By Roy Mathur, on 2025-07-14, at 23:12:53 to 00:03:43 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Notable Cast: Sixth Doctor: Colin Baker, Peri Brown: Nicola Bryant, Mel Bush: Bonnie Langford (Bonita Melody Lysette Langford); actress, dancer, and singer, also Just William, and frequent light entertainment guest, Professor Sarah Lasky: Honor Blackman, also Zeus's wife, the goddess Hera, in Jason and the Argonauts, The Avengers' kinky booted Dr Catherine Gale, Bond's Pussy Galore, need I go on?
Director: Chris Clough, also The Ultimate Foe, Delta and the Bannermen, Dragonfire, The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis
Writer: Pip and Jane Baker, also The Mark of the Rani, The Ultimate Foe, Time and the Rani and novelizations, Make Your Own Adventure with Doctor Who: Race Against Time, The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind audio
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Location: BBC Television Centre, Shepherd's Bush, 1986
Broadcast: Story 143c, serial 3, season 23, Parts Nine to Twelve, the penultimate story of The Trial of a Time Lord, following Mindwarp (pod 586), 4 x c. 25 min, 1--22 Nov 1986
Media: Target novelization by Pip and Jane Baker 1987, VHS 1993, DVD 2008, 2014, Blu-ray 2019, BBC iPlayer since 1 Nov 2023
I was no doubt struggling at A'Level college, though I did have a girlfriend for a bit, which was nice.
The UK no. 1 single was Nick Berry's (Eastender's Wicksy) intensely miserable one hit wonder Every Loser Wins.
Doctor defends himself by playing the Matrix recording of the events aboard a spaceship.
Onboard the Hyperion III spaceliner, an officer under attack sends a distress call intercepted by the Tardis. The Doctor and Mel arrive and meet the captain, a reluctant old acquaintance, the crew and passengers, including Lasky and her fellow scientists. They say they are transporting giant empty fruit shucks from the planet Mogar to Earth. When Mel investigates the hold, the escorting officer is electrocuted.
The Doctor and Mel find a woman with extensive plant growths. She who begs them to stop Lasky. Lasky and the other scientists arrive, sedate her, and explain the hybrid is an assistant, whose thumb was scratched and infected by pollen. She is being taken to earth for treatment.
The Doctor discovers the pods, far from being empty, contain hostile plant-based aliens, the Vervoids, who are attacking the crew. They are a new slave race, the result of Lasky's experiments.
A scientist steers the ship towards the black hole of Tartarus to destroy the Vervoids. The Vervoids enter the bridge, emit a deadly marsh gas, killing the hijacker. Mogarians, protected by environment suits, take control and steer the ship to safety, then hijack the ship themselves to recover vionesium mined from Mogar by exploitative humans.
The Doctor deploys the vionesium, which explodes with high intensity light, causing the Vervoids to rapidly age and die, then the Doctor and Mel leave.
In the court, the Valeyard accuses the Doctor of genocide, a capital crime.
Terror of the Vervoids sounds like a prog rock band and would today probably end up on the British government's proscribed list, which is about as contemporaneously topical as I'm going to get.
How incredibly undiverse the year 2986 is; all the humans on board are white and most of the crew is male. There is one female stewardess, who, after offering advice on a UFO to a ship's officer, is dismissed with, "You make delicious coffee". Late 80s Doctor Who seems to be turning the clock back decades, to paint a very old fashioned vision of the future.
Speaking of old fashioned, one of the Mogarian aliens refers to Travers' reassurance as, "Simply a bromide." Bromides were uses as sedatives in the 1900s, so it is an incredibly archaic turn of phrase for the 80s, let alone 2986. Ironically, there is dialogue that pokes fun at the Doctor's archaic mode of speech too, when he says it is not quite Mel's, "style to go into a brown study." To which she replies, "Brown study? Is the vocabulary of all the Time Lords so antediluvian?" Were the writers self-aware enough to send themselves up, or were they oblivious to the irony of mocking something that they themselves were guilty of?
I liked the ship sets, though it seemed rather flat for a ship. I enjoyed the CGI'd panoramic sunroof and bridge viewscreen. The latter with scrolling alphanumerics and graphics, representing targeting, course, and trajectory. All were very much 80s spaceflight video games in style. I liked the Mogarians' robotic environment suits, reminding me of Star Trek DS9's Breen. I found the Vervoid creature design disturbingly effective. The smooth, fleshy, oval faces, with a centre sprout of spikes, crash into the uncanny valley of human generative organs as any earthly orchid.
Unlike New Who, speech was easy to hear. This was a combination of a low-cut dialogue track, good separation of restrained incidental music, and a clear speaking cast.
Here's where we first meet Mel, a very 80s, aerobics mad young woman the Doctor picked up in an off-screen adventure. The Doctor says that her life with him is a, "Far cry from the carefree life of Pease Pottage" (a village in Sussex). Unfortunately, her screams immediately grated as more caterwauling than silver screen scream queen.
I was delighted to see Honor Blackman, Bond's Pussy Galore, then distressed to see her playing a short-fused, tetchy, extremely unlikeable, and unethical academic.
I noticed a couple of humorous Easter Eggs. Lasky is reading Murder on the Orient Express and the aliens are playing Space Invaders.
Effective sets and creature design, let down by an overly complex script and a crew and passengers I cared little for, though I could empathise with the suited aliens angry at human exploitation of their home and a rebellious vegoid Vervoid slave race. The Doctor does, however, as the Valyard points out, kill their entire species in the process of saving the ship. In summation, clearly one of several Agatha Christies in space common to Doctor Who, but not as good as The Robots of Death. I am also finding the interruption of court scenes too frequent.
According to Howe, walker, and Stammer's Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who, Colin Baker says when Nicola Bryant left, they chose a known celebrity to replace her with a more energetic and daring character and not written as a whiner. What he doesn't say, of course, is the scriptwriters replaced a whiner with a screamer. Bloody writers.
A glaring ommission from pod 586, The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp, was not drawing attention to Brian Blessed's singular and very funny prayer to his gods that included whistling.
Another omission was not discussing Peri's fate at the end of Mindwarp. This is revealed in a short, The Eternal Mystery, by Kerblam!'s Peter McTighe; a promotion for Doctor Who: The Collection: Season 22 (2022). She marries Yrcanos, becomes the queen of Krontep, until his death, then rejoins Six for more adventures in the Tardis.