144: Trial of a Timelord: The Mysterious Planet

8/26/08

Wow. Where to start? I'll give a brief rundown of the plot, but there's a lot to say about this one.

The TARDIS is pulled, forcibly, across space and into a space station, where it ejects the Doctor, alone, into a large room, totally dark, with a chair. Across the room, a man greets him and tells him to have a seat. The Doctor is dazed. He doesn't know where he is or how he got there. When he sits, the lights come up and the doors open as an entire jury walks into the room. He is in a courtroom, and he is now on trial by the Timelords for violating their first law, which forbids interference in outside worlds.

To get the full impact of this story, you have to know a little bit about what was going on behind the scenes at this point. I'll talk in much more detail about this when I do my "6th Doctor: A Look Back" in a day or two. Basically, the powers that be at the BBC, mainly the controller, Michael Grade, did not like Colin Baker and did not like the direction the show was going in. He said it was overly violent and thought it to be a waste of time, money, and energy of the BBC. He forced the show to take an 18 month hiatus, and when the show came back in 1986, it was reduced from the standard 26 or 27 episodes to a mere 14. What's more, when the season was finished, Michael Grade had Colin Baker fired. This is also the man, who three years later, canceled Doctor Who, where it would not return to television in series form until a decade and a half later.

So we're going into this knowing that the tone has been dramatically shifted. Things are dark, and Trial of a Timelord is a dark story. It shows all over the place. It's in the stories, it's on the screen, and it's in Colin Baker's performance. Peri is gone. We don't yet know what happened to her. The Doctor is on trial for his life. Things have gotten very, very serious.

So we flashback to what forms the bulk of the story. The Doctor and Peri arrive on a planet called Ravalox, much like Earth, but it's not where Earth should be, so is dismissed as being that planet. But in actuality, it IS Earth. How did it get there, two light years from where it should be? We don't get our answers in this story, but rather, later.

On this planet, the Doctor finds that there were huge fires that drove survivors underground. There, a select few have taken the sacred Three Books of Knowledge (Moby Dick, The Water Babies and UK Habitats of the Canadian Goose) and deified them into holy texts. They do not realize that the fires have abated and have not blazed for hundreds of years, and that now there are whole societies of survivors above ground. They are led by a renegade robot who refuses to believe that life exists above ground.

That's all we get in this story, but I was extremely invested in what must follow. This is only the second time in the history of Doctor Who that a whole season was devoted to one story. The other was the Key to Time series, which starred Tom Baker in the role.

The coolest and best thing about this story is the way that the first episode begins. It's honestly the best visual I've ever seen in Doctor Who, and I'm including the new show too. It resonates with me on so many levels. This is what we see:

We open to cold open space. In the distance is a round space station, very large. The camera zooms toward it, and flies over it's surface. When it gets to the center, it begins to spin around the inner walls of the space station, and the stars in the background begin to spin as well, making for an awesome visual, but it's not over yet. Then, a portal opens and a blue beam of light shoots out, dragging the TARDIS through it. We see the TARDIS as it passes, then the camera follows it down the portal, and then the TARDIS materializes in the space station. It seems so simple on the page, but it's breathtaking to me. It's like the shot of that first Star Destroyer in Star Wars: A New Hope.

I couldn't find a good copy of this scene on youtube, but I found a passable one, which comes from a commercial for the story. It's got overdubs and it's got some annoying video elements, and it's really dark, but you can get the scope of what I'm talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2km6b8n44

I left this episode full of questions and with more than a little worry. That's good writing, and that's good storytelling.

I give Trial of a Timelord: The Mysterious Planet a 8/10. I give the first 2 minutes a 10.