“Trial of a Time Lord: Parts 1-4: The Mysterious Planet” – Season 23, Serial 1, Story 144a – The Sixth Doctor is put on trial by the Time Lords for being naughty with time and space. As part of the Valeyard’s prosecution, he forces the Doctor to watch episodes of Doctor Who. First up: the Doctor and Peri’s adventure on Ravolox, which is really Earth, which makes Peri cry. Because Peri Has Had It With All This Adventuring Crap.
The first episode of the season-long TRIAL OF A TIME LORD gets off to such a cracking start it’s a terrible shame that it’s already fallen apart by the end of the first serial. The initial four-episode story, which has come to be known as THE MYSTERIOUS PLANET and sees the show returning to 25-minute episodes, sees the Doctor and Peri landing on Ravolox, which turns out to be Earth from way way way in the future, after parts of the planet have been fireballed. It’s so far in the future that London has turned back into a forest, but not so long that an underground sign indicating they’re at the Marble Arch tube station is unreadable. Go with it. The planet has been moved a couple of light years away from its original location, but we’re not told why, as of yet.
MYSTERIOUS PLANET has so much going for it in the first fifteen minutes that it becomes tragic watching it all dissolve away into a muddled mix of classic WHO staples and modern WHO demands.
The serial opens with the best effects shot I’ve seen in the original DOCTOR WHO run as the camera moves in and around a Time Lord’s space station before our slow pass is interrupted by a burst of light emanating from an open port. The light turns out to be a tractor beam and we see it pull the Doctor’s TARDIS inside. It’s a fantastic shot and a high quality one at that. Unfortunately, as Eric Saward mentions in the bonus features, we then have to go inside the station where the sets are the same lack-of-quality sets we’ve been getting all along.
So even when the show does something right, it just ends up reminding you what it’s doing wrong.
The awesomeness of the opening effects shot gets much discussion in the bonus features, as the effects guys are notably proud of it. Of course, they’re the same guys who created the L1 and L3/Drathro maintenance robots, which aren’t huge improvements from the K1 robot back in Tom Baker’s debut serial, ROBOT.
Which was a decade ago.
One step forward, one step back, and at this point in the DOCTOR WHO run the show has to be doing more than treading water.
After the opening shot, the Doctor exits the TARDIS (no Peri in sight) and enters a courtroom where we find out that the Valeyard is putting him on trial for meddling with space and time. It’s a solid, if not completely new, set-up, but at this point it’s all promising. There’s a real charge of animosity and contempt between the Valeyard and the Doctor that overcomes some admittedly clunky dialogue from the great Robert Holmes. The Doctor continuously resorts to childish name calling to score points against the Valeyard and it gets annoying fast, hurting the courtroom drama, but it all feels like something finally, like there’s a plan and a point that will pay off. But the name calling … yeesh. You don’t see defense attorneys calling Jack McCoy names on Law & Order for good reason – it’s silly. While the John Nathan-Turner regime has been marred by a dearth of humor, the courtroom isn’t the place to be putting it back into the show.
Things start to go wrong when we discover that the Valeyard’s prosecution will consist of the Doctor, and the audience (both internal and external) watching the Doctor’s adventures on Ravolox unfold. The Doctor, in other words, will be forced to watch his own show.
For an entire season.
Such a gimmick might work for an anniversary episode (“Tonight, on a very special episode of DOCTOR WHO …”) but to expect this to last an entire season, especially a season as important as Season 23 (coming off an 18-month hiatus, with orders for only half a normal season’s worth of shows) is a highwire act that Nathan-Turner and Saward probably should have recognized as being a bridge too far.
Coming off that effects shot, drunk with the crackle between the Valeyard and the Doctor, and wanting to give the show a shot, however, I was willing to roll with it as the Doctor, Valeyard, Inquisitor, and jury turn to a big TV on the wall to witness the Doctor and Peri strolling through a forest.
The TV, by the way, is located behind the jury, which means they have to turn around 180 degrees every time the action switches from the TV to the courtroom. Wow is that a bad set design. In the bonus features, Baker mentions that instead of money being spent on that opening effects shot he’d have liked to see it spent on something else – like him. Filming in an actual courtroom would have been nice. Did the Beeb do any courtroom dramas in the mid-80s? Why is this set – which will be used throughout the entire season – constructed in what looks like the butt end of a studio?
As the action switches back to Ravolox, the finest aspect of this serial comes immediately into play – the relationship between the Doctor and Peri. Gone is the pointless, endless bickering, replaced with an obvious affection between the Doctor and his companion. There’s a clear inference that a good deal of time has passed between the end of REVELATION OF THE DALEKS and the beginning of MYSTERIOUS PLANET, and the Doctor and Peri have obviously spent it working out their differences. They walk through the forest, sharing an umbrella, Peri’s arm intertwined in his as she leans against his shoulder, and their attitude towards one another is warm and comfortable, recognizing but playing with their former hostility – the exact opposite of how they were typically portrayed in Season 22.
The show reinforces this newfound maturation by dressing Peri as an actual woman with longer, fuller hair, instead of as a vacationing tourist with her short shorts, revealing tops, and teeny-bopper haircut. A little less something for the dads, apparently, but a little something more for the character and the show.
It’s all a welcome advancement in the characters and it leads you to think that the show has finally realized some of its former mistakes. Perhaps, you start to think, the hiatus has been put to good use by the production staff – like maybe that they actually sat down and tried to figure out what was working and what wasn’t and gave themselves a good helping of honest self-criticism. For all the deserved bashing JNT and Saward take, and as much as JNT’s vision seems as uninterested as it is uninspired, they’re clearly not stupid dudes. Especially Saward, who comes across in the various bonus features as smart and reflective, if a bit dour. With a stronger producer – or with a stronger production vision – he’d probably have made an excellent script editor on WHO because while he comes across as a guy that doesn’t think out of the box, he does seem the sort of chap that can paint inside the box quite effectively – so long as he knows exactly what’s expected of him.
Peri and the Doctor stroll through a forest that Peri mentions feels like Earth, and the Doctor responds that her observation is why they’re here – Ravolox has the same mass as Earth and that’s a very odd thing. Excellent mystery. Excellent reason for being there. The Doctor allows Peri to come to her own conclusions and playfully teases her when she does. 
It’s a short sequence but this stroll through the forest stands with the all-time best Doctor/Companion moments. In the bonus features for the previous season’s TIMELASH, Nicola Bryant admitted that show saw her worst acting performance on DOCTOR WHO; there’s no corollary moment here with Bryant praising her MYSTERIOUS performance as her best, but it is clearly her strongest work to date. Unlike previous serials where Peri’s “Let’s play it safe” whining comes off as pointless, here it has a real power to it. You can tell that being on Earth That’s No Longer Earth really negatively affects her and when she refuses to go down into the tunnels of the underground to investigate alongside the Doctor you can tell that she’s already planning on stepping off the TARDIS ride.
It’s Colin Baker’s, too. He’s absolutely fantastic throughout this serial and it officially solidifies his tenure as a Wasted Opportunity. Even though this isn’t Robert Holmes’ finest script, there’s plenty here for Baker to work with and he attacks the part with a fierceness that seems single-handedly designed to save the show. Every actor playing the Doctor has that moment
when you realize that he’s the Doctor now, when performance and script come together and you can see that he’s finally taken hold of the part, and MYSTERIOUS PLANET is that moment of arrival for Colin Baker.
His arrival comes through the juxtaposition of two moments – between the comfortable playfulness with Peri and the obstinate distaste for the Valeyard and the trial. It’s doubtful, of course, that the show would have markedly different if they could’ve gotten rid of that daft coat, but it’s splintered tackiness has never been more out of place than it is now, as Baker races through the serial being determined, forceful, and with a tempered elitism that demands the respect of everyone in the serial. For the first time in his tenure, he’s clearly THE DOCTOR, recognized both through the power of his performance and through the show’s producers giving him a script with him at the center. So much of the JNT/Saward tenure has been about producing shows in which the inclusion of the Doctor seems a necessary evil, but here the Doctor is front and center with an episode that demands more range from Baker than any preceding serial, and Baker absolutely nails this performance.
(For what it’s worth, I’d argue Tom Baker’s moment of arrival as the Doctor comes in GENESIS OF THE DALEKS when he refuses to blow up the Kaled mutation room that would have destroyed the Daleks in an embryonic state, and Peter Davison’s comes in EARTHSHOCK, when the Doctor cannot save Adric and refutes the idea of going back in time at a later date to save him.)
While the Doctor and Peri are walking through the Earth-like woods, we encounter Sabalom Glitz and Dibber, two criminals with a Holmesian penchant for crackling dialogue. Both characters are fantasticly conceived and portrayed by Tony Selby and Glen Murphy as rogue opportunists who’ve come to Ravolox in order to steal secrets of the Time Lord’s Matrix, which have somehow ended up in the possession of Drathro.
Besides the fun they add to the serial, Glitz and Dibber are also evidence of how much Holmes can work into a script. Questions like how this information has been removed from the Matrix, let alone falling into the hands of a maintenance robot are touched on, but allowed to simmer under the surface instead of being the focus. No one in DOCTOR WHO does narrative broth like Robert Holmes. No one. MYSTERIOUS PLANET is far from Holmes’ best work (he was apparently not well during this period, dying a short time after), but there’s still plenty of juice on display.
Where the serial falls apart is with Drathro and the surface dwellers, a group of wild Euro barbarian types led by Katryca, who hates space travel and is the most unconvincing barbarian leader ever. The tribesmen hate technology but worship a black light converter that powers the robot. None of it works all that well – the robot is neither threatening nor impressive (either in its actions or its look) and the tribesmen look like extras from The Holy Grail that have wandered onto the wrong set. None of it is fully realized and they all come off like speed bumps we have to wade through to get to the good stuff. When Katryca leads her people down into the tunnels you just want them to die so you don’t have to deal with them mucking things up anymore.
Also hurting the effectiveness is the constant switching back and forth from the story to the trial. I could stand it if they would return to the trial to have real arguments but as I mentioned earlier, it dissolves into name calling and procedural tiffs. More damning, however, is that if the premise is that the Valeyard is showing these adventures in order to prove his point, why is he showing so much unnecessary footage? And why show anything with Glitz and Dibber, who clearly mouth “Matrix” when discussing what they’re on Ravolox to steal in front of a roomful of Time Lords? (They do it to raise speculation in the TV audience, but it strains credibility that we can figure it out but a courtroom full of Time Lords can’t.)
Further, why is he showing this adventure other than the fact that the serial needs to show us a new adventure? It would be far more effective to show us bits and pieces from all sorts of adventures instead of one long adventure, and the show could have easily done this by creating small sequences from a whole batch of unseen adventures. (This might be a great way to handle a Multiple Doctor serial.) The fact that they had an entire season of scrapped episode treatments and that they infer all this time between REVELATION and MYSTERIOUS provided a ready-made opportunity that’s just left there to sit.
It’s a shame they didn’t follow through on it, but it’s a bigger shame that MYSTERIOUS PLANET has so much going for it and yet still manages to fall apart. It is a very watchable episode but there’s just far too much here that annoys to elevate it to anything more than a solid, average episode.
There’s even a new, limp reworking of the opening theme to contend with for TRIAL OF A TIME LORD. It doesn’t kill the serial, but it doesn’t help, either. When you watch the bonus features and find out they only gave the new guy a week to do it, and he’d never worked on WHO before, and he didn’t even have a full range of equipment to work with … yeah, sometimes the little things say it better than the big things.
