The Trial of a Time Lord - episodes 9 to 12 : Terror of the Vervoids

Still reeling from the shock of Peri's death on Thoros Beta, the Doctor uses the Matrix to gather evidence for his defence. The Doctor looks to the future, to a time when he is travelling with a new companion named Melanie, and they answer a distress call on a luxury spaceliner headed from the planet Mogar to Earth. The call has been faked, though, and the commanding officer, Commodore Travers, is less than pleased to see the Doctor on his ship as their paths have apparantly crossed before. Also on board the ship are members of the Mogarian race, as well as the eminent agronimist Sarah Laskey and her team of researchers. As the flight is underway, the passengers and crew being to diasppear, murdered by forces unknown, until the ship is overrun with the planet-creatures known as Vervoids. The Vervoids are a result of experiments by Laskey, who has plans to use the race to perform menial tasks on Earth, but they have become self aware and view all mammalian life as a threat to them. As the bodies begin to pile up on a compost heap, the Doctor is forced to take drastic action and wipe out all the Vervoids before they reach Earth - committing an act of genocide...

There's a lot to be said about what goes on in these four episodes, even if they're not the best of the season. For starters there is the Doctor's growing conviction that the evidence is being tampered with at its source - confirmed by sequences he reviewed in priavte now being at odds with what the jury and the Inquisitor see in the trial room. The Valeyard is all smug about it and says that the Matrix cannot lie, and it's a dead cert now that he's somehow behind it. By now the sniping across the courtroom is getting a bit tiresome - every few minutes the action is interrupted, including one pointless demonstration where a sequence is rewound to show a poisoning victim.

Melanie Bush, the new assistant, is played by Bonnie Langford, and she's always smiling, and always bouncy, and a health freak, and she has this squeaky voice ... and the most shrill scream EVER in the history of the series. Personally... I don't like her. Too perky. I have this urge to backhand the TV when she starts the screaming. Oh the SCREAMING. Why do we need this? WHY? And why is the Doctor so whipped in her presence? Stupid stupid stupid.

The Vervoids. Hostile plant people. Not like the Krynoid, though; they have a pack mentality and a highly developed sense of self-awareness and parinoia. And poison thorns. They're not realized the best - they're obviously just dude in rubber suits with thick leaves glued on, but it's hard to do it convincingly on any budget. Their genocide doesn't exactly leave a yawning gap in an evolutionary sequence, but they're still a species, and they're all gone now, and it's all the Doctor's fault, so whether he's simply a meddler or not, he's now a mass murderer.

The Time Lords. Interesting how they sit there all judgemental about the Doctor saving Earth from extinction at the hands )leaves?) of the Vervoids yet these are the same people who two regenerations ago sent the Doctor to do just that very thing to the Daleks. (Although the Dalek thing has now been retconned in light of the new series - see future blogs about any Dalek story from 2005 and onward).

So at the end of it the Doctor almost proves his point, that he is needed where he goes and he helps when asked - and he almost is home free until the truth of how he deals with the Vervoids comes to light. Foolish if you ask me. Like he's played right into the Valeyard's hands.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ULTIMATE FOE