Chris Baer

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…

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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…

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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…

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