The Trial of a Time Lord Part Seven

The one where Peri teams up with the inevitable resistance fighters...

Michael Jayston is good casting as the venomous Valeyard, and gives the character a steely, uncompromising gravitas which runs rings round the defendant Doctor. The Valeyard has an answer for everything, he always has a trick up his sleeve, and he certainly knows how to put on a good show. Like a good Netflix documentary, he always has a tantalising twist to keep viewers involved.

I also like his prodigious vocabulary, here calling the Doctor "a toady, a coward, a turncoat!" And he's not wrong, unlike the Doctor when he insists: "I would never want to harm Peri." Erm, well, yes... we'll just gloss over that claim, shall we?

While this is part 7 of the season-long story, it's also part 3 of what's known as the 'Mindwarp' section, and you can tell. It's one of those part threes where nothing very much happens, and people spend a lot of time running along corridors, occasionally bickering, often prevaricating, talking a lot but saying little. Yrcanos, Peri and the Lukoser decide to seek out the resistance fighters that inevitably exist somewhere on Thoros Beta, and it's not long before they're captured by what turn out to be Native American knock-offs.

The Alphan rebels are led by Tuza, played by Gordon Warnecke with more wood than the Amazon rainforest. I mean, Warnecke is baaaad every time he either speaks or moves. The Alphan rebels team up with Yrcanos, Peri and the Lukoser to launch an attack on the Mentors, but their plans are scuppered when they find their arms dump has been buried in a rockfall, caused by Frax. Along the way they discover a 20-year-old Alphan called Linna who has been aged to death by the Mentors' experiments. The extra playing him manages to die in slow motion, which is both a tremendous skill and also just terrible acting!

Meanwhile, the brain-addled Doctor continues to act perversely, aiding Crozier in transferring Kiv's brain into the slightly larger skull of another Mentor found washed up off the Islets of Brak. This Mentor retains its "primeval sting" in the tail, much to the horror of the fawning Sil, who fears that if Kiv ends up dying, the Lord's guards will kill everybody. Sil has his self-interest at heart, but not much plot to speak of. As with Vengeance on Varos, Sil is memorable because of the sheer brilliance of Nabil Shaban's performance, not due to anything he does. He's just there, on the sidelines, waffling on, but not actually being a very good baddie.

I really do not rate writer Philip Martin, not as a script writer anyway (his unmade Mission to Magnus was also pretty poor). He came up with some good ideas in his two Doctor Who stories, but when it comes to pacing and particularly dialogue, he had a weakness. Vengeance on Varos was rife with very unsayable dialogue, and actors are being forced to deliver lines which no one would ever say. "Sil, stop gyrating your throat," says Crozier; "Nobody likes brain alteration," whines Peri. The lines are so bad that the actors have no chance of making them sound realistic. But then, when you're just a bad actor like Warnecke, even pretending to spit on the ground presents a challenge.

After 22 minutes of people running, shouting - lots of shouting - and spouting nonsense, the episode ends with Yrcanos, Peri, Tuza and the Alphans (including one that looks like Sean Connery) being gunned down by Frax's guards. We're to presume they are dead (we know they won't be) but the most surprising thing is that the Doctor is more bothered that he's not held responsible for the deaths, rather than the fact Peri is dead. He sees his supposed friend gunned down in cold blood, but the first thing he thinks of is that he is not blamed.

Shocking.

First broadcast: October 18th, 1986

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: I quite like the matte shot of Crozier's laboratory from afar, but that's about it.
The Bad: Gordon Warnecke's ligneous acting.
Overall score for episode: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Word repetition: 7

NEXT TIME: Part Eight...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Four; Part Five; Part Six; Part Eight; Part Nine; Part Ten; Part Eleven; Part Twelve; Part Thirteen; Part Fourteen

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

The Trial of a Time Lord is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Trial-Time-Lord/dp/B001ARYYNG