November 29: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Three & Four

(The Mysterious Planet parts 3 & 4)

There are some more self-aware lines in the courtroom scenes ("Valeyard, are these unpleasant scenes necessary to your case?" the Inquisitor asks.  "I too find it repugnant to witness, my lady, but the Doctor has a well-known predilection for violence," the Valeyard replies), but these scenes do sometimes feel intrusive as well -- one is designed to point out why we're viewing events the Doctor wasn't present for (useful but presented rather tediously), two are because of sensitive material, and one seems designed just so that the Inquisitor and Valeyard have some screen time, even though the points being made feel rather irrelevant.

Dibber and Glitz enter Drathro's control room, where Drathro and
the Doctor are already present. (The Trial of a Time Lord Part
Four) ©BBC

But there seems to be a larger problem at stake here.  The Valeyard has presented this Ravalox material as proof that the Doctor interferes and leaves bodies in his wake, but we only really see three people die (Katryca, Broken Tooth, and Grell), and Grell was probably going to die by Merdeen's hand anyway.  The Doctor may be indirectly responsible for Katryca's and Broken Tooth's deaths, but that's really only because his presence caused Drathro to send a robot after him, which the Tribe of the Free mistook for Drathro himself.  It's not his fault that they charged into Drathro's base and then confronted the robot directly.  But more importantly, here's a situation where the Doctor definitely had a positive effect, if his claims about what would happen in a black light explosion are true -- and there's no reason to believe they're not.  (Even if they bear a worrying resemblance to the plot of Plan 9 from Outer Space...)  The Doctor resolved a situation that he wasn't responsible for (as he had nothing to do with blowing up the black light collection aerial) with minimal casualties.  Why does the Valeyard think this is a good example of the Doctor's meddlesome activities?¹⁴⁴

Moreover, the sequences we're shown not only demonstrate the good-hearted nature of the Doctor (the way he presents himself to the L1 robot so that Peri and the others can escape, the conversation he has with Peri -- "I can't let people die if there's a chance of saving them"), but also show that the Doctor has freed them from Drathro's influence -- no more forced cullings, it seems, and while life will probably be harder in some respects for the underground dwellers, there's no suggestion that this isn't a desirable thing -- Merdeen's been trying to free people for years, after all.  Even Humker and Tandrell, Drathro's lackeys, seem happier away from him.  So if this is meant to be an instance of the negative influence the Doctor's meddling has, it's not a very effective one, and it's not like the Doctor's history isn't littered with more damning examples (such as The Caves of Androzani, in which the Doctor's mere presence leads to a huge number of deaths and the destabilization of an entire society).  No, what we actually get in The Mysterious Planet is an entertaining little tale with ultimately a much more upbeat ending than we might have expected, given it's being used as evidence against the Doctor.  Of course, the Valeyard promises us that the best is yet to come...







¹⁴⁴ This choice of evidence is going to seem even stranger when we get to Parts 13 and 14, and the nature of the censored secrets is revealed -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves.