November 30: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Five & Six

(Mindwarp parts 1 & 2)

See, you can tell this is a separate story not just by the new writer credit during the title sequence, but also by the fact that we don't get a reprise of part four's cliffhanger.

The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Five through Eight (aka Mindwarp)'s story proper opens with a lurid pink sea and a eye-strainingly blue shoreline, all against a green sky with a ringed planet at the horizon.  Can you guess what new toy the BBC visual effects department has procured?¹⁴⁵

And into this environment (the planet Thoros Beta), the Doctor and Peri have come to find out why advanced weaponry is being supplied to comparatively primitive cultures -- but it's perhaps no surprise to learn that Thoros Beta is the home of the Mentors, the race of beings that Sil from Vengeance on Varos hailed from (and Thoros Beta does indeed get a namecheck in that earlier serial).  Happily, this means that Sil is back, ready to be manipulative and scheming.  Sil is still entertaining, as he fawns obsequiously over his leader, Kiv, who's suffering from some sort of brain-case size problem that requires his mind to be transferred to a new body.  "Take charge, Sil!" Kiv cries, in an effort to find the Doctor and Peri.  "Before I perish!  Then where will you be, eh?  Dead!  No, worse than that, poor!"  And so what Mindwarp does is it makes Sil no longer unique; now he's from a whole planet where everyone's like he is, where his behavior is considered normal.  This therefore in turn makes the Doctor and Peri the outsiders, even more than usual, and when the Doctor gets his, er, mind warped (well, that is where the title comes from), this makes Peri really alone.

Well, not entirely.  Far and away the most watchable person on the screen is Brian Blessed as King Yrcanos, a Krontep warlord who's been brought to Thoros Beta to be pacified.  (Didn't work.)  Blessed is in his usual over-the-top form, which turns a rather dull character on paper into something much more entertaining -- the way Yrcanos is completely dedicated to his cause of killing the traitors and villains who brought him to Thoros Beta, starting with the Doctor, is both incredibly watchable and surprisingly believable.

The Doctor, the Inquisitor, and the Valeyard in the courtroom.
(The Trial of a Time Lord Part Five) ©BBC

Meanwhile, writer Philip Martin has started to play with the trial format he's been given.  Not only is the Doctor's mind warped by Crozier's brain machine, but there's also the fascinating suggestion that the Matrix, which we're repeatedly told is infallible and that the mere suggestion that the events shown have been altered or fabricated in some way is laughable, has in fact been tampered with.  The Doctor insists that these events didn't happen the way they're portrayed and seems thoughtful when he's informed of the Matrix's infallibility.  If there's been a problem so far with the trial format, it's that The Mysterious Planet played far too safe with events.  A censored word here or there hardly makes for exciting television, and that, coupled with the relative benignity of the events shown, has made the trial seem somewhat unimportant.  But here, we get some damning evidence of the Doctor working with the Mentors and actively betraying Peri, and with the mystery as to whether this is a result of the mind warp, a ruse by the Doctor, or tampered evidence, Martin gives us something more tangible to mull over.  The question is then whether the next two episodes can deliver on what Martin has set up here, both regarding the events of Thoros Beta, and the events of the larger trial story.







¹⁴⁵ The answer is a digital image manipulation system called Harry from Quantel, makers of Paintbox.