The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax

 "I've failed".

Granada's Sherlock Holmes, after a couple of yars' absence, is back for the '90s, a new decade and a new title. It's interesting that we begin with an adaptation of a later short story, written in 1911, and one clearly set after the the turn of the century- Suffragettes are mentioned, and the Boer War has ended, so it can be no earlier than 1902. Holmes and Watson are middle-aged, and it is no longer obviouly trues that Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke are really too old to play their characters, wh would both have been aroung fiftyish.

There's also a hint that Holmes' faculties may be declining with age; he solves the case- and prevents poor Lady Frances from being buried alive- soon enough to save her life but too late to prevent what appears to be severe PTSD. His sense of failure and guilt is very much played up by the direction and the excellent performance of a mildly frailer-looking Brett.

The filming in the Lake District is breathtaking, and the early scenes, with Watson on holiday writing to Holmes. Lady Frances' delightful eccentricity in these scenes is in horrible contrast to the tragedy that is to befall her- and Michael Jayston's superb performance as her aristocratic brother reminds us that, privileged though she may be, Lady Frances exists at the whims of men who control the purse strings.

The air of religiosity around the earlier scenes feels most odd in a Sherlock Holmes story but it is, of course, a clever piece of misdirection: it is the saintly missionary who turns out to be not only a confidence trickster but a murderer.

This is a strong opening, but possibly one that may herald an older and less confident Holmes?

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968)

"Lord, what fools these mortals be..."

I never knew before tonight's random looking through Amazon Prime that this odd little Peter Hall film existed- associated with the RSC although unconnected with the many screen Shakespeare plays made a decade later.

As a production it's... odd. There is much use of location and visuals, yet this is very much in the style (and with the necessary attitude to realism) of a stag play- I suspect the budget would not allow otherwise. The make-up for the fairies, in particular, I can imagine working well on stage, but their look falls very flat here.

The fun of this production, though, is not in the visuals; it's in seeing this splendid cast of unfeasible young actors (Helen Mirren is in her early twenties here, and none of the leads are over thirty- five) perform one of Shakespeare's plays with which I'm most familiar. And Ians Holm and Richardson, in particular, are truly sublime as Puck and Oberon respectively. Most striking though is a young, sensual Judi Dench as she frolics erotically with Paul Rogers' Bottom... and yes, I know: that's quite a sentence.

Even a flawed production of Shakespeare such as this can showcase some individual performances worth seeing, and this is the case here. And I must admit that this particular version of Pyramus and Thisbe is the funniest I've seen. On the whole, then, a mixed bag- but it was always going to be a joy to see this play with this cast.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Flushing Out the Mole

"Poor George. Life's such a puzzle to you, isn't it?"

Ah. You know how I’ve been saying that yes, Tinker Tailor is bloody good, the acting is superlative, the slow pace is excellent and the whole thing is superb but not quite in the very first rank? Well, I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes it’s the impact of a final episode that can fully drive home a multilayered and complex subtext, and this final episode is both extraordinary in itself and defines the entire series. I suspect also that there are all sorts of scriptural references I’m not getting.

Yes, this is the episode where the mole is unmasked,  and the first ten or so minutes are a suspenseful whodunit, but that’s over quickly. Gerald is caught, he’s Bill Haydon, and suddenly the world is entirely different. The whole senior echelon of the Circus are summoned to hear the tapes of Haydon speaking to his handler, and you can see from the previously supercilious Percy Alleline that he’s utterly defeated. The tables have turned, and the outcast Smiley suddenly commands the room, a situation that lasts for most of the episode. Toby in particular is suddenly very, very oleaginous.

We see where Jim Prideaux has gone- he’s watching as Bill is taken to a camp and, quite obviously, roughed up. Everyone is shocked that good old Bull, outgoing, patriotic, the “laughing cavalier” should be a traitor. But Ian Richardson is extraordinary in explaining his motives to Smiley- they all started at the Circus when they were “golden with hope”, and Bill gradually came to hate America for its callousness towards its own poor, presumably meaning its cruelly inadequate welfare system and its lack of a decent health system- but was the Soviet Union any better? America may never have had an NHS, but neither did the USSR. Bill, though, with the cynicism of the defeated idealist, comes to see, as early as the Forties, that Britain is a fading, irrelevant power. None of this explains his motives satisfactory but that, in itself, makes him seem real.

Even his affair with Ann was directed by Karla- he was to “join the queue” to make any suspicion from Smiley feel like a personal thing. And yes, he shafted his old partner Jim. He is a traitor in every way. But he’s an unsavoury character in other ways- he tries to pay off not only a girlfriend but a “boy” who is “a cherub but no angel”. I assume we’re not talking over sixteen here. Brr. This was hardly approved of in 1979 but there was perhaps more of a tolerance for a kind of public school pederasty that makes the flesh creep.

Fittingly, Bill is killed by Jim amongst lax security, the traitor meeting a fate far more merciful that the traditional one at Tyburn but denied a melancholy, vodka-soaked exile. And Smiley is left master of all he surveys, his words conveying absolute authority as he explains he’s been “asked to look after things for a while.” But this is nicely undercut when we meet Ann, played by the splendid Sian Phillips, who is openly having relationships and living free and apart, treating George as an innocent friend to be patronised. And that’s Smiley; man of the world and yet not so, a fascinating character, one very much worthy of the great Alec Guinness.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Smiley Sets a Trap

"Ever bought a fake picture, Toby?"

We get closer to unmasking Gerald in a slowly gripping final episode, but we begin with a rather odd character, Jerry, player with delightful eccentricity by the legendary Joss Ackland. Yet Jerry speaks in a bizarre “Red Indian” argot of “braves” and things that are “heap big”, a retro type of casual racism from a very different age. This, like the BP petroleum station, reminds us that this was made fiery years ago and makes me, a young man of forty-two, to feel not perhaps in the very first flush of youth.

Jerry, while admittedly confessing to some xenophobia owing to Toby Esterhase’s Hungarian origins (very much played down in this adaptation) Jerry drips more suspicion on Esterhase, who forced him to sit on suspicious information of Soviet troop movements on the Czech-Austrian border just after Prideaux (who seems to have gone AWOL) was caught.  So Toby is lured to George’s lair and, in a series of gripping scenes where Alec Guinness demonstrates the art of acting at its finest, interrogated and turned, a pawn who knows not what lies behind the suspicious largesse of Witchcraft. With Esterhase an innocent dupe, the suspects reduce to three...

I like this. I like it a lot- and I saw an article in the Guardian about a week ago that praised Tinker Tailor to the skies. So far I’m finding it very good, indeed excellent, but not quite first class, in spite of the performances. Yes, there’s a certain subtext of national decline and doing the right thing in spite of that, without reward- yet I can’t help feeling that the slow pace and silences, while unquestionably a good thing, flatter the series somewhat by allowing the viewer to fill in the subtext.

Still, Smiley is setting a trap for Gerald; let’s see how it ends...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: How It All Fits Together

”One day that lack of moderation will be Karla’s downfall.”

Things are developing now, plot-wise, but plot is not, of course, everything. The slow pace allows for depth, character and, I think, commentary both on how youthful ideology fades into cynicism, as well as reflection once more on how Britain's place in the world has diminished into- to use a '70s phrase- managed decline. All so much more grown-up than the delusions of today's political class that we, a medium power since at least 1956, can somehow survive against the great powers of today without the solidarity of the European Union. But I digress.

Perhaps the central scene is the flashback to Smiley’s interrogation of Karla in New Delhi in the ‘50s, where Smiley talks and talks and expresses a cynicism about the Cold War and ideology that he assumes his counterpart shares- but Karla, a fanatical Communist, says nothing. And there is another interrogation- of Peter by Percy Alleline, who now knows of Ricky Tarr and believes him to be a defector. But this in turn proves to Smiley that the Witchcraft source is linked to the mile in that both are run by Karla. Soviet penetration of British intelligence is complete, and now we have to tell the Americans, who don’t trust us anyway. Such is our place in the world.

Not everything here is worthy of praise- there are once again no female speaking parts(!) and I note that Fawn, the only character not from the world of public schools and Oxbridge, has his accent mocked and is judged only in terms of his physical prowess. But things are heating up, and it’s all very compelling.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Smiley Tracks the Mole

"Poor loves. Trained to empire. Trained to rule the waves."

The pace is certainly as slow as ever and, in fact, the structure of this series is completely unlike what we’d normally expect even back in ‘79. (Incidentally the offices of the Circus, with all the brown, the grey and the paper files, are a splendid artefact of Seventiesness). After last episode being pretty much an extended flashback, here we get Peter trying to burgle the Circus and ascertaining that the file on Irina has been deliberately ripped out, while George visits Connie and we get an extended flashback showing us all the suspects. That’s it.

Connie, though... she’s a fascinating and multilayered character, and not only by virtue of being a rare female presence in the Circus and, indeed, the episode’s only female speaking part. Sacked as Head of Research for, it seems, getting too close to fingering Polyakov as Karla’s local underling, she’s very bitter behind the sunny surface, and now struggling to find meaning in her life. Beryl Reid is superb but so is Alec Guinness; he says little, but somehow avoids coming across as cold.

We learn, mainly through flashbacks, that Control, and by extension George, always found the “Witchcraft” material a little too convenient, and Alleline’s arrogant pride a little annoying- and Alleline, indeed, comes across like a proper twonk. Then we have the cynical Roy, the enigmatic Bill, the ambitious Toby, suspects all. And it’s all a splendid opportunity to see a bunch of character actors at work.

It’s gripping. And, still, pretty much nothing has happened.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Tarr Tells His Story

"It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?"

Again the pace is positively glacial- plot-wise, Ricky Tarr reveals the presence of a mile high up in the circus, something Control knew about a good while ago, and Smiley is appointed to smoke out “Gerald”. That’s it.

But it isn’t plot that’s the purpose: this episode, an extended flashback with Hywel Bennett foregrounded as Tarr relates what happened, isn’t about that but about the pathos of Tarr, in Lisbon on assignment, coming across Irina, a Russian wanting to defect, and falling in love with her while trying to get out of her the big secret- there’s someone in Russia, known as Karla, who is running an agent called “Gerald” right at the top of the circus. And there’s more to it even than this; Irina is a complex character, with a deeply religious soul that thirst for meaning and the freedom to explore it.

And it is Tarr who almost certainly dooms her by reporting back to London in too much detail, and she is returned to Russia in circumstances which evoke the possible horrors and, indeed, martyrdom that await her.

Tarr’s broken reaction is real too, but not overplayed. And we find that only Smiley is brought back from retirement to which the mole, without involving the resources of the Circus itself.

It’s slow. It’s gripping. It stars Alec Guineas. This is extraordinary telly.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Return to the Circus

"I shall become an oak of my own generation..."

This is, of course, a justly renowned piece of telly and, as I saw it before many years ago, I’ll not be departing from the general view. I must confess that, to my mother’s disapproval, I’ve yet to read any John Le Carre, so I’m unfamiliar with any greater levels of depth and detail which no longer exist deep within the novel and, indeed, series of novels on which this is based. I comment only on what I see. But I see much.

The slow pace is truly extraordinary from the perspective of 2019, forty years later the pre-credits scene consists simply of the four mole suspects- Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland and Percy Alleline- slowly entering a room. but this allows for much subtle physical acting by the character actors portraying them. Similarly, very little really happens- we learn of the existence of the mile, Jim’s Czech mission goes south, the retired George Smiley is accosted by the gossipy and somewhat camp Roddy Martindale and endures am interrogatory lunch which gives us much exposition about the Circus, Smiley’s forced retirement, the uneasy atmosphere, and his hinted at marital problems. He is then summoned by Peter Guilin to meet Oliver Lacon and hear an apparently shocking tale from one Ricki Tarr. That’s it. That’s all that happens in fifty minutes.

And it happens slowly. There’s loads of tension in the scenes with Jim in Brno. We get to see Alec Guinness’ extraordinary acting mannerisms and use of cleaning his glasses to evoke a deep interiority. It’s fascinating to see the master at work here; no method actor he. It’s all about the exterior mannerisms, as he says in his autobiography, and that’s what makes him so bloody good.

We also get time to get an impression of the Circus as a downbeat, very male (there are no speaking female parts in the whole 50 minutes!), very public school and Oxbridge little club not trusted by the Americans. We get to breathe. And it’s wonderful.

I’m looking forward to the rest. I can’t help noticing, though, that Ian Richardson looks scarily Old at 45, and that’s me in three years...

Cromwell (1970)

"An England without a king is unthinkable!"

I watched this film principally because I wanted to see two great actors- Richard Harris and Alec Guinness- play two iconic roles from history; Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. And they are, indeed, magnificent. Their performances- Harris as a principled sociopath slowly descending into a dictatorial sociopath and Guinness as a politely arrogant congenital liar- are superlative and alone enough to make the film worth watching. The film succeeds brilliantly if seen as a character piece based on its broadly valid idea of Cromwell- a man who can honestly give everything for the supremacy of Parliament and then simply dismiss it when it does not live up to his expectations. For this reason the film succeeds as drama in spite of being so incredibly rush and in spite of its ending so suddenly.

And yet... no film set in the past can be historically accurate in full. I accept this. Events must be compressed into a shorter period of time and simplified to fit the medium of cinema. And yet... here we have Cromwell as one of those MPs whom Charles tries to arrest in January 1642. We have Cromwell present at Edgehill. We have the Earls of Essex and Manchester making speeches in the Commons. We even have arch-republican Henry Ireton (a shockingly young Michael Jayson) trying to persuade Cromwell to take the crown, in spite of having died during the (glossed over) Irish campaign in 1651. All this is a little much to swallow; these are not small things.

I'm also uncertain about the dialogue; a film set in the mid-seventeenth century should either use modern dialogue or contrive to use contemporary speech but contrive to favour those sentence constructions and that vocabulary that would be understood today, preferably the second. Instead we get a bizarre mish-mash of speech which mixes archaisms such as "withal" with modern coinings such as "international". The effect is clumsy and distracting.

Still, it all looks magnificent and, in the final analysis, it's all about the acting. And, judged by this criterion, the film is superb.

Doctor Who: Trial of a Time Lord Parts Thirteen and Fourteen: The Ultimate Foe

Part Thirteen

“I’m as truthful, honest, and about as boring as they come.”

The court is back from recess, and who should turn up but James Bree! There’s little time to wallow in nostalgia, though; the main trial plot has stopped treading water and started swimming again, and the Doctor’s in trouble. He’s run out of tricks for his defence, he’s accused of genocide and he’s a hair’s breadth away from being convicted and condemned. So now, of course, is the dramatically appropriate moment for Mel and Glitz to mysteriously turn up to testify in his favour. Glitz, necessarily, has softened from the thug of earlier.

It’s also the dramatically appropriate moment to reveal they’ve been sent by the Master, who is a most suitable means of extracting maximum dramatic potential out of the revelations that follow. Particularly as he turns up from inside the Matrix. Glitz was working for the Master back in parts one to four, and that mysterious box was full of “stuff the secrets had been nicking from the Matrix for years”. And, of course, this being a script by Robert Holmes, a dirty Time Lord cover-up then ensued, involving Earth being naughtily moved across the galaxy to become Ravolox, with enormous collateral damage caused by solar flares. The Doctor gets a great speech after this revelation, describing his own people as “decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core,” although unfortunately this is one of those moments where Colin’s performance suffers a bit of a wobble.

And then the Master casually refers to the Valeyard as “the Doctor” while explaining that he’s been adjusting evidence on behalf of the High Council to ensure the Doctor’s conviction. The Doctor is told that he’s “an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final regeneration.” Interesting- this wording, together with the fact he seems to be working for the High Council as some sort of expendable stooge, seems to indicate he’s not so much a future incarnation of the Doctor as a distillation of certain of the Doctor’s qualities, and to some extent an artificial creation of these shadowy Time Lord politicians. This is the Robert Holmes script about corrupt Time Lords to end all Robert Holmes scripts about corrupt Time Lords. Literally.

Oh, and it all seems to make sense, incidentally. The only bits so far that haven’t made sense at all have been in the Pip and Jane Baker episodes, where the workings of the trial seemed to be all over the place and the consequences of the evidence being from the future hadn’t been though through. But the whole business with the sleepers, Ravolox, and the Doctor’s apparent actions on Thoros Beta seem to have been resolved pretty much satisfactorily to me. I don’t think we need to have it spelled out exactly which scenes happened as shown and which didn’t.

Oh, and I haven’t any complaints about Peri’s fate, either. It makes sense, more or less, given her earlier relationship with Yrcanos.

Anyway, Holmes recalls his own script for The Deadly Assassin as the Doctor and Glitz spend the rest of the episode inside the Matrix. Among other things they encounter a number of Mr Popplewicks, all played by Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances, a wonderfully Holmesian satirical dig at bureaucracy.

Part Fourteen

“You are elevating futility to a high art. There’s nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality.”

…So, after a sublime swansong from Holmes, we move to the ridiculous in the shape of this script by Pip and Jane Baker. Sadly, the comparison with their lamented predecessor hardly shows them in a good light.

We get to see the familiar sight of the inside of the Master’s TARDIS. It’s only by doing this marathon that I’ve come to realise just how consistent was its appearance during the ‘80s. We also get an exploding quill pen, by far the coolest thing in this episode. Unfortunately, there’s an awful lot of utter poo here. The Doctor states that “I would trust Mel with my life,” but he’s not even met her yet! I know he’s only pretending to go along with the fake trial, but still. At least I got a cheap laugh out of “Never mind the Sydney Carton heroics,” mind.

This is so poor compared to the previous episode, though. There’s not actually much wrong with the plot, but the dialogue is awful and the characters keep explaining the plot to us in a condescending manner which rubs me up the wrong way. Plus, we get loads of no doubt accurate scientific gobbledygook which reminds me of all the things I didn’t like about the Bidmead scripts. And then the Master, hearing that the High Council has been deposed and insurrection has ensued, actually makes a speech to the Time Lords in the courtroom offering to take control which bears uncanny similarities to a certain speech in Logopolis. Unbelievable.
As a final indignity, the Doctor actually suggests the Inquisitor as a candidate for the presidency. Why? She’s spent the whole season being nothing but an incompetent buffoon.

So, it’s a tale of two episodes. The first part, a worthy swansong from Robert Holmes which fortunately doesn’t leave the plot for Pip n’ Jane to explain, gets 5/5, while the Pip n’ Jane monstrosity gets 2/5. I’m not too bothered about what Eric Saward’s version would have been like, but I’d have loved to have seen Robert Holmes’. I was going to give it a 1/5 but I suppose giving one episode 5/5 and the other 1/5 would have been a bit much.

The last episode aside, though, it’s actually been a damn fine season. I wasn’t actually expecting that I’d be rating this particularly highly until I got to it, but it’s a relief to give a season a good score for once- at 4/5 it’s a creditable joint sixth, which comes as a genuine surprise to me. Who’d have thunk it? Not only is this much-maligned season a triumphant return to form after a poor few years, but it’s the best season of the ‘80s so far by a long way. I suspect the famously diminished presence of Saward may have something to do with it…

Doctor Who: Trial of a Time Lord Parts Nine to Twelve: Terror of the Vervoids

Part Nine

“Let’s exercise the grey cells for once, shall we?”

The Doctor, still very upset at Peri’s death, is nevertheless forced to continue with the trial, and to show some evidence of his own. And this evidence is… from the future. His mind really must be addled by grief. And how does this work anyway? Can’t the Doctor think of anything that’s already happened to him throughout his entire life that will help his case? Why is evidence from the future even admissible? After all, by definition it can only be from a possible future, particularly as it seems at the moment that the Doctor is to be executed long before he ever gets to meet Mel or visit the Hyperion III.

So, it’s 2986, and said ship is travelling between what appear to be the colonial possession of Mogar and Earth- interestingly, given the fact that we appear to be in the same time period as The Mutants. We’re not in the same genre, though; there’s a murderer on board, and the spirit of Agatha Christie hangs in the air. No doubt this’ll be just as good as The Robots of Death, then.

Honor Blackman’s in it. The Doctor’s wearing a yellow cravat. Oh, and there’s a new companion, Mel, or rather there will be once the Doctor actually meets her. I’m enjoying this sort of timey-wimey stuff, much as the trial framing sequence is no longer making any sense. And I like Mel. And I like Bonnie Langford. There, I’ve said it.

Our scheduled broadcast of carrot juice and exercise bikes is interrupted by a mayday call, and our two TARDISeers are, er, embroiled in a web of intrigue. The Doctor and Mel have a great relationship, very tactile, with no serious bickering and a great chemistry. And Mel’s a likeable character who actually seems to enjoy travelling in the TARDIS, which comes as a huge relief. Because arguably no one else really has ever since Romana.

There’s an awful lot of aerobics in this story; it may be the 2980s, but it’s still the ‘80s. It’s all such fun though. I love the novel Professor Lasky’s reading…

We finish with some more apparent evidence that the Matrix has been tempted with. But on the plus side, Mel is definitely great- she can scream in the exact same key as the closing theme…

Part Ten

“The fellow may be a fool but he’s not a criminal.”

We get our first intimations here that there’s a dangerous alien plant species on the loose. And some more stuff happens with the murder mystery plot. But the main distinguishing feature of this episode is that rather cool-looking three dimensional Space Invaders clone the Mogarians are playing. Aside from its obvious coolness, it’s another example of how impressive the effects have been this season. Seldom before have we seen such casual brilliance.

We get a mention of the Black Hole of Tartarus, but we’re assured it’s perfectly safe. It’s definitely not going to be a threat at any point, then. The Mogarians discuss Earth’s plundering of their planet- bit of politics there- and there’s another murder. There’s some rather too heavily telegraphed Poirot stuff from the Doctor in the courtroom as he shows off about the Mogarian translator, but by now the murder mystery plot is bubbling nicely.

Mel screams in exactly the right key again.

Part Eleven

“Never mind the Just So Stories! That guard looks trigger happy to me!”

In a departure from the norm, Mel screams quite early in the episode this time. And narrowly escapes being murdered in true Perils of Pauline fashion. Meanwhile, the Vervoids appear properly and turn out to look fab- once again on the production side things are superb. And they get such naturalistic dialogue, too, with lines such as “We are doing splendidly!” which sound in no way bizarre coming from a talking plant.

Meanwhile the viewer gets confirmation that the Matrix’s pants are well and truly on fire as the Doctor is shown smashing the communications equipment. Much as this may not be anywhere near as well-written as Mindwarp, and the trial sequences make a lot less sense, I must admit that this time at least we know when the Matrix is lying and when it isn’t.

But the trial sequences make no sense at all here. The Investigator implies that the Doctor is guilty until proven innocent, the Valeyard is now trying to condemn the Doctor for things which haven’t actually happened yet and possibly never will, and the Investigator describes the Doctor’s “fair trial” as “an indulgence”. Everything tells us that this is just a show trial, with barely a pretence of justice, yet the Doctor seems to have no objection whatsoever to the Inquisitor’s conduct, and the script seems to assume that the audience are supposed to accept her as a legitimate authority figure, which is absurd.

Part Twelve

“The charge must now be genocide!”

Well, there’s a surprise- the ship’s headed straight for the Black Hole of Tarsarus. Who’d have thunk it? Technically, of course, there’s no danger at all as the Doctor and Mel could simply bundle everyone else in the TARDIS. In fact, that’s definitely what he would have done back when he was Peter Davison, although come to think of it that sort of thing more or less stopped with Planet of Fire.

Anyway, Rudge and the Mogarians slightly irritate our heroes with a fairly crappy hijack attempt. This is soon dealt with, but at least it manages to highlight the rather fantastic looking graphic effect on the screen on the bridge. The Doctor rather cleverly fingers Doland as the killer and turns the tables on him, and Lasky rather suddenly sees the error of her ways. Although she gets killed by the Vervoids anyway in the obligatory “But you can’t kill me! I’m your creator!” scene.

As a final nice touch, the Vervoids’ leaves turn autumnal before they crumble and die. Unfortunately things then start going all arbitrary in the courtroom…

The actual Vervoid story was rather good, I thought- nothing particularly clever, unlike last story, but it was a straightforward adventure done well and there’s nothing wrong with that. And like everything else in this season so far it looks great. It’s just a shame that the trial sequences, rather well-integrated until now, have started to unravel. Still, 4/5.

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.

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Parts One to Four: The Mysterious Planet

Part One

“I intend to adumbrate two typical instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum.”

It gives me a warm fuzzy glow, all the ambiguity about the story title. Reminds me of the early Hartnells. (Although, as we’ll see, this reminds me mainly of The Krotons.) And I for one will be taking neither side in the debate as I’m rather fond of shades of grey.

Anyway, the story starts with the most fantastic special effects sequence we have yet seen- something which looks like, yet cannot be, CGI. And while we’ll see nothing as mind-blowing as this for the rest of the four episodes, the production values seem pretty impressive to me, whatever may have been going on behind the scenes. 

The Doctor (now with a red cravat) is put on trial by a bunch of Time Lords in a fairly obvious metaphor for off-screen events- actually a brilliant idea in principle, and something which mostly works very well, at least for these four episodes. This trial is also the last time we’ll ever see many of what have become the essential trappings of Time Lord society- robes, Chancellery Guards and the like.

Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston are great as the Inquisitor and Valeyard respectively, which is quite a relief as the story absolutely needs them to be. The Doctor has, of course, been deposed as president, and in the interests of providing a more dramatic narrative he insists on defending himself in spite of having had no chance to do any preparation whatsoever, which is hardly fair. He has no real idea what he’s supposed to be defending himself against either but as the charges against him seem to constantly change arbitrarily throughout the story this hardly seems to matter.

That’s the framing sequence dealt with; the four-parter proper is another good ‘un from Robert Holmes, crammed with great ideas and great dialogue. We have the planet Ravolox in the far future, a planet suspiciously similar to Earth. We have a relationship between the Doctor and Peri where they’re back to being friends, a relief after certain recent stories where their relationship has been decidedly awkward to watch. And we have the fantastic Glitz and Dibber, the, ahem, Holmesian double act at its finest. Their dialogue is fab; the whole riff on the prison psychiatrist is a joy.

The whole script sparkles, with Holmes seemingly in a much lighter mood than he has seemed to be in of late. The postmodern wit is back (“Ancient life on Ravolox by Doctor-“), and so are the great ideas. The Doctor and Peri discover what seem to be the ruins of Marble Arch, and it seems that this could almost be Earth except it’s two million miles out of place, instantly a great concept. And it’s a nice touch that the whole thing is laid out like something that was once a tube station, and its inhabitants call it “Marb Station”. I’m enjoying this hugely, which is more than can be said for the Doctor: “Can’t we just have the edited highlights?”

On top of this we have the village, with Joan Sims as Katryca doing an impressive female version of Brian Blessed. I love her reaction to Glitz’s story- she’s clearly no fool. We also get Balazar and his books, another top comedy moment. And just when you think it’s peaked already, here’s Tom Chadbon…

Part Two

“These bars remind me of home.”

The early courtroom scenes in this episode suddenly make it very clear; Holmes is writing for the Tom Baker Doctor, isn’t he? In fact, it’s mere minutes after this thought occurs to me that the jelly babies come out. And I can’t think of any better way of writing for Colin Baker’ Doctor. Certainly the early wobbles over the character’s instability seem to be long gone by this point, although Colin’s performance seems to wobble a bit at the “I always like to do the unexpected” line.

The Immortal has two human underlings who, much as they remind me of David and Tony from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, I shall henceforth refer to as Gonds for obvious reasons.

It’s another damn fine episode, with a bit more plot fed out to us amongst all the fun; Drathro and his “secrets” are to do with some “Sleepers” from Andromeda. Drathro’s power comes from a Black Light converter which relies on an aerial in Katryca’s village. An aerial which Dibber blows up, meaning that Marb station is soon going to blow up. Oops.

We also get another mention of Saward’s Speelsnapes, and some great character stuff. Drathro knows perfectly well that there’s rain falling outside and that the solar flares’ effects have been much exaggerated, but continues to ration water because that’s what the plan says, inflexible as any machine. A more sinister example of the same mindset, and the most disturbing aspect of the story, is the “culling” of “work units" above the set quota in spite of the fact this is completely unnecessary.

Part Three

“They are out of control, outside the plan.”

Holmes puts into the Inquisitor’s mouth some ironic commentary on recent off-screen-developments: “Valeyard, I would appreciate it if these brutal and repetitious scenes were kept to a minimum.” I’m tempted to see in this not only the obvious reference to criticism of the previous season but also a nod to the truncated length of this season, although sadly I think that may be a temptation too far. Still, more great dialogue.

It’s confirmed; Ravolox is Earth. And there’s now a race against time to avert a big bang. We get some postmodernism and political commentary too, though; the Matrix scenes are censored, something that can hardly fail to conjure up either recent criticism of the programme’s violence or government cover-ups. Mind you, Glitz and Dibber are blatantly talking about the Matrix.

Part Four

“Oh, the Black Light, yeah. We’ve got so much of that, sometimes we can hardly see.”

The Doctor is frustrated by his failure to persuade the solipsistic Drathro that, as he’s going to die anyway, he might as well allow everyone else to survive. But Drathro insists that “The work units exist only to serve me. Without me they would have no function.” This is a disturbingly accurate prediction of modern management practices…

Fortunately, Glitz’s “low cunning” proves to be more persuasive than the Doctor’s moral arguments and so catastrophe is averted. But still unsolved are three questions; why has Earth been moved two million years through space, and by whom? What are the “secrets” of the Sleepers? And what exactly was the point of the Valeyard showing us all that?

Well, that was great, Holmes at his best. And at this stage at least the trial scenes are fine. 5/5.