Rose

Chapter The 82nd, in which a TV programme comes back from the dead at Easter-time.

Plot: 
Late one evening after the end of her shift at a department store in London, Rose Tyler goes down to the basement to deliver the staff syndicate's lottery money to the Chief Electrician, Wilson. As she walks around, the shop window dummies in storage down there come to life around her. Backed into a corner, she is surrounded and they come in for the kill. A Manc fellah in a leather jacket saves her just in time, and they escape in a lift. He blows up the roof of the building just after she gets clear. Before disappearing off, he introduces himself as 'the Doctor' and explains that the dummies are living plastic, brought to life by an alien intelligence transmitting a signal. The Doctor then turns up at Rose's house the next day, trying to track the signal. Rose presses him for answers, but he isn't forthcoming, and goes off again, seemingly into a mysterious disappearing big blue box.

Intrigued, Rose researches on the internet, and meets up with a conspiracy theorist, Clive, who has been combing history for signs of the Doctor, and believes him to be an immortal alien who brings death in his wake. Rose's boyfriend Mickey waits outside Clive's house in case Rose is in any danger from this man she met on the internet, but the plastic wheelie bin nearby has been taken over, and swallows him up. He's replaced by a slightly unconvincing plastic duplicate, who questions Rose about the Doctor later when they're out for dinner. But the Doctor has tracked them to the restaurant and rescues Rose when plastic-Mickey starts smashing the place up. They escape into the blue box (called the TARDIS) which is bigger on the inside than the out, and the Manc fellah turns out to be a space-wizard, and grumpy to boot.

Tracking the source of the signal to an underground chamber beneath the London Eye, the Doctor and Rose rescue the real Mickey. The Doctor confronts the Nestene Consciousness - a big vat of talking gloop - but is captured, and a signal is sent using the Eye's structure as a transmitter. All over London, shop window dummies come to life, and attack people including Rose's Mum Jackie, who survives, and Clive, who is killed. Rose uses her childhood gymnastics skills to swing on a chain,  knock over a couple of dummies and free the Doctor; in the confusion, the Consciousness gets destroyed, the signal cuts out, and the mannequins become inanimate once again. The Doctor invites Rose (but not Mickey) to travel with him; she hesitates at first, but on the second offer runs into the TARDIS leaving Mickey behind.

Context:

The random number generator method used to select which story to watch next for the blog settled on Rose, an intriguing choice with lots of associations; this was good, as I'd been busy and it had therefore taken me ages to write up the last story for the blog; something to inspire me to write with more efficacy was to be welcomed. I also happily realised it was a perfect blog post to publish during an Easter weekend, it being the biggest episode ever broadcast at Easter, and one that started a tradition that lasted for a good few years afterwards that the kick off of a new run of episodes should debut on the Saturday following Good Friday. This in turn reminded me that in the year when Rose first aired, that Saturday had also fallen towards the end of March. It then dawned on me that the 13th anniversary of that historic broadcast was the very day on which I was having all these thoughts, the 26th of March, and if we started watching in the next few minutes it would be bang on to the exact minute. Hurry, hurry.

As it was, it took a while to gather the interested parties together in the living room, and we started at 7.08pm, eight minutes later than Rose had started in 2005. Close enough, unless you're some weirdo obsessive about these things (hush). Anyway, the interested parties in question were all the kids (boys of 11 and 8, girl of 5) and the Better Half who, hearing the urgent preparations, joined us as the title sequence was rolling. We watched from the DVD, and there was a lot of visible evidence that it was doing what it was supposed to do: the youngest was scared by the quiet bits, the middle child was jumping up and down during the exciting bits, and even the cynical eldest pre-teen said "this is the Doctor I like the best", only to be corrected by his sister: "He's not called the Doctor, he's called Doctor Who". Based on the credits of Eccleston's era at least, this was quite accurate of her. The eldest was also taken by Clive's son when he said "Dad, it's one of your nutters". There's clearly something in the story for everybody!

First-time round:
There was immense build up of interest before Rose's initial BBC1 broadcast. It is mirrored somewhat by what's happening now in anticipation of Jodie Whittaker's debut series, with little teasers (new logo, hero images, snatches of audio) released months before the really big marketing push. When things really got going in 2005, it was verging on the ridiculous - stupid great billboard advertisements, talking points on review shows, special edition Mastermind tie-in episode. I wonder what sort of hoop-la we'll see this Autumn. Things peaked when Rose was leaked early in March, a little under three weeks before it was due for transmission. I read about the leak, but resolved to be strong. The next day, however, a colleague and friend at my day job of the time, Lee -  that guy one knows in every office who has an evangelical belief that copyright is an affront to personal liberties - came in and handed me a DVD-R, then walked away without a word. I was not strong enough to resist, and started watching it on my laptop during the working day. In the evening at home, I showed it to the Better Half, and rewatched it again more than once before the Easter weekend.

I saw the live broadcast with the Better Half, my sister and her partner James, in my sister's old flat in Worthing. My sister, never the biggest Doctor Who fan, was hosting us with such enthusiasm, even down to providing bowls of jelly babies, that I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I'd already watched the story multiple times. I don't regret it, though; the version I saw first didn't have an audio interruption from Graham Norton spoiling the most tense bit.

At the time, the BH and I were living in Kent, so had to stay over; I went out in Worthing early afternoon on Saturday 26th March 2005 as I needed to buy something, rushing as I didn't want to risk missing a minute of the pre-match build up including that Doctor Who: The New Dimension show narrated by David Tennant (whatever happened to him?). While I was out, I saw the front cover of a red-top rag, I forget which, bigging up the competition for Saturday night audience between Who and Ant and Dec. I had a sinking feeling: what if it bombs?! Luckily, the ratings revealed the next day were stratospheric; they didn't quite sustain at that level, so there must have been many curious souls in Rose's audience that decided it wasn't for them. One of these was my university friend Mark - the least enthusiastic whenever we had a video watching session in Durham - who texted me at 7.45pm on that Saturday to say "It's still shit".

Reaction:

There's only one way I think one could be disappointed by the story Rose, and that's by stubbornly assuming its plot is supposed to be about Autons, which it clearly isn't, and thereby accusing it of having a thin plot, which it doesn't. Just look at the synopsis above - there's lots of story beats, they're just not centered on defeating aliens. Sure, anyone can dislike the show because of its tone, or production values, or the performances of the leads. But if you disagree with the plot being structured around the person with an ordinary life getting pulled into the mysterious stranger's orbit (or 'turning Doctor Who into a soap', as it was called by online crazies ad nauseum) then you have to seriously think about what would have happened had it been done differently. This outside-in approach is the only viable option to bring the show to a new audience. It's how it was done successfully in 1963, and the opposite of how it was done unsuccessfully in 1996. Paul McGann's TV movie is the epitome of an inside-out approach: start with the Doctor rather that the audience identification figure, alienate some of your viewers, and add swathes of narration to paper over the cracks. Avoiding this is a big reason the show is still running to this day, allowing many different types of story to be told, including many big 'defeat the aliens' plots for traditionalists (though not ever a proper rematch with the Autons, curiously enough).

I never understood the soap opera accusations at all. It's not exactly brutal realism, nor even a misery-fest confection like Eastenders (the comparison most often made by the online crazies). All the tourist biscuit tin shots of red buses and the houses of parliament clue us in that we're watching a somewhat heightened version of reality. I miss this bright, fun adventure look and feel, which has got progressively gloomier over recent years of Who's new episodes. What I feel many don't like, but can't bring themselves to say, is that Rose, Jackie and Mickey are common - if they were realistic and the centre of the narrative, but were middle class professionals (like Sarah Jane Smith) I think some people would have less of a problem with it. But never mind those people - it's all about the characters, and these characters are great.

Like many of the stories in the 2005 run, all the surrounding spectacle belies the deliberately small nature of the story. There are only five significant roles in this piece - the two regulars, the two semi-regulars, and a nice guest performance by Mark Benton as Clive - and their interactions drive the story forward. All five are expertly cast, and perfectly performed. Noel Clarke has been harsh in reflecting back on his choices in these early episodes, but as part of his overall arc throughout the season, I can't fault his work here. Camille Coduri gets the best lines: "Skin like an old bible", "I know she is Greek, but that's not the point" and so on. Her brief scene with the Doctor in her bedroom was the funniest thing there'd been in Doctor Who up to that point. Eccleston and Piper are so good, I can't really express it without being dull, they are too good if anything; while not looking like as well-matched pairing as, say, Tennant and Piper, they have bags more chemistry. They are another two big reasons why Doctor Who took off again.

It's not quite all there from day one. The music is not yet enhanced by real recorded orchestral parts, it's all synthesised, and now sounds a little tinny and cheap in comparison to what came later. There's a few parts where they haven't quite got the tone exactly right, but they're brief, a few seconds of the running time in all, and the show would get better very quickly at this. Piper's treatment of Mickey at the end jars a little, but not as much as it did first time I watched. It's not exactly subtly expressed that Mickey is not a good boyfriend, and Davies has gone on record of not wanting Rose to be too perfect, but her kiss off line is just the wrong side of cruel for me. When it comes together, though, it's magic. There's one glorious moment, a tiny thing that you could blink and miss: just after the plastic Mickey's head's been pulled off and the male diner has screamed, there's a look on Eccleston's face of madcap joy, like he adores the chaos all around him.

One other thing I noticed this time, because I'd so recently watched the first first episode of Doctor Who, was the parallels between the debut deaths in the twentieth and twenty-first century versions: Old Mother and Clive are both prophets of doom, and probably the wisest non-Gallifreyans to appear in their respective stories; they try to warn other characters in the narrative that they're in danger, but in the end it's they who come a cropper. It's an interestingly bleak theme of Doctor Who that might be inadvertent here, but is picked up deliberately elsewhere too: you can be as clever as you want, but without the Doctor, you'll never be safe.

Connectivity: 

Both Rose and The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky are Russell T Davies era earth-based stories involving invasions by slightly reworked monsters from the original series. In both, the Doctor confronts the aliens at the end with a MacGuffin device that will destroy them, but won't activate it until he's given them a chance. In both instances, he can't bring himself to do it, and someone else has to intervene.

Deeper Thoughts:
Who Knows Part Three. Well, a few weeks back I'd have said that another of those mysteries of Doctor Who to which we might never get answers was what exactly happened between Christopher Eccleston and the production team in the early days of filming the return series of Doctor Who. But he's only gone and spoken about it, thirteen years on. He must have finally got frustrated with people asking him over and over and/or thought that, as so much time has passed, he could share some details. From small comments made in the intervening years by many parties involved, it's consistently clear that whatever happened to cause Christopher Eccleston to quit happened in the first production block (covering Rose and the two-part Slitheen story, all directed by Keith Boak). It's been hypothesised that Eccleston fell out with Boak, or producer Phil Collinson, or many other people on the senior production side; his interview suggests he fell out with all of them, including Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner. As he puts it: "They lost trust in me, and I lost faith and trust and belief in them".

Eccleston felt the weight of being the most seasoned member of the cast, yet in a role that was out of his comfort zone; the part was one he felt required "a natural light comedian" which is not how he saw himself. His resultant insecurity made it a stressful experience. From other testimonies about this time, though, it's clear nobody knew what they were doing; there was no frame of reference for making a show like Doctor Who's 2005 model, as there hadn't been anything quite like it done before, certainly not in the UK. With a lot riding on it being successful, it's not surprising everyone was stressed. There were many issues and delays; the planned schedule was clearly inadequate, as it's been reported they were something like three weeks behind after only a day of filming. This was not an atmosphere conducive to on-set harmony. But if the producers really lost faith in Eccleston's performance, as he seems to have done himself, then this viewer at least thinks they're dead wrong. If he was out of his comfort zone, he used it to spur him on to something special. It makes sense: the Doctor is a character putting on a brave face while inside he's not enjoying himself as much as he appears; that's a pretty good summary of Eccleston himself as he did it.

Where even Eccleston's acting wasn't good enough, was the publicity drive after the series had wrapped. He’d made an agreement with Davies not to damage the reputation of the series, and he did his best; but, as anyone who saw those interviews and appearances can testify, he couldn't help but come over as awkward and defensive. I hope getting the negativity off his chest in this recent interview has helped him. A good sign is that he has agreed for the first time ever to attend a sci-fi convention, with an appearance at London Film and Comic Con planned for July. It's just a shame he's charging an arm and a leg (and two hearts and a respiratory bypass system) for an autograph.

In Summary:

If the kids don't like that, then the kids don't deserve to have any television ever shown to them again.

The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky

Chapter The 81st, details the Sat Navs of the Potato Men.

Plot: 
Martha uses the Time-Space Telegraph app on her phone to call the Doctor and Donna back to Earth, where they all help UNIT investigate a hot-house private academy of clever kids using environmental car accessories to take over the world. The tech genius in charge of this is Mark Zuckerberg, sorry Luke Rattigan, and he's secretly in league with the Sontarans. Devices in millions of cars around the globe are activated and start spewing out poison gas, which will eventually kill all humans and turn the Earth into a clone hatchery. The Sontarans have promised Luke a passage to another planet so that he and his followers can start up a new society (he's gone from Zuckerberg to Elon Musk now). His followers are not so keen on this, particularly the breeding programme he's planned, so leave him alone. Despite lots of gun battles and use of clone infiltrators, the Sontarans are defeated: the Doctor burns off the poison gas using a gizmo, and the tech whizzkid redeems himself by doing selfless acts to make up for his years of evil; so, a bit like Bill Gates, is what I'm thinking - the three ages of tech whizzkid.

Context:

Watched from the DVD, separating the episodes by a couple of days. The first one was watched only by myself, the Better Half and middle child (boy of 8), the three biggest fans in the house, I'd say. But the second and final instalment attracted the remaining members of the family (elder boy, 11, and girl, 5). There were long periods of complete silence, edge of the seat concentration; this is always a sign that something's going down well. And after the story ended, something unprecedented happened - they watched the next episode too, a few days later. Every time they watch one they really enjoy, there are choruses of "Next ep, next ep" at the end, but after that they don't usually bug me for days and days until I get it down off the shelf. This time, they did, and very much enjoyed The Doctor's Daughter too. Tennant is a crowd-pleaser. I was under the weather when they watched that following story, and had a nap instead, so won't be blogging it next (it would have felt like too much of a rule break from the random order concept anyway).

First-time round:
The 2008 run was the first full Doctor Who series we saw from our new family home, which we'd moved into just before the previous Christmas, and where we still live. The family at the time was only three in number, with our first child less than two years old. This Tennant / Tate series was broadcast in an earlier slot than it had been previously, and we'd taken advantage of this to watch the first couple of episodes live, with the little 'un sat on a lap. The Adipose one - one of the earliest shows to come up randomly for the blog - went okay, but then The Fires of Pompeii's lava monsters scared the poor mite, so we abandoned live watching and started timeshifting for viewing later in the evening without him, and that was the settled pattern by the time we got to the Sontaran two-parter.

Errata: re-reading that early Partners in Crime blog post, I realise I misrepresented its first-time round watch there, forgetting all about trying to watch episodes live, but we did do it. I had previously written about this very same scaring of my first-born on my old blog, so you'd think I'd have remembered.
 

Reaction:

When I watched this in situ, as part of the fourth series of the twenty-first century return of Doctor Who, I was underwhelmed; the year as a whole was top-drawer, but this two-parter felt at best ho-hum, maybe even a little duff. Fast forward to now, and watching it - trying to be as objective as I can - it feels like something from a golden age. We were really spoilt back then. In fact, such do I feel the need to mentally interrogate myself on this era, being a big fan of the first few years of the new series and Russell T Davies' other work, I'm not just trying to be objective, I'm actively trying to hate it. And I can't. Tennant is charismatic and in full control, totally in his rock star pomp.

The story itself, which again seemed like one of the most unremarkable at the time, is a rollicking tale. The Sontarans are handled expertly - great masks, great costumes, great performances. Both the two main Sontaran performers, Christopher Ryan and Dan Starkey, returned to the show, the latter becoming a very successful recurring character, Strax; this says something about how successful they both were in their first outing. The script serves the aliens well, playing up their 'Colonel Blimp' conception, but adding in nice little details like their "Sontar-Ha" haka. Teaming them up with another villain of diminutive stature in Ryan Sampson's Rattigan was a clever stroke too; Sampson relishes his role, and the emotion of his arc is nicely delivered as is the (broad) comedy stuff too. Also returning is UNIT, which has its biggest extravaganza of the new series to date. The Doctor reacting badly to guns and salutes is possibly not needed (it's never been something he's worried about before), but the script calls out the Doctor's hypocrisy on this. The abrupt death of Ross, and Tennant's righteous anger in reaction to it, is very good too.

The evil Sat Navs hook is very tenuously linked to the main plot, and hasn't aged terribly well, but despite that, this story is closest to the urban thriller genre that Doctor Who has got; it's closer probably than The Bells of Saint John, which was marketed as the first ever Who urban thriller, but is pretty much exactly the same template as the Sontaran story - killer wi-fi upgrading the Sat Nav idea. The one major weakness is the inclusion of Martha. Freema Agyeman 's performance is a little bit wobbly compared to her full year - maybe she, as a less experienced actor, needed a bit more attentive direction than she got as a returning guest character. Catherine Tate on the other hand is faultless, and has great chemistry with Tennant. Bernard Cribbins and Jacqueline King are perhaps the best semi-regular family cast in Doctor Who history (Camille Coduri and Noel Clarke were excellent too, but it's Bernard flippin' Cribbins - you can't do better). More of stuff like this, please, Chris Chibnall - it's been reported that "family" is going to be the next series' watchword, which already sounds okay by me.

Connectivity: 

Another story that ends on a cliffhanger linking in to the next broadcast tale, and both stories involve sequences where the air inside a sealed vehicle is clouded with a gas that's poisonous to humans. They are also both stories that include Christopher Ryan in the cast, if one were to count Trial of a Time Lord as one big story. As I made a big deal of saying I don't consider it such in my last post, it's a bit of a cheat to use Chris Ryan as a connection here. But I have anyway.

Deeper Thoughts:
Who Knows Too. Continuing my loose theme of unanswered questions from the making of Doctor Who over the years, here's another biggie: why have so few women written for the series? Despite having a female producer right at the beginning and employing some key female directors early on,
no woman was employed to write a single episode of Doctor Who until it had been going for twenty years. (Yes, yes, I know one writer insisted on a co-credit for his wife alongside him on a 1960s story, but there's no evidence that she contributed whatsoever to the actual script, and the commission was purely his.) If, since that first story in 1983 (Barbara Clegg's very wonderful Enlightenment), it had been wall-to-wall female writers, it might not have been so bad, but it really really hasn't been. In the final few years of the original series post 1983, Jane Baker - half of a married couple writing team - co-contributed three stories plus a single episode, alongside her husband Pip. There was one more story solely written by a woman in the original run, and that was the very last one of the twentieth century, Rona Munro's Survival. Three women in all.

[Note: I'm not counting Paula Moore, credited author of Attack of the Cybermen, as this person doesn't exist. The person who reportedly receives the cheques for Attack, who has a similar name, very probably didn't contribute to the scripts at all. Who did write it, and - more importantly - why, are two more of those unanswered and probably unanswerable questions that remain contentious talking points within Doctor Who scholarship.]

This was in the dark ages of sexism in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, though. In our more advanced times, things will have improved greatly, won't they? No. Only another three women have been employed so far to write Doctor Who in the twenty-first century, plus there was another story from Rona Munro. Six individual writers in total out of nearly a hundred.  By story, or by number of minutes produced, it's an even worse percentage. The entire Doctor Who writing output of one half of the world's population totals less than, say, a writer like Don Houghton who penned a couple of stories in the 70s. Helen Raynor, author of the Sontaran story under review here, does best with two stories each comprising two 45 minute episodes; so, the most an individual woman has been able to write for TV Doctor Who ever is 180 minutes in total. I've had baths longer than that.

It's shameful, and I can only really moan about this. I can't muse on any possible solutions, as I can't see any reason why it should be; Doctor Who is not a show with a particularly male outlook, I'd have said, and there are plenty of experienced writers who would jump at the chance. I only hope that Jodie Whittaker taking over as lead actor encourages the addressing of this lack of gender diversity behind the scenes; and, maybe having a showrunner who isn't a man would be good to try when the day comes that Mister Chibnall is ready to move on.

In Summary:

Good solid meat and potatoes fare, heavy on the potatoes.

Terror of the Vervoids

Chapter The 80th, where Agatha Christie meets John Wyndham meets a Thesaurus.

Plot: 
The Doctor's on trial for his life because of something or other - best to skip over all that, really - and is presenting his defence, a precognitive projection of an event in his future. This is a bit tricky, legally-speaking: how can one defend against a capital punishment with a potential future which won't happen if one gets executed for one's previous crimes? Is it even a defence if the good behaviour hasn't happened yet, so can't refute any accusations made about one's past? Anyway, this is all admissible, because everything seems to be permitted according to Gallifreyan law, it's bonkers - anything goes. Also, it's mandatory in a Time Lord courtroom to use myriad polysyllabic verbiage, which can make it difficult to follow what's being adumbrated.

The defence concerns an incident aboard a spaceship, the Hyperion III, with a murder mystery or three, an attempted hijack, espionage, and a minor conspiracy to cover-up some dubious scientific experiments. These experiments created walking vegetable creatures, the Vervoids, who escape from the hold and kill pretty much everyone in the ship that hasn't been killed already. It sounds exciting doesn't it? And it is, except when it gets interrupted to bang on about the Doctor's trial. In this future tale, the Doctor and Mel (a friend he hasn't met yet) solve the mystery and destroy the Vervoids. This lands the Doctor in even more trouble in the courtroom, as he's committed genocide, which makes it even more likely that he'll get executed. Except, he hasn't done the genocide yet, that's in his future; and, if he gets executed for the genocide, he won't actually commit the genocide. My brain hurts.

Context:

Watched with the whole family (the Better Half and three kids, two boys aged 11 and 8 and a girl aged 5) from the DVD over a brace of nights, two episodes by two. It went down well, with mostly hushed viewing, and each cliffhanger garnered excited cries of "Next ep, next ep". Both the middle child and the B.H. separately moaned about the frequency (both in terms of pitch and number of instances) of Mel's screaming. The eldest described the Vervoids, amusingly and I suppose somewhat aptly, as being "made of food" (the Vervoids have been victims of worse visual comparisons over the years).

First-time round:
The one thing that leapt to mind about watching this for the first time (on its debut BBC1 broadcast in November 1986) was that my sister saw the final episode before me. This did not happen very often, as she usually didn't watch Doctor Who at all. I'd been out somewhere for Saturday afternoon, probably to do DJ or fund-raising duties at Worthing Hospital Radio, which I was involved with around this time; she was at home, and must have been bored. When I got back, she told me it was the guy from Brookside who done it before I could even cue up the video recording. Luckily, I remained unspoilered despite this slightly unkind divulgence. This was due to a misunderstanding on behalf of myself or Doctor Who Magazine's previewer: the preview for the third part of the Trial narrative (in DWM 118, fact fans) covered all the final six episodes as if they were one lump.

This is not as surprising as it might seem: the numbering of the Trial episodes suggests it's all one story, so there's no rule as to how and where or even if you split it up; the now standard division into four, and their unofficial titles, had not quite been established then. The final six episodes were made as one block, identified with a single production code, with the same director. The action between the fourth and fifth episodes of the six is continuous. Why wouldn't someone think they were all one piece? Unless one had actually seen them, of course, but it's very possible the previewer hadn't. Anyway, the only clue in the magazine (from memory - all the back issues of that vintage are in a cupboard somewhere that I'm not going to search through just to check) was a comment that the story took a different turn towards the end, and the last two episodes included Anthony Ainley's Master. I was expecting six episodes set on the Hyperion III, with a big reveal of the true villain two thirds of the way through. As such, I brushed off my sibling's comments as only part of the picture: I knew it was Beard-Face who was really behind it all. It only dawned on me what was actually going on at the point when it was supposed to dawn on me. Sometimes two wrongs do make a right.

Reaction:

In 1986, the twenty-third production run of Doctor Who episodes was presented as one story of fourteen episodes. This has made a lot of people very angry and was widely seen as a bad move. The show had almost been cancelled altogether the previous year before getting at least one more series as a reprieve; coming back with the biggest ever story in Doctor Who's history, a story where the character - like the show - was being put on trial, must have seemed like a good idea. It is the sort of momentarily seductive brainstorming session idea that everyone rapidly drops. Only they didn't drop it. Drawing attention to the show's dicey position was a risky move indeed, and the biggest ever story in Doctor Who's history doesn't sound so hot if you call it the longest ever story in Doctor Who's history. Anyway, it's not really one story - it's three tales with a framing narrative, followed by a two episode wrap-up. It could so easily have been rewritten, even at a late moment, to lose the over-arching plotting, and re-titled with individual headings (it's nearly universally referred to by four different titles as it is), and it might have seemed like less of a slog. Only, they didn't do this.

Luckily, this didn't kill off the series, but it felt at the time like it was a close thing.  With some distance from the pain of those bad old days (and I know it's not much to be proud of that it meant so much at the time that Doctor Who survived, but it did to me and many others) it's easier to see the positive points. To start with: Bonnie Langford. I mean it. The character of Mel as written and performed is a breath of fresh air after a number of years of more adversarial and bickering companion / Doctor relationships; the Doctor and Mel get on well with one another, and have a natural rapport. Mel also gets enthusiastically involved in the adventure throughout rather than whinging about wanting to get back to the TARDIS. It's a shame the characterisation is one note: this was the first time a companion actor needed a more defined role to put distance between the character and existing audience perception, but alas she didn't get more than "keep fit enthusiast" with which to work. Also, Bonnie is encouraged to scream all the time. Hers is a wonderful scream, the best in the business, but it does get overused very quickly.

Everyone is giving their all in the cast, in true Agatha Christie gang show fashion. Honor Blackman is the big star name, but her two assistants as played by Malcolm Tierney and David Allister are also good value; my personal favourite guest character, though, is Denys Hawthorne as Rudge, the weak man gone rogue. Colin Baker is as restrained and nuanced as he can be acting from inside a technicolour eyesore (they add a new waistcoat and cravat for this story that are even more garish than usual, if you can believe such a thing possible). And it's easy to overlook the sterling work put in by Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston, because whenever they appear the story grinds to a shuddering halt; poor things, it's hard not to associate them with the annoyance this causes. The trial framing device of which they are part works against the drama, as scenes set in the courtroom need to be inserted every so often to remind the viewer that what they're watching is actually not what they think they are watching, but is in fact some other people watching that stuff.

In the previous sub-stories it hasn't mattered quite so much as it does in episodes 9 to 12: in the first four episodes, the device was still a novelty; in the four after that, the script goes to the greatest lengths to integrate the action on the screen with the action of the court: Mindwarp is all about the veracity of the evidence, and without the Doctor, Inquisitor and Valeyard's final reactions, it doesn't really have an ending. The onboard action of the Hyperion III, though, stands on its own as a solid adventure, which makes the trial dull by comparison. The few call-back references to evidence tampering feel much more tacked on, and so aren't effective; they are just enough, though, to puncture and deflate at crucial moments. Without the trial sequences, I really think this would stand as Colin Baker's strongest individual adventure. Writers Pip and Jane Baker are terribly underrated and should be given a break. Their dialogue is not as awful as I remembered - although it is very wordy - and the plot and characters are all evidence of a fine job done within the constraints of this era.

Malcolm Clarke's music veers from beautiful, delicate melodies to noisy passages of percussive clunks and synth parps; this, however, is the challenge and genius of every Malcolm Clarke score, and I wouldn't want it any other way. The production design is day-glo, but there may not be any other option: as I understand the design thinking on this, Colin's coat would swamp any surrounding colour palettes if they were even slightly muted, so the saturation has to be turned up to 11 for other costumes, sets and props during his era. With the Olivia Newton-John style 'keep fit to music' action, and the idea that this floating hotel for the nouveau riche would throw towels into the waste disposal after only one use, it all adds up to a none-more-80s tale. Again, though, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing.

Connectivity: 

Two stories on the trot featuring aggressive flora and a lead-in from the previous story.

Deeper Thoughts:
Who Knows. Even with the vast volume of Doctor Who reference works written over the years, there are still some questions that can never be answered even about the real world of the show's production (let alone the irreconcilable inconsistencies in the fictional universe of the Doctor, if you factor in those you'd be here until doomsday... or the end of time). These aren't just about obscure trivia either, but can be about the fundamentals, like how to refer to stuff. Until near the end of William Hartnell's time as the Doctor, each episode had an individual on-screen title, but the groups of episodes that formed a story - the one with the cavemen, say, or the first Dalek one, or the one where a switch breaks and all the clocks melt - didn't have any overall title, at least not one that was available to the viewers at home. There were various production documents which touched on group headings, and references in the Radio Times and programme synopses, but they were often inconsistent or plain wrong. This didn't matter too much until ten years or so later, when the first of those reference works was published, and it needed to include a story list. Doctor Who books do need to include story lists, it's a rule.

After that, and for many years to come, titles for those Hartnell stories were debated back and forth, suggestions were tried, countered, found favour, or fell out of use. Often, the name of the first episode was just used to refer to the lot, which only works if it is a vaguely representative handle. The worst candidate, you'd have thought, was that one about the cavemen. 'An Unearthly Child' doesn't have anything to do with three quarters of the story, but it's the name that's stuck. Doctor Who Magazine's style and content guides dictated for a while, though not sure whether they still do now, that it should be referred to by the never popular moniker '100,000 BC'; but, 'An Unearthly Child' is what's on the front of the video, the DVD, and the novelisation, and so I've followed that popular wisdom when covering it for the blog. The first Dalek story is known as The Daleks, which is appropriate if dull, but not a title that was ever used by the people making the thing. They may have called it 'The Mutants', but that's also now the name of a later Jon Pertwee story, so would be confusing. It may even have been called 'Beyond the Sun' at one point, but that twistily became applied to the following story too (the one with the melting clocks). That one has settled down more recently as 'The Edge of Destruction'  - it's opening episode title.

This chaos stops once the overall titles are on screen for all to see, until The Trial of a Time Lord. Trial has the opposite issue of those early Hartnell shows; the on-screen label is inadequate and the whole thing needs tags for its sub-segments. These quickly became established as 'The Mysterious Planet' (1-4), 'Mindwarp' (5-8), 'Terror of the Vervoids' (9-12) and 'The Ultimate Foe' (13-14). These are roughly based on working titles used in production, although 'The Ultimate Foe' was actually a working title for the Vervoids story, but somehow came to be associated with the final two-parter probably because it's a better description than 'Time Inc.' which was the other likely contender. Nobody ever calls it 'Time Inc.' even though 'The Ultimate Foe' is just as unofficial (sitting on the fence, BBC Worldwide labelled the DVD boxes just with the Trial title and episode numbers, but added a sticker to each box with the commonly used name).

We've come full circle since 2005, each episode has an individual title, no matter how many of those episodes form a wider story. As they are significantly less episodes than the Hartnell ones, two or at a push three parts only, it has been merely been necessary to have a slash. As in: The Sontaran Stratagem slash The Poison Sky, to pick a random example.

In Summary:

Terror of the Vervoids is great. The bits that are The Trial of a Time Lord episodes 9-12, not so much.