An Hour of Who a Day

December 3: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Eleven & Twelve

(Terror of the Vervoids parts 3 & 4)

The Vervoids plan their next move. (The Trial of a Time Lord
Part Eleven) ©BBC

It's a bit difficult to get a handle on these two episodes; on the one hand they do seem to sort of be following the murder mystery conventions, with red herrings and extra complications (like the sudden hijack of the ship), but on the other hand it all feels a bit distant, like everyone's just going through the motions until the time is up and the murderer is revealed. It also doesn't help that there don't seem to be many plausible suspects available (and the culprit is hardly a surprise when we do find out for sure), and that the murderous intent of the Vervoids overshadows what was the main plot.

Actually, this might be a bigger problem than it first seems. Because the murder plot is so lightweight (and probably because the segment's called Terror of the Vervoids rather than, say, The Hyperion III Murders), the Vervoids become the main focus of attention, and all they're doing for most of this is lurking in the (really quite impressively large) ductwork and occasionally killing crewmen. (And pause to note that, yes, the Vervoid heads do look a bit naughty -- although frankly they don't look as inappropriate as is sometimes stated.) So the end result is this lopsided story where the script wants us to concentrate on the murders and the finished product is far more interested in the Vervoid side story. There are lots of bits relating to the murders -- including an attempt to kill Mel halfway through part eleven (although this requires Hyperion III to incinerate its used towels rather than launder them -- humanity is such a wasteful species -- and for the worker on duty to literally be paying no attention at all to what he's throwing away) -- but they're frankly rather uninvolving. The script sort of seems to be aware of this, so we get an end-of-episode cliffhanger involving Lasky's assistant Bruchner hijacking the ship and piloting it into an incredibly unconvincing black hole, just so that there's some excitement happening.

Mel and the Doctor say their goodbyes. (The Trial of a Time
Lord Part Twelve) ©BBC

Oh, and in case you missed it, the murderer is Lasky's other assistant Doland, who's so desperate to exploit the Vervoids as a slave race (even though one pollen spore in a microscopic cut was enough to turn his assistant Ruth into a half-human/half-Vervoid mutant) that he'll kill a number of people to get them through to Earth. Although one wonders who would actually want a genetically-engineered slave race with built-in insta-kill thorns in the first place; that seems like you're just asking for trouble. And then you have to wonder why Doland rigged up the electrocution booby-trap in the hydroponics lab that activated the Vervoids in the first place; surely they would be much easier to deal with in their pre-germination state? As Zaphod Beeblebrox might say, "Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?"

Still, part twelve is a vaguely more exciting episode as the Vervoids start openly attacking people. There are some decent scenes, such as Janet the stewardess and some guards trying desperately to keep the Vervoids out of the lounge, but soon enough the whole story ends when the Doctor does something clever to wipe out all the Vervoids -- which leads the Valeyard in the cliffhanger to accuse the Doctor of committing genocide. So, you get to try people for crimes they haven't committed yet in Time Lord courts, do you?

There seems to be a conscious effort with Terror of the Vervoids to create a deliberately whimsical tale -- albeit one that still seems awfully bloodthirsty; stop and think for a moment about how many people are dead by the end of this -- but this leads to a feeling of being rather lightweight and disposable as well. It's certainly not a bad story, and there's nothing that's truly egregious about it, but one does get the feeling that in context this is a misjudged opportunity. Doctor Who is on trial for its life, and it needs something more than a throwaway tale to convince people that it's a show worth doing. Terror of the Vervoids might be okay in isolation, but in this larger framework it falls rather flat.

December 2: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Nine & Ten

(Terror of the Vervoids parts 1 & 2)

It's the Doctor's turn to mount his defense, and while I see what the production team is going for with this Christmas Carol past-present-future vibe, it really is a terrible defense, to the point where it doesn't really seem like a legitimate one at all. (Or, to quote About Time, "if it's not immediately obvious as to why [the basis of the Doctor's defense really is crap], we refer you to the Monty Python sketch where Eric Idle is accused of murdering several people and claims, 'I'm very sorry and I won't do it again.'") But this is where the trial is going, so I guess we have to go along.

Terror of the Vervoids¹⁴⁶ does something of a first for the show (well, "An Unearthly Child" excepted): it introduces a companion in media res, without any of the "getting to know you" stuff that's usually standard for these things. This is of course because this story takes place in the Doctor's personal future (so, er, he's found innocent at the trial, then -- and when did this thing become a trial anyway? It started as an inquiry...), and so from his point of view he's already known Mel, the new companion, for some time. And so Bonnie Langford is introduced as something of a health nut, trying to get the sixth Doctor into better shape. Mel is somewhat relentlessly cheerful and bubbly, but as it makes a welcome change from Peri and the Doctor's more fractious relationship (even allowing for the softening we saw in the first two stories this season) the positives outweigh the drawbacks. (And, being American, I have no preconceived notions about Bonnie Langford going into this -- I understand that's not the case for the majority of British viewers.)

The actual storyline concerns a murder mystery, and other than a couple instances where the Doctor contests what's being shown in the courtroom, contending that it's been altered since he reviewed it in preparation, the trial interruptions are generally kept to a minimum -- thus allowing Terror of the Vervoids to develop its own pace -- and as this is intended to evoke Agatha Christie's stories, pace is a crucial concern. But it's an odd sort of murder mystery that Pip & Jane Baker are presenting us with -- the initial death turns out to have been faked, but then that person dies for real, while there's some stuff involving giant plants that seems to worry Professor Lasky and her two assistants (probably because they end up being killer plants). This means that the first mystery has been cleared up, the second leaves us none the wiser, and meanwhile there are a bunch of homicidal plants on the loose that nonetheless no one seems to know about, even though they've started killing people too. It's almost like setting Murder on the Orient Express (and note the homage early in part nine) in the middle of a slasher movie. And since this is a Pip & Jane Baker script, people talk in ludicrous ways; infamously, Michael Craig, as Commodore Travers, has to deliver the line "Accident? Why can't you use plain language, mister?" and then follow it up with "Whoever's been dumped in there has been pulverised into fragments and sent floating in space, and in my book that's murder." He also gets lines like, "I should accept that advice and drop the sophistry", while the Doctor has to say things like "The weird atmosphere down there could lead to phantasmagoria." It's particularly obvious with Craig because he spends the rest of his time trying to play a no-nonsense ship commander, and the dialogue gets in the way of that.

Nice design though; you do get the sense that this is a luxury liner (the cabins in particular seem to have been designed to be small and claustrophobic, as you'd expect), with carpet on the walls and warm colors everywhere. Plus full marks to whoever decided to put framed comic book pages up as artwork in the cabins. And there's a nice costuming touch that's been going on throughout the season: Colin Baker's cravat changes color (so blue means past, red means present, and now yellow means future) to act as a subtle indication of what version of the Doctor we're watching.

So it's not the worst thing ever, but judgement of Terror of the Vervoids will probably depend on how it resolves the various problems and mysteries it's setting up. Nice cliffhanger into part eleven, though; the design of the mutant is realized very well.

¹⁴⁶ As the whole season is officially called The Trial of a Time Lord, we get to hark back to the days of William Hartnell and debate what to call these segments. The first two had their accepted titles on the scripts, so no problems there, but the working title for this third segment was first The Ultimate Foe (now the accepted title for the last two parts -- a confusion that might have occurred because these last six episodes share a production code of 7C) and then The Vervoids. Terror of the Vervoids is a title that was invented for the Target novelization (although it's not clear if it was someone at Target or Pip & Jane Baker who actually came up with the title) and which has since stuck with everyone except the people who insist on referring to The Daleks as The Mutants.

December 1: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Seven & Eight

(Mindwarp parts 3 & 4)

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.

Kiv wakes up in his (her?) new body. (The Trial of a Time
Lord Part Eight) ©BBC

It's that second half of part eight that really kicks Mindwarp into high gear, though. Crozier decides to use Peri as the new host for Kiv's mind (as that second body is only meant to be temporary), while the Doctor does his best to free Yrcanos and others to help him save Peri. There's a lot of good action in these scenes, and while the ending is spoiled rather by Time Lord machinations, you can tell that Nicola Bryant is having a ball, getting the chance to play an amoral character. She takes particular delight in the waking-up scene as Kiv, enjoying the feel of warm blood. Of course, this does mean the end of Peri, as her mind was destroyed when Crozier put Kiv's mind in her body. Thus we bid farewell to Peri and to Nicola Bryant -- but what a way to go, eh?

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.

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.

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.

November 28: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts One & Two

(The Mysterious Planet parts 1 & 2)

And so here we are, eighteen months after Doctor Who was last on the air, and the show's undergone a bit of an overhaul in the meantime. The focus of the hiatus had moved increasingly from being a purely financial decision to a creative one. The show, according to the BBC's upper management, had become too violent, and that needed to change. (There's a theory that the BBC wanted to be rid of the show entirely at this point, but that the public outcry when the hiatus was initially announced led them to rethink their plans. This probably isn't true (as there's no indication in the initial announcement of a permanent cancellation), but it's no secret that BBC1 Controller Michael Grade and Head of Drama Jonathan Powell hated the show (and its producer, John Nathan-Turner, it seems) and wanted to be rid of it.) In addition to less violence and more humor (so, a bit like what Graham Williams was told, it seems), a couple more radical changes were initiated: the show was to revert back to its 25-minute format (the 45-minute format having been deemed a failure -- nobody tell BBC Wales), and the season was to be shortened to a mere 14 episodes.

Obviously these changes mean that the original season 23 has had to be scrapped (although, based on the subsequent Big Finish adaptations of some of the planned stories, we had a lucky escape in not having Mission to Magnus made -- and one wonders if The Hollows of Time would have still been as worryingly convoluted (even with the framing narration out and the Master back in) as the audio version). In its place, John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward have come up with a new (and somewhat fate-tempting) plan: as the show is on trial in real life, why not have a season-long story where the Doctor is also on trial for his meddling (an update to the events seen back in 1969 at the end of The War Games)? But rather than have one extra-long story, they decided to take three stories and have them be loosely connected to the trial theme, followed by a wrap-up for the overarching tale. And so The Trial of a Time Lord was conceived...

That's the set-up then; what did they actually put on television?

The very first thing to notice about The Trial of a Time Lord is that they've revamped the theme tune. Instead of the more triumphant version we've been used to, composer Dominic Glynn gives us a much more ethereal rendition, with lots of high pitches and little in the bass range. I actually rather like it just because it's so different from anything we've heard before or since, though I understand it's not exactly a universal favorite. At this point it doesn't really seem like it fits with the title sequence at all though.

It's a hell of an impressive opening shot, though, as the TARDIS is pulled into some sort of space station via a beam of light (I'm trying to avoid using the term "tractor beam", but as the phrase actually comes from E.E. "Doc" Smith rather than Star Trek, it's probably okay). Clearly some motion control work went into this shot -- the stars moving along with the camera is proof of that. It's a really nice shot. That's then followed by some self-aware dialogue. "Am I late for something?" the Doctor asks as he enters a darkened courtroom. "I was beginning to fear you had lost yourself," the prosecutor, the Valeyard¹⁴³, replies. It seems there is to be an inquiry into the Doctor's activities regarding interference in other cultures -- something, you may recall, expressly forbidden by Time Lord law. "I intend to adumbrate two typical instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum," the Valeyard tells the court -- and yet this is a Robert Holmes script, not a Pip & Jane Baker one. Why he can't just say that he's going to show two different examples of the Doctor's guilt is beyond me.

This leads into the (first) main story proper: that of the Doctor and Peri's investigations on a planet called Ravalox, some two million years in the future. It's quickly clear that Ravalox is actually Earth, though as of now there's no clear reason why Ravalox and its "constellation" (er, does he mean "solar system"?) have moved a couple light years away from their typical location. But look! Everything's on video now, which does give the production a unified look (the real world reason having to do with the problems of developing film -- an incident involving a scratch on a film negative for The Two Doctors, necessitating a pricey reshoot of the footage, only to later discover that the scratch wasn't that bad, made Nathan-Turner decide film was more trouble than it was worth). And the story is rather intriguing so far, with two "tribes" of people nearby -- one on the surface and one underground. The surface dwellers look like a primitive tribe, while those underground appear to be locked into a dictatorship run by an L3 robot named Drathro. Drathro is a suitably impressive costume -- it looks like a metal robot (instead of, say, a foam rubber costume) and it towers over everyone.

But the best part about these two episodes are the Holmes double-act of Sabalom Glitz and his partner Dibber. In the tradition of characters like Jago and Litefoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Glitz and Dibber engage in highly entertaining banter, with lots of dry wit. Unlike Jago and Litefoot, Glitz and Dibber's conversations are significantly more sadistic:

GLITZ: You know, Dibber, I'm the product of a broken home.
DIBBER: You have mentioned it on occasions, Mister Glitz.
GLITZ: Which sort of unbalanced me. Made me selfish to the point where I cannot stand competition.
DIBBER: Know the feeling only too well, Mister Glitz.
GLITZ: Whereas yours is a simple case of sociopathy, Dibber, my malaise is much more complex. A deep-rooted maladjustment, my psychiatrist said. Brought on by an infantile inability to come to terms with the more pertinent, concrete aspects of life.
DIBBER: That sounds more like an insult than a diagnosis, Mister Glitz.
GLITZ: You're right there, my lad. Mind you, I had just attempted to kill him. Oh, I do hate prison psychiatrists, don't you? I mean, they do nothing for you.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Trial of a Time Lord - The Mysterious Planet)

Glitz and Dibber are less like villains (even though they want to kill the Doctor and Peri, though only to eliminate competition) and more like an amoral third party, come to cause extra problems. But they're already significantly more entertaining than anything in The Two Doctors was.

But then this first part of The Trial of a Time Lord (hereafter The Mysterious Planet, as that's what everyone calls these first four episodes) is already a lot more interesting and entertaining than Holmes's last script for the show. The story is moving at a nice clip, and while it might not be the most original story, it at least has its charms (such as Katryca, the leader of the Tribe of the Free, already knowing what a spaceship is), and the interruptions of the actual trial aren't too bad. Interesting how both cliffhangers end with a close-up on Colin Baker's face, though.

¹⁴³ It's occasionally stated that "Valeyard" is an old word for "prosecutor" or some such, but I've never been able to verify this -- the only thing that ever seems to come up when you do a search for "Valeyard" is Doctor Who.

November 27: Revelation of the Daleks Part Two

So the point of the fake statue (complete with fake blood inside) was apparently entirely for the entertainment of Davros -- note the way he was laughing hysterically in part one as the Doctor was about to discover the statue. Oh sure, there's some guff about using it as a lure, but given that Stengos's interment at Tranquil Repose was enough of a lure, it's hard to see why Davros bothered. And why did he want the Doctor, the person who keeps ruining his plans, to come to Necros in the first place?

Of course, even though the Doctor and Peri are now involved in the events going on at Tranquil Repose, they still have little influence over them. Orcini is already making his way through the complex at the behest of Eleanor Bron's character, while Takis and Lilt have already called for the other Daleks (the grey ones) to come get Davros, who has already manipulated Tasambeker into killing Jobel. About the only thing that the Doctor and Peri do is get the DJ involved (and incidentally, here's another clear instance of Nicola Bryant getting the American accent slightly wrong -- Americans stress the "D", not the "J") -- although it looks like Davros was going to kill him anyway, so at least the DJ got to take out a couple Daleks before he went.

Now, it is a Saward script, so a lot of people do ultimately die on-screen, but at least this time most of them feel like they die for decent reasons rather than just because of cannon fodder. Kara (Eleanor Bron's character) is killed by Orcini for betraying him, while Jobel is murdered by Tasambeker partly because Davros has been goading her on and partly because Jobel so thoroughly rejects her. "Do you honestly think I could possibly be interested in you?" he tells her. "I have the pick of the women! I would rather run away with my mother than own a fawning little creep like you." It's one of the most dramatic scenes in the piece, entirely there to give a sense of how Davros has been ruining lives while installed as the Great Healer. (And I love the way Jobel's toupee falls off as he dies.) Really, the only person whose death feels somewhat gratuitous is the DJ's, and that's only because of the way he steps out from behind his rock and roll gun to check his handiwork, even though there's a Dalek pushing its way in.

It's definitely a better script that Saward's last couple, and it's amply aided by Graeme Harper's direction -- which isn't quite as strikingly wonderful as The Caves of Androzani, but is nevertheless quite good. Not everyone dies at the end (notably, Takis and Lilt survive, along with a number of extras), and there are a number of black comedic moments (the toupee falling off, the Doctor offering a handshake to Davros's shot-off hand) that work rather better than anything in The Two Doctors. Not only that, but satisfyingly, Orcini gets to die a noble death -- something that's been denied most of the characters in Saward's scripts. In many ways Revelation of the Daleks looks like Saward aping Robert Holmes, but if this is the result then that's not a bad thing.

And so that's the end of season 22. It's been a bit of a rough ride this time around -- the accusations of increasing violence certainly didn't help (although I do think they're somewhat exaggerated -- again, this is likely a reaction to increased concern over "video nasties"), and those tuning in to The Two Doctors Part Three (easily one of the most casually violent episodes this season) probably went away with the wrong impression.¹⁴² Making the sixth Doctor a deliberately unlikeable person was a risky move, and I'm not convinced it paid off -- the most successful stories in terms of the Doctor have been the ones that have shown his moral, more compassionate side, with bits of alienness thrown in. The bright spot in this is that the production team seems to have realized this, and they've settled down on that alien nature while still maintaining the core of the character. They haven't been the best set of stories (and the hit-to-miss ratio is worryingly lower than it's been in a very long time), but you do get the sense by the end of season 22 that the people making Doctor Who have worked out what they're going for, and if the ratings and appreciation figures are any indication, the audience is willing to go along for the ride.

Of course, Revelation of the Daleks ends on a freeze-frame ("All right, I'll take you to—") -- the original ending word "Blackpool", which was meant to be a lead-in for season 23's opener The Nightmare Fair by former Who producer Graham Williams, has been excised, as it's become clear that whatever plans John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward had for season 23, they'll have to be scuppered in response to a series of new directives from above. The knock-on effects of this will be felt all through next season...

¹⁴² If they did go away, that is -- the ratings have been steadily improving from their low point of 6.0 million for The Two Doctors Part Two back up to a very respectable 7.7 million for Revelation of the Daleks Part Two.