-Katryca
I will mercilessly attack the entire The Trial of a Time Lord format when we get to The Ultimate Foe. In the meantime, here is a scathing review of that debacle's first installment.
...Which, actually, doesn't start off all that badly. The Doctor and Peri are being nice to each other for once, and they're on location in a forest as opposed to a BBC Quarry for once, so yay! They've nicely gone and taken the hiatus as read in show-time, so they can get past that boring character development stuff and show Six in a better light.
Peri: Is there any intelligent life here?
Doctor: Apart from me, you mean?
It's a silly joke, but it works. It works mostly because these two have been at each others' throats for so long and have finally loosened up. That, plus the impressive model shot at the beginning, might have actually fooled some people into thinking that this was going to be good.
Then we meet Glitz. His dialogue alternates between this gem from Episode 1:
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." ...Mind you, I had just attempted to kill him.
and this one from Episode 3:
Philanthropist, you ignorant dink!
The first line would have actually been funny if Glitz hadn't used the same sort of big words as his shrink. The second line had no hope. We know Robert Holmes is capable of better stuff than this. We've seen it.
The problem is, Glitz isn't alone in this. The Valeyard has lines like "I intend to adumbrate two typical instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum." No, seriously. Why is Robert Freaking Holmes trying to write like Pip'n'Jane Baker?
...oh right, the whole sick and dying thing.
For those of you who don't know, here's what happened. In the spring of 1985 (that's Season 22 for you laymen), Holmes submitted an outline for a Season 23 story entitled Yellow Fever (and How to Cure It). One assumes it wasn't about the Chinese, but then this is the same person who brought us The Talons of Weng-Chiang, so let's just leave it at that. Then Michael "C*nt" Grade put the show on hiatus for 18 months, and the original Season 23 was scrapped. For some asinine reason, Holmes was paid in full for his outline, which now meant that he owed the BBC at least 4 (and possibly as many as 6) episodes. He began work on The Mysterious Planet and worked with the script editor, Eric Saward, on The Ultimate Foe, but he eventually fell ill and died. Some people have commented that Episode 1 actually does sound like Holmes, except it's still got lines like "I do hate it when people get lucky! It offends my sensibilities," and "I hate competition. Especially when it poaches on my territory." Really, bits and pieces of it sound like Holmes - mostly stuff the Doctor and Peri get to do - but the trial scenes and anything pertaining to Glitz (and least, anything not flagrantly recycled from The Ribos Operation) don't. And speaking of that, you could hear Garron, basically the same character, giving those lines and just barely getting away with them. I really don't like condemning actors because I can't see bad acting unless it actually jumps from "bad" to "atrocious," in which case the director's obviously so incompetent that the entire production is already screwed anyway... but having said that, if you imagine Garron saying some of those lines above, you can hear him just about making them sound convincing. In contrast, Tony Selby looks like he's concentrating more on just remembering the damn things (especially in the exchange about his psychiatrist) than delivering them properly. At any rate, you can read these lines and see that they're absurd. That the role may have been miscast is not an excuse.
Now, I'm beating up on a sick and dying man here, which seems unfair. But this is Robert Holmes we're talking about. He doesn't get a pass because he's normally awesome; if anything, the opposite is true. A serial like The Armageddon Factor is going to get a boost because it's an average serial written by a pair of writers I think were hacks. In contrast, a serial like this is going to get a horrible score from me, because it's a piece of crap written by someone who's normally very good. He wrote both of the best two Doctor Who serials ever, and heavily re-wrote the third. Now, yes, The Talons of Weng-Chiang was directed by David Maloney and had the benefit of being the last one produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe (i.e, nobody was too concerned about overspending). But none of that would have amounted to a hill of beans if the script hadn't been decent; just look at Planet of the Daleks for Maloney's effort when he's given a subpar script. The Mysterious Planet should be the epic swansong of a beloved writer who was taken before his time. Instead what we get is a shoddy re-hash of other Holmes scripts, like The Krotons, The Brain of Morbius, and the better parts of The Ribos Operation. It furthers the downward spiral that began with The Two Doctors, proved, unfortunately, that that serial's shoddiness was not a fluke, and it ended his career on a distinctly sour note. It's notable that the man spent five years away from the show between The Power of Kroll and The Caves of Androzani. When he returned, he pumped out Caves, but in doing so evidently emptied his chamber. It's possible that Caves was the result of every good idea he'd had in the intervening five years condensed into about 100 minutes.
Now, let's talk about what doesn't work. Katryca sure as hell doesn't. Here's a frame from the same scene as the page quote:
If you can't see at least three things wrong in this frame, quit now. The set is overlit, the costumes are God-awful, and Katryca is proving that Colin Baker is not nearly as guilty of overacting as people seem to think.
Then there's Sabalom Glitz, a mercenary cut from the same mold as Garron (see The Ribos Operation) but who got saddled with some truly awful dialogue.
Next, there was an entire subplot about Andromedan "sleepers" that was cut from the finished script... except that there are still references to it throughout the plot. Now, I'm more willing than some people to give Eric Saward some slack, but seriously, was the man doing his job?
There's the L1 robot, which trumps the Daleks in both "how did they do that" and impracticality. There's the L3, which we're supposed to be fooled into thinking isn't a man in a suit just because we can't see the zipper. WHY do people think they have a license to overact if we can't see their face? At no point during any of his wild gesticulatons do we ever seriously think that Drathro is believable as a robot.
There's the problem in-context with the trial, in that, not counting Drathro, three people die, and none of those deaths can really be said to be on the Doctor's conscience. And as he says, he saved the entire Universe (maybe) in this story.
And finally there's the entire Trial format, which can't help intruding here and leading to those bloody "censored" clips.
Requiescat in pace.
Number of times the plot is interrupted by the Trial scenes: too many
Number of times the Doctor refers to the Valeyard as "The _____yard": too many
If this story were written by Joe Brown and not given the hideous trial frame, I'd give it a 5 out of 10, The Mind Robber and City of Death being 10. I'm going to take off a point because of the moronic trial interruptions (which is going to happen to every story this season), and another because Robert Holmes' name is on the credits and it sucks. I'm going to add a point back on because the man was ill, for a final score of 4 out of 10. Bear in mind that the highest-rated Colin Baker story, Revelation of the Daleks, got a 6. So relative to the Sixth Doctor's era, this story gets something like 7 out of 10.
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