In all my travelings throughout the universe I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here. The oldest civilisation: decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core. Ha! Power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, they're still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power; that's what it takes to be really corrupt.The revelation of all this comes via the Master of all people, who's been hiding out in the Matrix and is frankly better here than he's been his last few appearances. Anthony Ainley seems to delight in playing the role of a spoiler, come to undo the High Council's actions ("I've thrown a pebble into the water, perhaps killing two birds [the Doctor and the Valeyard] with one stone, and causing ripples that'll rock the High Council to its foundations. What more could a renegade wish for?" is delivered with particular glee), and he's much more interesting here than when he's trying to kill the Doctor. And I utterly adore the way the true nature of the Valeyard is just casually tossed away by Ainley: "They made a deal with the Valeyard, or as I've always known him, the Doctor, to adjust the evidence, in return for which he was promised the remainder of the Doctor's regenerations." Also, full marks to composer Dominic Glynn for not highlighting this reveal until the Doctor cottons on to it.
But what a fascinating idea! The concept of a dark Doctor from the future -- "an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation", as the Master puts it148 -- is a striking one, and it also makes the current sixth Doctor seem more moral in contrast. This sixth Doctor has been alien and often nontraditional in his approach to concepts of good and evil, but when placed next to the Valeyard, who seems significantly more corrupt, the sixth Doctor's virtues become more apparent. And then Robert Holmes, the man who wrote The Deadly Assassin, sends the Doctor and the Valeyard into the Matrix to have an entertainingly surreal battle, with loads of Victoriana and bureaucracy swimming around. This is an environment in which the Doctor seems both out of place and in his element as he fights his future self (his ultimate foe in more ways than one, you might say -- another reason why that's a much better title than Time Inc. ever was), trying to both play by the Valeyard's rules and to work out how to build to a final confrontation.
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| The Doctor and the Valeyard in the Matrix. (The Trial of a Time Lord Part Fourteen) ©BBC |
I suspect that The Trial of a Time Lord, as an entire story, has improved with age. Audiences are now willing to devote more time to longer-running threads that run through a series of unrelated stories (indeed, Steven Moffat has been making it a huge part of his run on Doctor Who -- although he seems to have dialed it back in his most recent series), and the trial part of The Trial of a Time Lord fits this style very well: a few hints here and there to suggest that something else is going on, leading to the big reveal at the end of the season, with implications for the future as well. It may have confused viewers at the time (one of the primary criticisms often leveled at this story -- although the audience appreciation figures are all reasonably high, suggesting this may not have been the case), but the season as a whole holds together very well. If there's a complaint to be made, it's that the individual segments often play it safe, opting for familiar, well-worn paths rather than trying something new, beyond the overarching theme. As with Terror of the Vervoids, the whole thing isn't bad (and The Ultimate Foe leaves one with, perhaps, a greater feeling of goodwill toward this season than it actually warrants), but at this point in time, not being bad isn't really good enough. But with the departure of Saward and Colin Baker, the shake-up that this show really needs might finally be around the corner.
But yes, it's time to say goodbye to Colin Baker, who was unceremoniously fired by BBC1 Controller Michael Grade after season 23 aired (thus unfortunately making that "Carrot juice" line his final one as the sixth Doctor). Many of the scripts Baker was saddled with were problematic, and much of what he was asked to do in terms of performance was questionable, but Colin Baker himself managed to rise above this to create a compelling new persona -- larger than life and often abrasive, but still the same Doctor we'd come to know and love. Anyone who's listened to some of his Big Finish audios will know that Colin Baker plays an excellent Doctor, and that the sixth Doctor definitely works as a character -- it's simply a sad fact that the televised stories didn't afford him quite the scope or control over the character to really make this clear. There are certainly gems to be found during his era, but the fact that sometimes you have to dig a little deeper to find them isn't his fault, and by the end of season 23 he was firing on all cylinders. Michael Grade made the wrong decision, and Colin Baker frankly deserved better than he got from the show.
But it's the nature of the show to always keep moving forward; now it's on to season 24 and a brand-new Doctor...
147 The story so far: the original season 23 had to be scrapped, as you'll recall, and John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward came up with the idea of having a season-long story about the Doctor being on trial. The first two segments went relatively smoothly, it seems, other than some last-minute requests by Head of Drama Jonathan Powell to make some major changes to Robert Holmes's segment -- which were eventually worked through, but Saward became unhappy with the disrespect he perceived from Powell toward Holmes, a man he respected very much. Saward also found that the last two segments of the trial format were going very poorly -- at least three writers were approached and had scripts found wanting (either by Saward or Nathan-Turner) before Pip & Jane Baker came along for parts nine to twelve. In addition to all this, Saward found his relationship with Nathan-Turner was deteriorating (he felt Nathan-Turner was emphasizing and paying attention to the wrong things and disagreed with a number of decisions being made) and he was rapidly losing the stomach to keep working on the show.
Then Robert Holmes died, having only written the first episode of the concluding segment, and Saward was devastated. He wrote up the final episode, based on the discussions he'd had with Holmes, only for Nathan-Turner to disagree about the ending (Saward had written a "down" cliffhanger ending that showed the Doctor and the Valeyard locked in a struggle as they fell through a time vent, inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty's death in "The Final Solution"; Nathan-Turner disliked this on the grounds that it would make it too easy for the BBC to cancel the show, if the last shot was of the Doctor apparently going to his death). This, it seems, was the final straw; Saward withdrew use of the final script and quit the show entirely.
Nathan-Turner, now desperate for a final episode, turned to Pip & Jane Baker, who, after a story conference with Nathan-Turner that apparently included a third party to witness the fact that Nathan-Turner hadn't told the Bakers anything about Saward's part fourteen script, went off and wrote their own ending based on everything that went before and a handful of locations that had already been scouted (Saward's script, for instance, apparently required the use of a large round building that ended up not being used in the Bakers' script, though you can still see it in some of the Victorian sequences). Fortunately the Bakers were able to turn in a script that was largely coherent, thus saving the day.
148 Obviously this slightly odd description (not necessarily a future Doctor so much as a dark distillation offshoot) is intended to not have to actually cast Michael Jayston (or some equivalent) as an evil thirteenth Doctor, and it's also the case that the language is such that, given that we've subsequently seen that the Doctor has more than twelve regenerations, we might not have actually witnessed the creation of the Valeyard yet. But with the recent revelations, in "The Day of the Doctor" and "The Time of the Doctor", both of a War Doctor between McGann and Eccleston and that the Doctor's almost-regeneration in "Journey's End" does count as using a regeneration, an interesting correlation shows up.
To recap: if McGann is the 8th incarnation, then Hurt is 9, Eccleston is 10, and Tennant is 11. But then Tennant uses up a regeneration in "Journey's End", thus also becoming 12. And what happens in "Journey's End"? A little after the regeneration we get a second Tennant Doctor (the metacrisis Doctor), one who we're told was "born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge" -- not exactly an "amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature", but close enough (as well as matching up with the "between your twelfth and final incarnation" description surprisingly well) to at least require some thought. Pure speculation, obviously, but more has been built with less.