For the purposes of this thread I'll be looking at the four sections of Trial of a Time Lord individually, even though it's supposed to be one long story. Except when it isn't.
One thing very wrong with these four episodes is that they make up the last complete storyline written by the much missed Robert Holmes, and sadly it is one of his weaker ones.
The Caves of Androzani had been a reworking of one of his less successful earlier works - The Power of Kroll - and it proved to be far superior. The Mysterious Planet also reworks elements of a less successful earlier work - The Krotons - but lightning doesn't strike twice and it is far from being a classic.
It's also upsetting to learn that Holmes was ordered by Jonathan Powell to go back and redo a lot of the story, despite it having already been accepted by JNT and Eric Saward - leaving him feeling he was being treated like a first-timer instead of a seasoned script writer / editor.
Onto the story itself, and the most obvious problem is the choice of evidence selected by the Valeyard to open the trial. The whole Ravalox affair is meant to be kept ultra-secret - so why select this to screen in the first place. It surely draws the Time Lord court's attention to something which they aren't supposed to know anything about.
And we can clearly see that the Doctor has intervened very little in the affairs of the planet, compared to some of his previous adventures. In Frontios he actually asks the colonists not to so much as even mention that he's been there, for instance.
He stumbles into these events purely because he's intrigued by the planet and is forced to later intervene to save half the galaxy being blown up through the actions of Glitz and Dibber, over whom he had no control - so hardly his fault.
A small amount of dialogue gets bleeped out, but anyone who can lipread would surely be able to see what's being talked about. Why not simply delete that section of evidence altogether, rather than draw attention to it? The Valeyard leaves in the bit about "...the biggest net of information in the Universe". Wouldn't the Time Lord court be thinking that sounds just like their Matrix round about now?
The Valeyard claims that lives were lost, but the body count here is very small, and again outwith the Doctor's control. Merdeen would probably have had to kill Grell whatever happened as he threatened to shop him to Drathro, and the Doctor would have tried to prevent Katryca and Brokentooth from entering Marb Station had he had the chance.
The Doctor visits Earth on a regular basis, so how did he not spot that his favourite planet was not where it was supposed to be for however long it's been Ravalox? We're talking millions of years.
Glitz tells Dibber to keep his gun out of sight when they approach the village - but then pulls his own weapon on Katryca in the middle of her throne room when he's surrounded by her warriors.
It's stated that the tribe have had few women for a very long time. If that's the case, how has it been sustaining itself all this time? (And what do they eat?). Has Merdeen only been allowing men to escape to the surface, or does Marb Station also have a gender imbalance?
The Marb people treasure their water - yet leave it in the corridor where it could get stolen or spilled. Why not have it securely locked away if it's so precious?
Do they hide behind their doors all day on the off-chance that a stranger might wander in and take a sip?
And would Marble Arch Underground station really look just as it did in the 1980's after 2 million years? It's had two major refurbishments since the 1930's, the most recent of which was in 2010 - so the one we see here is already out of date.
Drathro uses a Black Light Converter, so these things must be fairly common back in Andromeda. Surely one of them must have broken down at some point in their history. Yet the Doctor claims no-one knows what will happen if one is destroyed and thinks it could destroy the universe. It's hard to watch this without thinking of Plan 9 From Outer Space.
The cutaways to the courtroom happen far too often and take you away from the story and, like the Inquisitor, we get fed up with the Doctor's feeble name-calling.
The two blond-haired blokes are annoying and aren't in the least bit funny.
Holmes does a David Whitaker and confuses a solar system with a constellation (a pattern of stars as seen from a specific location). For an entire constellation to move 2 light years means an awful lot of stars - which surely would have been difficult to conceal.
Why does the Doctor's tribunal take place on a space station and not simply on Gallifrey itself? Something we will revisit: what sort of judicial system do they have on Gallifrey where the participants can start making it up as they go along? How can a Prosecutor - a mere court official - possibly turn a tribunal into a trial, unilaterally?
In the very last scene the Doctor states that his presence on Ravalox was "most specifically requested". By whom? There's no evidence to support this at any point during the story. He simply turned up because he was puzzled by the similarities to Earth. Something lost in those rewrites?
And finally, a Canadian goose is simply a goose that lives in Canada. The specific breed of goose which you might see in the UK is a Canada Goose...
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