Published: September 1988

Edition read: Target first, 1988

Coolest Cover: Alistair Pearson’s Popplewick is rather good- it’s just a shame that the author’s credit covers the list of Time Lords.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: There’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex in there (another one?).

Crimes Against Literature: It’s unforgivable that two professional writers should refer to "Charles Dickens’s story ‘Scrooge’".

The TARDIS dematerialises...with a bellow.

Childhood Recollections: By the look of the finger marks on my copy, on first reading I got as far as page 54- which is, coincidentally, where the cliffhanger occurred in the original script.

Ramblings: The troubled circumstances of the Trial season’s production are sufficiently well-known for me not to have to recount them here, although ‘The Ultimate Foe’ remains unique in Doctor Who as the only story whose writer died halfway through the writing. It’s therefore equally unusual in being one of the few of Holmes’s scripts not to be adapted by Holmes himself or Terrance Dicks- only Ian Marter’s take on ‘The Ark in Space’ readily springs to mind as another exception. That the first televised episode accounts for 54 pages and the second for another 72 only emphasises how keen the Bakers were to adapt their script, and indeed it has to be said that there’s much more elaboration of the second episode than the first- the Master’s forced entry to the Matrix is explained (albeit unnecessarily and unconvincingly) and there’s also a scene where Mel is restored to her rightful place in the Sixth Doctor’s timeline (which does rather make one wonder why so many books written over the following sixteen years or so tried to resolve the anomaly in various ways). It can also be a deeply infuriating book- the Bakers clearly had no intention of dropping their habit of using exclamation marks in descriptive prose!- not least because of the choppy effect created by so many short chapters in succession- is there really any need for a 126-page book to have 23 plus a prologue and epilogue, unless it’s to help disguise the amount of blank space?

Regardless of the original script writer and the adaptors, however, ‘The Ultimate Foe’ had so much to achieve as a story that it’s unsurprising that the production team turned to Robert Holmes to write it. Not only does it have to resolve the Trial storyline- after fourteen weeks, the Doctor had better be either acquitted or found guilty- but it also has to tie up all the loose ends caused by the ongoing questions about evidence being suppressed or interfered with. Sadly, the Bakers don’t rise to the task at all- the Master’s exposition in the first half of the story is simply transcribed without any real feel for the significance of what’s being said, and it’s difficult not to conclude that they’re more interested in the trappings of the Matrix sequences and the final episode. If only they could have made them come alive, it might have worked- as it is, the adaptation fails to emphasise either the tension of the trial situation or the implications of the Valeyard being an embodiment of the Doctor’s darkest aspects. Instead, what we’re left with is a dash through the story, told in a desperately fragmented style and very little sense of the significance of what’s being described. It’s not exactly a disappointment, more something which fails to build on a story which desperately needed to come across well for the sake of Doctor Who as an ongoing series. Of course from the perspective of 1988, the immediate crisis of 1986 may have seemed to have passed, but that’s no excuse to let the last story of both Colin Baker and Robert Holmes’s involvement in televised Doctor Who be treated with quite so little respect.