“The only logic is that there isn’t any logic.” How apropos
that this disaster of a trial winds up with this confession.
The Ultimate Foe (Trial of a Time Lord, Parts 13-14) brings
us to a surreal, slam-bang finish, and when the dust settles, well, the joke of
it is that nothing is settled. The Doctor is simply free to go with no real
legal justification. The entire trial is thrown out of court with not so much
as a ‘case dismissed.’
Getting to that point is a bizarre and twisted road, starting
with the Master. It is the Master who provides all of the answers, all of the
evidence to clear the Doctor and condemn the Time Lords. The Master has been
watching the proceedings from inside the Matrix, and for the life of me I can’t
understand why the Inquisitor doesn’t immediately declare a mistrial upon his
appearance, but that’s Time Lord (in)justice for you.
“In all my travelings throughout the universe,” the Doctor
declares, “I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I
should have stayed here. The oldest civilization—decadent, degenerate, and
rotten to the core. Ha! Power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen,
they’re still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute
power, that’s what it takes to be really corrupt.”
Hear, hear. As I have stated before, this season should be
labeled Trial of the Time Lords rather than Trial of a Time Lord.
The Time Lord High Council has engineered the removal of
Earth from its own space, its destruction and renaming. Talk about Article
Seven. When the Doctor blunders onto Ravalox, the High Council yanks him out of
time, brings him up on trumped up charges, falsifies evidence, and makes a pact
with the devilish alter ego of the Doctor in the form of the Valeyard—“the
distillation of all that’s evil” in the Doctor, an incarnation of the Doctor
from somewhere between his twelfth and final regeneration. Again, talk about transgressing
the Laws of Time.
What I find unfathomable is that they then choose the very
adventure (The Mysterious Planet) that is full of all of the condemning clues to
their fiendish plot as their Exhibit A. What were they thinking? I suppose they
were thinking that the Inquisitor and the sitting Time Lords are too stupid to
realize this, and that was actually a safe assumption on their part.
Of course, we only have the Master’s word for any of this,
and I trust the Master about as much as I trust the Matrix at this point.
“We’re not dealing with reality,” the Doctor tells Glitz as
they traverse the Matrix. People jumping in and out of the Matrix; secrets
being stolen from the Matrix; recorded events being manipulated within the
Matrix; duplicate keys to the Matrix floating about; how is it again that the
Time Lords have come to respect and revere and rely on this Matrix?
The unreality of the Matrix, however, provides the bulk of
the entertainment value for The Ultimate Foe. Anything goes in here, and the
weird, fantastic dreamscape created within it is just the right touch to put an
end to this season of outlandish perplexity. Because it all has been a dream. A
lie. A land of make believe.
The Dickensian touch is particularly appealing. Popplewick,
J J Chambers, the Junior Mister Popplewick—it’s all good. The cobbled streets,
the Sydney Carton speech, the steam engine—why not? The fog, the horse drawn
carts, the water barrels—atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere. A world of
fiction. If you’re going to enter a world of fiction, what better?
It has absolutely nothing to do with the trial, the Time
Lord treachery, the Master’s machinations. Who cares?
The hands reaching out from the sand to drag the Doctor
under is effective and compelling, but it doesn’t rhyme with the rest. Everything
else in this Matrix world is straight from the Fantasy Factory dream world of
Dickens; the sand and the hands are discordant. Where did that come from and
where did it go? Either have more of this nightmare diversity ala The Deadly Assassin or commit to the Dickensian theme.
Then we have the fake courtroom scene. Ironic that the only
true trial sequence, complete with actual witnesses, is phony in this season
long Law and Order.
And it’s a waste of Mel, isn’t it? Mel was thrown at us in
mid stride and we really haven’t had a chance to know her. Suddenly she’s
called as witness, but then it’s a fake Mel as most things Matrix are. Glitz
has some nice companion moments with the Doctor, but wait, now he’s with the Master
and we really don’t know where his loyalties lie.
Ah, the Master. He always seems to be called in when the
show doesn’t quite know what to do. But then the show never quite seems to know
what to do with the Master. The Master apparently has been sitting back with
his own bowl of popcorn watching the farce along with the rest of the Time
Lords until he got bored and decided to interject himself into the act. With
his love/hate feelings for the Doctor showing, the Master sides with good
Doctor vs. evil Doctor/Valeyard; but then he veers off into Matrix secret
snatching even though the Matrix has been revealed to be a tissue of lies and
deceit.
The Valeyard, meanwhile, has switched from his prosecutor,
henchman of the High Council role to that of a Snidely Whiplash villain. It
must be something in the Matrix air.
Now we sink into the Doctor racing against time to defuse a
ticking time bomb to avert the destruction of the Time Lords, or as the
Valeyard would say, “prevent the catharsis of spurious morality.” Voila, the
Doctor pulls a few wires on this “megabyte modem” (why not?) in this fictitious
matrix of deceit and saves the day. Fourteen parts leads to this.
“All charges against you are dismissed, Doctor.” The trial
wasn’t real; the charges weren’t real; the adventures weren’t real. You saved
us from certain death so all is forgiven, if there ever was anything to forgive
which we have never established.
The duplicitous High Council, meantime, has been overthrown
and Time Lord society is in upheaval, if you can believe the Master. How he
knows this I don’t know; how he has possibly manipulated it (?) I don’t know;
why they take him at his word I don’t know. Similarly, I’m not sure that I
trust the Master’s revelation that Peri is alive and well and living with King
Yrcanos. The Time Lords and the Doctor accept this bit of news with no
question. I never much cared for Peri, as you well know Gary, but I think she
deserves better. The truth about Peri deserves to be told. I blame the Doctor
for not finding out.
Instead the Doctor blithely leaves with the mysterious Mel
from some mythic future in a world of paradoxes that boggle the mind.
There is no law; there is no order. Trial of a Time Lord,
parts 1-14 is a slap dash affair with no rhyme or reason.
But it somehow works.
It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t come together. It doesn’t enlighten.
But it entertains.
It is like the Sixth Doctor’s coat. Colorful, loud, in bad
taste, patchwork. It’s garish and obnoxious, but for better or worse it is the
Doctor; it is Doctor Who. And in some bizarre, Matrix-like way it works.
For better or worse, Gary, it is Doctor Who . . .
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