My Top Ten Favorite Stories

1. Remembrance of the Daleks
2. The Curse of Fenric
3. The Stones of Blood
4. Warriors' Gate
5. The Happiness Patrol
6. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
7. Delta and the Bannermen
8. Battlefield
9. An Unearthly Child
10. Paradise Towers

The Seeds of Death

Slaar: You have dessstroyed our entire fleet!
The Doctor: You tried to destroy an entire world.


Jamie! Zoe! Let me in! Oh! Oh no! Oh my word! Let me in!

I don't get Doctor Who fans. This story is an absolute classic. It is the best surviving Troughton story. Yet for some reasons a lot of fans think it is a bit rubbish. Why? Because it is too long? Lots of stories are too long. Each episode of this story is full of action. Because it has holes in the plot? So does Pyramids of Mars. Gaping big holes. Because the 21st century costumes look silly? The costumes in Robots of Death look a bit silly too and most people seem to like that. Because the Ice Warrior Grand Marshal wears a spangly, disco helmet covered in glitter? Well, I think he looks cute. I just don't see what the problem is with this story. It is a brilliant one.

The Seeds of Death was among the first ten or so novelisations I borrowed from the library when I first got into Doctor Who back in 1990. And then to my delight, it turned out that my parents had bought me the video that Christmas. I was both surprised and delighted when I unwrapped it back in Xmas 1990. Oh memories, aren't they sweet? The BBC Video had not remastered the original recording so the sound and picture got a bit jittery towards the end. In my childhood innocence, I thought this was my fault because I paused the video too many times.

Some people seem to think that Seeds of Death is not as good as Ice Warriors. Personally, I never compare complete stories to incomplete stories. I found the Ice Warriors rather boring, but then the missing episode probably did not help.

What is so great about Seeds of Death? Well, for one thing, it contains some of the most inventive camerawork of the black and white era, such as showing the moonbase crew from the Martians point of view and the projection of numerals onto Gia Kelly's face. It also has one of the best musical scores in the history of the show. It is an highly cinematic score. At times it feels like it belongs in a Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy film.

The Seeds of Death is a base-under-siege story. Yes, the Troughton era was a bit overcrowded with those kind of stories, but this one is different. For one thing, we get the relief of more than one location. We see the concern of the Earth command centre when the moonbase is no longer in contact with earth. The Doctor does not conveniently turn up in the base-under-siege in the TARDIS (oh hello, problem with alien invaders is it?) but has to travel there in an antiquated rocket.

The premise behind the story is remarkably original. Back in the late Sixties rockets were at the cutting edge of technology and interest in space travel was at it's peak. A story about rockets and space travel being made obsolete would have been pretty radical. Given that our society no longer has much interest in space travel now, the serial may be seen as prophetic. We might wonder that governments would completely rely on one form of technology to keep the world fed and organised, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they could be so complacent (though how it is that only Gia Kelly understand T-Mat is another question). The moment where Eldred and the Doctor indulge in their boyish enthusiasm for rockets is beautiful and might awaken in older viewers a nostalgia for that old Dan Dare vision of space exploration. One of the things that brings this sense of the future-obsolete is the way the moonbase seems so big and deserted, filled with rooms stuffed with unused equipment.

Seeds of Death is full of fantastic supporting characters. Osgoode is not on for very long, but he is great while he is there. His look of grim defiance in the face of death is stunning. Eldred and Radnor are a great pair. There is a real sense of history between them. They are too old men whose friendship was spoiled by politics. When Kelly defies Radnor and goes to the moon, Eldred dryly comments "She's after your job, Julian." Kelly herself is great. Somebody who knows she is indispensable; cooly efficient, but rather too quick to seek somebody to blame. I love the fact that as soon as the crisis is over Eldred, Radnor and Kelly are back to the old arguments about the merits of rockets over T-Mat. Terry Scully is also brilliant as Fewsham. When he wails "I want to live!" you believe him. He is helped of course, by being blessed with a very expressive face that helps to enhance his misery.



The Ice Warriors look great in black and white. The lack of colour helps to attract attention to their crustiness and makes them look especially scary. It has been suggested that with the introduction of an officer class, a 'Davros Factor' was added, reducing the impact of the ordinary Ice Warriors. I am not so sure. With Davros, you had somebody who was not a Dalek bossing the Daleks around and thus making them look stupid. Slaar, on the other hand is very much one of the Ice Warriors, despite his differing armour. Alan Bennion at times gives Slaar an hilariously camp posture, though on the whole he is pretty menacing.

The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe were such a brilliant team. Zoe was so cute and sassy. She is pretty useful and effective in this story. You have to feel for Jamie, however, he is patronised mercilessly through this story by both the Doctor and Jamie. Though he does get a good comeback, stating the obvious fact that they will die of thirst before they drift into orbit around the sun.

Patrick Troughton clowns around an awful lot in this story. The contrast between this and his rather more straight performance in Tomb of the Cybermen is striking. He is wonderful entertainment throughout the story, though he becomes deadly serious when he confronts Slaar towards the end. The Second Doctor was certainly the most ruthless Doctor. He was prepared to destroy the entire Martian fleet, even knowing that they were a dying race. He was no pacifist and in this story goes into action, killing Ice Warriors with his make-shift solar energy weapon.

This story definitely deserves a better reputation than it has so far received.

A Christmas Carol

The plot of 'A Christmas Carol' recreated in the far future with Steampunk visuals and flying sharks.

I did not have high expectations for this story, but I have to say that even I was surprised at how bad this was. This has to be the biggest load of garbage we have ever seen from the BBC Wales series. What surprises me most is that this story seems to be getting so many positive reviews and on comment threads, critics of the special are being dismissed as 'scrooges.'

Critics of the BBC Wales series have harboured hopes that the producership of Steven Moffatt would be a major improvement on the RT Davies years. Well, A Christmas Carol has satisfied me that Moffatt has all the faults of Davies and more.

As with so much of the BBC Wales series, this story has been written with visual impact in mind. Moffatt wants a visual spectacle, so the plot is purely subordinate to making the wonderful things he has imagined happen.

A Christmas Carol is built around an utterly contrived attempt to re-create a classic story. It fails in this because it tries to translate the basic plot of a fairy tale-like story into a sort of science fiction disaster movie. Dickens' story was about the individual grasping with his conscience; it was about the responsibility of one man to his fellows in the human race. This Christmas special is about the Doctor trying to prevent a disaster by manipulating somebody.

There are two basic problems with the situation that we are given in A Christmas Carol. The first problem is that there is no plausible motive for Sardik's unwillingness to do anything for the spacecraft in peril. So he is a nasty, mean-hearted old man, but there seems little indication that saving the spacecraft will be any great loss to him. It seems unlikely that the Doctor could not easily find ways to persuade him to act, either through bribery or pressure. Does Sardik really want people to die merely out of spite?

Secondly, the Doctor's strategy of saving the spacecraft fails to work both in terms of continuity with the history of the show and purely on a narrative level. In narrative terms, it is jarring to see the Doctor leaving the scene of a life-threatening adventure to travel back in time and have a long series of light-hearted adventures over a long period. While time travel presumably makes that possible, it seems to trivialize the significance of the disaster and rather makes one wonder that the Doctor could not come up with a more immediate answer to the situation. However, what is even more worrying is that the Doctor's strategy is such a departure from the way Doctor Who normally works.

Steven Moffatt has shown a worrying tendecy to use time travel as a plot mechanism. We saw this in his spoof Curse of Fatal Death, though nobody would have taken that seriously. More recently, he had the Doctor interfering in his own timeline in The Big Bang, despite his insistence that this was not possible in Parting of the Ways. I'm a 'Rad' fan and all for experimenting with different kinds of stories, but completely re-writing the way Doctor Who works is not a good idea. Throughout the history of the show, the Doctor enters a difficult situation and he gets on with dealing with it. He never travels back in time and alters the past. If the Doctor can do this, he has a 'get out of jail free card.' We can no longer enjoy him as a protagonist. If he can do this, he is nearly a god. Are we to just ignore the fact that the Doctor has never worked like this before? Are we to ignore the fact that the Doctor has said that you can't change the past, as he did in the Hartnell era (a notion which while not carried through consistently, still makes sense within a lot of later stories)? Are we to imagine that the Doctor's alterations to the past would not have massive and unpredictable results, such as the machinery for controlling clouds no longer being available?

A Christmas Carol even features the Sardik the boy meeting Sardik the old man. I know the notion that meeting your self causes an explosion, as seen in Mawdryn Undead makes absolutely no sense, but surely the fact that we never see this happening in Doctor Who (except in multi-Doctor stories) indicates that it really is a bad thing? I don't think we can just ignore the way time travel works in the continuity of the show and imagine that the Doctor can do anything he likes. That is just too easy and if it continues, we may see some seriously lazy script-writing.

This story features the greatest use of Steampunk visuals in a Doctor Who story. Personally, I am not a big fan of Steampunk. It is all just a bit too knowing and consciously cool. There is something of an air of unreality about Steampunk, given that it is trying to visualize a past/present/future that never was or is likely to be. Surprisingly and refreshingly, however, the crew of the spacecraft are wearing very retro-futuristic uniforms. This makes a refreshing change in BBC Wales Dr. Who. I have commented before about the tiresome tendency of the show to always make the future look like contemporary earth.

In my mind the casting of Katharine Jenkins was a seriously bad idea. Clearly, the woman is quite unable to act, but this is hardly a surprise given that she has never played a serious dramatic role in her life. At least when they cast Kylie Minogue, they had somebody who had some considerable acting experience.

Finally, seeing a carriage pulled by a flying shark as though it were Santa's sleigh just made me want to throw up. Far too much icing...

The Dark Flame, by Trevor Baxendale (Big Finish Audio)

The Seventh Doctor, Ace and Bernice encounter a sinister cult and an eldritch entity.

This is the second of Big Finish's audios that are set within the New Adventures continuity. That they have not made any further audios with the NA TARDIS crew indicates that there can't be that many weirdos like me who view the Virgin New Adventures as a golden era of Doctor Who. I think it's a shame. Big Finish appear to want to concentrate on a period they have 'discovered' in between Survival and the new Adventures. Judging from Colditz, they wanted a kinder, gentler Ace than the one seen in the New Adventures. This reflects the fact that Big Finish is all about pleasing people who want good old fashioned Doctor Who rather than people who like the challenging, experimental approach of the Virgin range. Still, I am glad they appreciated us NAstalgics enough to give us two NA era audios.

Perhaps a little oddly, this story is not by one of the NA writers. Maybe they were all tired of this era and wanted to do other stuff. Like many of the New Adventure novels, you can see the influence of Lovecraft, with the presence of a sinister cult, worshipping a godlike extra-dimensional entity. The other NA-like offering from Big Finish, Shadow of the Scourge was much more creative in terms of plot and ideas than this. Unsurprisingly, Shadow of the Scourge was by Paul Cornell, one of the greatest of the NA writers.

Ace comes across as a good deal more aggressive than she was in Shadow of the Scourge, though as with that play, Sophie Aldred fails to capture the New Adventures version of the character. Lisa Bowerman is fun as Benny, though her constant joking does strain credibility. McCoy's performance is full of enthusiasm.

If you are a New Adventures enthusiast you will want to listen to this, if not, you can be assured that Big Finish have released better audio dramas than this.

Timewyrm: Exodus, by Terrance Dicks (Virgin New Adventure novel)

Pursuing the Timewyrm, the Seventh Doctor and Ace discover an alternate post-war Britain under Nazi rule.

This is the first New Adventure novel I read. This is where the New Adventures began for me. I read this when I was eleven years old. Then I read it again and again. It was my favorite book for about a year.

When I was eleven years old, Terrance Dicks was a name I knew and loved. I had read dozens of his Target novelisations and I knew he had written The Five Doctors, which was the first Dr. Who video I ever watched. Dicks' novelisations were easy to read, and so was this. It was exciting, fun and full of great characters and humour that I could mostly appreciate at that young age (mostly).

What is more, it was about the Nazis. Like so many other English boys, I was fascinated by the Second World War and thought the German uniforms were cool. Timewyrm: Exodus was just written for my younger self. This book hardly curbed my fascination. I learned so much about the history of the Third Reich from this book and it got me reading lots of history books to find out more. That was what Doctor Who was originally supposed to do. We all know how Doctor Who started out with an educational agenda, featuring those two teachers who were supposed to help young viewers to learn about both science and history. Well, Timewym: Exodus helped me to learn so much about Twentieth Century history and if I ever meet Terrance Dicks I would shake his hand and thank him for it.

Timewyrm: Exodus was my first introduction to the Seventh Doctor and Ace (apart from that lame BBC science program that the BBC kept repeating back in the early 90s). I had never seen any Seventh Doctor stories, bar ten minutes of The Curse of Fenric which terrified me. I was fascinated by the character of this Doctor. He was sligtly sinister, manipulative and with incredible powers of persuasion. His willingness to be ruthless was obvious, despite his unwillingness to use violence himself. Looking back, I can see that Terrance Dicks gives us a Seventh Doctor who is at times closer to the Third Doctor in his occasional patronising of Ace and his enjoyment of the luxury hotels in the story, but it is still the dark, manipulative Doctor of the New Adventures; however 'Trad' Dicks' leanings might be.

After this, I went on to read other New Adventure novels, though I found most of them much more difficult than Timewyrm: Exodus. Nvertheless, I look back on the era of the Virgin New Adventures as a golden era in the history of the show. It was a time when being a fan really meant something and the mythos of Doctor Who was being explored from new angles. This was the only Doctor Who that was current when I was a young fan, so as I have said before, the Seventh Doctor of the New Adventures was 'My Doctor.'

This is quite a personal review for me to do. I could write some more critical comments about Dicks' style and about the development of the characters. I could make a number of criticisms of this story, but I don't feel I want to. This is a story that meant a lot to me when I first read it and I am sure that anybody who reads it will find it to be one of the most enjoyable of the Virgin New Adventures.

The Ultimate Foe (Trial of a Time Lord parts 13-14)

"I'm as honest, truthful and about as boring as they come."

You could sum up this story simply as "Deadly Assasin goes pantomime." I don't mind the pantomime feel of the next season after this, but Trial of a Time Lord was a story arc that cried out for a dramatic conclusion. What we get is a rushed and half thought out mess.

Offscreen circumstances can largely be blamed for the failure of this story. Robert Holmes wrote the first episode of this, but his illness and subsequent death prevented it's completion. Eric Saward wrote a concluding episode in his absence, but then resigned and kept the copyright to it. Pip and Jane Baker were hastily called in to write a conclusion to a story that they had not written, without knowing how it was all supposed to end. Hence, what we are left with.

The idea that the Valeyard is the 'dark side of the Doctor' is a bit bonkers. Of course, he never really admits this himself and we find out this from the Master, who might just as well have made it all up for a laugh. Onscreen evidence actually suggests that the Valeyard may have been the Keeper of the Matrix all along.

We find out that the Time Lords have been up to some pretty shady stuff, though we pretty much knew this already. As I said before, the whole backstory about the earth being moved by the Time Lords is a bit of a continuity nightmare.

Despite the poor script, Colin Baker put's everything into it. He is stunning in his condemnation of the Time Lords and his apparent surrender to fate. The real tragedy is his becoming a scapegoat for the failings of his two seasons and his dismissal as a result. Bonnie Langford's Mel is less effective. I like her, but this story really does not suit her style. Anthony Ainley gives his worst ever performance as the Master. Michael Jayston is good as the Valeyard, but he does lose the chilling restraint of previous stories and become another gloating, cackling villain.

It is fun to see Sabalom Glitz again, though it is odd that he seems to be friends wiht the Doctor, despite being a cold-blooded killer. Perhaps Glitz met the Doctor a second time after The Mysterious Planet.

The pseudo-Victorian world of the Matrix and Mr. Popplewick are cool, though with the massive Steampunk obsession that has been goig since the 80s, perhaps too consciously cool. The problem with virtual reality stories is that they don't engage very well with the viewer. If the events depicted are not real, why get excited about them?

The Dallas-style reversal of Peri's horrifying fate is very disappointing. On the other hand, there is something delightfully surreal about Peri marrying Ycarnos and becoming a barbarian warrior queen. According to the novelisation, Ycarnos goes with Peri to California, where he comes a champion wrestler with Peri as his manager. This is amusing, but rather silly.

The really remarkable thing about The Trial of a Time Lord is that of it's segments, the two which are written, or in this case half-written, by Robert Holmes are the worst. Mysterious Planet was a derivative runaround, this conclusion was a confused piece of scripted chaos, while Mindwarp was very good and the nice-but-mediocre Pip and Jane Baker gave us a reasonably decent story in Terror of the Vervoids.

Terror of the Vervoids (Trial of a Time Lord parts 9-12)

"Your defence is that you improved? This I must see!"

Having witnessed in the Matrix the death of his companion, Peri, the Doctor has lost the arrogance and cockiness that he showed in the first story of the Trial series. He is now far more subdued and rather melancholy.

The Doctor is given the chance to make his defence. He does so by presenting an adventure that takes place in his future, involving a companion he has not met. His defence is that his conduct improved and that his intervention was requested by somebody in authority and that it was vital to the protection of countless human lives. I am not going to begin to discuss the complexities and anomalies involved in the Doctor knowing about a future adventure. Let us just say it is a bit of a mind-boggling notion. As I mentioned when reviewing The Mysterious Planet, if this was an American sci-fi show or made by an independent television company, this season would have included a story featuring stock footage of at least one older story. This would make sense as I can think of plenty of adventures that could have been forcefully used by the Doctor in his defence. He could have mentioned the many occasions in which his intervention was arranged or ordered by the Time Lords. He could have mentioned the stories of Season 16, when he was asked by the White Guardian to retrieve the Key to Time. He could have mentioned the Dominators and those dreaded Quarks- hang on, he already did that last time he was put on trial.

Judging from the DVD commentary, Pip and Jane Baker are absolutely lovely, kind people who one would just love to meet. Unfortunately, they seemed unable to write convincing dialogue. The script for this story is really bad in places. On the other hand, they have created a really effective Agatha Christie style murder mystery. I would argue that this story works much more effectively as a murder mystery than the dreadfully overhyped Robots of Death. In Robots of Death, you knew a robot did it (if the title did not give you the clue), so it is not difficult to work out which member of the crew is most likely to be the culprit. The detective element works better in this less well regarded serial.




With vicious monsters on board a spaceship, we know we are in Alien territory. Doctor Who knows this territory well, after all, it got there first with Ark in Space. The production team certainly don't let us down with the Vervoid costumes, bar the odd moment when you can see what the actors are wearing underneath. I am a bit puzzled by their intelligence, knowlege of human technology and their command of English (or whatever language the crew and passengers speak). Some fans have raised the question of how the Vervoids have come to be armed with stings when they are bred as servants. Probably, they are crossbreeds of various plants, one variation of which must have possessed a poison sting. On the other hand, it could be that they have really been bred for military purposes. The mutated woman is very well created, though she is rather superfluous to the plot.

I struggle a little with the notion that the arrival of the Vervoids spells the extinction of animal life on earth. There is hardly an army of them on board. I am sure they would not stand up to a sustained bombardment of weed killer. One also wonders why the Doctor does not mention, when charged with genocide, that the Time Lords ordered him to commit genocide against the Daleks and that the Time Lords committed genocide against both the Vampires and the Fendahl. For all people complain about the excessive continuity of mid-80s Dr Who, it all get's forgotten in the Trial of the Time Lord.




It really does seem in this story that the Sixth Doctor has changed and improved. Colin Baker plays him as a much more affectionate and likeable character than before. I also think his new waistcoat and tie are an improvement, though I am sure a lot of fans will hate both versions of his costume. Baker has a real chemistry with Bonnie Langford. Mel is a companion who is tailor made for the Sixth Doctor. Her cheerful disposition counterbalances his tendency to moodiness. I am not quite sure how she manages to get him to exercise against his will. It is impossible to imagine Peri forcing the Doctor to do anything against his will.

Mel is a rival to Adric for being the most hated companion, but I really like her. As much as I like Tegan and Peri, it is refreshing to have a companion who enjoys being with the Doctor. I have said before that I cannot stand Jo Grant. I find it hard to reconcile in my mind how I can like Mel, but hate Jo Grant when both characters share a number of qualities. I think perhaps it is because at this period of the show, it was all being taken less seriously. There was room for a larger than life character like Mel. Pertwee played his part absolutely straight and his stories were written to be taken seriously, hence the presence of the childish Jo Grant was an irritation. Bonnie Langford gives her best performance here in Terror of the Vervoids.

The guest cast in this story are decent enough, though none of them particularly stand out. It is nice to see Honor Blackman doing her turn in Doctor Who. The spacecraft set is very well designed, even though it wobbles once or twice. The black hole special effect really is awful.

This is truly an enjoyable story in the good old-fashioned Doctor Who style. Quite a switch from the rather 'Rad' second part of ths series.

Mindwarp (Trial of a Time Lord parts 5-8)

The Sixth Doctor's relationship with Peri becomes abusive (again).

The Mysterious Planet was full of running around and getting captured. Mindwarp is also full of running around and getting captured; the difference is that Mindwarp has real quality, while Mysterious Planet was a derivative mess.

Right from the start of the story in the trial scene, we learn that something has happened to Peri and we are left waiting to find out what this is. This adds an immense sense of tension and foreboding to this story. We start to see the Doctor lose his cockiness and become desperate to make sense of what he sees in the evidence.




Despite it's many camp elements and despite it looking in many place like a video for a multi-racial 80s pop band, Mindwarp is one very bleak story. Mindwarp is the ultimate elaboration of Eric Saward's vision of the cosmos. Throughout the Saward era, we were given a glimpse of a dark future filled with violence and carnage. Yet Mindwarp is the darkest of all these stories. Caves of Androzani was bleak. There were no nice people in that story; only a lunatic with a deformity and a massive grudge, brutal mercenaries and self-serving capitalists. Nevertheless, for all it's darkness, in the midst of Caves of Androzani, we had the faithful and compassionate Doctor, steady as a rock. Mindwarp takes away that last security. In Caves of Androzani, Peri could depend on the Doctor in an hostile universe, here he has finally succumbed to the sheer monstrosity of the cosmos and given in to it. The Doctor who gave his life for her has become a coward, a traitor and a perversion of what he was before. This makes this the darkest of Dr. Who stories. This is a story about how the Doctor who once saved Peri comes to betray and fail her.




The tragic nature of this story makes one feel that it would make a great opera. This is Peri's tragedy, a story of betrayal by the one man she could rely on. The story focuses on her, showing her growing realisation that she could die alone, away from everything she knows and loved. We see her finding solace and camaraderie in the only characters who come across as sympathetic, Ycarnos and Dorf. There is a sense of irony in this, in that they are bloodthirsty barbarians who delight in killing.

Practically everyone agrees that the best part of this story is the climax when we see Peri, her head shaved and her personality replaced with that of Lord Kiv. Nicola Bryant is quite chilling when she speaks in the deep voice of the new personality invading her body. Peri's shaved head may be an allusion to the holocaust, the ultimate scene of dehumanisation. Since the introduction of the Cybermen, Doctor Who has often dealt with the theme of dehumanisation. The destruction of the human personality seems to many people a fate worse than death. In the figure of the shaven-headed Peri speaking with Kiv's voice, we have a far more stark image of the destruction of the human personality than the Cybermen ever were. Many of us fans feel deeply disappointed that the decision was made to reverse Peri's fate and let her survive this story Dallas-style. It makes sense aesthetically that Peri whose life was saved by the Doctor should die in the end because of the Doctor's failure. It creates a much greater sense of tragic pathos.

A good deal of the unpopularity of this story is no doubt down to the agony for fans of watching the Doctor become so selfish and cowardly. When we see Peri chained up and alone with the Doctor, we are made to hope that the Doctor is going to explain his plan to her, but we become horrified when we find that he really has betrayed her. Of course, we are not helped by the fact that Colin Baker had absolutely no idea how to play this role; the scripts had not been clearly explained to him. There are in fact four possible explanations of why the Doctor is acts the way he does in this story. It may be that he is suffering the effects of Crozier's brain tampering. It may be that the Matrix has been altered to distort the record of the events (which we find out has occurred in some places, but not necessarily those relating to the Doctor's odd behaviour). It may be that this really is a trick and the Doctor is pretending to descend to evil; though this is difficult to believe when he could easily have proven his good faith when he was alone with Peri on the rocks by the sea. Most disturnbing of all, it could be that the Doctor realy has succombed to the cowardice and malice that he showed after his regeneration in The Twin Dilemma. To my mind, this is the most interesting possibility. The Doctor's fifth regeneration does seem to have been particularly traumatic and the unstable beahviour he showed in his first story can be seen throughout season 22. It seems to me that the Doctor was going through some sort of mental crisis throughout his sixth incarnation that reached it's climax in this story. No doubt this crisis intensified by Crozier, but it cannot be separated from the instability that he had shown prior to this. I understand that a lot of viewers find the uncertainty rather confusing, but I find it quite interesting. The fact that it is not explained leaves us room to think about it and puzzle out the Doctor's out of character behaviour.




Brian Blessed is hilariously over the top as Ycarnos. Some viewers might find his performance irritating, but he does inject some life into an otherwise rather bleak serial. Some people feel that Patrick Reycart (Crozier) is a bit wooden. I feel that this reflects the character. Crozier is a totally amoral figure. He has no politics, agenda or even cruelty. He simply wants to perfect the techniques he is researching. He is the cold face of science without ethical resraint. The moment when he sips tea from an old fashioned cup and saucer before carrying out his surgical procedure is beautiful. It just sums up the banality of the character.

It is fun to see Nabil Shaban again, as the slimy Sil. Some fans feel he is less effective here as a flunky and sycophant, rather than as the big villain. I think it is interesting to see him in a different position, and it allows us to see him in a double act with Kiv (who is ably played by Christopher Ryan and later Nicola Bryant). After all, we got to see Darth Vader twice as a flunky and only once as head honcho. The rest of the guest cast are pretty awful, the worst offender being Gordon Warnecke as Tuza. The monstrous Raak is unusually well filmed for a Dr Who monster. We only get brief glimpses of the creature, which is a lot better than the usual full frontal view.

This is a really brilliant story that is often too quickly dismissed by fans who have no love for this troubled period in the history of the show. I think for those of us who have grown up with the New Adventures, Mindwarp is probably not so shocking. The New Adventures followed up Eric Saward's bleak vision of the universe and also occasionally bring ambiguity and doubt about the Doctor's workings.

The Mysterious Planet (Trial of a Time Lord Parts 1-4)

The Doctor is charged with conduct unbecoming a Time Lord.

Although I tend to think of the Trial of the Time Lord as four individual serials, they are united by such a tight story arc across Season 23, that it is quite a challenge to review them as such. The reason I prefer to review them as separate stories is the huge variety in quality between them.

The trial makes use of evidence in the form of three of the Doctor's adventures, one in the recent past, one which has just taken place at the time of the trial and one which, bizarrely, has not yet occurred. You can be sure that if this was an American science fiction show, this season would have included an adventure from the show's past. American sci-fi shows, and those made by Independent t.v. companies in the UK so often throw in an episode where old footage is used just to save the budget at the end of the season. Generally, those sort of episodes are very disappointing and a bit cheap. However, given the lack of repeats of Doctor Who in the UK, fans would have welcomed a story in which footage from a classic story, such as The Seeds of Doom was used. It would have been quite interesting to watch the Doctor and the Time Lords commenting on such an adventure.

The model shot of the space station in which the trial is held looks great. The problem is that it does not look in any sense Gallifreyan. The space station looks just like something from Star Wars or the Alien movies. A Time Lord space station (we are never told why this trial is not held on Gallifrey) would surely have an ethereal magnificence to it.

The trial room with its rather miniscule gathering of Time Lords looks a little pathetic when compared with the model shot of the space station. Nevertheless, as with most court scenes in television, there is plenty of room for effective drama. Colin Baker get's the chance to be rude, rebellious and arrogant. Michael Jayston is brilliant as the sinister Valeyard. The contrast between his angry restraint and the Doctor's brashness is delightful. I just love watching the way the Valeyard glares at the Doctor.

A lot of people find the periodic switch from the action of the story to the trial scenes rather intrusive. I find them rather fun, though it must be said that in the case of this first serial, this is not difficult because the Ravolox story is so dull. The plot of The Mysterious Planet is completely uninteresting; a dull runaround that is largely derived from other stories. One just feels a sense of deja vu on watching Mysterious Planet.

Sabalom Glitz and his young accomplice, Dibber help to keep the story from being unwatchable. They are a glorious Holmesian double-act. What is most hilarious is the way that Glitz takes pride in the way he is an object of speculation by criminologists and prison psychologists. He offers some biting satire of the field of criminology. It is a little hard to be sure how thick Dibber really is. At times, it seems that his wit is a little sharper than that of his boss. The rest of the guest cast are not terribly impressive. Joan Sims is especially disappointing as Katryca.

Colin Baker was clearly playing the Doctor in the Ravolox scenes as a nicer character than we experienced in Season 22. While it is nice to see him actually appearing to like Peri, it does jar a little with what we see in the courtroom, where he is as obnoxious as in Season 22. It also does not fit with what we see in the next story, Mindwarp.

The location work is quite good and the village is well designed and created. On the other hand, the suggestion that the London Underground would still be recognisable on a ruined earth a million years into the future is ludicrous. The robot is pretty good.

One thing that baffles me is that Katryca wants to give Peri some fine husbands, yet she locks her up with two scoundrels who might easily molest her. A rather perplexing decision.

Being a fan who obsesses over continuity; I really struggle with the issue of how to fit this story in with the future history of earth in other Dr. Who stories. I am not quite convinced by Tat Wood's view that the removal of Earth by the Time Lords is the same apparent destruction of earth in The Ark.

What is most interesting about the Trial of the Time Lord is the way it deconstructs the narration of Doctor Who. We are forced to ponder how accurate the reporting of these stories are. If crucial bits have been missed out of this story about Ravolox, how do we know crucial bits have not been left out of say, The Brain of Morbius?

I'm a Doctor too

This is me at the graduation ceremony where I was awarded my PhD (University of Gloucestershire). The ceremony was held at Cheltenham racecourse.

I am a doctor, but I am not a doctor of many things; my research was in theology. The paisley tie is my salute to Sylvester McCoy. Then again, I was wearing a blue suit like David Tennant.