Re-Tried With New Evidence, Part 1 – Doctor Who: The Trial Of A Time Lord – The Blu-Ray Director's Cuts, Reviewed
Over the last couple years, BBC Video
has been doing the amazing work of painstakingly restoring full
seasons of the original 1963-1989 Doctor Who series
for blu-ray, and releasing the seasons as both beautiful
limited-edition box sets in the UK, and more readily-available
standard editions in the US. These sets have been a dream come true
for dedicated Whovians, and seem like profoundly unlikely releases
for a couple reasons. Firstly, with few exceptions Doctor
Who has never been available in
full-season box-set form; the format of the series was always long,
loose seasons broken down into several, usually four-to-six episode
serials, and each of those serials got their own individual releases.
This made the show a bit more approachable in some ways, as each
story arc stands reasonably on its own, and the individual
movie-length releases make it easier for newcomers to sample various
points of the long-running show's 26-season run. But it also made
Doctor Who a
cumbersome and very expensive show to collect. But secondly and
perhaps more importantly, Doctor Who was
not produced in a format conducive to HD. Up until its last few
seasons all of the on-location work done for the show was shot on
film (though most of the negatives didn't survive), but the studio
work forming the bulk of most episodes was shot on tape, and the show
was edited to tape in SD. However, the professional-grade tape
formats used (at various times throughout the show's run, 2”, 1”,
3/4”, then various betacam formats) did hold more visual
information than SD home video formats (especially NTSC in the US)
could utilize, leaving some room for HD upconverts to look far better
than the old DVD and VHS releases. BBC's painstaking HD restorations
use new scans of the negatives when possible (particularly in the
cases of the entirely-shot-on-film Spearhead from Space and
Shada), and when that
isn't possible (which is most of the time) they pull every bit of
detail they can out of the original tape masters, resulting in new
1080i versions that look shockingly good. These aren't simply
upscales of the old DVDs repackaged into a single box-set, these are
the episodes lovingly cleaned up in a way that you have never seen
them before; the best that a low-budget series from the 1960s, '70s,
and '80s could possibly look. Not to mention, each season comes
packed with new and old extras, and whenever additional material
could be uncovered, extended director's cuts of the episodes.
Rather
than starting at the beginning and moving forward, BBC has been
releasing an assortment of the various Doctors, allowing fans to get
a taste of the show's various eras and incarnations in HD. At first
the releases were about what fans would expect, starting with the
fan-favorite seasons of Fourth Doctor Tom Baker, Fifth Doctor Peter
Davison, Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, and then another fan-favorite from
Tom Baker, since he is generally the most-loved Doctor and certainly
the longest-running. But one of the latest releases is a very
unexpected choice indeed. For the fifth box set I would have expected
a Second Doctor Patrick Troughton season, or perhaps one of the
much-loved final two seasons with Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy
(although one of those followed, and was just released in the UK with
the US version coming next month). Instead, they opted to release the
second season from Sixth Doctor Colin Baker; season 23 of the overall
series.
Colin
himself has grown into a very popular Doctor over the years, thanks
largely to his run of excellent audio serials produced by Big Finish
Productions, which really allowed his gruff and sardonic Sixth Doctor
to shine. But while he is very good as The Doctor, his era was
famously a mess, and his two seasons are widely considered to be two
of the worst, although they did at least produce a few good story
arcs like the excellent Vengeance on Varos
and the fascinating but flawed Revelation of the Daleks.
It wasn't his fault; his era was plagued by behind-the-scenes tension
and drama as the working relationship between the two showrunners,
producer John Nathan-Turner and head writer Eric Saward, became
increasingly toxic and embittered, and this toxic working environment
caused the show to become very dark and very sloppy, with a few
stories more or less falling apart on-screen. As the show's
increasing darkness and violence alarmed parents and BBC executives,
the show was put on hiatus for a season with demands that the team
get their act together; they couldn't, and towards the end of Colin
Baker's second season Eric Saward quit in frustration with the finale
unfinished (it didn't help that the long-time Doctor Who
writer who was supposed to pen the finale died before the script was
done, and no one could figure out what to do about it), and Baker was
unceremoniously fired from the show as viewers not privy to the
behind-the-scenes drama associated his Doctor with the era's failure.
But now, as Colin Baker's cult reputation as a great Doctor trapped
in a deeply flawed era has grown over the years (Peter Capaldi's
ascerbic Twelfth Doctor borrowed heavily from Colin's Sixth, with
much-loved results), BBC video somewhat shockingly decided to make
this embattled season the fifth entry in their blu-ray line. The box
set clearly seems aimed to look honestly at, and hopefully
rehabilitate, the season's reputation, with new extras that pretty
candidly look at what went wrong, and director's cuts of every single
episode. It also includes two director's
cuts of one of the story arcs, Terror of the Vervoids,
one of which is a standalone re-edit removed from the season's
overarching story. With all this new evidence, can the re-trial of
The Trial of a Time Lord
cast this most-maligned season in a better light?
The
Trial of a Time Lord
is very interesting and unique in concept. As mentioned earlier, the
structure of a classic-series Doctor
Who season
was typically a chain of four-to-six-part serials which more or less
stand on their own apart from one another, with minimal overarching
story to the larger season; a structure very friendly to syndication,
especially since BBC's biggest foreign importer of the show, PBS,
showed each arc as a single movie-length edit, similar to the
movies-as-TV-episodes format of Sherlock.
There were only four times in Doctor
Who's
26 seasons when the show employed full-season (or most-of-a-season)
story arcs that bridged multiple serials: The
Key to Time Saga
starring Tom Baker, which occupied the entire six-story-arc season
16, The
E-Space Trilogy
starring Tom Baker, which occupied half of his final season, The
Black Guardian Trilogy
starring Peter Davison, which was a 20th-anniversary-season special
event, and The
Trial of a Time Lord.
The
concept of the season reflects the state that the show itself was in
at the time: after its hiatus and the demand that John Nathan-Turner
and Eric Saward get the show back on track or face cancellation,
Doctor
Who itself
was very much on trial. As such, the arc they attempted saw The
Doctor himself on trial, for breaking the laws of time. The courtroom
arguments in a space-station courthouse above Gallifrey form the
narrative wraparound for the entire season, with three individual
story arcs presented as evidence from The Doctor's past, present, and
future, and the court proceedings themselves eventually turning into
the fourth story arc. It's an interesting concept; the problem from
the beginning is that (aside from a genuinely impressive and probably
very expensive opening effects shot of the TARDIS being pulled into
the massive space station) the trial scenes just are not very good.
They're clunky, cumbersome, filled with a lethal combination of
sci-fi technobabble and Gallifreyan law jargon, and just don't work
particularly well as a narrative device. Repeatedly coming back from
the individual stories to courtroom commentary and bickering tends to
harm the momentum of the stories themselves, and the use of future
events as evidence doesn't make a whole lot of sense, even in the
context of a time-travel show. It's an interesting gamble, but
breaking the stories up in this way just wasn't a very good idea; it
would have been better if the episodes started and ended with
courtroom material, but the flashbacks/flashforwards to the stories
themselves could have been uninterrupted in the bodies of the
episodes. Looking past the inherently not-that-good nature of the
wraparound story, however, the three individual arcs that make up the
bulk of the season range from pretty effective to very good, even if
two of them are a bit too familiar. In this two-part review series we'll examine the new director's cuts of all four stories (two in each installment), and see how this most divisive season holds up in its new format.
The Mysterious Planet, by Robert Holmes:
Robert
Holmes was a long-time writer on the series, going all the way back
to the 1968 Second Doctor serial The
Krotons.
He created two fan-favorite recurring monsters, the Autons and the
Sontarans, and he formed half of arguably the most iconic team of
showrunners in the history of the classic series with Philip
Hinchcliffe. The Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, with Fourth Doctor Tom
Baker, was known for its blend of sci-fi, gothic horror, and dark
fantasy elements, with fan-favorites like the Lovecraftian The
Pyramids of Mars,
the Mary Shelley-inspired The
Brain of Morbius,
and the Sherlock-Holmes-meets-Jack-the-Ripper-meets-H.P.-Lovecraft
genre mash-up The
Talons of Weng-Chiang.
Robert Holmes continued to write for the show for the remainder of
his career even after he stepped down as co-showrunner, writing some
of the most well-regarded episodes of the series, including the
brilliant finale to the Fifth Doctor Peter Davison era, The
Caves of Androzani.
But by the time The
Trial of a Time Lord
rolled around, Holmes was getting older and growing ill, and that
kind of shows in his opening arc, The
Mysterious Planet.
This
is by no means a bad arc; far from it. It has a lot of very strong
points, chiefly a great premise, an intriguing villain, some
interesting supporting characters, and a very fun antihero co-star.
The story finds The Doctor and Peri investigating a Mysterious
Planet
that has suspiciously similar properties to Earth, and they quickly
realize that it in fact IS Earth; a far-future Earth that has somehow
been stolen and moved to a totally different place in the universe,
amid some sort of cataclysmic event that has split the remnants of
humanity into two very different and isolated dystopian societies. As
they try to solve the mystery of how and why this happened, they
become embroiled in a conflict between the quasi-Medieval feudal
society that half of humanity has devolved into, and a
hyper-intelligent robot which rules the planet from beneath with a
human slave force that makes up the other half, but whose AI
consciousness has literally gone insane. And they also must contend with a
cruel but comic outer-space bounty-hunter who also has mysterious
reasons to be there. It's a solid premise based around a strong
central mystery, the concept of an insane AI makes for a very
intriguing (if sometimes rather silly) villain, and the roguish,
double-dealing bounty hunter Sabalom Glitz adds some welcome comedy
to the proceedings. The problem with it, and the key indicator that
Holmes was struggling to produce new material in his sickly state, is
that it is very, very similar to several scripts that Holmes worked
on in the past. In particular, it strongly recalls elements of four
of the six story arcs from The
Key to Time Saga – The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, The
Androids of Tara, and
The Power of
Kroll.
Holmes wrote two of those, but was involved enough with the writer's
room during that season that he likely had a hand
in all four. In varying ways they all involve sci-fi stories set in
future (or alien) societies that nonetheless show hallmarks of
Medieval, feudal, or pirate-plagued past eras of humanity. Even in
The Key to Time
these stories start to feel a tad repetitious, even if individually
they are all very good; that The
Mysterious Planet
feels like The Key
to Time
greatest-hits compilation is both telling of that fact, and revealing
of just how much Holmes was recycling past material rather than
coming up with new material. This isn't a death blow to the story;
it's still very effective in its own right, a lot of fun, and
probably better if you haven't seen that past season. It has some
truly inspired moments, like the members of its
two-million-years-in-the-future human society mistaking a recovered
copy of Moby Dick
for a long-lost religious text like the Dead Sea Scrolls (“Mow By
Dick – it tells of an ancient water diety!”). It's just the kind
of story that has been done better elsewhere in Doctor
Who,
including by its own writer.
This is the story arc that benefits the least from a director's cut;
Holmes knew what he was doing by this point, and he wrote his scripts
to the specifications of four half-hour episodes very well. Nothing
had to be cut for content, and only a small handful of short scenes
were cut for time, mostly in the first episode where some of his
material was trimmed to allow time for the introduction of the trial
wraparound. Granted, I hadn't seen this episode in several years, but
I can honestly say that I did not notice any of the restored scenes until I watched them isolated in the special features. It
also really does not fit within the trial context very well; one
assumes that Holmes wrote it as a standalone story first and
retrofitted the trial stuff in, sometimes awkwardly. Multiple times
during each episode either The Doctor or the judge ask why scenes are
relevant to the court proceedings, and why the court is being shown
this at all; the villainous prosecutor The Valeyard merely says some
variation of “it will become apparent” every time. The audience
can't help but agree, though: there is no good reason why this whole
story would be submitted as evidence, and most of it is wholly
irrelevant to the trial concept. Of course, we aren't asking why we
are being shown the story; we are asking why the story is being
interrupted by these dry trial scenes that fully admit their own
irrelevancy. It's a shame that this story didn't get a standalone,
trial-free director's cut like Terror of the Vervoids; it
probably would be better that way.
Score:
Mindwarp, by Philip Martin:
By a wide margin, the best story arc of the entire Colin Baker era is
season 22's Vengeance on Varos, a brilliant, scathing,
decades-ahead-of-its-time extra-dark social satire about a cruel
society where torture and execution are broadcast as reality
television, and the loser of presidential elections is killed on-air
when the votes are tallied up. Colin got at least a handful of good
story arcs, but Varos is the one that manages to be truly
great, and worthy of ranking among the show's best; I would put it in
my top 5 classic Doctor Who stories. So it is no surprise that
the best story arc in The Trial of a Time Lord (as broadcast,
anyway – we'll soon see if the trial-less director's cut of Terror
of the Vervoids changes this) is a semi-sequel to Varos
penned by the same writer, Philip Martin. Unlike the overly familiar
and derivative Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp is a very original
tale, and is also the only one of the three primary story arcs from
this season to do anything particularly interesting with the trial
wraparound story, using the villainous Valeyard as a (possibly)
unreliable narrator. It is a very divisive love-it-or-hate-it story
arc, because it goes to some very dark places that the show usually
does not – not least of which is turning The Doctor into something
of a villain – but I'm firmly in the “love it” category,
despite a few flaws that can still be found; the risks it takes pay
off in a very memorable tale.
This is a most unusual Doctor Who story (maybe even a
one-of-a-kind) in that it has two unreliable narrators, and the
audience has no way of knowing what is actually true. From early on
in the story, The Doctor insists that the evidence is being tampered
with and falsified by The Valeyard in order to frame The Doctor into
looking like the villain of the piece. This is without a doubt true,
at least to a degree, but we have no way of knowing exactly how much
has been falsified. The Doctor is surely right that at least some of
what we see didn't actually happen (or at least, not in this way),
but it's hard to know where that ends and the other unreliable
narrator begins. From the time he falls victim to Sil's
mind-alteration machine, The Doctor does in fact start behaving like
a villain, and is clearly not himself for most of the story. In the
courtroom he doesn't even remember most of these events as a result
of his brain being scrambled by the titular mindwarp. So how much of
what we see is the brainwashed Doctor genuinely being a villain, and
how much is the manipulation of The Valeyard? That is largely for us
to decide, since only The Valeyard knows, and he certainly isn't
telling.
Recognize this specimen in the mad scientist's lab? |
Unfortunately neither the script nor the acting is this uniformly
strong across the board. The story arc had a troubled production,
with a lot of tension between Philip Martin who, along with Eric
Saward, wanted the arc to be as dark and troubling as Vengeance on
Varos, and John Nathan-Turner and the BBC who wanted to soften
the tone and interject more humor to avoid controversy. There are
moments of levity added by Martin that genuinely work (a lazy and
self-pitying security guard of Sil's species who is someone we have
all worked with at some point in our careers), but there are others
that stink of studio interference. The arc features a famously
over-the-top, scenery-chewing, deliberately camp performance by Brian
Blessed as a totally ridiculous warrior king with a fanatical martyr
complex and the hots for Peri. From the perspective of silly '80s
camp his performance is a total riot, and loads of scenery-devouring
fun. But he seems like he is in a completely different story from
everyone else, and his insane over-the-top antics heavily undercut
the darker elements of the tale. Of course, that was literally John
Nathan-Turner's idea, and I can't entirely say it's a bad thing
because Blessed's King Yrcarnos is very fun in his own right, and
steals every scene, but the decision to play him this way makes the
whole arc much more tonally uneven than it would have been had the
character been more restrained.
Mindwarp is a story arc that benefits from a director's cut a
bit more than its predecessor. Just less than ten minutes of extended
scenes are added throughout, and they add some pretty valuable
character and story development, as well as adding some extra
attention to the tone, and providing a slightly more violent version
of the story's notorious climax. The changes do not fundamentally
change the story, but they do make it better, giving some elements
room to breathe, and further developing both The Doctor's mindwarped
villain persona and the idea that The Valeyard is manipulating all of
this as an unreliable narrator. Given that last point, Mindwarp
really needs the trial setting to work, and unfortunately couldn't
get a standalone director's cut without it, even though it might be
better that way, as the great majority of the trial material still
just isn't very good, despite being more relevant. As such, this
uncut version won't make a night-and-day difference and change
anyone's mind about the story; if you're in the hate-it camp, you'll
probably still hate it, but if you're in the love-it camp like I am,
this version certainly makes it better.
Score:
Next time, though, we do get to see how one of the Trial stories
works outside of the courtroom framing device, as Terror of the
Vervoids makes its debut as a standalone director's cut...
- Christopher S. Jordan
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