They are a bit uneven, these two episodes, aren't they? In some respects it feels like they're padded out to meet the required length, with lots of corridor wanderings and little in the way of complications -- the first two parts of Mindwarp had all the stuff with the Doctor behaving unpleasantly to keep things going, but here it just feels like marking time, waiting for the end of part eight to start moving again. Kiv being placed into a new body is rather nice, and the hints that the host's old brain cells are influencing Kiv are intriguing, but they don't do enough with it, content instead to show Peri, Yrcanos, and Dorf wandering corridors while the Doctor continues to help out with Crozier's experiments. And more egregiously, they don't really make it clear when the Doctor's mind slips back into phase (for lack of a better term), which leads the audience to wonder how much of the Doctor's behavior was a ruse and how much was genuine.
And yet I find I don't mind too much. There may be a good deal of padding, but it's at least entertaining padding -- Brian Blessed continues to be a lot of fun ("Oh, very well. Today, prudence shall be our watchword; tomorrow I shall soak the land in blood"), and the bits with Sil are still fun; the way in which Kiv slowly awakens in his new body to see Sil's face beaming at him is a comic delight. The manner in which Colin Baker plays the Doctor for most of this, with a sort of off-kilter, fascinated joy, is also worth watching -- you can tell he's not taking things for granted. The scene with him and Sil, discussing commerce and future events that could lead to profit, is a particular highlight. But apparently it depends on my mood as to how much I enjoy the sound-sensitive Mentor in the induction centre -- I recall being highly amused by him in the past, but this time it fell a little flat.
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| Kiv wakes up in his (her?) new body. (The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eight) ©BBC |
However, these ending scenes are marred by that aforementioned Time Lord interference. We have no way of knowing whether the Doctor would have arrived in time to save Peri (or if Yrcanos would have, for that matter -- although it looks like he probably would have been too late), because this is the moment that the Time Lords choose to pluck the Doctor "out of time" (as the Doctor puts it later), as well as slowing down Yrcanos's charge so that he'll be able to kill Peri/Kiv and Crozier at the right moment. And yet the Time Lords have the sheer nerve to then claim that Peri's death is the Doctor's fault, as well as continuing to accuse him of meddling in the affairs of others. The hypocrites. It's also weird how the Inquisitor is suddenly the one to start berating the Doctor for his actions and to inform him what the High Council decided -- you'd think this information would have come from the Valeyard, rather than the supposedly impartial Inquisitor. Good cliffhanger ending though: "There's something else going on here. The High Council has no right to order Peri's or anyone else's death. ... I was taken out of time for another reason, and I have every intention of finding out what it is."
Mindwarp's actually a surprisingly entertaining segment; I remember not caring for this story much the last time I saw it, but I'm not actually sure why: this time it seemed significantly more enjoyable. It's nice that the trial sequences are being used for more than just rather tiresome points of exposition, and the suggestion that something more is going on than simply a sudden whim to now try the Doctor for meddling is a welcome one. The Valeyard's actual case seems suspect (this time around the argument seems to be that the Doctor was responsible for everything that happened on Thoros Beta just by being there -- which may be true but seems a lot like supposition rather than a genuine argument (there's no reason to believe that the Doctor was instrumental in Crozier's success, for instance)), but we're starting to get an indication that this trial format might actually work out.