The Trial of a Time Lord I

I find I encounter a problem as I sit down to write about "The Trial of a Time Lord". The problem is that for many years I have fought strongly for this adventure to be treated as a single story, and yet anybody reading these regular columns is going to inevitably feel cheated if I knock out but a single day's thoughts to cover this season-long epic. I shall therefore divide my notes about "Trial" over four separate columns, but without pretending that it's four distinct Doctor Who stories. Which it isn't.

You may think it's a matter of supreme unimportance after all this time, but I persist that this travesty of a viewpoint is as unfair today as ever! The only logical reason for dividing up "Trial" and judging it as four discrete entities is because this was the way the production was divided up (into three!). Yet we don't take "Enter the Rani" as the correct title for the Season 22 historical runabout over what was eventually shown on screen, just because this was how it was known during production, do we? Admittedly the case for the defence isn't helped by certain nods that to the multi-story structure that linger in the finished article (no cliff-hanger reprise at the start of Parts 5, 9 or 13 for example). But this Doctor Who story was broadcast as one, 14-part adventure. That fact SHOULD decide the issue with no room for argument.

The sticking point of course is that a one-season story doesn't squeeze easily into our preferred viewing of the history of the series. Think honestly now about how you view each era of the series in your head. I'll bet you're picturing an episode guide, with each story listed next to its number of component episodes. It's how we were taught to view the series. At one time every Doctor Who reference book contained such a guide, and even DWM regularly printed an episode list in the days when it needed to be updated every six months. But what happens when you scan down your memory-stored list to the Colin Baker era? The feeble number of stories makes it look a bit sparse doesn't it? How much better to beef it up by splitting "Trial" into four normal-looking adventures with suitably Doctor Who-ey titles. Had the best working titles John Nathan-Turner was able to provide been "Story 1", "Philip Martin Adventure", "Vervoid Story" and "Somebody Please Finish", I wonder if we'd still have embraced the four-story "Trial"?

Not that we're entirely to blame. As stated earlier and elsewhere, the production team themselves confused the issue by providing individual titles, and in not appearing completely sure of the matter themselves. If it's one big adventure, then why wasn't there more communication between the writers? Why wasn't there more crossover of characters? It IS one big story, but it's a ham-fistedly put together one for sure. What the production team actually did was to secure the budget, scripts and resources to make four separate stories, then attempted to join them all together into one.

But the reason I feel so resolute that "Trial" should be dealt with as one tale is because the divide was entirely fan-orchestrated. It's revisionism. I can remember watching "Trial" and having no idea it was being judged by the show's most vocal majority somewhere as four adventures. I probably would have actually liked it a whole lot more if there'd been more Part 1's. As it stood the thing seemed to go on forever, and I was left wondering how I'd managed to miss a story called "Terror of the Vervoids" when I picked up a DWM a couple of years later and read about it.

So let's consider "Trial" to be one mighty epic. Does this, then, solve its problems? Well, no. When considered as a gigantic single adventure, we then have to consider how well it stands up as a 14-parter, if it makes sense over the whole of its length and the pulling power of the single longest Doctor Who story of them all. But we'll talk about those things tomorrow.