The Sweeney: Ringer

 "Who's Godot?"

"Plays full back for QPR."

I knew of The Sweeney, of course. I certainly knew the theme tune, one of those based nicely around the syllables of the name of the programme. I knew "get your trousers on, you're nicked". I knew John Thaw was in hisearly thirties, looking somehow much older... but then, everyone seemed to in the '70s. The endless nicotine and the Lutwaffe, no doubt. 

And yes, I knew it was incredibly laddish, about the Flying Squad, the East End, and policing in a world before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a very different world. So... is the first episode what I expected?

Well, yes. It is. This episode is a nice little opener, establishing what Regan and Carter are like, whata maverick Regan is, how his strai-laced superintendent can't stand him. It shows us a vanished East End underworld not long after the Krays. It shows us a world, not long agos, when photographs needed to be developed. It establishes that this is going to be great actor spotting fun- we have Brian Blessed and Ian Hendry as gangsters, and June Brown as a little scrote's mum. 

It also shows us the '70s, though. The clothes, the different values- Life on Mars for real- and the cars, oh the cars.

I think I'm going to like this...

I, Clavdivs: Old King Log

"The man who dwells by the pool shall open Graves..."

The first episode, which seems so long ago, featured an interesting bit of breakage to the fourth wall early on as, while Augustus, Marcus Agrippa and co reclined and chatted, a couple of minor characters discussed how the old days never truly existed, that the past is an illusion. That was a clear acknowledgement by Jack Pulman that we rely on sources but we can never arrive at real historical truth, and certainly not via Suetonius.

And so it’s appropriate that, in this final episode, realism breaks down somewhat and the fourth wall is constantly pointed at- and not only in the above quote from Claudius’ farewell speech to the Senate, where he refers to Jack Pulman and Robert Graves. No; in this final episode Claudius has become convinced that he erred in ruling wisely; he reconciled Rome to monarchy instead of discrediting it. So Old King Log resolves to “let all the poisons that lurk in the mud gat h it”, leaning into the Sibylline Prophecy. So he marries his niece and favours Nero as heir over his own son Britannicus. In doing so he raises himself from a mere principal character almost to the status of author, truly Claudius the God. This is often humorous, as when he exasperates Agripinilla by anticipating her every wish without hiding his contempt. (How come such a noble couple as Germanicus and Aggripina spawned such a nest of monsters?). He exerts control over his own death. Yet the ferryman waits for us all in the end.

There is one thing Claudius can not control- his honourable yet naive son, Britannicus, who refuses to  go along with Claudius’ secret plan because “no one believes in the Republic any more”. Instead he chooses to put on his manly gown and face death. Claudius is not omnipotent, after all.

So Claudius gets his big death scene, and a chat with the Sibyll. We get the cameos we’ve longed for from the characters we missed. We get to know the loathsome Agripinilla and Nero (interesting casting!) who, as we won’t be following their exploits after Claudius, can be portrayed with relish, with Nero noting “What a pretty thing a fire is”. No subtext there...

A fitting end to a drama that is justly seen as one of the finest ever. Who cares about the obvious staginess. This is superlative telly.

I, Clavdivs: Poison Is Queen

"Don't touch the figs..."

Well, even by the high standards of this rightly praised drama, that was exceptional. And this, more than anything, proves that the great Brian Blessed was an actor of incredible depth and subtlety, if not necessarily softly spoken while doing so, and it's such a great shame that he very shortly after became typecast as shouty barbarians.

So Germanicus returns to a warm and brotherly reunion with an unhappily married Claudius, and at last hears and believes the news about Postumus' framing for rape and Livia's misdeeds- although, I'm glad to see, not without a very #MeToo nod to the fact that actual rapists use such excuses all the time.

In the very next scene Augustus clearly knows everything, and is very cagey about Livia. Rightly so; his eyes may now be open, but will soon be closed forever. His secret reunion with Postumus is deeply emotional for both men, yes, although Augustus' tears are self-indulgent as ever, but they must tread with care and it is, in truth, far too late. Livia is running rings round them throughout, whether secretly getting access to Augustus' altered will, ensuring the despairing Tiberius is not far away, or finally managing to poison the rightfully paranoid Augustus to death. Too late. poison is queen, and Postumus is doomed, although in the process we meet the ruthless Sejanus, played with icy steel by a young and only very slightly balding Patrick Stewart. It's all moving towards an inevitable conclusion, but you can't take your eyes off it even if the whole thing looks absurdly studio-bound at times.

But Livia, blinded by her cruel dismissal of Claudius. never suspects his part in revealing the truth, and she constantly humiliates him throughout, culminating in that final scene where a somewhat pissed Livia, having achieved what she wanted, mocks Claudius while telling him too much. Sian Phillips is one of the great villains of television history. And what an episode.What writing. What acting. 

I Clavdivs: What Shall We Do About Claudius?

“Are you sure this girl will marry him?”

“What’s it to do with her?”

In a sense, I suppose, you could say that this episode’s plot is largely a continuation of previous episodes in that Livia is still scheming to get rid of all rivals to her sullen son Tiberius so he can succeed Augustus- in this case Postumus, played here by a frighteningly young version of the baddie from RoboCop 3.

But it’s not about the mere plot, of course, entertaining though the scheming may be. No; it’s about the people, the acting, the clever scripting. It’s about the way Livia traps the charmingly thick Livilla (a young Patricia Quinn just after Rocky Horror) into betraying her lover Postumus, running rings around her. It’s about how Postumus blurts out Livia’s entire catalogue of murders to Augustus just before his exile to a tiny island, to the Emperor’s scorn- but manages to reveal all to Claudius first. This smells very much of foreshadowing.

It’s just as much about little moments, too. Augustus appreciating Horace but disparaging Ovid for “smut”. Augustus shouting “Quinctilius Varus, where are my eagles?” as three legions are massacred in the Teutoberg Forest; it’s 9AD, and Augustus is an old man with a lot on his shoulders. Livia’s hilariously psychopath is speech to the gladiators- “These games are being degraded by the use of professional tricks to stay alive, and I won’t have it!”, along with the entire imperial family being perfectly fine with the gruesome spectacle, in scenes more obviously set in a small studio than most. At the Games, we are so very obviously looking at a theatre set with a camera pointed at it, but we are far too engrossed to mind.

But the main purpose is to introduce the young adult Claudius, with Derek Jacobi appearing for the first time without prosthetics in an extraordinary performance. Humiliated, belittled, despiser by his own mother and an embarrassment to all, he causes laughter at his wedding to a woman who dwarfs him . But he is an intelligent and principled young man, as devoted to the republic as his father. And the historian Pollio encourages him to play up his infirmities in order to outlive those who threaten him. It’s an artfully constructed episode, building up Claudius within the flashback narrative alongside plenty of wit and black humour, while moving Livia’s plotting to a point where next episode has to give us some kind of climax.

I Clavdivs: Waiting in the Wings

“IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER???!!!”

Sometimes it’s hard finding a quote. Today is not one of those times.

We ended last episode with Tiberius in exile for violence against his wife, Julia, Augustus’ daughter, while Caesar’s grandchildren Gaius and Lucius were being groomed for power. Well, Gaius has already had a “sudden and unexplained death”; I’m sure Livia was shocked. Now, as she spends the episode plotting to have Tiberius recalled, I’m sure she’s anxious for poor Lucius. It would be a shame if anything were to... happen to him. All very similar in shape to last episode, then, except that Claudius is now a limping, stuttering child thought a fool by everyone. Like Tristram Shandy, it’s taken a while but he’s got past his own birth in his autobiography.

Last episode I failed to note a few actor spotting moments, not the least of which was Granny Pig from Peppa Pig (a key cultural touchstone to we parents if young children) discoursing on anal sex. Well, Julia is now, having been told last episode to lay off a bit, shagging around with wild abandon and her terrible downfall and exile is, I suppose, the central plot line of the episode, giving us a chance to see some splendid plotting by Livia and leaving Julia both sweating revenge against Livia and with a fairly clear idea of what’s been happening. It’s all very clever plotting at the same time as giving some superb actors a chance to have some real fun with some delightfully scheming characters. Sian Phillips is deliciously evil here, with loads more to come. But BRIAN BLESSED, beneath the SHOUTING, give a wonderfully subtle performance of avuncular bonhomie which can switch to menacing in an instant. Livia may manage to manipulate him on family issues, but this is a believable, power-hungry Augustus, albeit one who has long grown used to power and is now saddened by the tragedies that seem so inexplicably to befall his blood descendants.

In the middle of the episode is an odd omen that seems to predict Claudius’s rise, followed by some wonderful dialogue between Livilla and Antonia as she wishes herself dead before Claudius should ever come to power and is promptly send to bed without any supper, an appropriate prefiguring of Livilla’s own manner of death.

There’s also a lot of witty commentary in the dialogue on Rome and its ways- Julia and Antonia bemoan the unreliability is slaves these days, while Augustus forces his knights to get themselves married- “And don’t try to get round it by getting engaged to nine year old girls. I know that dodge”. But all this is overshadowed by Julia’s exposure, and by THAT scene. It may be a famous shouty Brian Blessed scene. It’s also an extraordinary piece of acting. Although personally I also love Kevin Stoney as fraudulent astrologer (but I repeat myself) Thrasyllus as Tiberius shares with him a dramatic reversal of fortune and is unexpectedly recalled to Rome. Their fit of laughter as they hear of Lucius’ seemingly natural deaths is utterly wonderful.

But now stage young Postumus is joint heir with Tiberius. And he’s intelligent to know this probably isn’t good for his life expectancy. So ends another magnificent episode, but I suspect I’ll be ending all the rest of these blog posts with similar sentiments.

I, Clavdivs: A Touch of Murder

"It never was what it was..."

It's 20th September 1976. I am as yet a very small collection of cells in my mother's womb, a bizarre thought, and on BBC One there begins the first feature length episode of I, Clavdivs, the BBC's new prestige drama adapting Robert Graves' novels I Claudius and Claudius the God, both of which I recommend heartily, or at any rate at least those parts of the novels that don't require any location filming.

Because that's the thing; there are no locations, no handheld camerawork. Instead there are small sets where you can tell the sets dressing extends no further than is visible on screen. It's theatre with a camera pointed at it, with only lip service made to realism. It relies only vaguely on spectacle; it's entirely about the acting and the script. And, my God, it's magnificent. I would never want them to take away today's location filming and handheld cameras, but we shall never again see the likes of I, Clavdivs.

We begin, after a title sequence that I'd quite forgotten would later inspire the titles of Black Adder II, in the present day in, I think, the 50s AD, with that young Derek Jacobi aged up as the elderly Emperor Claudius as he prepares a framing device, Greek chorus to his own autobiography with the added Greek touch of a riddle from the Sibyl. Then we are in flashback, the seventh anniversary of Mark Antony's defeat at Actium so 24BC, where there is dancing with boobies and our dramatis personae- the splendid Brian Blessed as Augustus in a large yet subtle and nuanced performance that is the highlight of his career, and rivals Herod Agrippa, the old warhorse, and young favourite Marcellus. We also have Augustus's sister Octavia mother to Marcellus, and his wife (and Caesar's only child) Julia- keep up at the back. And at the centre of the web we have Livia.

So we're all set for a long game of- well, definitely not thrones, that's for sure, because Rome doesn't do kings. Oh no. Definitely not. Because Augustus can't wait to lay down his temporary burdens and the republic will be back again like it was in the recent past, right? But before this we get an extraordinary fourth wall-breaking moment as a Greek orator and an actor playing an actor have their faces foregrounded over the main characters and lament how the theatre is not what it was, and never was  in th first place. We are deliberately reminded of the artificiality of all this, that Suetonius may well have been writing out of his arse, and even (by Augustus) that history is not being told as it was but with poetic licence. All this is quite wonderful.

We see the early power games between Agrippa and Marcellus, until first the latter and then the former are fatally poisoned by Livia, whose choice of words is exquisite as she "helps" her sick victims, in order to maneouvre her glum and awkward son Tiberius to the top spot. We see the contrast between Tiberius' weakness and deep depression versus his heroic and cheery brother Drusus, who hopes for a republic but, alas, has a mother who hates him and happens to be Livia.

Augustus is the consummate psychopathic politician, a mafia don, whose every act is politically calculated and whose calculated bonhomie covers a terrifying ruthlessness. And Rome is a goldfish bowl where marriages, divorces, sex and happiness are but political tools. Power pervades every action. Tiberius' self-loathing is quite understandable.

We end with Drusus' suspicious death, with deeper darkness engulfing both Tiberius and the widowed Antonia, a crying baby, and Claudius in the present day with his food taster, suspicious that his wife and stepson are trying to kill him, because such is Rome. It's a richly written, superbly acted bit of telly history and I don't care about the very 1976 hair of young Gaius and Lucius, Livia's next victims. I'm loving this already.

Henry V (1989)

"I'm afeared there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?"

This is the second screen adaptation of this play that I've seen and blogged after The Hollow Crown, albeit one made twenty-three years earlier, and the differences are stark from the opening scene, where Derek Jacobi's chorus awakens us by lighting a match. This introduces two themes: this production's constant okay with light and it's claustrophobic feeling, indoors and on small sets as much as possible and with the location scenes shot so as not to look expansive. Hal finds the crown as uneasy as did his father is the clear message, and his guilt over being an usurper's son, paralleled by his anxiety over the war being just (because sending people to their deaths and their bereaved dependants into penury because of who should be King is totally just, right?) is reflected in the visuals.

Kenneth Branagh is a suitably angsty Henry. Yes, the speeches are present and correct, but this is not a jingoistic Henry V but an anxious one.

The rest of the cast excellent too, including a surprisingly unshouty Brian Blessed, whose message to Charles VI reeks of a menace he hasn't exuded since he was Augustus in I, Clavdivs. And, on top of those mentioned in the tags, we didn't have room for Derek Jacobi, Robbie Coltrane as a splendid Falstaff in scenes nicked from the Henry IV's, Robert Stephens, Paul Scofield, Harold Innocent and a very young Christian Bale. I particularly enjoyed Ian Holm's Fluellen, discoursing on Pompey the Great- for Shakespeare, all Welshmen are in some way his old classics teacher!

This is a superbly visual production, superlatively acted and directed. The emphasis on sparse lighting, points of light in the darkness and claustrophobia gives us an individual version of the play from Kenneth Branagh that is highly effective. A fine film.

Flash Gordon (1980)

“And use your fingers too, this time. Careful, darling! It’s very sensitive.”

I can’t believe I managed to get to the age of 34 without seeing this film. It’s… unique. The whole look and style is basically the 1960’s TV Batman ethos as applied to pulp magazine / 1930’s movie serial sci-fi (Lorenzo Semple Jr even does the scripting duties!), but this is a film which definitely feels as though it was made just post-Star Wars.

I don’t know much about Flash Gordon, really, aside from a half-remembered cartoon I saw as a very young kid and, of course Defenders of the Earth. But I understand this is a very faithful adaptation of the original comic strip, in all but tone. Certainly, it has a very 1930’s serial feel, with constant peril and non-stop action. I suspect the heavy erotic element may be new, though; about half the cast list at the end of the film is for scantily clad concubines of one kind or another, and there’s quite a lot of scenes in the movie which are pretty much soft porn. These are generally the scenes featuring Aura, who is constantly kissing, carousing, being whipped (and enjoying it, according to Klytus!) and coming out with some delightful double entendres. I’m not good with heights myself, but she can teach me to fly any time.

Sam J. Jones is perfect as Flash, in an Adam West sort of way. There’s a touch of plywood to his performance, of course, but this is deliberate and appropriate. The whole thing looks and feels very garish, glittery, camp and over the top, and the excellent soundtrack from Queen, the campest band in all of rock n’ roll, is just the icing on the cake. The alien landscapes and spacescapes are very stylised, and in no way realistic, but the sense of scale is definitely cinematic.

There’s one thing that makes me feel just a little uncomfortable, though. There’s some rather dodgy orientalism going on; the baddies are effeminate, sensuous and despotic, thus embodying all the tropes of the East as seen by the West. I suspect this may not have been Edward Said’s favourite film. And as for Ming the Merciless himself- well, he’s a great moustache-twirling villain, and delightfully played by Max Von Sydow, but, well, he’s a rather arse-clenchingly embarrassing Chinese stereotype, isn’t he? The clothes, the moustache, even the make-up imply a sort of Fu Manchu in space. And all of this stuff is too prominent and foregrounded to be dismissed. It’s a genuine problem. I mean, the very name “Mongo” has certain ethnic connotations.

Still, Max Von Sydow is fantastic, as are many in the cast. Although (yes, I know where this was filmed), I couldn’t help noticing how many of them are British. I say this as a Brit, but do Americans not mind when so many films based on characters from their popular culture are stuffed to the gunwales with British actors? The recent Batman films by Christopher Nolan show the very same syndrome.

Oh, and there’s one of these British actors who most definitely deserves a paragraph to himself: Brian Blessed, of course. I recall reviewing his appearance in Blake’s 7, which seemed to be a sort of transitional phase from Brian Blessed, the versatile actor to BRIAN BLESSED THE BARBARIAN KING, WHO GOES “RAAAAARGH!!!” Although I was surprised that “Gordon’s alive?” doesn’t even make it into his top twenty shoutiest lines in the film. It’s a good performance, which is a very good thing as he’ll be using it non-stop for the next thirty years…

The plot is pretty relentless, and works on the same two levels as the 1960’s Batman TV series. Personally, I found it hilarious that weddings on Mongo use the same Wedding March as we do on Earth. Perhaps Richard Wagner was from Mongo?

The last scene, though, with a gloved hand taking Ming’s ring from his charred finger… Russell T. Davies has seen this film, hasn’t he?

Blake's 7: Cygnus Alpha

“Wisdom must be gathered. It cannot be given.”

A bloke is a cloak, a sunset which is clearly a painted backdrop, a night sky which is even less convincing… hardly an auspicious start. And yet this episode is quite as brilliant as the first two. The Captain is subdued as the London is about to land; he’s not exactly shrouded himself in glory of late, as we’re reminded by a quick flashback.

Blake, whose recent achievements have been rather more impressive, is still with Jenna and Avon in their cool and mysterious new ship. The ship has some powerful weapons. There’s a nice scene where Avon points one at Blake, only for Blake to turn around and ignore him. This is a nice little scene, mainly about who’s the alpha male, of course, but also showing us that Blake has decided that much of Avon’s amoral cynicism is just a front.

The ship goes through “negative hyperspace”, meaning it’s “crossed the anti-matter interface”. Well, quite. What’s interesting here is that this is technology far in advance of the Federation, and presumably humanity. It’s alien, then. And yet so far we’ve had no explicit mention of aliens. Presumably, then, they’re known to exist (this isn’t Isaac Asimov’s human-only Galactic Empire), but few spacefaring civilisations are known to exist within explored space, although the concept is considered plausible? Certainly, it seems as though this new ship, the Liberator as Jenna christens it in a revealingly Blake-sympathetic moment, must be alien. And yet we know little of its origin is that it was involved in some sort of altercation last episode. Perhaps.

Oh, and we’re introduced to Zen. And he says “confirmed” for the first time, while remaining effortlessly, enigmatically cool. He really gets on Avon’s tits, which helps. Oh, and “spatials” are apparently a unit of measurement.

Before long we come across what appears to be a matter transmission room, and triggers another contest between Blake and Avon over who is the alpha male. Blake wins this quite easily by being the only one of the two of them who’s man enough to risk using this untried technology to teleport down to Cygnus Alpha. Jenna’s impressed, I can tell. She certainly gives him a big hug when he teleports back.

Meanwhile, Cygnus Alpha is not what we were expecting. There are no guards and it can only loosely be termed a prison; convicts are simply dumped there and forced to fend for themselves, a bit like people who’d finished their sentences on Devil’s Island. We also get a bit of a closer look at Gan, who has really only been a supporting character thus far. And I’d like to get a look at him, having read the rather splendid Liberation by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore. This excellent fan guide to Blake’s 7 posits, rather fascinatingly and convincingly, that Gan is some sort of sex offender, and it’s going to be interesting to watch what he does with this in mind. Certainly his threats to the bloke being nasty to Vila hint at some possible psychopathic tendencies, but generally he comes across as a nice chap.

Vila, Gan and their redshirt friends encounter a rather grisly corpse, and Pamela Salem in a cloak, looking particularly lovely. She orders them to kneel, which they do. Fair enough. I probably would have done the same. I mean, she kisses Gan.

Interesting religion they have here; monotheistic, practised in what looks very much like a church, with an altar and candles and everything. It looks as though it’s been largely ripped off from Christianity which, to give the designers their due, seems to fit in rather nicely with what we’re later told.

Oh, and let’s talk about Brian Blessed, shall we? Apparently in Z-Cars, which I haven’t seen, he was a talented actor. Certainly in I Clavdivs, which I have seen and enjoyed very much, he’s outstanding. But at some unspecified point (arguably The Black Adder is the point of no return), he seems to lose the ability to play anything other than loud, shouty, bearded barbarian kings. Is this where the rot begins to set in? Beard? Check. Shoutiness? Check. And yet there are still several scenes here where he still has that Augustus-like ability to be quietly menacing. I miss that side of Brian Blessed.

Back to some rough kind of chronology, the prisoners are apparently suffering from the “Curse of Cygnus” to which, conveniently, only the priests have the cure. It’s not long before Brian is telling Blake that the priests are all descended from convicts, making him some kind of Great Space Australian. Interestingly, he admits that society used religion to bind together a society which had become conflicted, over fifty generations, between newly arrived convicts and those born on the planet. So, is he a true believer, someone consciously using religion as a tool or, as I suspect, both?

“Fifty generations” is interesting, too, as it gives us a clue as to how far into the future we are. It seems humans broke “the light barrier” at least, say, 650 years ago if a “generation”= 25 years.

Meanwhile, there’s conflict between Avon and Jenna; they’ve discovered untold wealth on the ship. Avon persuading Jenna to give Blake just an hour before abandoning Blake generates a lot of dramatic tension, of course. But it’s much more interesting than that. Jenna is being torn between two ideologies here. And Avon is persuasive. Blake is a “crusader”. He can’t win. Does she want to be rich or dead? He has a point.

Blake gets to be cool, too, though. Placed in a cell with the other prisoners, who know perfectly well that if he doesn’t agree to give Brian their ship then one of them will be sacrificed, Blake manages to get them on his side through sheer force of will. He’s definitely the alpha male here. But also, perhaps, again showing signs of being a charismatic and dangerous fanatic.

We get a final showdown with Brian who reveals, perhaps too easily, that the “disease” is a mild and artificial poison, and dies, most certainly too easily, before he can get started on all that space evangelism. Still, nice episode.

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts Five to Eight: Mindwarp

Part Five

“Then where will you be? Dead! No, worse than that. Poor!”

It’s all presented as the next episode, not a new story, but there’s no reprise, and Robert Holmes gives way to Philip Martin. It’s the planet Thoros Beta, the year 2379 and we’re about to see what was happening before the Doctor was taken out of time, or so we’re told. Certainly we see some highly impressive special effects and the most brilliantly realised alien planet yet seen. The pink sea and the ringed planet in the sky are completely unlike anything we’ve ever seen before and somehow manage to give this story a very different feel to usual from the beginning.

Of course, this being Philip Martin, we get a bit of metatextual stuff- the early trial scenes are essentially about directors’ choices of shots and decisions made in the editing! Still, seeing as I got a lot of enjoyment from this sort of thing in Vengeance on Varos I'm a bit disappointed by the relative lack of it in this story.

The Doctor and Peri are here to investigate a bit of naughty arms dealing, while Brian Blessed- in what is surprisingly his first appearance on Doctor Who- lies elsewhere on a table. This planet is ruled by the Mentors, led by a barely recognisable Christopher Ryan as Kiv, and the story is essentially based around mad scientist Crozier as he does loads of unethical experiments in a quest to cure Kiv’s headaches. Frankly, I’m not sure the people who design the headache pills I use are showing quite the same level of commitment.
Oh, and Sil’s back. Yay! I preferred the original costume, mind.

Part Six

“I have a special death reserved for him. He is a traitor known as the Doctor.”

The Doctor can’t seem to remember anything after Sil uses the machine on his brain, which makes the trial somewhat unfair from this point on. And it’s quite surprising that we only get one episode of the Doctor being unambiguously himself- I didn’t recall the stuff about unreliable narration starting so soon.

Brian Blessed, in a surprising departure from his usual type of part, plays Yrcanos as a shouty barbarian king. It’s good to see that his previous work in The Black Adder, Flash Gordon and Blake’s Seven hasn’t typecast him as quiet, nervous types. The character’s just a bit of comic relief, really, but in spite of being a bit of a prat he’s a nice chap really.

The Doctor’s initial betrayal of everyone, and his later betrayal of Peri, comes as a bit of a shock. In the wider context of the show, with the axe hanging over it and the earlier examples of The Twin Dilemma and Attack of the Cybermen, this probably isn’t a great idea. But in the context of this particular story it actually works quite well; with the framing device of the trial it’s allowed to be portrayed in a metatextual way with the reliability of the footage from the Matrix being open to question in spite of the Valeyard’s protestations that the Matrix cannot lie. And it could of course be, partially or wholly, just a clever plan by the Doctor, or a result of what Sil did to his brain earlier.

Be that as it may, the scenes with the Doctor interrogating Peri arguably cross a line. I hope this is the Matrix lying.

Towards the cliffhanger the Inquisitor appears to voice Philip Martin’s own frustrations with the trial scenes as she states that “I do grow tired of these continual interruptions…”

Part Seven

“Today, prudence shall be our watchword. Tomorrow, I shall soak the land in blood.”

Oddly, the Doctor is given a chance to pause the trial but insists on its continuing in spite of the blatant unfairness of the circumstances. By now there is a definite sense of doom surrounding the fate of Peri.

Kiv orders the death of all those who fail to save his life, causing Sil to become quite splendidly panicked. He calms down after the operation’s success, though, claiming that “I endeavour to maintain a certain continuity”, something with which the story is about to start having problems very soon. Still, there’s some good stuff. The scene in which the Doctor uses his knowledge of the future to help Sil make money is a nice touch, but it’s odd this is not immediately seized upon by the Valeyard.

Part Eight

“I thought it was somewhat gratuitous.”

There’s a great scene in which Peri explains love to Yrcanos while he explains his conception of the afterlife, where his destiny is “Why, to fight! What else!” Yrcanos is bonkers, of course, but he’s basically a decent and even innocent fellow underneath all the shouting, and Peri clearly likes him.

Things get even more confused as the Doctor seems to become one of the goodies again, rescuing Yrcanos and endeavouring to save Peri. Yrcanos soon stirs up some real trouble for the Mentors, and Kiv is eventually forced to abandon his business meeting with a pink Terileptil so that he can have his brain transferred into Peri’s body. The operation begins, while elsewhere Yrcanos’ rebellion gets under way- and it’s at this point that the Doctor is taken out of time and we rejoin the first episode of the season.

As a coda we get to see the horrifyingly effective sight of Kiv occupying the body of a bald Peri. Crozier has discovered a way to transplant any mind into any body; practically a form of immortality. To this the Time Lords have to intervene. Presumably if the Doctor hadn’t intervened, Crozier would have failed to save Kiv and been executed by the bodyguards. As it is, the Time Lords now use Yrcanos as an assassin to kill everyone.

So, Peri’s dead. And it’s the most shocking and affecting companion death yet. I certainly hope they don’t retcon it. That would be bad.

So, surprisingly given its reputation, I liked this one. There wasn’t quite as much humour in the metatextual stuff as there was in Martin’s previous effort, but he still managed to use the format of the trial to play some rather enjoyable games with the different layers of narrative, once again giving us a piece of television drama which is fundamentally about the fact that it’s television. I think the broad sweep of what was happening is more or less implied (the Matrix showed the Doctor being a little nastier during his time as a “turncoat” than he was in reality, but broadly speaking it was all his plan) and anyway, I’m sure it’ll all be explained away perfectly satisfactorily at the end of the season. 4/5.