What's Wrong With... Ghost Light

"It's not clear. It's not clear at all..." The Doctor (The Dalek Invasion of Earth).

I've been reading some old issues of the Doctor Who Bulletin recently, covering Season 26. The majority of letters were in favour of this story, but with a significant number objecting to its clarity of plot. Even the favourable ones mention certain aspects of the plot being obscure, or admit they had to watch episodes several times - rather undermining their insistence that they "got" this story.

(Personally I think it was very much a case of the Emperor's New Clothes - or the Doctor's lyre-playing).

I also looked at the extras on the DVD and can't help but notice that Andrew Cartmel often responds along the lines of "Well I know what the writer meant...".

Well, he would - wouldn't he, having had ample opportunity to discuss the story thoroughly with Marc Platt, as that was his job. We lesser mortals didn't have that opportunity. We have to go by what appears on screen, as it appeared on the evening of broadcast.

Some of the issues are small ones - imagery which appears to have been included simply because it looked striking and weird. 

What, for instance, is the business with Fenn-Cooper's snuffbox? Is Light inside it? What is the light which it emits? Isn't Light supposed to be hibernating down in the spaceship in the cellar? Then there's the glowing eyes on stuffed birds and animals. Are these supposed to have video cameras secreted inside them? Why do they suddenly make noises, when they're dead and stuffed?

How can desiccated and definitely dead insects come back to life?

Why does the candle suddenly flare up in front of Josiah Smith?

He manages to devolve the Rev. Matthews into a monkey - but by what means? Smith does things, but they are never properly explained.

How can his discarded husks have any animation for a start? We know that they were only included at JNT's insistence to give the story some traditional monsters, but some sort of reasoning behind their inclusion and subsequent actions might have been useful - apart from providing a cliff-hanger.

Who undressed Ace and put her to bed, and why can't she recall it happening? Did she beak into the drinks cabinet the night before?

Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Other natural philosophers had written along similar lines prior to this, with some evolutionary theories going back to the 18th Century. This story is set in the 1880's when the arguments between Creationists and Darwinists were hardly topical.

The way Matthews talks, Smith's "blasphemous" views are new.

Apparently the writer had intended the story to be set a couple of decades earlier - but JNT intervened as he preferred the frocks of the later Victorian era...

Smith does not want Control to evolve for fear she will supplant him - so why does he permit Mrs Pritchard to deliver her a copy of The Times every day?

(Understanding what's going on isn't exactly helped by the fact that we can hardly make out what Control is saying half the time).

What exactly is the point of the day staff, if everyone in the house appears to be nocturnal? Mrs Grose claims that you'd never catch anyone staying there after dark. If the house is that scary, why doesn't she just leave? Positions in service were ten a penny at this time - it was only with the mass casualties of the First World War and subsequent influenza pandemic that the days of the wealthy having huge households began to draw to a close.

And who - or what - are the maids who only come out at night? They look the same, so are they clones, or androids? There are four of them, but we don't see what happens to them all by the end of the story.

If the day staff are employed just to keep up appearances, then Smith is running quite a risk that Mrs Grose and the other servants might say too much about what they see / hear in the house. Perivale is pretty much still a village on the edge of London at this time, so gossip would be rife about everything.

The Doctor and Ace turn up at the house out of the blue. Instead of being arrested as trespassers, or simply killed as intruders, they are accepted and treated as guests, as though they were expected all along. If Smith knew who or what they were, it might explain this behaviour.

Smith thinks that human beings are the ultimate evolutionary forms on Earth - hence him wanting to be the top dog of the British Empire. But there are animals and insects which are far more successful than us - many insects like the cockroach, or animals which sit at the top of the food chain which would happily prey on humans. Some plants are even better at adapting than us.

If evolution is a constant process, with plants and animals adapting to conditions ever since life on Earth began, why hasn't Light ever noticed it before? It drives him insane now that he's awake, but it should have been obvious to him from the start. Didn't they have similar natural processes where he originated from?

Why did he hibernate in the first place - and why for so long? Why not complete his survey and simply move on to the next destination, or retire?

Ace got probation for committing arson. Highly unlikely even today but almost impossible in the 1980's. It was considered such a dangerous crime that a custodial sentence was almost guaranteed, minimum 5 years, but some people were jailed - or committed to mental hospitals - for life as the risk was always that they would do it again. Ace ought to have found herself in Feltham - the Young Offenders Institution south west of London. As someone who constantly rebels against authority, hers would probably have been a lengthy stretch.

Ace tells the Doctor that in her time she felt a sense of evil about Gabriel Chase, which is why she burned it down - but the Doctor must have already known all this - otherwise why did he specifically bring her here in the first place?

What's Wrong With... Battlefield

When a story's own author - Ben Aaronovitch - says there's a big issue with it then you really can't argue about the problems of Battlefield. (He even struggled with the novelisation and someone else had to step in and write it).

Season 26 suffered from a particular problem throughout - and that was poor work on the part of Andrew Cartmel. A good script editor knows how many characters to have, how many sets / locations are needed, and that the story then has to fit into the allotted time slot on the day, ensuring that all the salient plot points needed to satisfy the viewer are present and correct. Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks understood this, as did most of Cartmel's predecessors. (They also knew not to use the exact same plot twice in the same short season, less than a month apart).

Just about every episode of Season 26 over-ran in terms of the scripts and rather drastic cuts had to be make to ensure the episodes fitted their evening time-slot. (We've now seen a lot of this material as "Special Editions" of the stories).

This had been going on since Cartmel arrived. At a DWAS convention following Season 24, one writer answered almost every question put to him by telling the audience to read the novelisation. If the episodes as broadcast can't tell you what you need to know, and you have to rely on buying a book to understand the plot, then there's something very wrong with how the story was structured and presented.

And a lot of that is down to the script being edited efficiently in the first place.

Battlefield's main issue was that it just about worked as a three-parter, but Aaronovitch had to stretch it to four. It's not just a case of dragging out or padding the plot, this upsets the whole story structure.

As for that plot...

There are far too many characters included for a start. As well as incorporating Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart we have to introduce a second Brigadier, an archaeologist, the archaeologist's assistant, a pub landlord, the pub landlord's wife, various UNIT underlings, a demon, a heroic knight from another dimension, a villainous knight from another dimension... and his mum.

There's so many characters but we can't have them all meeting at once, so some can only appear in the first half then be shunted out of the plot, and the more significant characters have to wander about a bit so that they don't meet up too early, because they're needed for the climax.

It is high summer by the looks of it, yet a scenic location with lake, forest and ruined castle isn't teeming with tourists.

We visit the pub a couple of times and yet it doesn't appear to get many visitors - local or tourist. Warmsley and Shou Yuing appear to be about the only customers. 

Whilst the landlady, Elizabeth, gets a small part to play in the plot - a bit of character development for Morgaine - there is absolutely no point of including husband Pat in the story.

We know how Morgaine and her knights get through to our world, but how exactly did Ancelyn manage it, and why didn't he bring any support with him?

Attempts to discuss the concept of military honour are another inconsistency. The scene between Morgaine and the Brigadier at the war memorial is very good, but she kills the unarmed Laval, before then restoring Elizabeth's sight just to pay for a round of drinks. 

Brigadier Bambera fails to have the Doctor and Ace instantly locked up when they try to access a restricted area with outdated UNIT passes. It's only afterwards that she's told about the mysterious scientific adviser from Lethbridge Stewart's time. How did she ever achieve that rank without knowing about the Doctor anyway? Why are UNIT doing mundane military work when they were set up to deal with alien threats in the first place?

Being a great fan of Time Team, the archaeological dig bears little resemblance to fact. The idea that a single individual, with just one assistant, would undertake a site of such a scale (and supposed importance) is unrealistic. The site really ought to be crawling with student volunteers, or at least a few local ones. There are groups all over the country.

Vortigern does not necessarily mean "High King". Vortigern was a king who, according to Bede and other early chroniclers, invited the Saxons into Britain to help repel attacks by the Picts and Scots, rewarding them with land in Kent.

The Doctor deduces that the spaceship will open at his command as his future self would have programmed it to obey his voice - and yet he doesn't think to tell the automated defences to stop attacking him. And what exactly do these snake-like defences do, apart from bumping into people?

And if he arranges all this in the future, why doesn't he remember then to make sure not to do something silly like endanger his earlier self who is going to blunder into this?

You can see the notorious crack in the glass when Ace almost drowns.

The script is inconsistent on the effectiveness of the knight's armour. Bullets bounce off when the script needs them to, but the knights die from ordinary gunfire when it doesn't. 

And just how does 1980's UNIT manage to defeat a warrior class of knights, armed with futuristic weapons, anyway?

Does the Doctor know that he's going to meet a demon who is susceptible to silver? How does Ace know about the bullets' significance?

The Destroyer is one of the most impressive monsters ever seen in the series, yet he doesn't get to do a lot. Maybe a bit of destroying might have come in handy to make his inclusion more worthwhile.

One of the biggest issues for me was what happens to Morgaine at the end. She can summon demons, traverse dimensions, teleport around, and bring down helicopters with her fingers, so I hardly think Holloway Prison is going to hold her for long. Was it too much to ask to see her and Mordred banished back to their own dimension at the end, instead of that painful sit-com walkdown at the Brig's house? They could have been honour-bound not to return to this dimension, just to draw a line under their involvement.

What's Wrong With... The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

A question you could be asking yourself now, or any time since Peter Capaldi left the series, though some might argue a lot further back into Tom Baker's later reign.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is actually well regarded for its season, though many fans took offence against one particular character. That is, of course, Whizzkid, who was seen as a thinly veiled criticism of certain sections of fandom.

Even though he is supposed to be an alien, or at least a human from the Earth of the far future, his outfit is deliberately contemporary, though old-fashioned for the 1980's. He is far from trendy, and presents as a typical teenage nerd, with glasses, bowtie and tank-top. He's obsessively fond of a particular show and talks of little else. And he collects all the merchandise.

Only the anorak is missing to have him appear as the stereotype of the young, male, boyfriend / girlfriend-lacking, Doctor Who fan.

JNT had been suffering ongoing and increasingly hostile complaints from the more vocal sections of fandom, especially since Season 22. 

People were unhappy with: 

• the quality of scripts, 
• casting of light entertainment figures, 
• his rampant self-promotion,
• his petty vindictiveness,
• kowtowing to America,
• casting Colin Baker,
• casting Bonnie Langford,
• "ruining" returning monsters,
• over-reliance on the series past,
• not relying on the series past,
• listening to Eric Saward,
• not listening to Eric Saward,
• Saward's infamous Starburst interview,
• not using tried and trusted directors from before his time,
• not using tried and trusted writers from before his time,
• the hiatus,
• the lost Season 23,
• prioritising pantos over producing the show,
• prioritising conventions over producing the show,
• and basically staying in the role for far too long...

And that was just what you saw in the letters pages of Doctor Who Bulletin. You'll notice that Whizzkid says of the Psychic Circus that everyone knows it's not as good as it used to be - a common complaint among Doctor Who fans of every generation, but especially during the second half of the JNT era.

Onto the story itself.

The Doctor claims that he has fought the Gods of Ragnarok through all of time. Funny he's never mentioned them until now.

The Gods crave entertainment, but this seems to boil down to fairly rubbishy amateur circus acts - which don't seem to take place very often. If it's simply the death and destruction part they are after, why not just have mass executions and skip the juggling and strongman acts?

They also appear to have gotten rid of the Circus members who were actually quite good at this type of thing - people who may have been able to entertain them more successfully.

If the Gods really are deities, or aliens with god-like powers, why leave the means of your own destruction lying around nearby, guarded only by a robot?

They have the power to raise the dead, so surely they could have protected the medallion piece a lot better.

They begin firing energy bolts at the Doctor, who deflects them with the medallion - but the Gods keep on firing even when they can see it is having no effect. And they keep on firing even when this begins to destroy themselves and their arena.

Where does the Doctor get all that magic paraphernalia for his act at the end? The arena doesn't look like it has a ceiling, so what's he hanging from?

What exactly is "psychic" about this circus, which has fairly mundane acts. It can't refer to whatever it is the Gods get from the so-called entertainments, as it was known by this name long before they took it over.

The initials of Psychic Circus would be "PC" - so why do we see "PS" all over the place?

Allowing for the fact that we know the circus was much bigger in the past, was this the only bus they used to get around? It could hardly have carried all of their equipment, including the actual tent, fittings and fixtures, let alone the members. Bellboy has an entire robotics laboratory.

The Bus Conductor must be the work of Bellboy - so why doesn't he warn Flowerchild about it?

The Stallslady hates the circus-goers, yet they seem to be her only customers - and, as mentioned, there don't ever seem to be all that many of them. She seems to be standing in the middle of a desert, with no signs of habitation for miles around.

How can something as simple as an advertising robot manage to breach TARDIS defences?

Or has this all been set up by the Doctor in the first place? As well as claiming to have battled the Gods, he seems to know about a specific gladiator who fought and died for them, and mentions things getting out of control sooner than he anticipated - suggesting it's yet another old score from the past he's decided to deal with now, just like the Hand of Omega and Nemesis. If it is, it's the third story to have featured this set-up - out of a season that's only got four stories. A pity that the script couldn't have been clearer on this. (Maybe it was originally. Cartmel era stories are nearly always over-written and then need to be pruned right back to fit the running time).

How can Ace have been wearing one of Flowerchild's earrings on her jacket before she has even found it?

And why can't she recall that the rucksack which she's hunting for got blown up along with a Cyberman shuttlecraft only recently?

What's Wrong With... Silver Nemesis

When you've only got four stories to produce in a season, you would think that the producer and script editor could at least make them different...

The first thing that strikes you about Silver Nemesis is its similarity to the season 25 opener, Remembrance of the Daleks. 

Once again we have the Doctor revisiting something he did a long time ago - though we never got to see it - which is going to have an impact on the present. It's the Earth which will be affected once again. The threat revolves around some ancient Gallifreyan device which can be used as a super-weapon, which the Doctor was somehow able to take away with him when he left the planet with Susan.

The Doctor basically tricks the villains into using said device, so that it destroys them instead.

By screening the Dalek story first, this looks like a weak imitation.

Remembrance of the Daleks featured the junkyard at 76 Totters Lane and Coal Hill School and other references to An Unearthly Child - yet Silver Nemesis is supposed to be the anniversary story?

There's cameo appearances by a number of people associated with the show - actors, writers and directors, including Nicholas Courtney - but they all appear in group shots with their backs to us, so what was the point? If you hadn't read about this somewhere, you'd never know they were there - just a bunch of extras.

The story really isn't very good, and certainly isn't well regarded - so why give it to someone who had never written for the show before and was relatively new to the business anyway?

As for the plot, we're told that the Doctor sent the Nemesis statue into space to stop it falling into the hands of Lady Peinforte in 1638 - though she clearly must have possessed it at some point for her to have fashioned the living metal into a likeness of herself. Did the Doctor deliberately put it into an orbit which meant it passed the Earth every quarter century?

As each orbit results in some major upheaval on Earth, then isn't the Doctor responsible for centuries of death and destruction? If launching it into space was just to get it out of Peinforte's hands, then why not simply move it somewhere else afterwards - like parking it on the dark side of the Moon or in orbit around Pluto? Why leave it going round the Earth for 350 years?

And why have it land in 1988? It can't have been in a decaying orbit as its passing was too regular. It must have been programmed to come back in November 1988 - but the question is why.

How could the Doctor have known that Lady Peinforte would be able to time travel to her home in that year, or that the Cybermen were going to turn up looking for the statue? Or that a bunch of mercenaries led by an old Nazi war criminal would come looking for it. Is it all just coincidence? A very big one if it is.

If it's been going round and round for 350 years, why did the Cybermen not simply hijack it in space?

And one everyone knows - the mathematician employed by Lady Peinforte couldn't possibly have known that the calendar was going to be amended, losing 11 days on the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by Great Britain in 1752. His calculations ought to be out.

Do we know if major upheavals actually occurred every 25 years between 1663 - its first pass - and 1963 - it's last pass? JFK was assassinated in '63, but the world was much closer to disaster two years before that with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the statue only reaches critical mass when complete, you also have to ask why the Doctor didn't do anything sooner about the bow and the arrow.

There's mention of Roundheads being about when the Doctor first launched the statue into space, and it's the Doctor who says this early in Episode 2. But the Roundheads weren't founded until 1641. (It refers to their haircuts, not their helmets, and was initially a term of abuse).

When the Doctor first visits Lady Peinforte's home with Ace he states that it has been months since he was last there - so it has to already be 1639. But all the dialogue, and even captions, state it's 1638.

Another timing issue is the speed with which De Flores and his mercenaries manage to get from South America to Windsor - managing it in a matter of hours when they've only just worked out the date and location of the landing.

And did they book into their hotel and hire the van dressed like that?

It's looking unseasonably warm for late November in England, and an awful lot seems to happen in broad daylight, which would only be about 8 hours maximum at that time of year.

As for the Cybermen - they are at their weakest here (until their heads start exploding due to the power of Love). Their spaceship manages to land and move around without the military swarming the area - considering they're next door to Heathrow Airport and Windsor Castle, and the Queen in is residence.

(Talking of which, the Doctor and Ace manage to get extremely close to the monarch before security bother doing anything about it).

The Cybermen are actually scared just to be in the vicinity of gold now, and are easily despatched by gold coins fired from a catapult - despite having armoured bodies.

Why do the Cybermen bother capturing De Flores and Karl - why not just shoot them? De Flores is given the earmuff-like devices, presumably to mentally condition him, yet they don't appear to have any effect on him.

The silvered coating on the new helmets of the Cybermen oxidised and turned a golden colour, rather defeating the whole "silver" theme of the story.

The Cybermen falling from the gantry are all too obviously dummies.

Another big problem for me is that there are far too many incidental characters in what is only a three part story - and yet it still feels padded. The skinheads are utterly pointless and add nothing to the story, as does Dorothea Remington. Dolores Gray was only cast in this so that JNT could have a big Broadway / West End star in the show for publicity value - even though she wasn't terribly well known to the general public. The peak of her career was in the 1950's. Her scenes with Lady Peinforte are at least funny.

What's Wrong With... The Happiness Patrol

It is very much a "Marmite" story - in that you either love it or hate it - but in terms of plotting it actually holds up for the most part. The problems are minor compared to some.

For a start, how can you have a Late Show at the Forum, when there's a curfew in place? We hear that attendance is compulsory, so not sure how that works in practice.

Additionally, when we do get to see inside, there's hardly ever anyone there.

Failure to be happy earns you a death sentence, yet Gilbert M is grumpy all the time, and the doorman at the Forum even more so. You can understand why Gilbert M might be tolerated, but surely the doorman could be easily replaced.

Actually, some of the worst offenders are the Patrol members themselves, who hardly ever smile and are usually squabbling.

If making people happy is the prime driver on Terra Alpha, how does the creation of thousands of widows and orphans help achieve that?

Silas P is employed to root out Killjoys by pretending to be one of their number - handing over a card that claims to offer a support group for them. On the reverse, however, is his true identity as a member of the Patrol. Problem is, he hands over the cards with the real ID face upwards, and the Killjoys in each case have to turn it over to show the fake side - without spotting the Patrol ID.

And if he is such a prominent member of the Patrol, ensnaring many Killjoys, why does Priscilla P shoot him down without first checking that he's okay. He's simply acting groggy after being knocked out, so not his usual self. Has she carried a grudge against him for a while and was looking to get rid of him, possibly to get his role? If that's the case, there's nothing to suggest it on screen.

Trevor Sigma is conducting a galactic census, and seems to suggest that he is doing this entirely on his own, on foot - which seems more than a little unlikely.

One production error that makes it into the finished episode is when a Patrol member appears on screen a little too early, whilst the Doctor is messing about with the go-kart.

And what is the point of these vehicles if you can overtake them easily at a brisk walking pace. (We saw a similar problem with the buggies in the Varosian punishment dome).

There's also the business with the Kandy Man's head. It was altered part way through production to add the metal mouth piece and so looks different when we see him in the pipes in the final episode, recorded earlier.

We know that scripts were generally running overlong during this period of the show, with a lot of cutting going on to make episodes fit the time slot (either in the script editing, or in the actual recording edit). This may be why Gilbert M seems to pop up out of nowhere then vanish again at times. On one occasion his disappearance from the Kandy Kitchen actually allows the Doctor to re-stick the feet of the Kandy Man and so escape.

Finally, I suppose we need to talk about that bizarre villain. In the original scripts, the Kandy Man was supposed to look human in a lab coat but with a shiny glazed face, and with belongings like spectacles and pencils which proved to be made of sweets. A decision was then taken to have him made entirely of different sweets, but they elected to go for ones that made him look almost identical to a long established commercial character - Bertie Bassett. This drew a complaint form the company. Surely they must have known that there would be copyright issues here? There are lots of sweet varieties they could have used that would have served the purpose but left him looking unique, and not some copycat. When you consider the issues of product placement at the BBC, it is especially strange that this decision was made. (This was the era when Blue Peter presenters couldn't call it Sellotape, and brand names on things like washing up liquid bottles - ideal for Apollo rockets - were taped over).

Knowing how much he craved publicity for the series, one suspects that JNT provoked this controversy deliberately.

He had to promise that the character would never be returning to the series - so maybe not something wrong after all...

What's Wrong With... Remembrance of the Daleks

After the most popular story of Season 24, we get the most popular of Season 25, and some would argue the best of all the McCoy stories.

It tries to tie in with the earliest history of the series, but in doing so it creates problems.

The story is set in the Coal Hill district of Shoreditch in 1963, a short time after the events of An Unearthly Child. The Doctor has left the Hand of Omega there, secreted at a local funeral parlour, in the expectation that the Daleks will come looking for it, use it without fully understanding it, and destroy themselves. 

Two of the settings are the junkyard and the school, both if which featured in the opening episode back on 23rd November 1963.

Ace even finds a book about the French Revolution in the science lab.

Trouble is, none of this really matches with that original episode, or with the first Dalek story. 

We never saw the school exterior in An Unearthly Child, but what we did see was pupils wearing their own clothes. Here we only see pupils in school uniform, with one wearing jeans - which I don't think would be acceptable in 1963.

The junkyard is nothing of the sort - clearly recorded in a builders merchant yard which is something different entirely. The gates, as is well known, have the wrong spelling of "Foreman" on them. Apparently they were originally painted with the right spelling, but this was changed. (You'll note that this looks nothing like the yard we saw in Attack of the Cybermen either).

The biggest issue is with the idea that the Doctor took the Hand of Omega with him when he and Susan left Gallifrey - and he was already plotting the destruction of the Daleks even then.

It is pretty clear from The Daleks that the Doctor hasn't encountered the creatures before, and thinks he has seen their extinction by the end of that story anyway. 

We were always led to believe, also, that he was nothing special amongst Time Lords when he elected to steal the TARDIS and run away from home with his granddaughter. That he had access to an immensely powerful stellar manipulator device, which no-one seemed to ask for back in any of his subsequent encounters with his own people, just doesn't make sense. It might fit with Cartmel's alleged "masterplan" but bears little relation to anything we saw previously. Both The War Games and The Deadly Assassin would have played out differently if he was some sort of Super Time Lord who could be trusted with such powerful devices.

What exactly is Davros' plan? The Hand detonates suns, providing an immense power source. That's fine, but I'm pretty sure the Gallifreyans never detonated their own sun, in their own backyard.

And just having that power doesn't necessarily lead to mastery over time travel. I'm sure there was a bit more to it than that. Has he done all the other things which Omega and Rassilon had set up back home which would harness that power?

It might have been a smarter idea if Davros had perhaps tested the device somewhere safer first. Why not detonate the Earth's sun as a test, and get rid of the human race - and the Doctor into the bargain?

The book Ace finds cannot be the one Barbara gave to Susan, as that was with her in the TARDIS when it left the junkyard. It doesn't look the same anyway. Neither does the room Ace finds it in, if this is supposed to be Ian Chesterton's science lab.

The other issue everyone notices is the TV scene. We hear an announcer state that a new science fiction series is about to begin, but it's 5.15pm and it's broad daylight outside - impossible for November.

Also, Ace has only just had breakfast and we get a lot more subsequent scenes - again in daylight.

You don't have to look too closely to see modern 1980's buildings in the background of a few shots.

It is evident that the Dalek shuttle had landed in the playground before - we see the scorch marks on the ground. But none of the neighbours seem to have noticed this. When we see it land, it blows in all the classroom windows. The janitor must have done a very good job of repairing all the windows the last time the shuttle landed.

Why does the Doctor get everyone to make the hazardous slide down the rope into the shuttle when they could simply have walked down the stairs?

The transmat has a Dalek on guard, but it takes ages to show itself when the Doctor and Ace first go down to the basement.

Why pick the school as a base in the first place, when it's during term time and therefore in constant use Monday to Friday?

Finally, the Daleks wobble badly when out of location, and whilst we can imagine a blind vicar failing to realise that the Hand is floating by itself, it's hard to believe no-one else noticed this as it is transported through public thoroughfares between the funeral parlour and the cemetery, and all before Group Captain Gilmore has the district evacuated.

What's Wrong With... Dragonfire

Widely regarded as the best story of Season 24, Dragonfire still has its problems - the first of these being the whole background to Kane's imprisonment.

Why would you imprison someone on a spaceship - a means of escape - even if you had removed its power source? There was always the chance, surely, that he - or someone visiting - could have provided an alternative to the "Dragonfire". 

Not only have they left him with a functioning spaceship, but they've left that power source on his jail with him. Why has he taken this long to get someone to go look for it, considering he's been here for thousands of years? The Dragon has built-in weaponry, but it is easily destroyed by a couple of his guards.

And why leave him unguarded? He could simply have taken over a visiting spaceship, after first disabling the thermostat, and fled.

Kane is building an army, but seems to have only recently started on this as it comprises only a handful of people bought from Glitz.

(Are there lots more in cold storage? What's Glitz going to do with them all now that he's the new owner of Iceworld?).

Iceworld must generate enough wealth for him to have funded a ready-made mercenary force ages ago.

He kills by touching people but they have a certain amount of body heat - so it would feel like grabbing a hot coal to him. Why not simply shoot folk he doesn't like?

Did Kane wake up one day and think "How should I go about building an invincible army to wreak revenge on my home planet?... How do I start?... I know - open a frozen food shop!".

He commits suicide the minute he hears that Proamon has been destroyed. Might it not have been a good idea to confirm this first? How does he know the Doctor hasn't simply tricked him?

And surely, during all this time, he would have checked on his homeworld every so often. There must have been visitors to Iceworld who could have told him that the planet had been destroyed.

He's planning on attacking it first chance he gets, so you'd think he would be keeping an eye on it.

Ace is a very popular companion, but personally I've never liked the character - mainly because the idea that she acts like a genuine teenager and was the programme's first real working class companion, is a nonsense. She's what the BBC of 1987 liked to think a teenager acted and sounded like, sanitized and watered down. If you can't have a character swear then don't even go there.

She tells Mel that she has never told anyone her real name - yet she's only known her five minutes.

The "ANT" hunt is just embarrassing. They are trying to do Alien / Aliens but in a harshly lit studio. The Dragon looks not too bad confined to the shadows, even if an obvious rip-off of the Xenomorph, but should never have been shown fully.

Does the little girl serve any function whatsoever in the story? She just wanders about the place - including into Kane's high security living area where even a slight temperature rise could kill him...

I'm no astrophysicist but surely something as massive as Iceworld would affect the orbit of Svartos?

Sylvester McCoy is the only person acting like the floors are slippery. A bit of consistency from the director might have helped here.

Mel's departure is terrible. She decides on a whim to go off with a man she hardly knows, other than that he once happily allied himself with the Master against the Doctor, lies, cheats, steals, cons and is not averse to selling his own crew.

Not even a note of caution from the Doctor about her irrational decision.

When Barry Letts decided to incorporate an audition piece into the series, we got The Daemons. When Cartmel does it, we get this...

And then there's that Part One cliffhanger... Trying to make out afterwards that it was really some post-modern comment on the nature of episodic television just doesn't wash. What everyone saw, on the night, was the Doctor climb over a railing and dangle above a precipice for no reason whatsoever. 

What's Wrong With... Delta and the Bannermen

The background to this story, in a nutshell, is that the Bannermen are engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Chimeron.

Why?

No reason is ever given for this action. We don't know if they are doing it because they themselves want / need it to happen, or if they are mercenaries carrying out their crimes for another party. If the latter, that's never mentioned so we have to assume that they want the Chimeron wiped out for their own reasons.

It would have been nice if some sort of explanation had been given on screen. A couple of lines from Delta would have sufficed.

(There is a reason given in the novelisation - a terribly weak one - but that's no good for the people watching this on broadcast).

Their fearsome reputation is definitely unwarranted if this lot are anything to go by. They are tricked easily and often, and beaten by a bunch of civilians using 1950's technology or homemade traps.

We're told they have a war fleet - but this appears to consist of a single ship. They had two, but a couple of Chimeron were easily able to steal it. Their massed ranks seem to add up to about a dozen troops.

They do at least have the power to time travel - as does Nostalgia Tours. The latter are evidently a company with a very poor reputation, yet they are able to travel in time for mere pleasure jaunts. At least one of these coincides with a key moment in Earth's technological progress - the early Space Race.

I thought that the Time Lords were supposed to be policing time travel? It wasn't that long ago they were sending the Second Doctor to stop Dastari.

If Bannermen do indeed have time travel technology, surely they could have used it to eliminate the Chimeron at any earlier point in their history when easier to achieve?

Being the 1950's there would have been all sorts of implications for Billy forming any sort of relationship with one of the campers, and people would have had a lot to say about Delta's status as a single mother. They've picked the nice bits of the '50's - the music and nostalgia factor - but ignored the social realities of the decade. (Imagine what an RTD2 / Gatwa story with the same set-up might have been like. Or maybe not...).

Mel, who has done a fair bit of space / time travel by this stage screams her head off at the green baby - but Billy hardly bats an eyelid?

Billy steals some of the child's food. What made him think it would make him turn into an alien like Delta in the first place? And why would a foodstuff cause a genetic transformation in an entirely alien species? If people turned into cows after drinking milk then we might see where he was coming from.

The Chimeron lifecycle appears to be based on insect life. I do hope Billy knows that a lot of female insects eat their mates after procreation...

No matter how much in love they are, is going on a picnic - without leaving any word of where you can be reached in an emergency - really the brightest thing to do when you know genocidal aliens are on their way, specifically intent on killing you and your child? It's no wonder the Chimeron are on the brink of extinction...

If you are fleeing genocidal aliens, it is probably best not to mention your species to a bunch of strangers on a holiday outing. One of the fellow passengers just happens to be a bounty hunter who knows all about the Bannermen / Chimeron conflict - so much so that he has a direct line to Gavrok. Considering that no-one knew Delta was going to turn up and join the tour, that's one heck of a coincidence.

Gavrok doesn't want to pay Kiellor the bounty, so kills him - but does it before he has bothered to get the exact location and so has to land and run around the countryside hunting for Delta.

Gavrok shoots the Toll Master, yet allows Hawke and Weismuller to live, even wasting a couple of soldiers to guard them - men who would have been more usefully employed on the search, surely?

Even with a special code, it is highly unlikely that you could ever have gotten through to the White House from a standard Police Public Call Box.

I have found evidence that Police Boxes could be found in Cardiff and Newport, but none in any rural district of South Wales.

I've stayed in a holiday camp, and there's no way that the grass in front of the chalets would be allowed to grow that long during the season. 

We hear the music for Housewives Choice when everyone is having lunch - even though this was broadcast between 9 - 9.55am on the Light Programme. And the music for Music While You Work is playing over breakfast, when this was broadcast between 10.30 - 11am, and again between 3.45 - 4.30pm, according to the BBC Genome project for summer 1959.

Most of the male Navarino tourists dress as Teddy Boys. Holiday camps catered primarily for families (competitions ranged from Bonny Babies to Glamorous Grannies), and people identifying as a particular youth sub-culture would be frowned upon due the potential for violence. It wasn't until the end of the 20th Century that camps began to specifically advertise themed musical weekends, now that the families were going elsewhere.

What's Wrong With... Paradise Towers

A lot of the blame for problems this story might have can be laid at the door of one man - guest star Richard Briers. We know he was a very good actor, though much of his career was based in situation comedy. In later life he was "adopted" by Kenneth Branagh and appeared in several of his cinematic Shakespeare productions.

In Paradise Towers his performance as the Chief Caretaker is just too broad, as though he is hamming it up for the kids. Things get worse once he is possessed by Kroagnon. He's a caricature, in a story very much built along comic book lines (Andrew Cartmel being a huge fan of 2000 AD etc) where what it really needed was some verisimilitude. We can never believe that the Towers is a real place, inhabited by real people. Being studio-bound, with little or no budget for extras, doesn't help. 

Apparently the producer encouraged the performance by Briers, so he has to take some of the blame.

Most of the background to the story collapses under scrutiny. 

Kroagnon was turned against by the occupants of the Towers and confined as a bodiless entity in the basement. Why not just kill him?

If he's just a brain (or a lifeforce - it's never made clear which) how could he create the technology to hijack the Cleaners? They kill people and bring the bodies to the basement, but for what purpose? He's not using them to build a body for himself as he has the technology to transfer himself into another person and possess them. Again, how can a disembodied being achieve any of this?

Did the residents provide any of this and, if so, why?

Remember that the Time Lords were prepared to resort to assassination to prevent mind transference technology in Mindwarp, so why not intervene here as well?

The Chief Caretaker believes the Doctor to be the Great Architect - yet he's in constant communication with Kroagnon and is actively aiding and abetting his schemes.

The timescale is all wrong. There are young male Caretakers and we have the Kangs, so the war during which all the young men left can't have been all that long ago - unless these are very long-lived humanoid aliens. People ought to remember what happened. 

What sort of conflict was it that every single male failed to return, but no-one seems bothered about why?

If there are teenage female Kangs, then where are all the teenage boys who were too young to go off to war? Where are the men who were too old to fight?

There ought to be a wider age spread for both males and, especially, females here.

The Kangs would have worked far better had they been feral children, but they're obviously in their 20's, and there appears to be a drama school somewhere in the Towers.

Tabby and Tilda resort to eating animals (and people if they get the chance), but how does everyone else survive here?

The Caretakers have a rule book which numbers thousands of rules, most with sub-sections big enough to need paragraphs - yet it's the size of a pocket notebook.

The Towers are clearly dilapidated, yet Tabby and Tilda get a new front door in no time at all.

If they are somehow getting preferential treatment from the Chief Caretaker, why doesn't this include food?

The script had to be changed to avoid showing Mel being threatened by a knife, due to then current rules around violence. But showing her being threatened with a huge toasting fork is more acceptable?

The plan to get rid of Kroagnon is overly complicated. The Kangs have crossbows - so why not simply shoot him? And what sort of "pests" does the Towers have that requires the Caretakers to keep a supply of dynamite?

Mel tells the Kangs that she doesn't have a colour - said whilst wearing a bright blue top...

What's Wrong With... Time and the Rani

Time and the Rani is what Doctor Who would have looked like had JNT not had the influence of a Script Editor to keep him in check.

Andrew Cartmel is the credited Script Editor, but the story was already well advanced by the time he started and he has very much distanced himself from it. JNT had gone ahead and commissioned Pip & Jane Baker for another story, being a "safe pair of hands" (or two pairs of hands, rather) and could be trusted to get on with things whilst Cartmel got settled in. Bringing back an old enemy, played by a big US soap star, was an obvious way to get a new season launched.

We were also being given the debut of a new Doctor, someone well known to children's TV audiences.

On paper, it should have been a big success, but even the president of the biggest fan club felt compelled to go to the media slating it. What went wrong?

First of all, there's the absence of Colin Baker to participate in a satisfying regeneration scene. The Doctor appears to have simply fallen off his exercise bike after the Rani shot at the TARDIS. We see her with a relatively small gun, so how on earth did that weapon manage to target a TARDIS?

Later we'll see that she hasn't got any sort of navigation / targeting device on her Strange Matter rocket. It's the key to her entire scheme, yet it's stuck in a fixed trajectory and will miss the asteroid if it isn't launched at a precise time. Why have a gun that can target a small moving object precisely, and not a vital rocket aimed at a big hunk of rock in a supposedly stable orbit?

If the asteroid is as dense as is claimed, it ought to have drawn the rocket towards it anyway so there's no way it could miss. Also, Lakertya ought to be orbiting it, rather than the other way round.

Efforts are made to obscure McCoy's features when the Doctor is turned onto his back, but it just doesn't work.

As to the cause of the regeneration, the novelisation blames "tremendous buffeting" due to the gun.

McCoy's first couple of episodes are far from promising. He might have appeared with the National Theatre, but his acting is appalling in his first few scenes with Kate O'Mara, and the pratfalls are embarrassing.

O'Mara having to dress up and act like Bonnie Langford for two episodes is another embarrassment.

At what point did the Rani know she was going to impersonate Mel? If it was always the plan, why leave the real one lying in the TARDIS, free to get away, when she took the Doctor?

The Rani is watching Sarn run away, during which she bumps into Mel - yet a short time later she's surprised to learn that Mel is on the loose.

And at what point did she and Mel meet in order for her to know what she looked, acted and sounded like? There can only be a missing story somewhere - except Mel doesn't recognise the Rani...

The Rani's plan is to create a Time Manipulator which will alter history throughout the universe, back through time and not just henceforward. That would mean that all the genii she has collected to help her big brain with its calculations might never have been born - creating a temporal paradox.

One of the people she abducts is Einstein. Not only is this a bit of a cliché, but he was no fan of quantum physics so surely his mental input would either be disruptive as he fiercely disagreed with it, or simply useless as he would have zero talent in this field.

The Rani changes her mind about saving the Lakertyans as a slave labour force - despite the fact that the entire planet is going to be destroyed when her rocket hits the asteroid.

The Doctor gets locked in the Rani's laboratory, yet there's a second door which Mel is able to just walk through.

The Bakers always prided themselves on their research, with Pip often reminding interviewers that his brother was a scientist. But there's some very dodgy science on show here.

The Doctor uses fibre optic cables to bypass the deadly ankle bracelets as though they were electrical wires - even though they don't conduct electricity. (Pretty pointless of the Rani to employ the bracelets when she has her killer insects. All she's done is provide the Doctor with a quantity of explosives).

The Rani wants the rocket to launch at the Lakertyan solstice. A solstice is simply the date on which the sun reached either maximum or minimum declination, giving us on Earth our longest and shortest days. It should have nothing to do with the orbit of an asteroid.

What's Wrong With... The Ultimate Foe

Trial of a Time Lord limps to its conclusion, and we have already covered some of the problems with this season-long single story, such as the bizarre vagaries of the Time Lord judicial system.

One thing we have to bear in mind is that the Vervoid story hasn't actually happened yet. The Doctor hasn't met Mel at this point in his own timeline, and what we saw for the last four weeks was simply a look into his future. Which begs the question of what he will actually do when he finally gets that call for help from Special Investigator Hallett?

Do the Time Lords wipe his memory of those events before he goes free after this is all over? There's no suggestion that they do anything of the sort. He simply departs the space station with Mel.

Everyone now knows that he is going to commit genocide at some point in the future, so is that addressed? Unless the Valeyard really messed about with the last bit of evidence then the Doctor showed no sign of remembering having seen these events unfold before. Is he just a very good actor, or does his memory get wiped?

If he does recall those events, will he feel obliged to allow everything to run its course, or will he attempt to handle things differently to avoid genocide - even if that means changing his own timeline and those of everyone on the Hyperion III?

Look at any typical court case and you'll probably find witnesses involved. So far none have been called for the Doctor's case, by either side. It finally gets mentioned here, but the Doctor moans that anyone who might be able to help him is scattered throughout time and space. But these are Time Lords, who can visit any point in time and space they choose - so picking up witnesses should be the simplest of tasks.

We can understand why the Master selected Glitz to be brought to the station, as he had evidence of the High Council's involvement with Ravolox and the thefts from the Matrix, but why bring Mel whom the Doctor only knows through watching an (unreliable) future adventure?

The biggest problem with this pair of episodes is the Matrix. It's an artificial environment which can be manipulated by whoever controls it. In this case, that's the Valeyard.

At one point the Doctor ties him up. But that's Matrix wire he's using. The Valeyard should simply be able to think himself free. Same for everything that happens here, yet he fails to kill the Doctor or Glitz.

Maybe it is the fault of the troubled circumstances under which these episodes were written but there is no consistency regarding the rules of how the Matrix works. One minute it's not real so you can't be harmed, and the next you can be.

If it's an artificial environment fashioned by the Valeyard, how did the Master manage to park his TARDIS inside? It's a physical object, which the creator of the domain must surely have noticed.

The Matrix is said to have seven doors, but the Keeper claims that there is only one key. Does that key then open all seven doors - a bit of a security risk if they left it on the bus. If each door has its own key, then what's the Keeper talking about? Does each door have its own Keeper, and this one only looks after the one on the space station?

Was the Keeper a disguised Valeyard all the time, or did he simply bump him off and take his outfit only after escaping from the Matrix?

The Valeyard, posing for no real reason whatsoever as the Dickensian Popplewick figure, tries to get the Doctor to sign away his remaining lives. The Doctor agrees to do this, on the basis that the Valeyard could kill him anytime anyway. So why doesn't the Valeyard do this? Why only here and now is he able, or willing, to destroy the Doctor and thus gain an existence of his own?

What has giving consent got to do with the process?

The separate business of assassinating another bunch of Time Lords, who all just happen to be gathered to watch this trial, isn't very well set up. It's suddenly added late in the final episode.

If you've got everyone you want to kill assembled in one place, in deep space, isn't it easier to simply sabotage the space station? Let all the air out or blow it up.

The least said about a Megabyte Modem being a devastating weapon, the better... The only thing scary about those was the time it took to download videos.

The Valeyard unleashes a Particle Disseminator onto the court. If this really does what the name implies, then you shouldn't be able to avoid its effects by simply ducking under your chair. Interesting how all the Chancellery Guards leg it from the courtroom, leaving their superiors to fend for themselves. The weapon not only fails to harm anyone in the courtroom, but it doesn't even damage the furniture.

And earlier, did the Valeyard really have to stress the word "disseminate" so obviously when talking to the Doctor - giving away his whole plan?

More Pip & Jane unrealistic dialogue on show, especially things like the Valeyard's "catharsis of spurious morality".

Mel states that Gallifrey doesn't have any Crown Jewels. How would she know? And surely the well known relics of Rassilon - his Coronet, Sash, Rod and Key - constitute a "crown jewels" of sorts.

Once the Valeyard's scheme has been defeated, the Inquisitor simply shrugs her shoulders as though nothing really serious has occurred - even though we've just heard that there's civil strife on Gallifrey. She suggests that the Doctor run for President again - despite now knowing that he's not only capable of genocide but will actually commit it in the near future.

And what has she said or done throughout these entire proceedings to make the Doctor think that she might be the best person for the job? She was all for the assassination plot to take out Crozier for one thing.

The fact that Peri is still alive and married to Yrcanos is a massive cop-out on the ending to Mindwarp.

Bearing in mind once again that Mel will only become his companion at some later date, why doesn't the Doctor simply go and collect Peri now that he knows she's still alive? Does she actually want to be stuck on a barbaric planet with Brian Blessed?

And just what did actually happen at the conclusion of Mindwarp, if she's still alive and not a repository for Kiv's mind? (Or is it actually Kiv whom Yrcanos married...?).

Not a problem at the time, but hindsight certainly hasn't been kind to this story. 

The "gap" between incarnations during which the Valeyard was said to come into being came and went without anyone even noticing it, when Steven Moffat decided to have the Doctor's life-span come to an end on Trenzalore at Christmas 2013. Then Chris Chibnall decided that the Doctor wasn't an actual Time Lord at all, and had lots of incarnations before the grumpy old bloke in Totter's Lane - so the Valeyard should really have come from a point in the Doctor's distant past, and not his future. 

(One way round this is to accept that there is a potential for a Valeyard-type figure for any Time Lord towards the end of their normal 12 regenerations cycle. Perhaps the Borusa of The Five Doctors was actually his "Valeyard", who had bumped off the nice but doddery Arc of Infinity one and usurped his role as President. Left with only a single aged life after finally achieving his own existence, he would certainly want to become immortal).

A lot of unanswered questions, but we should just mention those troubled circumstances under which this story came into being. The Ultimate Foe is a bit like the Valeyard himself actually, falling between the incarnation started by Robert Holmes and completed by Eric Saward, and the incarnation devised by Pip & Jane Baker after Holmes passed away and Saward then fell out with JNT and quit.

Unlike the Valeyard, this story actually succeeded in bumping off the Doctor, as Colin Baker got the chop very soon after...

What's Wrong With... Terror of the Vervoids

It's one of the few whodunnits I know where you don't actually care who done it. Once the monsters start running amok you almost forget that there is supposed to be a murder mystery here.

By the time they get back to this plot thread, you've lost interest.

You can have monsters running around a spaceship, or you can have a killer hidden amongst aliens on a spaceship, but it takes a very careful balancing act to run both types of story simultaneously - and the Bakers (Pip & Jane) don't quite manage it.

The big problem here is, of course, the fact that this story takes place in the Doctor's own personal future - when he's being threatened with being put on trial for his life. Doesn't the fact that this particular epistopic interface from the spectrum show that the Doctor is going to get away with everything and be free to back to roaming the universe, meddling in the affairs of others - the very thing they've pulled him up on? 

Why was the Doctor allowed to see into his own future when permitted to select this evidence? Most people would prefer not to know their own future. What if you go to look and find that you get run over by a bus in half an hour?

Surely there were older adventures the Doctor could have selected that he would actually have remembered, which might have better illustrated his innocence. Why not show them The Three Doctors, or The Deadly Assassin, where he actually saves Gallifrey pretty much single-handedly. That would shut them up.

How do you send a message to a time machine, when you aren't a time traveller yourself? How can the investigator, Hallett, possibly know that the Doctor is in the vicinity in this particular time zone?

He's another of those old friends who are popping up every five minutes these days whom we have never heard of.

After summoning the Doctor, Hallett then denies that's who he is in such a manner as to make everyone suspicious of him. He might as well wear a "murder me because I am out to get you" T-shirt.

After posing as a man named Grenville, he then disguises himself as a Mogarian. How come the other Mogarians don't spot he's an imposter amongst them?

If Hallett's so good, why did he make the schoolboy error of not switching on his translator in the lounge?

He is killed straight after this, so how did the killer manage to spot this faux pas and then administer poison in a busy area in so short a time?

The Mogarians die at the slightest splash of water, yet we see them drinking tea and they are on their way to Earth, which has an awful lot of rain in most areas. Their protective suits aren't terribly efficient, are they?

Presumably their rooms are en suite - which is like you or I being given a room with a lethal booby-trap on the other side of the door.

The Doctor is soon being brought before Commodore Travers - yet another of these old acquaintances. The Bakers were notorious for their cliched dialogue, and Travers' "... I found myself involved in a web of mayhem and intrigue" is a choice example. No-one talks like that, outside a 1950's B-movie - or a Pip & Jane script.

There's more ripe dialogue such as Mel's "You've got a killer on board!" when Travers asks how three people have come to be murdered. Well, duh?

Or how about his "... in my mind that's murder" after describing someone being pulverised and sent floating into space.

And what was Edwardes going to say to Mel before he was so rudely electrocuted? "We don't want you breaking your neck. At least not until - ". Until what???

The spaceship seems to be rather empty for a luxury liner - so there aren't all that many suspects for the murder mystery element.

Is it common for luxury liners to have holds full of volatile minerals and quarantined passengers with deadly contagions? No wonder it's looking so empty.

It's 2986, and they are still using tape cassettes in the liner's gymnasium.

The bridge of the Hyperion III is said to be hijack proof - yet someone is able to walk in with a gun and hijack it...

"Demeter" doesn't mean "food of the gods". It's the name of a goddess.

Onto the Vervoids now, and why would you genetically engineer a slave race which comes equipped with poisonous spines and toxic gas?

Why give them the power of speech and this level of intelligence if they're only supposed to be slaves? One of them knows how a shower works within hours of them emerging from their pods.

If this evidence was selected by the Doctor just before the next stage of the trial began, how did the Valeyard have time to tamper with it? He edits in a sequence of the Doctor sabotaging the radio equipment, which doesn't seem very relevant anyway, but leaves in Travers specifically asking for the Doctor's help - when he's trying to prove to the court that the Doctor always interferes uninvited.

Finally, the Doctor gets accused of genocide. He selected this evidence out of all the other possible things he could have picked, and on hearing Article 7 mentioned he knows exactly what it means. Why pick evidence which will let everyone see him committing such a serious offence?

Considering that the Doctor's defence appears to simply be "I get better in the future", this was a very stupid choice.

What's Wrong With... Mindwarp

One of the problems with this story is the one which Colin Baker often mentions in interviews - namely what is going on with the Doctor when he acts in a hostile manner towards Peri and sucks up to the Mentors? Having asked the usual "What's my motivation in this scene" question of director Ron Jones, he was told to ask the script editor. When he asked Eric Saward for an answer, he was then asked to speak to the writer - who referred him back to Saward. There are three possibilities as to what is going on:

1. The Matrix is lying and has been tampered with,

2. The Doctor is only pretending to be nasty in order to curry favour with the Mentors so that he can undermine them,

3. His brain has been frazzled by Crozier's equipment.

Left with no answer from anyone else, Baker opted to play it as No.3.

We, the audience, are left asking the same question as Baker - why is he acting like this? He made up his own answer, but it's never explained to us what's happened.

Once again we have to question the Gallifreyan legal system. As mentioned last time, they seem to be able to make it up as they go along, so that an investigative tribunal can suddenly become a trial. The Doctor was brought here because of his continued meddling / interference in the affairs of others - but suddenly they bring up the fact that Crozier's experiments could change everything across the entire universe - and they appear to be blaming him for this. 

If they knew about Crozier's work, why not put a stop to it themselves? If they used the Doctor as an unwitting pawn once again, then they sent him to Thoros Beta in the first place - so they can hardly accuse him of interfering in this instance.

In fact, rather than allow the Doctor to put a stop to the scientist's work, they actually pull him out of the situation and opt for a less than subtle assassination, involving the deaths of bystanders.

The Valeyard accuses the Doctor of abandoning Peri - when it was the court which dragged him away and prevented him rescuing her.

The process which takes the Doctor out of time results in short-term memory loss - so is it really fair to put someone through a legal process which involves answering lots of questions about recent events when they know their memory of these is impaired?

The Inquisitor is supposed to be impartial, but she suddenly announces that she knew all about Crozier, the assassination and Peri's death all along.

The stupid thing is that we'll later discover that none of this part of the story happened anyway. Just where does the story actually end, and what's Matrix manipulation?

(How can the Time Lords even know what happened once the TARDIS leaves, as that's what's supposed to be providing the pictures?).

It's not just the Gallifreyan legal system that varies from minute to minute. Crozier is supposed to be a brilliant brain surgeon, but next thing he's able to transfer the contents of the mind into a new brain - which I would have thought must be an entirely different medical discipline.

Can't be many surgeons who allow food and drink - or exposed brains - in their supposedly sterile laboratory.

The idea that someone can transfer their mind into another body is hardly universe-shattering stuff. A giant slug was able to do it in Baker's very first story, and we've seen lots of instances of possession over the years - certainly since the Hinchcliffe-Holmes days.

Talking of mind transference, Sil seems to have undergone a personality transplant. He's quite a different character in this from when we first met him on Varos. He looks different as well - smaller cranium and he's changed colour.

And what were the chances of finding a dead marine Mentor who is the spitting image of Lord Kiv?

A few other questions: why does the Doctor leave the TARDIS door open when the ship has landed in the middle of the sea?

Why are there never any guards at the big metal door to Crozier's laboratory, despite the importance of what is going on and who is in there?

Why does Frax think that the Lukoser will kill the Doctor and Peri when (a) it's chained to a wall leaving room to get past, and (b) is quite a nice bloke really? Has he killed others? Just how many prisoners manage to escape from Frax's guards and get along that tunnel?

If Crozier is employed principally to save Kiv through brain transplantation - and there's urgency to do so, at the cost of his own life - why is he messing about making wolfmen, pacifying warlords and aging rebels?

What's Wrong With... The Mysterious Planet

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...

What's Wrong With... Revelation of the Daleks

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that some writers on long-running TV series much prefer their own original characters to the regulars, who they feel they can't really do a lot with. 

This is certainly the impression that Eric Saward seems to be giving during Season 22. We've already noted how the Doctor and Peri seem to take a very long time getting into the main plot - usually being left to argue in the TARDIS for much of the first episode.

In Revelation of the Daleks, the Doctor and Peri spend the entire first instalment walking towards the plot. And even then the Doctor gets held up outside Tranquil Repose at the cliffhanger, not even managing to get through the doors to where Davros is getting on with the plot. He doesn't even glimpse a Dalek. That's left for Peri to do, but she doesn't recognise it. Maybe the Doctor should have warned her about them, instead of showing her pictures of his old companions like Jo Grant.

We've spent most of the first 45 minutes in Davros' company, and meeting all the other grotesque characters who populate this story.

For a Dalek story, they don't feature very much in this - only really coming into their own in the last 10 minutes once the Imperial faction turn up.

We're told that Tranquil Repose is a fairly exclusive funerary complex, reserved for the rich and famous. Many of the bodies are being used by Davros to create his new Dalek army. So how can it be providing enough of Kara's foodstuff to alleviate famine in this corner of the galaxy?

Davros points out that the heirs to the people entombed there are hardly likely to ever want them back, so why hasn't everyone cottoned onto this? Surely the king of a planet, or the CEO of some big conglomerate, must know that the person taking over isn't going to do anything to haste them back in charge again, now that they're in control.

If the weed-plant is regarded as just that - a weed - why is it used to decorate the funerals of royalty? Isn't that a bit of an insult?

Peri states that the weed-plant is the only thing which grows on Necros, despite her and the Doctor walking through a forest at the time...

Can eating a sandwich ever really make a humanoid explode?

Davros is using a dummy head in a glass case to decoy potential assassins. Yet he seems to be able to see, hear and speak with it, and even fire electrical charges from it. He has controls in front of him and sits watching what's going on on a big screen. He's posing as the Great Healer, and is obviously afraid of assassination (or arrest as a war criminal and prison escapee). So why, if he's going to create a fake persona, did he make it look like Davros, the well-known war criminal and prison escapee? He could have had a fake head that looked like the Doctor, just to discredit him - or just for a laugh.

What's real Davros doing all this time anyway, and how does he communicate with his fake self?

Why hide away even when there's no-one but the odd Dalek in his control room? He also appears to have human guards. Why use them, instead of sticking with his new ultra-loyal Daleks to preserve his life?

(The idea of using a decoy is also far from original - having only just been seen in the previous story).

And talking of dummies, why replace Stengos' body with a fake? Just how often do relatives come looking to see their dear departed, and if it happens a lot then wouldn't much better fakes be best?

Why are Natasha and Grigory allowed to get so far into the complex - and what exactly are they homing in on? It can't be Stengos' body, as we know its been replaced with the dummy one.

As with the previous Davros story, he seems to have gathered an awful lot of information considering that he's been in hiding since being broken out of prison. How did he know what the Doctor looked like nowadays, to set up the fake tombstone? Why not just drop a real tombstone on the Doctor, instead of messing about with polystyrene ones?

The Doctor has defeated him three times already, so isn't he running a massive risk deliberately inviting him here to his latest base of operations.

When the real Davros finally shows up, we can see he is badly superimposed over Orcini's prostrate form - his leg waving about behind Davros' chair even though he's floating several feet away.

How do two lowly funeral technicians know so much about Davros and the Daleks, to the point that they can even contact Skaro and invite them over? So much for Davros' elaborate security measures.

What's the point of the glass incubator Dalek? Can't they just deposit the conditioned mutant directly into a Dalek shell?

When I reviewed this story, I said that it was the best of the Colin Baker era - but it wasn't the best Colin Baker story. That was because the Doctor hardly does anything until the final confrontation between Davros / Kara / Orcini. It's the Daleks who stop Davros, and Orcini who blows up the complex.

The Doctor need hardly have turned up at all...