The Doctor has been summoned by the Time Lords to a remote space station, there to stand trial again for interfering in the affairs of other worlds and times. His memory of recent events wiped (and his concern for his missing companion Peri growing), the Doctor has to formulate a defence in a trial where he doesn't know the rules, and the other side is not playing fair.
During the transmission of the twenty-second season of Doctor Who in early 1985, BBC controller Michael Grade tried to cancel the show. The resulting blowback of public opinion saw the BBC give it a stay of execution, an eighteen-month break to recover its creative mojo and come back swinging, but with a reduced count of just fourteen, 25-minute episodes, the shortest season in the show's history (and, in runtime at least, shorter than even the most recent Disney co-produced seasons).
Surprisingly, the BBC made no effort to refresh the show's creative team. Executive producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward remained in-situ (to even their own bemusement) and were given very little direction on how to handle the show's return. They did decide to dump the scripts they were developing, including the return of the Celestial Toymaker (that would have to wait for another forty years, in the event), the Ice Warriors and Sil, and instead developed a new story arc. They decided that, since the show was on trial by the BBC in reality, they would put the Doctor on trial in the story itself, an idea some (including star Colin Baker) found too cute, but does have a sort of perverse appeal.
Technically, Season 23 consists of one fourteen-part story called The Trial of a Time Lord, although this is a bit cheesy. More accurately, the season consists of three four-part stories that are linked by scenes back in the courtroom before the story is resolved in a concluding two-parter. These scenes are well-played by Colin Baker, the superb Lynda Bellingham as the Inquisitor and the accomplished Michael Jayston as the prosecutor, the Valeyard, though their use can be variable: sometimes commenting intelligently on the story, and at other times descending into acrimonious bickering.
The first four-parter, informally known as The Mysterious Planet, sees the Doctor and Peri arrive on the planet Ravolox, where they get involved in mysterious events revolving around two alien mercenaries, Sabalom Glitz and Dibber, the primitives who inhabit the surface of Ravolox and the more sophisticated society living in an underground society under the oversight of a robot with a very stupidly-sized head. The story is a classic Who culture clash playing off the different factions.
This is the effective swansong of legendary scriptwriter Robert Holmes, who had written or script-edited almost all of Doctor Who's all-time greatest stories and made a return in Season 21 with the epic The Caves of Androzani (and Season 22's okay Mark of the Rani). The Mysterious Planet was written when he was very ill, and is not among his best scripts. However, many of the Classic Holmes Hallmarks are present and correct. The secondary cast is very good, spearheaded by the Glitz-and-Dibber double act (Tony Selby and Glen Murphy sparking off one another superbly), and the robot villain is channelling 150% pure Douglas Adams energy. Joan Sims feels like she should be miscast as Queen Katryca, but instead it's a barmy bit of casting that works better than it should.
The story does descend into more running-around-corridors than it really should, and the Planet of the Apes-esque story elements are not as effective as they should be, but overall this is okay. A mid-tier slice of Robert Holmes whimsy, enlivened by some hints that things are not as they first appear. The story is enlivened by its opening visual effects sequence, a motion control tracking shot of the Time Lord space station with the TARDIS caught in its tractor beam, easily the most striking model shot in all twenty-six seasons of the original run of the show (and, given its insane cost, not one to be repeated again).
Mindwarp, the second serial, is a sequel-of-sorts to the preceding season's Vengeance on Varos and sees the return of the revolting Sil, played again with wicked relish by Nabil Shaban. The story this time revolves around Sil's boss, Kiv (a more stately performance by Christopher Ryan), who is dying and whose brain needs to be transplanted to another body, resulting in a lot of scheming as he looks for another host candidate, whilst simultaneously trying to take economic advantage of a planet ruled by King Yrcanos, played with scene-stealing thunder by Brian Blessed.
Yes! After many years, Doctor Who was finally able to snatch up a guest role by the legendary King of Shout himself, between his more standard activities of climbing K2 equipped only with spoons and a mask to drain more oxygen than normal from him, for the challenge. Blessed not only steals the story, he packs it up and slings it over his shoulder before travelling to Mars purely under his own motive power. Your tolerance for the story will entirely depend on your tolerance for Brian Blessed at his absolutely least-restrained and most unhinged. "WE MUST FIND WEAPONS, SUCH AS THOSE THAT TURN OUR ENEMIES INTO SLIME! WE'LL PILE THE HEADS OF OUR ENEMIES BEFORE US LIKE MELONS IN A HEAP!"
If your TV speakers survive that ordeal, there are some additional pluses, like a fully throttleable performance by Patrick Ryecart as the brain-transplanting doctor Crozier, and, of course, that ending. The ending to Mindwarp was, for six weeks anyway, Doctor Who at its absolutely most mind-blowingly tragic, horrible and shocking, far moreso than when Adric wiped out the dinosaurs with his own mediocrity (and several million tons of exploding antimatter attached to a starship travelling at insane velocity, but still). It's one of the very rare times when the show feels like it's gone out of control and doing something fresh, dangerous and mind-blowing, all helped by Nicola Bryant giving her best performance to date. Of course, the show manages to torpedo even that a few weeks later, but it's still a brain-melting end to a Classic Doctor Who story that not just breaks its normal rules, but atomises them.
Unfortunately, outside of the ending, some solid performances and Blessed's Defcon 1-level shouting, the story suffers a little in pacing. Whilst Shaban is outstanding, Sil doesn't actually have much to do in the story given the villain duties are being carried out by Kiv and Crozier, and Blessed is dominating everything else. There's also more the whiff of panto about this season than any prior, and this story is probably the most panto-like of the lot. Still, it's quite an unusual Doctor Who story in many respects.
Terror of the Vervoids is, perhaps to make up for Mindwarp, almost an aggressively normal story in comparison. The Doctor and new companion Mel have arrived on a space liner transporting a bunch of people through space. Murders take place, and the Doctor - who is handily known to the captain - has to investigate.
This story isn't the best-regarded, which is interesting as it may be the strongest of the season. The standard murder mystery plot in a constrained setting is a good fit for Doctor Who, making it odd it hasn't been used more often, and the decision to have the Doctor already known to the captain, thus avoiding two episodes of the Doctor being the prime suspect, is a very smart way of sidestepping that problem, allowing him to just investigate. The mystery is reasonable, and the cast of characters who may be involved is well-drawn, including a splendid guest turn from Honor Blackman (Cathy Gale from The Avengers, an early genre rival of Doctor Who's).
The story probably gets its reputation from the introduction of Bonnie Langford as Mel. Rotating off the popular Nicola Bryant in favour of a musical star and dancer not known for her heavyweight acting deeply annoyed the fans at the time, but it has to be said that time has been kind to Langford in the role. Her more recent appearances in the modern show have been strong, and her performance in Season 23 is actually very credibly good. It's only in Season 24 where the writers don't seem to know what to do with her that she risks becoming grating. In this story she's bossy and takes charge, but this is a fresh change from Peri, who was often far too passive in the face of the Doctor's bluster. The story also suffers from the mystery element giving way to a more standard "monsters running amok" ending, although the Vervoids are at least a striking and memorable design, and their motivation - survival - is effective.
The end of the story is also interesting, with the Doctor backed into a corner and having to morally question his decisions in a way that he didn't all that often in the classic series, in the process inadvertently giving the Valeyard the ammunition he needs to close his case and push for the Doctor's execution.
As people I think more commonly know, the season was supposed to end with a two-parter co-written by Robert Holmes and Eric Saward, but Holmes passed away having delivered only a rough draft of the first episode of the two. Saward and Nathan-Turner clashed horrendously over the finale, which ended on a cliffhanger with the Doctor and Valeyard locked in combat and falling into space, which Nathan-Turner felt was a gift to allow the BBC to cancel the show. Saward, who wanted to honour Holmes's dying request to end the story that way, was not to be moved and quit on the spot, taking his own draft for the final episode with him. Nathan-Turner had to call in Vervoids writers Pip and Jane Baker to pen the finale with no recourse to Saward's script at all.
The resulting two-parter, The Ultimate Foe, is not fantastic, and clearly had some major writing compromises going on, but it holds together better than you might expect (as even Saward had to admit many years later). The first part recalls The Deadly Assassin, with the Doctor and Valeyard doing battle amidst surreal imagery inside the Matrix, the Time Lord computer system. The second part sees the Doctor joined by Sabalom Glitz, Mel and even the Master as they team up to take down the Valeyard. It's okay, with some solid scares (the cliffhanger with the Doctor being sucked into quicksand is memorable, and the resolution quite amusing), but it wraps up the entire season arc far too perfunctorily, and somehow manages to introduce a new cliffhanger that the show never resolves again, whilst also retconning the splendidly dark ending of Mindwarp out of existence.
Overall, Season 23 of Doctor Who (***) is the definition of okay-but-underwhelming. None of the four stories are absolutely terrible or unwatchable, but it is overall less than the sum of its parts. It's a season straining almost visibly under the weight of behind-the-scenes chaos, but managing to deliver some watchable entertainment for all of that.
The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.
- 23.1 - 23.4: The Mysterious Planet (***)
- 23.5 - 23.8: Mindwarp (***)
- 23.9 - 23.12: Terror of the Vervoids (***½)
- 23.13 - 23.14: The Ultimate Foe (**½)
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