Who Review: Terror of the Vervoids

This is a situation that requires tact and finesse. Fortunately, I am blessed with both.
-The Doctor

It may come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about this story (well, other than the bit about the what the monsters look like) that the script iself is not as big a failing as everyone thinks it is. Yes, it's got plot holes so big you could pilot the Hyperion III through them and dialogue so dense the black hole couldn't compress it any further, but, basically, the script is a rehash of The Robots of Death with vegetables instead of robots and a few extra bad guys. We know that studio-bound murder mysteries can work. The problem with Terror of the Vervoids is that nobody is on the same page, and with that, we take you to the plot.

The trial has been in recess while the Doctor copes with Peri's death. (And incidentally, we get a glimpse of that very rare creature: Subdued Colin Baker.) When it resumes, the Doctor begins presenting his evidence. He decides to present an adventure from his own future, his defense being "I will get better." Apparently this is acceptable under Time Lord law. This is less preposterous than it seems, since Article XVII allows murder suspects to run for President and in doing so delay punishment for their crimes, and Article VII, as we learn at the end of this story, forbids genocide without exception (which begs the question of just what the Time Lords wanted the Doctor to accomplish in Genesis of the Daleks, but I digress).

So he intercepts a distress call from a passenger ship and goes to help. Since I put Remembrance of the Daleks as one of the best five stories of all time, you know I can't complain about the music too much but... good God, the music in that TARDIS scene compelled me to stop watching and listen to the Beatles for a few minutes before continuing.

And here we get introduced to the cast of characters, "one of whom," the Doctor tells us, "will be come a murderer." We have Janet, the put-upon stewardess. We have two aliens who can't breathe oxygen, and so wear black facemasks. We have Professor Lasky and her associates, Doland and Bruchner. We have the chief of security, Rudge, who will tell you at the slightest provocation that this is his last flight before retirement, so you know he's not going to live. There's Hallett, who pretends not to know another passenger, Kimber, even though that man clearly recognizes him (I had flashbacks to season one of Mad Men watching that scene).

Oh, there's also Commodore Tonker Travers, who actually knows the Doctor from a previous adventure and gives him a long enough leash to do all the hero-y things he has to do. So yay. There's one thing in this serial's favor: it does not rehash the tired old formula of "there's a murder, blame the guy nobody knows" that permeated pretty much every other Tom Baker story.

...and lastly there are the Vervoids themselves. I'd post a picture of them here, but frankly the internet is full of images of things that look an awful lot like them. Their appearance is the most obvious sign that something, somewhere, has gone horribly horribly wrong.

But before that, let's just take a look at the starship. The designers here have the same problem that the designers for Star Trek XI had, in that no part of the ship looks anything like any other part. The gaudy passenger lounge looks like it belongs outside the Doctor's courtroom, not on the same ship as the black-and-silver bridge and the Alien-esque cargo hold.

Hold up, wait, stop there for just a second. I want to point this out. I think the cargo hold wins the Best Set of the Season award, I really do. It beats out even the magic paintbox pink sea in the previous story. Again, its competition is largely crap, consisting of a terrible courtroom, an overlit tunnel, an unconvincing hut, an overlit lab, and some caves with strobe lights in their ceilings. This is precisely what I mean about nobody being on the same page, though. There's a great set, and the script does have moments of brilliance, but the rest of the design, from the tracksuits to the Vervoids, is insane and the script has moments of sheer lunacy. The script's faults you can chalk up to... er, Saward had pretty much jumped ship by this point, so the usual scapegoat is out. Hell, in some respects, this story stands as proof that however badly he screwed up on occasion, he did a very important job that nobody else seemed able to fill at the time.

Back to the plot. The Doctor's jazzercizing compaion, Mel, chats up a redshirt - sorry, wrong series - Guy Who's Clearly Not Going To Be Around For Very Long (hereafter abbreviated GWCNGTBAFVL). He agrees to show her around the cargo bay where some odd pods are being kept - and promptly gets electrocuted in a hilariously over-the-top scene. Mel screams.

Fortunately, Doctor Fashion Disaster is on the case! Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of backstabbing going on among the other crew - including one hilarious scene where one scientist is clearly all set to burn some papers and thereby destroy all records of their research, because, y'know, computers don't do anything in the future. Also the security chief is in league with the aliens and they try to take over the ship in order to pad the plot out for a little bit longer. This ends with them getting killed, but meanwhile the Genital Monsters are going around killing people. Eventually the Doctor gasses them all, but not before Mel gets in a few more screams.

At the very end, the Valeyard declares the the Doctor is guilty of committing genocide against the Vervoids. The Doctor says he had no choice, that the Vervoids would have wiped out all life on Earth. My question: where was that resolve when he was still Scarfman, holding those two wires together but apparently unable to wipe out something that he himself had compared to a disease not half an hour previously? It's at this point that the Doctor, McGann not withstanding, because Mr. No-Second-Chances. In his next incarnation, he's going to wipe out Skaro and go toe-to-toe with a god or two. (Then he's going to preach about not fighting like animals in his final episode, but I digress.) But it's here that the us-or-them mentality finally acknowledges itself for the first time, really, since Patrick Troughton told us that there were some corners of the Universe that have bred the most terrible things, things that must be fought.

Anyway, Gallifreyan law frowns rather heavily on this sort of thing, which is weird seeing as they once asked Scarfman to commit genocide against the Daleks. You'd think the Doctor would be aware of this law - notice he never says that this part of the evidence was tampered with. If he was trying to find evidence somewhere in his time-stream that he got involved at someone else's request, why not look at the entire UNIT era? Why not haul the Brigadier in as a character witness? Why would he show the court the one instance of him actually wiping out an enemy threat once and for all?

Final score for Terror of the Vervoids is 2/10. It's the definitive proof that a) the trial format was a stupid, stupid idea, and b) having Saward as a script editor is better than having no script editor at all.