Best episode of Trial of a Timelord

episode 14: Michael Jayston is a really good actor, it's a pity they waste him by having him play a part where it's never clear exactly what he's doing or why. 'There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality' is an all-time brilliant piece of terrible dialogue though, maybe they should have leaned into this kind of thing more, make a virtue of the fact that the story is incoherent and no-one making it has any idea what's going on by giving the antagonist dialogue that is impossible to parse.

Sometimes the dialogue in Pip and Jane Baker stories is so stilted and unnatural that it's kind of compelling and spellbinding. All of their characters talk in exactly the same way though, and in Terror of the Vervoids the rest of the production is too drab to prevent this from getting boring. It's such a contrast from the first 4 episodes where (like lots of Robert Holmes scripts) so much of the zip in the scripts is coming from having characters who speak in different registers meet and converse with each other, I can see why people might find the way the characters talk too schticky but I think it's what tends to make Holmes's episodes more consistently watchable than most other writers on the show.

Glitz is not as interesting in episodes 13-14 as in episodes 1-4, I think the reason he works in The Mysterious Planet is that he's *not* a Del-Boy style lovable rogue, he's genuinely unpleasant and dangerous guy who can present himself as a lovable rogue when expedient, the gift-of-the-gab stuff is supposed to come across funny but also creepy, having Glen Murphy there as the less polished, openly thuggish henchman is a big part of what makes it work. But when he appears again at the end he's just a straightforward twinkly, cowardly but lovable rogue.

apparently part of the original inspiration for the story was A Christmas Carol, and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come giving them the idea of adventures being shown from the Doctor's past, present and future - but then they don't actually do anything with this, there's no reason why the Vervoids bit couldn't also be from the Doctor's past, there's no indication of much passage of time between The Mysterious Planet and Mindwarp so there's no real sense that the former is from the Doctor's 'past' any more than the latter. Mr Popplewick and the Victorian London setting at the end seem to tie into the Christmas Carol/Dickensian theme, but it's not really developed.

I'd missed the existence of this until now, has anyone seen it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sil_and_the_Devil_Seeds_of_Arodor

Labour Party politician Jeremy Corbyn was seen carrying a copy of the DVD while at a political rally, although it is not known what his opinion on the production was.[8]

this is odd - maybe he's had some contact with Shaban in his capacity as a disabled actor, or his theatre group

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a344df73e1ddcc580a095930740aa0ca740c3975/0_248_5184_3110/master/5184.jpg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=971a646935c860274adcde90bc7b9b34

was it ToaTL that Chibnall had an on-air crack at Pip and Jane about? 'cos I felt his most recent season was quite reminiscent of this one - barely coherent, taking liberties with the continuity in very ham-fisted way, bit of cod Victorian nonsense...

i did watch this at the time and remember feeling glad that it was back to 25-minute episodes, and the Sixth Doctor and Peri having a warm relationship was also a massive relief (how terribly they messed with the fundamentals of the show during Colin Baker's era) - but it went fairly rapidly downhill after the first 4 eps.

I agree about the Sixth Doctor and Peri having a warmer relationship works better (it's interesting that this seems to be more due to how Baker and Bryant's acting choices rather than anything in the script) (the Doctor apparently betraying Peri in Mindwarp wouldn't really work without this warmer relationship, it doesn't really work anyway but for other reasons).

I think there's an issue with most of the 1980s companions (until you get to Ace, anyway) that it's never really clear exactly why they are travelling about with the Doctor. Nicola Bryant plays the part like someone who is convincingly terrified and having a horrible time going to all these awful places where her life is frequently put in danger and she might die an incomprehensible ditance away from her home, which is interesting sometimes, but the tone is inconsistant and there's no real sense of Peri doesn't just ask the Doctor to take her back to earth in the 1980s, she'd make more sense as a character in the original 60s set up where the Doctor can't control the tardis and is trying to get someone back to their home planet/time. This is probably an obvious point, but I think part of the reason Colin Baker works better in some of the audios is that when he's paired with Evelyn Smythe he seems like less of a bully, someone who will give as good as she gets wrt rudeness and stubbornness.

This thread reminds me of one of my favourite photos of Brian Blessed - he was in Mindwarp, there is a connection:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fca66225e-2611-11e8-bb7d-85110f4c5caa.jpg

That's from Cats, which also had Bonnie Langford, which raises the question of whether John Nathan-Turner was aware of this or not.

From what I remember Peri was written as a caricature of a bored US gap year student - the kind that travels the world, but only in the company of other people from the US, and only to places where people from the US regularly go. Reading a synopsis of Planet of Fire she just leaves her family and, from their point of view, vanishes forever, which must have been disconcerting.