt at teasing out the conspiracy on the Doctor’s part, of providing continuity, one might even say, would go a long way towards reassuring viewers that this is a story worth seeing to the end. Instead, by continually deferring intermediate resolutions in favor of—one hopes!—a grand revelation at the end of fourteen episodes, Nathan-Turner and Saward are gambling that the audience they so desperately need will stick around to find out the Doctor’s—and Doctor Who‘s—fate.
(Previous Story: The Mysterious Planet)
Post 150 of the Doctor Who Project