Is it going to be the Doctor’s defence that he improves?
Doctor Who seldom actually toys with temporality itself, treating time, broadly, as a setting rather than a concept or plot device to be explored. But by taking the Sixth Doctor “out of time” in order to conduct “The Trial of a Time Lord”—the fourteen episode story that makes up the entirety of Season Twenty-three—producer John Nathan-Turner creates an interesting, if ultimately risky, pivot for the series. Having been confronted with his supposed misdeeds in “The Mysterious Planet” and “Mindwarp,” the first two four-episode sub-stories in “The Trial of a Time Lord,” the Doctor draws, for his defense, on an event from his future instead of his past, in the form of Pip and Jane Baker’s “Terror of the Vervoids” (Story Production Code 7C Part 1), episodes nine through twelve of the season-long story.
This decision to present a story that happens in the Doctor’s own future serves two functions. Primarily, given the trial framing device that drives “The Trial of a Time Lord,” there’s no easy way, during a secret Gallifreyan trial conducted outside of time, to introduce a brand new companion to take Nicola Bryant’s place, with Peri having (seemingly) perished at the end of “Mindwarp“—the idea of a companion-less Doctor apparently beyond countenance for even a single episode. Thus, our first encounter with the future Sixth Doctor is of a winded Time Lord huffing and puffing on an exercise bike as Mel (Bonnie Langford) encourages him, part of an ongoing exercise regime. The easy banter and non-verbal interplay between Langford and Colin Baker suggests to viewers that Mel and the Doctor have had an extended series of adventures already.
More importantly for the overall story of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” this future-looking helps shatter the long-standing conceit of “Gallifreyan Standard Time,” that sense that although Time Lords can flit between past and future at will, there’s a consistent “present” time in which Time Lord history takes place, a continuum off limits to meddling via time travel. Up to now, the Doctor’s past has been linear and inviolable—the several meetings of the Doctor’s various regenerations notwithstanding. Otherwise, why not just pop back, for instance, and stop the death of the Lord President in “The Deadly Assassin,” once the Doctor uncovers the true murderer? Or whisk Adric off the doomed cargo ship before it plunges into Earth? Narratively speaking, the ability to simply undo anything that happens drains all the meaning from the stories on offer, which is why prior producers and writers have taken pains to prevent time travellers from revisiting their own timelines (qv. the Blinovich Limitation Effect). It’s a dangerous genie to let out of the bottle, prone to cheapening the Doctor’s efforts and sacrifices. But by this point, Doctor Who already having been placed on hiatus by the BBC once, Nathan-Turner seems willing to try just about anything.
So, suddenly, the Sixth Doctor finds himself plucked out of the time stream, but he somehow also continues on as though the trial has not yet taken place—otherwise, the events of “Terror of the Vervoids” could never have occurred, had he sequentially gone directly from the end of “Mindwarp” to the trial itself. Because they are recorded in the Matrix, the repository of all Gallifreyan knowledge and experience, pulled straight from the minds of Time Lords themselves, those events, and all the other unseen exploits of the Sixth Doctor and Mel, did/do/will happen; otherwise, they would not be there for the Doctor and the Valeyard (Michael Jayston) to call upon as evidence. He’s there and not there, Schrödinger’s Sixth Doctor.
When, exactly, does “The Trial of a Time Lord” take place? Simply put, out of time; that’s Nathan-Turner’s story, and he’s sticking to it. (Of note, long-serving Eric Saward departs as script editor after episode eight, resuming the duties for episode thirteen only—which was produced before “Terror of the Vervoids”—due to issues with the scripting of the final two episodes of the season, per Paul Kirkley’s irreverent history of Doctor Who, Space Helmet for a Cow. It’s all very confusing, much like “The Trial of a Time Lord” itself.)
By removing the Doctor from his own timeline, heretofore unthinkable temporal shenanigans become possible, and while they do not play much of a role in “Terror of the Vervoids”—which, more than the prior two sub-stories, finally begins to add substance to the trial framing device—the mere fact of the Doctor’s future being already written enables the main pay-off of “The Trial of a Time Lord” in the final two episodes. We still have Pip and Jane Baker’s four episodes to get through first, though.
What does happen in “Terror of the Vervoids,” then? Oh, just Murder on the Orient Express, in space, with violent plant creatures…
During a days-long journey to Earth from the planet Mogar on the space liner Hyperion III in the year 2986, a nice round millennium from the story’s air date, a passenger dies, a victim of foul play. A mayday message, warning of a traitor and a threat to Earth, sent directly to the TARDIS, draws the Sixth Doctor and Mel to the scene of the crime. In typical fashion, they are suspects, until, as so equally often happens, the ship’s captain, Commodore Travers (Michael Craig) recognizes the Doctor from a prior adventure, another of the unseen stories that have been called upon throughout “The Trial of a Time Lord” to gain the narrative heft that continuity provides, deepening the Sixth Doctor’s character despite a thin history of aired exploits to drawn upon. The “murder” turns out to be faked, as an investigator, Hallett (Tony Scoggo), has gone undercover to investigate something, and when he is recognized, he sheds his old appearance and assumes a disguise as a masked Mogarian.
Hallett, too, knows the Doctor, and he is the one who sends the distress call bringing the TARDIS to the space liner. A series of clues he leaves for the Doctor and Mel leads to the hydroponics lab, where Professor Lasky (Honor Blackman) and her assistants, Doland and Bruchner (Malcolm Tierney and David Allister) have installed plant pods that must be protected from normal light. Something nefarious, certainly, is afoot, particularly given that they also have a guarded “Isolation Room” that they enter and exit furtively. But in true Agatha Christie fashion, they’re not the only ones up to no good, such that when Hallett, in disguise, is poisoned, everyone becomes a suspect: the security chief Rudge (Denys Hawthorne), who feels sidelined on his last voyage before a forced retirement; the two Mogarians, Atza and Ortezo (Sam Howard and Leon Davis) who vociferously protest Earth’s strip-mining of their planet; chief purser Janet (Yolande Palfrey), with plenty of opportunity but no apparent motive; and even Kimber (Arthur Hewlett), who blew Hallett’s cover originally.
A simple space whodunnit might have been just the thing for Doctor Who at this stage, with the Sixth Doctor proving his smarts and foiling a villain in a taut, relatively non-violent manner, a fine defense against the Valeyard’s claims that his presence brings about nothing but death and destruction. Director Chris Clough takes pains to hide information from viewers, shooting many scenes in point-of-view where a more traditional story would reveal the antagonists more clearly, making the moments where the Doctor unveils a brilliant deduction all the more striking. When the Doctor reveals that one of the Mogarians is, in fact, an impostor, the Valeyard and the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) go so far as to accuse him of tampering with the Matrix.
It’s a key moment, as the Doctor has been insisting that even this tale, which he viewed prior to mounting his defense, had been altered from what he saw on first viewing in the Matrix—it being from his future, of course, and thus new to him. In the prior two sub-stories, the idea of the Matrix being altered is considered utterly preposterous, even by the Doctor himself. In this case, our resourceful Gallifreyan notices that the incognito Hallett speaks without turning on his translation device, thus marking him as non-Mogarian. It’s a throw-away, Poirot-esque moment, but the aside in the courtroom finally gives the audience a clear statement that the Matrix is, potentially, fallible, once the Valeyard and the Inquisitor raise the possibility.
But where Murder on the Orient Express has everyone taking a whack at the singular victim for their own reasons, here the corpses just pile up, because Hallett inadvertently exposes Lasky’s pods to light, unleashing the sentient Vervoids contained within. Once they start eradicating all the members of “animal kind” on board, the Doctor’s cleverness ceases to suffice. It’s kill or be mulched, as the Vervoids see all non-plant life a a potential threat, animals inevitably eating vegetation at some point in their metabolic cycle.
The bipedal, humanoid plant creatures’ realization on screen leaves something to be desired. It’s churlish to criticize effects on Doctor Who, given the strict budget and time constraints suffered by the production teams, but the Vervoids come across as little more than actors in rubber suits festooned with leaves and topped with rather awkward pistil-inspired masks, a failing that should have been obvious in the scripting stage of production. Doctor Who just doesn’t have the funds for a plausible walking, talking plant creature, to say nothing of a half-dozen of them at once, calling to mind the possibly apocryphal tale of writers on the original Star Trek being limited to two phaser blasts or one transporter sequence per episode to keep costs down.
Lasky’s experiments in improving crop yields using agricultural strains from Mogar result, somehow, in the creation of the shambling plant creatures, and where Lasky sees naught but the glory of scientific accomplishment, her assistant Dolan has in mind an upheaval of the existing economic order, essentially creating a species designed for slave labor, replacing robots and existing on sunlight and water. Bruchner, by contrast, realizes they have unleashed a force that has already begun to wreak havoc, with crew members and passengers disappearing at a rapid clip. He takes it upon himself to destroy the Hyperion III, in order to eradicate both the sole existing Vervoids and the means of their creation, by commandeering the ship and flying it into a black hole. But he practically has to wait his turn, as the Mogarians on board likewise wish to hijack the craft, to reclaim the minerals on board that they consider the stolen property of their own people, leaving the Vervoids just standing there, twiddling their twigs, wondering when someone will pay attention to them.
The Vervoids flood the control room with methane gas, causing Bruchner to collapse—a ploy that does nothing to actually stop the spacecraft from flying into the black hole, which the Vervoids were trying to avoid. Only the Mogarians, with their self-contained breathing apparatus, can enter safely and restore the Hyperion III to a safe course. But in concert with Rudge, who is ever so tired of being belittled by authority figures like Commodore Tasker, they use the opportunity to seize the liner filled with instinct-driven plant creatures, a bit like taking over the Titanic just before it hits the iceberg. The multiple, competing strands could work with, perhaps, a surer hand at the script; smaller stakes are required for such a delicate weave. The balance of concern tilts too far in one direction, for as the Doctor points out, “this hijack is just a sideshow,” given the final ultimatum at play: either the destruction of Earth or the destruction of the Vervoid species.
Once the hijack scheme is foiled, by an unseen assailant splashing a liquid on the Mogarians, eating through their face masks, exposing them to oxygen and killing them, the Doctor turns his attention not to the Vervoids, but again to the murders, drawing out Doland with a bit of subterfuge. The greedy scientist acknowledges that he, indeed, murdered Hallett and the Mogarians, in order to get his valuable work force to Earth at any cost, but on the way to the brig, the plant creatures finally take their turn in the spotlight, killing him and just about everyone else on board, Lasky included. This never happened to Poirot at his moment of brilliant deduction…
Fearing the eradication of humanity if a single Vervoid leaf takes root in the soil on Earth—something of a logical leap, to be sure—the Doctor devises a method not of directly killing the Vervoids, but of speeding up their life cycle so that they perish of old age via a massive wave of photosynthesis, turning, finally, to mulch. The result remains, though, that the Doctor has brought about the end of the Vervoids, leading the Valeyard to charge the Doctor with genocide, a powerful cliffhanger to lead into “The Ultimate Foe,” the final two episodes of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” but not one purpose-designed to bring back viewers used to scary monsters and odd aliens and tantalizing explosions and narrow escapes at act breaks.
While the Vervoids themselves draw much attention on the screen, for good and for ill, the guest casting must be considered a coup, with Honor Blackman, of Goldfinger and The Avengers fame, taking a star turn. She gamely carries out what the Bakers’ script asks, exercising in the gym of the Hyperion III and scowling at Mel and the Doctor on cue, but it’s a poor use of an actor with significant range. Michael Craig as Commodore Travers likewise fills a slim role and imbues it with life, playing wonderfully against Colin Baker as someone with experience of the Doctor, grateful for his assistance yet both wary of and resigned to the chaos the Time Lord brings to proceedings.
Almost as shocking as seeing Cathy Gale in Doctor Who must have been the audience reaction to Bonnie Langford as Mel. Much like Peter Davison, Langford comes to the show with a broad, already established public profile, a sunny, upbeat, energetic song-and-dance specialist. Most prior companions (and Doctors, for that matter) come from what might be considered the British acting rank-and-file, solid and talented but not marquee names. The Bakers’ script does her little favors, playing into her proclivities by having her exercise and clamber about frequently, but Langford shows no sign of treating the part with anything but seriousness and respect. Her quick rapport with Colin Baker lends depth to a relationship the audience needs to believe has existed for months if not years, in order for the “future Doctor” conceit to work.
For Colin Baker, the end seems near indeed, and the Doctor’s travail at being on trial must weigh heavily on the actor as well, victim not of his own actions but of BBC boardroom politics and some dubious decisions on the part of Nathan-Turner and Saward. Nevertheless, Baker brings a strength to the role of the Sixth Doctor in “Terror of the Vervoids,” giving the Time Lord a welcome blend of wit, coy misdirection, and utter dismay at the venalities to which humans are prone. Baker’s shock at the Doctor being charged with genocide at the end of the story feels real, the Doctor believing that humanity itself stood at the precipice of extinction but for his difficult choice. One begins to see what might have been with scripts that lean into the Sixth Doctor’s complexity, as opposed to his eccentricity.
Absent the trial framing device, Pip and Jane Baker deliver a solid if underwhelming Doctor Who story in “Terror of the Vervoids,” with a strong premise ripe for exploration, even given the tendency towards the hyperbolic “humanity in peril” nature of the underlying threat. But rather than a moment of deep reflection for the Doctor, faced with the impossible task of deciding between the continued existence of six plant creatures or the entire human species, the trial turns the ethical quandary into a legalistic charge. And with the entirety of the Matrix at his disposal, why did the Valeyard not just start with this massive violation of Gallifreyan law rather than harping on the somewhat lesser crime of “meddling” in the affairs of others? Even moderate analysis finds plot holes a plenty in a story that lacks a credited script editor.
It’s a good thing that the sub-stories have run their course by the end of “Terror of the Vervoids,” which, like “The Mysterious Planet” and “Mindwarp” before it, do succeed in setting up the denouement in the final two episodes in “The Trial of a Time Lord.” In particular, the decision to highlight that the Doctor’s future already exists, in a fashion, in the present—whatever that means in this courtroom out of time—directly enables just who “The Ultimate Foe” will be. But after twelve episodes of stories interrupted by trial sequences that begin to run together in sameness, the audience wonders whether it will all be worth it, and long-time viewers dismayed to learn that Season Twenty-three would only contain fourteen episodes are looking forward to it ending. Not, one assumes, what John Nathan-Turner had in mind to save the show…
(Previous Story: Mindwarp)
(Next Story: The Ultimate Foe)
Post 151 of the Doctor Who Project