Who Review: The Trial of a Time Lord

If you are questioning its veracity, is there any point in continuing with the Matrix?
-The Inquisitor

Oh God make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop...

Starting with the most obvious question and going from there: who thought we'd want 12 weeks of people in stupid hats watching Doctor Who and commenting about how violent it is, followed by 2 weeks of confusion and technobabble? Who thought it would be a good idea to use the Trial as a framing device? Who thought the charges could stick at all given what the Time Lords made the Doctor do in his 3rd and 4th incarnations? Who thought it would be a good idea to derail the only good story this year by making our brains do cartwheels as we try to keep track of what's real and what's not?

The Valeyard: HOW? WHAT?

(Here's a completely unrelated question: how come we're still viewing the 13-life limit in The Deadly Assassin as legitimate even though the very existence of Colin Baker's Doctor doesn't gel with the number of men in wigs we see in The Brain of Morbius? If we take that serial's evidence as the truth, Tom Baker is actually Doctor #12, the Watcher is the distillation between the 12th and 13th incarnations, and Colin is #14...)

Anyway, the Valeyard is a distillation of all the Doctor's evil. Let's take stock. (I'll revert back to the "official" numbering system now.) 7 (McCoy) is going to be dark and manipulative, and he's going to blow up a planet that, according to one section of the fandom, does somehow not richly deserve it. 8 is going to nuke Gallifrey. 10 is going to commit genocide against the Racnoss. There's clearly a lot of evil to come from the Doctors between 6 and 13... and yet, apparently, the Valeyard seems ready to wipe them all out of existence. This leaves 1, who once tried to brain a caveman with a rock; 2, who bonked someone's head against a table to prove they had a headache; 3, who, um... could have been less sentimental towards the Master; 4, whose greatest "evil" act was arguably one of omission (but Genesis of the Daleks is another can of worms); and 5, who seems to always drop into war zones and manages to save very few people. Yeeeeeeeah, planet-killers, assassins and revolutionaries these guys really aren't.

Whatever. I don't claim to know how evil really works, especially not in Who-science. The Valeyard's identity was kept vague because the producer didn't want to shoehorn Michael Jayston back into the series once Doctor Number Thirteen finally rolls around... which brings up two points.

1) Nu Who has referenced this serial about as many times as it has the TV movie. That is to say, none at all. This is a show where the Macra, whose debut serial no longer exist, get to be the monsters again blah blah blah even the Nu Who producers don't really like this one.

2) Ten regenerated twice (yes, the fake-out in "The Stolen Earth" counts as a regenration). Matt Smith may be the Eleventh Doctor, but he only has one regeneration left. Can you understand why I'm annoyed that the Dream Lord didn't turn out to be the Valeyard in "Amy's Choice?"

Okay, back on course again... Let's look at the Valeyard's plan. He makes a deal with the High Council to steal the rest of the Doctor's lives. In exchange, he must cover up the Ravalox affair. So naturally, his very first piece of evidence is... an adventure on Ravalox! Brilliant! (Don't get me started about introducing Glitz and his mission to recover the Time Lords' secrets, and then ignoring all that for two months before finally returning to it.)

Later it turns out that the Valeyard is plotting to blow up the jury. Remember that expensive space-station shot at the beginning of the story? This isn't Gallifrey (which begs the question of how the hell they can enter the Matrix - through a freakin' doorway of all things!) All the Valeyard's "megabyte modem" will do is kill a bunch of jurors. Yay! Has he learned nothing about his peoples' power since his second life? (Obviously not, since he would also remember being, to borrow a phrase, a fat idealist with no dress-sense who manages to defeat his own evil future self.)

Oh, at since it happens primarily in his episodes: how did Robert "Master of Dialogue" Holmes ever think we'd accept the Doctor referring to his prosecutor as the Brickyard, the Scrapyard, the Junkyard, the Knacker's Yard, etc, as being worthy of television?

The Doctor's five-minute trial at the end of The War Games meant something. He was on trial for interfering, and he defended himself by saying that evil had to be fought. The judges agreed with him and sent him to Earth to continue doing just that. The series was fundamentally changed, not only because of the Earth-based format of the next three years, but also because now we actually knew a tiny bit about the culture the Doctor ran away from. Trial does no such thing. It ends the exact same way The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors ends, with the Doctor refusing the Presidency, jumping off into the TARDIS, and going on more adventures. Frankly, every time we spend more than a few minutes with the Time Lords, the series takes a few more knocks. Getting rid of them was a smart move by RTD.

Overall, Trial gets a score of 3/10. If the Controller of the BBC didn't have it in for the show, the sensible thing to do would have been to fire the entire production team and start again. Instead, one scapegoat quit, another got fired, the show's last great writer died, but the man who so desperately needed to go was made to stick around for another three years.