The Bill, seasons two and three

The Bill returned for a second run of 12 episodes in 1985. Retaining the same hourlong format and post-watershed timeslot, the only clue that gives away that this was a different production block being a change in the regular cast line up.

The most obvious absence was PC Dave Litten (Gary Olsen), one of the main characters in the first season but now relegated to only a single guest appearance. Some new regular characters were introduced, including PCs Pete Muswell, Abe Lyttleton and Nick Shaw, with Muswell seemingly taking Litten's role as the PC who is a little bit dodgy. Actually that's an understatement - Muswell is several steps beyond Litten, being an unapologetic racist whose attitudes go unchallenged by his colleagues simply because they were so prevalent at the time. He also has a (topical, in 1985) backstory about having policed at the 1984 miner's strike, making lots of money from overtime and enjoying himself at the same time. Muswell and Lyttleton would only appear in season two, departing between seasons just as mysteriosuly as they arrived.

Overall the second season isn't as good as the first, with some episodes that struggled to make full use of the runtime, and which had to be padded out with unrelated B-plots that never quite joined up with the main plots in a satisfactory way. It still contains some really good episodes, including one of the best Bill stories evar, Ringer.

This was an episode about a serious car crash and the ensuing investigation that made excellent use of the regulars at all ranks and disciplines of the Sun Hill police force, from the PCs on the scene of the accident, to Mr Brownlow coordinating the response, to the CID team detecting who was responsible. It culminates with the second guest apearance from DS "Tommy" Burnside (Chris Ellison) when he unexpectedly turns up undercover, having been independently investigating the same criminals. This is a wonderfully put together piece of TV drama, and might well be The Bill's finest hour - certainly it's the best single episode of the early years.

After season two there was a gap of almost two years before the third season was shown on ITV in 1987. This season - another 12 programmes in the same format as the first two seasons - is remarkable for being script edited by Chris Boucher, the same role as he played throughout all four seasons of Blakes 7. It's therefore surprising that this season didn't end on a fantastic cliffhanger.

Once again there was turnover amongst the regulars. Perhaps the main new addition to the cast was Inspector Kite, who seemed to be there to be an antagonist for Sgt Cryer - outranking him but lacking his years of practical experience, they had very different approaches to policing that naturally brought them into conflict.

But Kite would last only the one season, so with hindsight it is fair to say that the more significant development was that PC Tony Stamp (Graham Cole) would finally get recognised as a named character with an occasional line all to himself, instead of just being the silent PC in the background he had been up until now.

Another noteworthy change in the series setup that would have long-lasting implications was that this is the point when PC Jim Carver (our original POV character back in the pilot, though now well-established as part of the ensemble cast) moved from the uniform branch to CID, where he would stay for many years to become one of the show's iconic detective constables. It does have to be said that this is quite a change for the character, going by his characterisation as established in his earliest episodes. In his attitude towards the CID he now seems more like Dave Litten was in the first season, so perhaps Carver took on some of his characteristics in the absence of Gary Olsen?

The pacing issues seen in season two seemed to continue through season three, though it did go out on a high with the last two being among its best. The standout episode of the season is Overnight Stay, which sees most of the cast guarding a jury overnight in a hotel, and makes great use of the setting to put our regulars in unfamiliar situations and combinations, and tells a distinctively different type of story as a result.

These episodes were also the last chance for the writers and producers to make use of post-watershed levels of nudity and violence, since after season three came the change of format - arguably the biggest single change in The Bill's 26-year history - when it moved to a half-hour timeslot at 8pm.

Just as significant in its own way as the format change at marking the end of an era, the end of season three also saw the departure of DI Roy Galloway (John Salthouse), a mainstay of the series and easily one of the most memorable and significant characters throughout the first three seasons.

At least we still have many more episodes ahead of us with Ted Roach and Sgt Cryer, my other favourite regulars. And you don't need to be a Detective Inspector to know who the perfect replacement for Roy Galloway would be, to be Frank...

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eight

"Is Peri dead?"

"No."

So much for that cliffhanger. The Inquisitor once again stands in for the viewer when she asks

"Then what was the point of showing that last sequence?"

and when she then says

"I thought it was somewhat gratuitous."

The plot starts treading water (something we cats hate) with the Doctor and Crozier spouting more technobabble about Lord Kiv's brain transplant. Crozier wants to put the brain into another body, and is clearly eyeing up the Doctor (naughty Crozier!) which is just putting the plot back to the state it was in a couple of episodes ago.

Imprisoned with King Yrcanos, Peri says 

"I just want to be back in my own time with people I love."

This seems like it has come out of nowhere, and is a somewhat contrived way of starting the ensuing dialogue between them, but I think we can let the writer off in this case because Nicola Bryant and BRIAN BLESSED transcend the script with their performances.

Yrcanos: "WHAT IS THAT? LOVE?"

Peri: "Well, it's when you care for someone or something more than yourself, I guess."

Dorf: "More than yourself?"

Peri: "Well, I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes more than life."

Yrcanos: "I CARE NOTHING FOR MINE."

Peri: "How can you say that, Yrcanos?"

Yrcanos: "WELL, ON MY PLANET OF KRONTEP, WHEN WE DIE, OUR SPIRIT IS RETURNED TO LIFE TO BE BORN IN A MORE NOBLE WARRIOR."

Peri: "Until what? Where do you end after all your brave deaths?"

Yrcanos: "YOU BECOME A KING! ME, AFTER MY NEXT DEATH I JOIN THE OTHER KINGS ON VERDUNA, THE HOME OF THE GODS."

Peri: "To do what?"

Yrcanos: "WHY TO FIGHT! WHAT ELSE?"

Thank Hoff that BRIAN BLESSED is in this, the story would be so much less bearable without him.

Between scenes Crozier has had to rule out the Doctor - magnificent head or no - as a suitable body for Kiv, and wants to consider Peri instead. The Doctor tries to dissuade him with the most unconvincing counterargument:

"Peri? Ah, quite unsuitable. Female. Silly. Oh... flibbertigibbet. Hopeless."

Crozier sees through this and observes "you have strong feelings for the woman." He offers to let Peri off the hook if the Doctor can find a better candidate.

The Doctor is obviously behaving a lot more like his proper character than he was back in part six, considering that he is now showing any concern for Peri whatsoever, but the damage has been done and the question that hangs over all the Doctor's subsequent actions in this story is why he didn't do any of them sooner. Alas it's not a question we're ever going to get a satisfactory answer to.

The Doctor goes to rescue Yrcanos and Dorf. Yrcanos shouts made-up swearwords at the Doctor until he is let out and the guard captain put in the cell in his place.

"HIS NAME IS DORF AND YOU ARE SCUM."

"No, actually I am known as the Doctor, and there's no need to thank me for helping you to escape. Come along."

Kiv and Sil meet with some silly-looking squeaky aliens in a scene that only exists to give them something to so in this episode.

Yrcanos wants to know why the Doctor released him.

Doctor: "I need your help to defeat the Mentors."

Yrcanos: "THAT I UNDERSTAND, BUT YOU ARE MY SWORN ENEMY. I HAVE VOWED TO KILL YOU!"

Doctor: "Yes, yes, well, we can deal with all that later. At the moment, we need each other."

Dorf: "He has a point."

Yrcanos: "EVERYONE HAS A POINT, NOWADAYS. I AM A MAN OF ACTION, NOT REASON!"

LOL! This story has more than its fair share of problems, but it has to be said that that is a great line.

Once again the Doctor stops Yrcanos from running in and pewing all the baddys with his pewpewpew gun, the Doctor saying he doesn't want Yrcanos to cause "a bloodbath." This lends credence to my theory about why he warned the baddys about Yrcanos back in part six, and perhaps the Matrix merely distorted that scene to make it look like the Doctor suddenly decided to side with the baddys for no reason. Again, we'll never know the truth for certain, thanks to a combination of the Doctor's very convenient amnesia in the courtroom and a lack of any later explanations about which scenes the Matrix distorted and how exactly it changed them.

"YOU THINK LIKE A WARRIOR BUT YOU DO NOT ACT LIKE ONE, IT'S MOST PERPLEXING."

Insightful dialogue like this from Yrcanos hints at a much better version of this story that we could maybe have gotten, if only its script flaws had been ironed out before recording. Even as it is, it still shows a much better understanding of the Doctor's character than Steven Moffat would later manage, with rubbish like "To the people of the gamma forests, the word 'Doctor' means 'mighty warrior.'" Mew.

The Doctor and Yrcanos attempt a 'prisoner transfer from cell block 1138' plan to rescue the other prisoners, which leads into a komedy scene with an unnamed Mentor who is obsessed with everyone being quiet, and is therefore the polar opposite to Yrcanos.

Mentor: “Oh, thank you.”

Yrcanos: “FOR YOUR LIFE? IT WAS NOTHING.”

Mentor: “No, for not shouting.”

and then

Yrcanos: “VAROONIK! WE'LL RELEASE THE SLAVES, AND THEN ON TO DEATH! VAROONIK!"

Doctor: “I'm sorry about the noise. He does so enjoy his work."

Mentor: "Just go. Just go!"

There's a sudden, immediate change of tone as this punchline crashes into the following scene, where Crozier has Peri bound and gagged on an operating table.

In the chaos following the releasing of the slaves, the Doctor gets separated from Yrcanos and the other rebels. The TARDIS appears next to him in a white light, and he walks backwards into it as though hypno-eyesed. We then see the TARDIS travelling into the space station from the beginning of part one, a neat way of showing how this fits into the overall story's timeline as well as an excuse to reuse the expensive SFX once more.

In the courtroom the Inquisitor gives the exposition about how the High Council of the Time Lords ordered that the Doctor be taken "out of time" and the prevention of "the consequence of Crozier's experiment." In doing so she comes across as just as much of an antagonist as the Valeyard, not an impartial party, being fully aware of what the Matrix is about to show next. (How the Matrix can have recorded what happened next after both the Doctor and the TARDIS have been removed to the trial is not explained, and a writer who was paying attention to his own writing might have used that as a way of hinting that what we see next is not really real.)

Crozier does a proper mad scientist rant as he explains to Sil that he has copied the "contents" of Kiv's mind into Peri's body, without actually transplanting the brain. The question of why he didn't do this before is not asked, so we can only conclude that he only just thought of doing it since the start of the episode. Except that he then says that

"This is what I wanted to achieve from the very beginning."

Yrcanos is trapped in a time bubble by the Time Lords. In the courtroom, the Doctor challenges the High Council with interfering. Isn't that exactly what they are accusing him of? It's always projection with baddys, isn't it, mew?

Inquisitor: "They're caught in a time bubble. Everything must be perfect before they drive home their final attack."

Doctor: "You're using Yrcanos as an assassin."

Inquisitor: "It was judged by the High Council as the most acceptable way, and Yrcanos will never know that he was used."

Doctor: "And so they took it upon themselves to act like second-rate gods?"

All very dramatic, except... isn't this exactly what Yrcanos would have done anyway? And then the only reason for delaying Yrcanos's attack seems to have been to give Sil time to do the punchline about Kiv being in Peri's body:

"I wish you could have found a more attractive one."

This line comes at the end of an otherwise really dramatic scene that shows us Peri is dead and Kiv is in her body, well acted by Nicola Bryant (as Kiv) and Patrick Ryecart. Tonally the end of this episode is all over the place. Come to think of it, the rest of Mindfuck isn't exactly very tonally consistent either.

Yrcanos charges in and does a Big No. And when BRIAN BLESSED does a Big No, it's a really Big

"NO!"

He pewpewpews everyone in the room, although the screen fades to white before we actually see anyone get pewed, thus leaving it to our imaginations. This is way more restrained than the writer has been at any point in the story up until now.

In the courtroom, the Inquisitor and the Valeyard team up to try and blame the Doctor for forcing the Time Lords to interfere. The Doctor remains defiant:

"No, I was taken out of time for another reason, and I have every intention of finding out what it is!"

Despite the camera already showing the Doctor in close up, it crash-zooms to even closer up: cliffhanger!

The Mindfuck section of The Trial of a Time Lord is one of the most confusing of all Doctor Who stories, and the most baffling thing about it is why they decided to make it that way. To purposefully misdirect the audience is one thing, but when you do so you put an expectation in the viewers' minds that everything will be paid off and explained eventually - and this never does so.

Not only is a full explanation still withheld from us by the end of part eight, it won't even be forthcoming by the final end of the season. This is a breach of trust between the makers of the show and their audience, and it means that however many points these episodes might otherwise have in their favour they can never quite make up for this underlying shortfall.

The mind that is being fucked with in the title of this section of Trial of a Time Lord isn't the Doctor's, or Peri's, or even Kiv's... it's the viewer's.

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 6

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Seven

Peri saves the Doctor, who runs away so that Yrcanos is left behind with Peri, whom he picks up... not in that way, naughty reader!

In the courtroom, the Doctor is now claiming to have partial recall of the events instead of either total amnesia or fully remembering them:

"I can recall some of it. Bits of it are beginning to bob back into my mind."

The Valeyard speaks for all of us when he says 

The Doctor once again insists that the Matrix is not showing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or as he puts it:

"The events took place, but not quite as we've seen them."

Yrcanos, Eckerry Dorf and Peri team up and go looking for other resistance fighters to team up with, although Yrcanos is convinced that they will find him and then make him their leader.

"ROM BROM SAVALOONA. YES. YES. THEIR FOOTSTEPS ARE GUIDED TOWARDS ME. THAT IS THEIR DESTINY... AND MINE."

Peri pets Dorf as she discusses with Yrcanos his belief in destiny versus her belief in "blind chance." This is a nice, quiet scene (well, as quiet as any scene can be that has BRIAN BLESSED in it) that adds to our experience of all three characters, unlike the following scene where the Doctor assists Crozier in transplanting Lord Kiv's brain into a new body. This consists of the Doctor and Crozier shouting a lot of technobabble and meaningless numbers at each other, and a pointless fake-out that Kiv has died for a few seconds before it turns out he's alive really.

Crozier says that

"As from today, Doctor, I can put any brain in any body, anywhere."

but the story frames this advancement of medical science as though it were a bad thing, being as it is done by the baddys for the benefit of the baddys, and the Doctor looks sad at the news.

It's not all bad, however, because this scene does in fact include the best moment of the entire season, when Kiv goes into "cardiac arrest" and Crozier insists on finishing his cup of tea before moving to help him. This shows more clearly than any of his dialogue that Crozier is a mad scientist who is only interested in his research and discoveries, he is not the sort of doctor who cares about helping anybody.

Yrcanos, Peri and Dorf get captured by some rebels and soon team up with them. Yrcanos takes charge, just as he said he would, and there is even a pretty good comic moment:

Dorf: "I have seen him inspire disheartened rabble into acts of heroism."

Peri: "But how many of them survived, huh?"

Yrcanos: "AH, THAT'S A MINOR CONSIDERATION WHEN THERE IS GLORY TO BE HAD!"

This is turning out to be an episode with some wit, which is good because it helps disguise the fact that the plot is not really progressing much through these scenes. The rebels' previous leader says

"Alright, King Yrcanos of the Krontep, we'll fight."

to which Yrcanos replies

"VAROONIK!"

We soon get an example of Yrcanos's leadership in the field:

Rebel: "I'll scout ahead."

Yrcanos: "WE'LL ALL SCOUT AHEAD."

As they all charge forward as best they can in the cramped studio tunnels, he provides the template for all subsequent Klingons in the various Star Trek spinoff series:

"THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR BATTLE. A GREAT DAY TO DIE!"

It's not just that one line (though it is the clincher), at other points he also rejects spying and ambush as tactics, and refuses to retreat even when that would be sensible. Yes, Star Trek took a lot from BRIAN BLESSED here. Perhaps they shouldn't have, mew?

Dorf manages to persuade Yrcanos to call off the attack, leading to a great line from the king that is both witty and characterful:

"YOU ARE A GREAT DOG OF WAR... I MEAN, A GREAT WARRIOR, WHOSE ADVICE I TRUST AND VALUE. OH VERY WELL, TODAY PRUDENCE SHALL BE OUR WATCHWORD. TOMORROW, I SHALL SOAK THE LAND IN BLOOD!"

It's too late, though, and the baddys spring an ambush on them.

They try to fight or, in Peri's case, to run away, and they all get pewpewpewed by the baddys.

This seems like a perfect place for the cliffhanger, but instead it goes back to the courtroom for one more short scene. The episode ends on an exchange between the Doctor and the Valeyard:

Doctor: "I am not responsible for that!"

Valeyard: "In your mind, perhaps not. But in reality it is somewhat different, Doctor."

It cuts back to the Doctor after the Valeyard's final word, and he is already in such a close up that there's no more room for a crash-zoom.

I suspect the director may have made a terrible mistaik here. This was probably supposed to be a crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger, but it isn't.

Gladiators (2024)

An early contender for TV show of the year is the BBC's reboot of Gladiators. It was campy and enormously fun; perfect entertainment for a Saturday night.

Before it started I wouldn't have expected any of the new generation of Gladiators to be able to compete (in terms of iconic status, I mean, because obviously they'd be able to compete physically) with the classic Gladiators such as Wolf and Panther, but I am happy to have been completely wrong about this - already there are multiple new Gladiators who are smash hits.

Whoever it was that decided to put Giant as the first face you see in the title sequence made one of the most genius decisions that has ever been made in TV history, letting viewers know what they're in for from the first seconds.

Along with Giant, the other giant Gladiator is Bionic, who is well-named because he's a machine (metaphorically speaking, I don't think he's a robot really) at games such as Duel and Collision. Fury and Apollo are both also forces to be reckoned with in the games, though of the two Apollo is the harder for viewers to take seriously because his haircut makes him look like he's Peter Serafinowicz playing a Gladiator in a sketch.

They are just some the 'Face' Gladiators who always show good sportsmannyship with the contenders afterwards.

In contrast there are also 'Heel' Gladiators; the baddys who are there to be bad sports, bend or break the rules, and get booed by the crowd. Wolf was the obvious template that all other such Gladiators are merely following. Sabre is one of the more subtle examples of a Heel, being overly competitive with the contenders and sulking when defeated by them, and Diamond looked to be mining a similar vein.

Then there are the outright panto baddys. From the very beginning it was obvious that the chief amongst these was Viper. He's actually a bit rubbish when on his own (e.g. Duel, where he is 'easy mode' for the contenders) but then he fits in well in games where there are multiple Gladiators, like Collision and Gauntlet, since there he can be the one who cheats while the other Gladiators play the game properly.

Last, but definitely not least, is the star of the show, and easily the best of the new Gladiators (in terms of how much fun he is to watch), Legend. His gimmick is that he has an enormous ego (almost as large as a cat's!) and whenever he's on screen he tries to make the show all about him, leading to some hilarious post-game interviews with the hosts. He's also genuinely skilled at Hang Tough, so is by no means a joke Gladiator there to be easy for the contestants to beat.

Aside from all new Gladiators, there's a new commentator, new hosts and a new refereeing team as well. The new head referee, Mark Clattenburg, is no John Anderson, even though he has adopted his catchphrases as if they were his own. Big John Anderson would never have stood for his ajudications getting booed by the crowd, the way most of Clattenburg's seemed to.

The decision to make a clean break from the 1990s series in terms of on-screen personnel might have been a wise one, since the last time Gladiators returned (on Sky in 2008) it was much too beholden to the past, so their new Gladiators never escaped the Shadow (and the Wolf and the Saracen and the Hunter) of the originals.

But the format itself is about as faithful to the original ITV series as it could be, only updated to modern standards of TV production and attitudes to health and safety. Each programme begins and ends with the iconic theme song, and the best-remembered of the games returned in mostly unchanged form - Hang Tough, The Wall, Powerball, Gauntlet and, of course, Duel.

Gauntlet has perhaps changed the most, and not necessarily for the better, with contenders facing only four Gladiators instead of five. This might very well be to make it safer for the contenders, but as a side-effect it makes the game much too easy and almost every single contender made it through with loads of time to spare.

This wasn't the only flaw in the show, since we also saw too many contenders beat The Wall by way of sacrificing a shoe to the purrsuing Gladiator, and in The Edge (the riskiest looking game by miles - and the one that seemed to result in the most injuries to contenders and Gladiators alike) too many points were available, which meant that one game could swing the results of a whole show by itself. Some rules were changed in the semi-finals, and it would be interesting to see if this was planned or if the producers realised their mistaiks and this was them doing what they could to course-correct mid-season? I suppose we will see what, if any, changes are made for the next season.

Whether they do or they don't, these are minor quibbles only. I can't wait for the series to return.

Did they get Little Alex Horne in from Taskmaster to write their Gladiator facts?

Gladiators is Serious Business to some mannys:

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord Part Six

BRIAN BLESSED saves the day when King Yrcanos goes on the rampage. He is careful not to hurt any of the mannys, but he does break a lot of things while shouting a lot. On his way out, he puts on his samurai-style helmet and seems to salute Sil.

"ROM BROM SSSSS. SABALOOMA."

I don't know what that means and neither, I suspect, does anybody else. The Doctor and Peri escape with him, and he tells them

"SORCERERS! EVIL DEMONS! SOUL STEALERS! THEY HAVE MY ECKERRY DORF IN A DUNGEON SOMEWHERE. WE MUST RELEASE HIM, OR DIE IN THE ATTEMPT! WERE YOU CAPTURED BY THE SLUGS WHO RULE THIS BALL OF MUD AND WATER?"

Peri does her best to get a word in, but she has no chance up against BRIAN BLESSED in full flow.

"WE MUST FIND SOME WEAPONS. SOME OF THOSE THAT TURN ONES' ENEMIES TO SLIME. WE MUST KILL ALL WHO STAND BETWEEN US AND VICTORY. WE'LL GRRRRRIND EVERY LAST SLUG BENEATH OUR FEET, YES?"

He picks her up at one point. Finally he gets around to introducing himself.

"RRRRRSSSSS! I AM YRCANOS, KING OF THE KRONTEP, LORD OF THE VINGTEN, CONQUEROR OF THE TONGKOMP EMPIRE! BUT YOU NO DOUBT KNOW THIS?"

He then has a little perv over Peri - a positively mild one by Sawardian standards - when he finds out she is not "PROMISED" to the Doctor.

In the courtroom, the Doctor admits that he cannot remember anything that happened after he was electriced. The Valeyard doesn't believe him, and says

"Then you're in for a surprise, aren't you, my dear Doctor? An exceedingly nasty one, if your memory is as fallible as you pretend."

The Doctor's laser-guided amnesia is a tired old trope, but it is necessary for the plot - if the Doctor cannot recall the actions of his past self, he cannot justify those actions to the court, which enables the writer to keep the past-Doctor's motivations unclear to the audience. Unfortunately, writer Philip Martin went too far and also kept those motivations secret from the actors, the rest of the production team, and possibly even himself.

Lord Kiv sets Sil to recapture the Doctor, telling him he only has one day and then he's off the case. Yrcanos takes the Doctor and Peri with him to try to rescue prisoners and steal weapons from the Mentors.

Peri: "That includes me, huh?"

Yrcanos: "ON MY PLANET OF KRONTEP, A WARRIOR QUEEN FIGHTS ALONGSIDE HER KING."

Peri: "We're not on your planet."

Yrcanos: "IT DOESN'T MATTER, THE RULE STILL APPLIES."

LOL. The Doctor warns the baddys of Yrcanos's attack, forcing Yrcanos and Peri to run away to avoid being captured - at least I think that's what happens, this scene is very confusingly directed. Peri attempts to pew Sil before running away, so all the mannys have to stand still so they don't get in the way of the special effect explosion going off.

The Doctor seeming to side with the baddys seems as out of character for him as anything since The Invasion of Time, but at least there we eventually got a full and satisfactory explanation of his actions. In the paws of a more skilled writer or script editor, the future-Doctor in the courtroom would have been able to explain his actions to the court (and thus the viewers at home) while his past self continued to act like a baddy. But we don't get that here, so the reason the Doctor teams up with Sil goes unexplained. His line to Sil

"I'm no hero."

feels like it should have been a nod and a wink to the audience that the Doctor is attempting "some trickery" (as Sil suspects), but it isn't played that way, nor is the courtroom Doctor able to claim that it was. Instead he tentatively puts it forward as a theory for his actions:

"No, there's something wrong. Of course! Sil was right! It was a ploy to fool the Mentors, yes... clever old me. Let the Matrix show what it will: a clever ploy. You'll see."

This scene also introduces the important concept to the plot that "the Matrix of Time cannot lie," a fact which all the Time Lords - the Doctor included, for now - accept as a self-evident truth.

Yrcanos meets the weredoggy and it turns out that he is the Eckerry Dorf that he mentioned earlier. He must have been Yrcanos's doggy, and Yrcanos is horrified that he has been turned part manny - a terrible fate for any doggy. Yrcanos rescues him and says

"WE WILL KILL THE SORCERERS. I SWEAR BY THE GREAT JEWELLED SWORD OF KRONTEP, YOU WILL BE REVENGED! COME."

Peri meets Matrona and gets a job W-wording for her. Oh noes! But even through a cunning disguise the Doctor recognises Peri straight away and denounces her. Again it is not made clear why the Doctor did this. Just as earlier he might have denounced Yrcanos to prevent a fight breaking out in which many mannys might have died, here he might have denounced Peri to save her from the terrible fate of doing W-word. But none of this is ever really clarified, so it looks as though the Doctor is just being a baddy for the lols.

In the courtroom, the Doctor claims

"I remember now. The ploy was to remove us both from the heart of the Mentor's control section. I gambled that after I'd helped them fix the cerebral transference unit, they might trust me to question Peri alone."

Valeyard: "To what end?"

Doctor: "Escape, I should imagine."

By saying "I should imagine" the Doctor gives away that he doesn't really remember what happened, he is just imagining what might have been his motivation for acting the way the Matrix showed.

Just when we think things are beginning to be cleared up, with the courtroom Doctor asserting that he was indeed only pretending to be a baddy, the scene where the past-Doctor interrogates Peri only confuses things further. He whispers to her that

"I'm your friend, you know that."

and

"I'm here to help you."

but then he appears to go on to interrogate her for real, even saying "Confess!" like he's a member of the Spanish Inquisition.

The courtroom Doctor asserts that

"It was never like that."

The Valeyard counters this by once again saying that "as we all know, the Matrix never lies," which the Inquisitor backs him up on. The Doctor quietly says

"I wonder."

as Colin Baker subtly shows the Doctor beginning to doubt this article of Time Lord faith. This is one of the better moments of the episode, and hints at a much better story than the one we're actually getting.

The Doctor and Peri are walking along with some of the Mentors' henchmannys when Yrcanos and Eckerry Dorf attack them. Yrcanos says

"NOW, DOCTOR, IT IS YOUR TURN TO DIE."

Crash zoom to the Doctor's face - cliffhanger!

This might have been a more effective crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger if the light levels hadn't been so low, so that we could see the Doctor's expression better (although we know that it is just going to be the same "oh noes!" expression that Colin Baker uses for all his crash-zoom-to-face cliffhangers), and it's not often you'll hear me complain that the light levels are too low in 1980s Doctor Who. It's this messed-up story; it does things to your cat brain. No wonder this part of Trial of a Time Lord is known as Mindfuck, mew!

Crash-zoom to face cliffhanger count: 5

How It Started vs. How It's Going: Harvest of Kairos Edition

How It Started vs. How It's Going: Logopolis Edition