This is a review written by someone who has never seen Trial before until this month on my public television station. I was completely blown away by this certain show, and many people on the forum have told me to "brace myself", and I did, and I was still completely shocked.

Colin and Nicola have both grown into their characters by this time, and it's a pity because this is Nicola's last show and close to Colin's end as the Doctor. You can tell the hiatus had taken place; Colin's hair has grown into a beautiful mound of blonde curls, and Nicola, well, she was almost unrecognizable to me. Anyway, this was a great story, both Colin and Nicola acted superbly in this, you can see they have come a looong way since the "Twin Dilemma".

The person I feel sorry for the most, is the guy that had been transformed and he had those fangs...his mouth seemed to be drooped open for most of the show, and that had to be painful for him. 

I wasn't expecting the same character from Vengence on Varos to appear in this show, but there he was. It seems like these characters were up to no good, doing transformations on people as it had been done to Peri in Vengence.

Again it happens to her at the end of the show, and I was so shocked by this. I was never a big Peri fan, but I have grown fond of her since seeing Vengence, and I had this huge sickening feeling that something bad was going to happen to her. She becomes the creature that had been suffering massive aches in the head,and Peri herself is no more. Seeing Peri bald and completely mad, her eyes bulging out of her head as she sees the King Yrcanos come in, was very creepy. Since they air Doctor Who at midnight, I wasn't fully aware of everything that night, so I watched it when I was awake, and I found myself crying at the demise of Peri, and Colin's superb performance when he finds out Peri had been "killed". His eyes seem to water up or at least become glossy with shock and sadness, and not expecting this from the Sixth Doctor, I was left speechless and tears running down my face. When I say "killed", it has never been really proven if she has survived or not. Some people say there is a book that says she has survived, but when I read the books, I seperate them from the tv show. A website has said they believed Peri was truly dead because why should the Master tell the truth now after so many years hating the Doctor, and causing trouble. That's a good theory. 

Mindwarp is a great show in the Trial of a Time Lord series. If you haven't seen it, you're in for a real treat. Outstanding performances by all, even the guest actors. Also if you're a big fan of Peri, and happen to be a big softie like me, don't be surprised if you at least have one tear in your eye. Colin's performance in the very last scene will take your breath away!

I am always slightly perplexed as to why this story is so widely disregarded in fan circles. Interestingly I have always found it an engagining opening to the seventh Doctor`s era. As a fan knowing all the background to all the turbulent times the series was going through by then it is always slightly spoilt. Colin Baker should have been around for another few years but was suddenly removed. Sylvester McCoy was thrown very much in at the deep end of things,but oddly enough that shows later on this season rather than in this debut romp.

To me this has always seemed a very typical piece of Doctor Who. It is a very watchable escape from reality with some very tight plotting each episode ( I cant fault Pip and Jane Bakers work in all honesty apart from some extreme dialogue that NOBODY could possibly say in an average (even in Doctor Who terms) conversation!) Visually it is very impressive with the best use of O.B filming I have seen in the series and The Rani`s bubble traps are a joy. The nature of the story the Bakers had in mind would have been better servd with a more gothic feel to The Rani`s headquaters-but that is only a small gripe as the scenes in the Tetraps lair and The Rani`s secret chamber are very atmospheric. 

One of the biggest missed opportunities after this story was we had no real rematch between The Doctor and The Rani. I adored Kate O`Mara in the her debut Rani adventure in season 22 and although by 1987 the actress was working on American super soap Dynasty she was more than happy to make this return. Her subsequent support and enthusiasm for her time with Doctor Who always made this fan happy as she is one of the UK`s best actors and such an endorsement of the series is wonderful. However in spite of my pleasure in Pip and Jane`s scripts imagine if Kate had gotten a script by say Robert Holmes? Hopefully the Big Finish audios may give her a chance one day to work on something with another writer,if P&J will allow it?? ) Anyway..her rapport with Sylvester`s instantly adorable Season 24 Doctor are a delight. A good proportion of the script is purely Sylvester and Kate and it works very well on the screen. The impersonation of Mel scenes are witty and well done (although should not have been carried over virtually 2 full episodes). The final part is very action packed with plenty of good visuals and high (camp) drama. It sees Rani cleverly achieving her aim but being thwarted by the newly regenerated Doctor,who quickly turns The Rani`s handiwork back on herself. A very well constructed story.

Bonnie Langford gets plenty to do as Mel (always well served by the Bakers scripts). She is over the top at times-but that is the nature of the entire piece. Mel works better with the Seventh Doctor and her scenes with Sylvester are well executed. The rest of the cast is small and do well , Mark Greenstreet and Donald Pickering are solid (if a little bewildered) , Wanda Ventham is very effective and restrained as Faroon (in particular when she stumbles across the remains of her daughter,killed by The Rani`s bubble traps) and Richard Gauntlett is deliciously malicious as the bat like Tetrap, Urak,who is obedient to his mistress Rani but far more astute and wise to The Rani`s ultimate objectives than he lets on.

Direction from Andrew Morgan is fast paced and ambitious. The incidentals are fresh and vibrant from Keff McCulloch (far better than some of the awful and cheap sounding incidentals McCulloch put together in later McCoy stories) and the new Seventh Doctor title sequence is impressive (never been sure of the logo though??!)

This is not the lemon some like to say it is. Catch up with it again soon and you will be pleasantly surprised. If nothing else enjoy McCoy and O`Mara in this admittedly lightweight piece that still retains all the wonderful ingredients of Doctor Who. Good Fun. Good Doctor Who.

Is there anything good that one can say about the seventh Doctor's debut season on television? After the excellent Colin Baker's performance the show took a decided nose dive for the worse. Reasons why I hated it, in no particular order, are:

1/ That music! That godawful incidental music that they used! It is useless to describe this music in written words but anyone who saw these episodes on television will doubtless remember it. It was so bad! If it had just been used in Time and the Rani, but every story from then on had the same cringe-inducing din.

2/ There were now only four stories per season, and most of these only ran to three episodes.

3/ Those guest actors! Only Sylvester McCoy would be pathetically proud to have Richard O'Brien and Ken Dodd on Dr Who. This is supposed to be a serious sci-fi show not a pantomime performance, and these actors were totally inappropriate.

4/ The Doctor's initial persona was a bit wet and wishy-washy. I understand that in later seasons the Seventh Doctor becomes a darker, more mysterious character, but alas! His debut season was enough to put me off for life.

But back to Time and the Rani. It wasn't all bad; I particularly liked the Seventh Doctor floundering around in the too big costume of the Sixth Doctor at the beginning. A nice bit of continuity there. And I (at first) liked him being so different. As Mel says, his hair...size...voice...face...everything was just so totally different about this new Doctor's appearance. The Rani was nicely evil, but could she really be that much of a threat to the pacifist Lakertyns? The dreadful music...oh, I've already mentioned that.

I'm trying to think of a good way to close this...ah! Pip and Jane Baker's scripts are always a joy, even in a dreadful story the characters have such good throwaway lines. There!

Ghost Light has always been one of those Doctor Who stories that you wouldn't be ashamed to show your friends. It has a certain respectability: atmospheric, well-acted, ironic, compelling. Good TV, plain and simple. Looking at it now, in 2003, I can't find any reason to change my opinion. There's the odd flaw, often related to haste or lack of time (as when a piece of dialogue is spoilt by an obtrusively abrupt cut in the the Reverend Ernest Matthews introductory scene). But this sort of tiny technical flaw is part of what makes Who so endearing; it's not enough to spoil an excellent story.

The plot itself is, as is often noted, a little opaque. One reason for this is that much of the dialogue (in the first two episodes at least) doesn't actually provide a lot of explanation as to what is going on - unusually for Doctor Who, there isn't a great amount of expository writing. There are enigmatic conversations (such as that between the Doctor and Isiah), bewildering monologues (Fenn-Cooper's, in episode one, is superb), and much else that is strange and perplexing (in a good way), but we, the viewer, are left to fill in many of the gaps.

We may have to watch Ghost Light a couple of times to appreciate it fully, but when a story is so full of brilliant moments, it isn't really a hardship. There is Ace's analysis of the 19th century mind: "Scratch the Victorian veneer, and something nasty will come crawling out!"; the Reverend, firmly against the theory of evolution, de-evolving into an ape-like state, munching a banana; and the iconic moment where the Doctor is told, after he stops a clock by halting the movement of the pendulum, that he is as "powerful" as he is "wise". Even writing about it makes me smile. Ghost Light takes Doctor Who and makes it better; takes two characters, and makes them finer and more complex.

The New Adventures told stories too broad or deep for the screen, and here Platt plants seeds for what would follow: a Doctor with dark motives and agendas - "Even I can't play this many games at once!" - and an Ace tormented with memories, looking on as a building burns, emergency-service lights flashing in her face. Highly recommended, and definitely worth revisiting.

There is something incredibly charming about stories like The Twin Dilemma - like old 1950s B-movies, where the monsters are cheesy, and the plots laughable, certain Doctor Who stories work, and are incredible watchable, because they just possess a charm and vitality which certain SF series, no matter how well-produced, will never possess. The Twin Dilemma possesses this charm, in my opinion, and as an added bonus, the primary performances in are really quite something too. 

Colin Baker's first time on screen as The Doctor has been described as 'misjudged', and at the time it may well have been. After the self-sacrifice of the magnificent Caves of Androzani, you would not need to apologize if you thought to yourself: who is this unbelievably arrogant, obnoxious person calling himself the Doctor, yet exhibiting none of the qualities that have become associated with 'The Doctor'... however, watching it now, it is a masterstroke to play the Doctor this way. It challenges what we know about the character, and places him into a far more alien position. Yes, it also alienates the viewer to a large extent (we sympathize with Peri, and find the Doctor very difficult to 'like' in any way), but by doing that the writers can prepare and plan for the moment when the Doctor re-enters our sympathies, and becomes our friend again - by having it that we dislike him for a time (yet know deep down that he is a 'hero'), the strength of our sympathy for him later will be all the stronger. And then, when we like him again, when he is our true hero again, the hints of the alien, and the strange will remain. There is nothing misjudged about this Doctor - it was simply that after the Fifth Doctor, this mad, bad Sixth Doctor felt utterly different. A Doctor, if he is to work, must be both alien and human. 

And there are constant hints in the characterization in The Twin Dilemma of what we like about the Doctor: his adamant claim to want to escape, his heroic saving of a life, his unceasing desire to save the world. The Doctor we know and love is there, but the characterization is underscored by an impatience to hang around (the scene when the police man gets trapped in the gastropod 'glue' is inspired and hilarious - the Doctor provides *absolutely no help whatsoever* while he struggles to free himself, and eventually just walks off!), a lack of selflessness, and a generally worrying change of character... But this side to the Doctor is not unknown. The Third Doctor could be arrogant, the First Doctor could be impatient, the Fourth Doctor was frequently high-minded... There are flashes of the past in this uncomfortable and unfamiliar incarnation of the Doctor. What a brave, wild thing to do for his first story. Colin Baker, and everyone on the crew, must have thought the writers were nuts. Place a crazed and mad Doctor into a basic, un-radical, but highly romp-ish pulp SF plot (good secondary work from Mestor)... light blue touch-paper... stand back... see what happens... Yes, the story is nothing special: as a story, a plot, a string of events... But as an experiment in character, the story is in inspiration. The plot is simply a side-show, a means to an end: the writers want to show us the nutter who is now the Doctor. 

I am now, more than ever, eagerly awaiting some Sixth Doctor novels. There is, and always has been, a huge amount of potential in the character.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!! Oh, whatever.

Oh dearie dearie me. They really made a mess of this story, didn't they? 

What could have been a great addition to the Doctor Who universe (the insane Borad, the kinda-cool-but-not-really-seen Bandrils, the Karfelons in their citadel) was reduced to mush by a lousy script, terrible sets and lousy special effects.

The story in itself is really rather good: The Doctor and Peri return to a planet which the Doctor has visited before, and get mixed up in the local politics. A common enough premise, certainly, but it had promise: The manipulative and secretive Borad, dictator of Karfelon; the rebels in every corner, trying to free their people; the powerless leaders; the sheer political intrigue which comes with such a situation. Add an unexpected almost-companion in the form of H.G. Wells (I'm serious), and you have a recipe for one memorable story.

Then why does it suck so much? I'll explain.

First off, the sets and costumes. Why, why, WHY did they make everything bright and sunny? It's a dark season, no doubts about it... so this story stands out simply for that. Add the fact that nothing shines (admittedly a story point, but hell on the eyes) and you're wanting to scream. The costumes are honestly terrible, which makes Peri, the Doctor, Vina and Herbert (Wells, yeah?) stand out even more. You can tell someone's political affiliation simply by the color of their clothes!!! Shoot me!

Next, script. My god, what an utter dud. What a total let-down. This could have been saved. But nope - it got sent out without proper revision, which shows. All the best lines go to Colin Baker, who performs admirably considering the utter crap he is given, and John Chandler, who simply makes Herbert shine. The single best scene in this story, the one part which I watch over and over again, is in the final episode, with an absolutely sterling scene in the TARDIS which lasts for almost 8 minutes, where Herbert drives the Doctor to the edge of violence. I get the impression that the entire story was just an excuse for this ONE SCENE. God......

Acting...... a mixed bag here... As I've said, Baker and Chandler give amazing performances, and Bryant is nicely grumpy in this one... much of the supporting cast is wooden, forgettable or both... but my utter loathing is aimed at Vina, (Jeananne Cassidy) who delivers each and every SINGLE LINE like someone in High School who got roped in because nobody else could remember the lines. Yuck. Shoot me now.

Much of the remainder is marred by simple lack of detail... but still, this story borders on forgettable.

But watch it anyway. Just to see Colin Baker look like he's about to punch out John Chandler. Classic!