Oh, no! Now I really am finished.
It all comes down to this. After twelve episodes, spanning nearly three full months, “The Trial of a Time Lord” finally concludes with “The Ultimate Foe” (Story Production Code 7C Part 2), written by Robert Holmes (episode thirteen) and Pip and Jane Baker (episode fourteen). The prior three sub-stories establishing why the Sixth Doctor is on trial—Holmes’ “The Mysterious Planet,” Philip Martin’s “Mindwarp,” and the Bakers’ “Terror of the Vervoids“—tax the audience’s patience, teasing at a conspiracy regarding the Matrix, that impregnable repository of all Time Lord knowledge, while hiding any real evidence to support the claim, like some poorly scripted mystery novel written by many hands. Taken on their own, the prior installments of “The Trial of a Time Lord” work well enough as Doctor Who stories, but viewers inevitably feel shortchanged by their incomplete nature. They are missing something vital, a feeling of helplessness mirrored by the Doctor’s own predicament as “The Ultimate Foe” begins, with the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) about to pass judgement on our hero, much to the delight of the prosecuting Valeyard (Michael Jayston).
With the Keeper of the Matrix (James Bree) testifying that the Matrix can only be accessed with the Key of Rassilon, which he wears on his person at all times, eye witnesses are the only proof the Inquisitor will entertain regarding evidence tampering. At a trial being held “out of time,” on a space station in the middle of nowhere, how could the Doctor possibly muster such assistance? No minor shock, then, when Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby), last seen in “The Mysterious Planet,” and new companion Mel (Bonnie Langford) suddenly appear in the courtroom, an answer to the Doctor’s greatest need. Whence this miraculous gift? Further shock still, with the Doctor’s benefactor revealed as his long-time adversary: The Master (Anthony Ainley).
Scarcely four minutes pass in the first episode of “The Ultimate Foe” before the Master’s intervention, a scene with greater impact than any in the three hundred fifty odd minutes of the dozen prior episodes. For those viewers who slog through the story to this point, the Master’s unforeshadowed appearance, commandeering the screen in the trial room, proves ample payoff, a moment of glee at the unexpected twist, to say nothing of the welcome return of a familiar fiend. Yet one wonders why producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward withhold this revelation for so long, when even a brief aside or two inserted into the sub-stories, hinting at his involvement, might amplify the anticipation. And on reflection, the Master appearing from on high—from inside the Matrix, as it transpires, much to the Keeper’s chagrin—feels like an unearned deus ex machina, dropped in to solve an insuperable plot conundrum caused by multiple writers contributing to the same story.
Aided by Glitz’s testimony, which fills in the “censored” gaps about the Matrix being surreptitiously accessed from “The Mysterious Planet,” the Doctor discovers that the Time Lords moved Earth “billions of miles across space,” resulting in its devastation, to hide the knowledge that had been purloined from the Matrix by the Andromedans. This implication of the High Council in a conspiracy and cover-up, resulting in mass death and the destruction of Earth’s “ancient culture,” finally reveals what the entirety of “The Trial of a Time Lord” has been about, with the Doctor set up as a scapegoat to hide the Gallifreyan leadership’s complicity in genocide. Well, almost what it’s all about.
The real revelation, the whole point of this fourteen episode-long, season-spanning story, comes as an adjunct to the High Council’s perfidy. Almost in passing, the Master reveals the Valeyard’s role in the trial:
The Master: They made a deal with the Valeyard, or as I’ve always known him, the Doctor, to adjust the evidence, in return for which he was promised the remainder of the Doctor’s regenerations.
The Doctor’s ultimate foe, then, is the Doctor himself…
As established in “Terror of the Vervoids,” and, in retrospect, made possible by the various encounters of the Doctor with his past selves—”The Three Doctors,” “The Five Doctors,” and, recently, “The Two Doctors“— history is no longer a constant, inviolable linear stream when it comes to Time Lords, with the Master already having encountered this future regeneration of the Doctor. The Valeyard stands as “an amalgamation of the darker sides of [the Doctor’s] nature, somewhere between [his] twelfth and final incarnation.” Though one wonders, if the Master already knows that the Doctor survives all of his increasingly feckless attempts at eliminating his evergreen rival, why even bother? Nathan-Turner, Saward, and the assembled writers do their best to hand-wave the temporal shenanigans all away with the trial being “out of time,” but this narrative Klein bottle seems best appreciated for its daring rather than analyzed for its comprehensibility.
With his ruse discovered, the Valeyard bolts from the trial chamber into the “seventh entrance to the Matrix,” which just happens to be right outside the courtroom on the Time Lord’s secret tribunal space station. The Doctor and a reluctant Glitz give chase, while Mel is left to banter with the Master and the Inquisitor about what just happened, learning in due course that Peri actually survived the events of “Mindwarp” and lives happily as a queen alongside barbarian king Yrcanos.
Harking back to the first time Doctor Who delved into the Matrix, in “The Deadly Assassin,” the vast computational space appears to the Doctor as a real place, in this case a late-Victorian street dominated by a brightly lit facade, that of “The Fantasy Factory, proprietor J.J. Chambers.” In that prior story, the Master, aided by a rogue Chancellor, manipulates the virtual presentation of the Matrix to create conditions conducive to hunting down Gallifrey’s favorite son; here, the Valeyard creates a game of his own, at once violent—with the Doctor pulled under water in an attempted drowning and Glitz taking a harpoon to the chest—and fanciful, with an officious clerk, Popplewick (the incomparable Geoffrey Hughes) setting up bureaucratic barriers to stymie them.
In addition to gaining the Doctor’s remaining regenerations, destroying him will—somehow—allow the Valeyard to excise the inherited “misplaced morality” and “misguided maxims” that prevent him from reaching his evil potential; in combination with his apparent control of the Matrix, very little could stand in the Valeyard’s way. The Bakers, taking over the story from Holmes in episode fourteen once the Doctor’s evil persona escapes into the Matrix, try to imbue the Valeyard with moments of traditional “Doctor-ness,” having him quote Hamlet and being given to clever-for-their-own-sake schemes, the better for him to rail against such “whims and idiosyncrasies” that endear the Doctor to viewers.
(Of note, other than a pronounced shift towards humor and levity in the Bakers’ contribution, the two parts of the story do not feel entirely at odds with one another despite the tangled authorship. Both Howe and Walker’s Doctor Who: The Television Companion and Paul Kirkley’s Space Helmet for a Cow suggest that Holmes’ contributions are more conceptual than constructed, given Holmes’ deteriorating health, and eventual death, during scripting. Eric Saward fleshes out Holmes’ initial drafts for episode thirteen and, in discussion with Holmes, writes a full episode fourteen. Nathan-Turner’s rejection of Saward’s conclusion to the story leads the script editor to both quit and to prohibit use of his script for the final episode, with the Bakers being called in to write a wholesale replacement after casting had already been completed.)
The Master, for his part, needs the Doctor’s help to defeat the Valeyard, confessing to his old foe that this evil incarnation of the Doctor poses much stiffer competition than the nicer version. Besides, he asserts to the Doctor after rescuing him and Glitz from another of the Valeyard’s lethal Matrix traps, “he’s infuriated me by threatening to deny me the pleasure of personally bringing about your destruction.” With friends like these…
In a neat inversion of the trial framing device, the Valeyard creates an illusion of the courtroom wherein the Doctor is found guilty of the crime of genocide, as laid forth at the end of “Terror of the Vervoids,” complete with the fake tribunal watching scenes from that story on the chamber screen. After the Doctor stoically accepts his sentence, the camera pulls back, a smooth bit of cinematography from director Chris Clough showing the real courtroom watching the fabricated trial proceedings, beamed straight from the Matrix. The postmodern tension between the real and the televised, as first introduced to the Sixth Doctor’s run in “Vengeance on Varos,” continues here, helping to amplify the power of the illusions the Doctor must confront to defeat the Valeyard.
Because the Doctor and the Valeyard are, effectively, one and the same, when the Valeyard unveils his final, cunning plan to kill “the Ultimate Court of Appeal, the supreme guardians of Gallifreyan law,” gathered in the courtroom to try the Doctor, by “disseminating” all sub-atomic particles therein via the Matrix screen, it’s not much of a leap for our Doctor to undo the plan, triggering “an anti-phase signal into the telemetry unit” that seemingly kills the Valeyard. It’s a prodigious feat of techno-babble seldom matched in the series’ long history, but the Doctor escapes unscathed.
The Master, meanwhile, takes advantage of an insurrection on Gallifrey that overthrows the High Council—ostensibly in reaction to the revelation of their corruption as revealed in the trial, but very much unexplored in the story—to claim dictatorial powers. Then he plugs the Matrix data tapes at the heart of the whole affair into his TARDIS and, along with Glitz, becomes paralyzed by a “limbo atrophier,” another entirely inexplicable moment in a story that has quickly gone off the rails. Tat Wood’s About Time Volume 6 notes that the Bakers’ submitted script comes in at a whopping thirty-eight minutes, almost ten minutes over the episode’s allotted length, and one can assume, or at least hope, that the excised bits attempt to address some of these glaring plot holes.
As ever, the Doctor leaves before the clean-up can begin. He turns down an offer to become Lord President (again) and heads off with Mel, who threatens him with a strict regimen of carrot juice and exercise. The Inquisitor tells the Keeper to repair the Matrix at once, and we are left with a close-up of the cosmic custodian, who is revealed to be the Valeyard. As with, essentially, the entirety of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” this cliffhanger ending essentially never receives reference again in the series. Even the Sixth Doctor’s final moments on screen pass without any remark, testament perhaps to the series’ uncertain future going forward. Saward’s preferred conclusion, with the Valeyard and the Doctor falling through time locked in a struggle, while far more dramatic, leaves the story unresolved, which, again per Kirkley, Nathan-Turner vetoes as being an inconclusive and unsatisfying end to the very long story—and possibly, indeed, for the series as a whole.
While the plotting may be all over the place, the guest stars do their best to overcome the script. Tony Selby’s Sabalom Glitz enters Doctor Who‘s pantheon of lovable rogues; Glitz’s absolute devotion to material acquisition gives Selby some wonderful moments, as when he completely ignores the Master’s attempt to hypnotize him though an intense focus on the value of the pendant being waved in front of his face. Anthony Ainley, for his part, picks up where the Master last left off in “The Mark of the Rani,” with not a bit of cynicism in the performance; like a time traveling Wile E. Coyote, his persistent efforts to snare the Doctor brim with enthusiasm, and Ainley’s Master never loses that vainglorious self-belief.
Michael Jayston deserves especial mention. For the twelve episodes prior in “The Trial of a Time Lord,” his Valeyard needs to skirt the line between proper prosecutorial conduct and barely restrained venom, in order to maintain a veneer of propriety in the trial, crucial to the audience believing that, just possibly, the Doctor might be guilty. The (overly) slow development of the corruption behind the scenes demands that Jayston not tip the Valeyard’s hand, so to speak, and when finally the character is revealed to be a future, evil regeneration of the Doctor, the unveiling comes with greater impact because of Jayston’s controlled demeanor. The Valeyard makes a fine foil to the Doctor, and while there’s not much salvageable, lore-wise, from “The Trial of a Time Lord,” it’s a shame that the character does not recur. The Doctor is often defined by his enemies, and the Valeyard, with his implication of an evil kernel within the Doctor himself, holds the potential for some interesting storytelling.
As Colin Baker’s final act, “The Ultimate Foe” sees him in fine fettle, holding his own against the larger-than-life performances by Selby, Ainley, and Jayston. Baker’s range, his ability to shift moods quickly, and his comic timing all come into play in the Sixth Doctor’s final moments. Throughout the entirety of his run, these strengths seldom come to the fore, hampered as Baker is by Nathan-Turner and Saward’s decision to start the Sixth Doctor as somewhat manic and then turning him into, apparently, a craven coward for much of “The Trial of a Time Lord.” Baker—and the Sixth Doctor—deserve more than he receives. Better, certainly, than to leave the stage uttering “carrot juice” over and over before closing the TARDIS doors for the last time.
“The Ultimate Foe” delivers what it promises on the tin. The Doctor confronts the adversary he has, in so many ways, fought against the most throughout his entire history, stretching back to 1963: himself. The Valeyard rails against those very qualities that make the Doctor such a compelling character—amazing power tamed by, harnessed by, knowledge and ethics, tempered by an awareness of consequence, a conflict as old as humanity itself. As a conceit for either pushing Doctor Who into a bold new direction of more mature, adult—indeed, sustainable—adventures or for providing a final coda to over twenty years of travels through time and space, the potential for further exploring the Doctor’s inherent morality is there. The execution, alas, is not. Following twelve episodes of uneven quality, hampered by an overburdened trial framing device and a lack of respect for the audience’s time and intelligence, Nathan-Turner, Saward, Holmes, Martin, and the Bakers just don’t reach the possible heights.
What we do get remains rousing, with vibrant acting and interesting, if dimly lit, direction and camerawork. “The Ultimate Foe” stands as the most satisfying, if not best, part of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” and were it to merely conclude Season Twenty-three, one would be more inclined to appreciate its strengths. But as the conclusion to the Sixth Doctor’s saga, as the potential savior of the series as a whole, one is left wondering what could have been. Doctor Who returns a year later, with a new Doctor at the helm, in spite of, rather than because of, this very long story.
(Previous Story: Terror of the Vervoids)
Post 152 of the Doctor Who Project