Finished off The Trial of a Time Lord over the last couple days. It's not top-notch Who by any stretch, but I found things to enjoy in every story.
Mindwarp. BRIAN BLESSED indeed livens up every scene he's in, and despite Nicola Bryant's protestations I think living as his warrior queen would be far preferable to... whatever was supposed to have happened to her. I don't really have a lot else to say about this one.
I like it less each time I see it. It's not really a finished story, since the Trial intervenes at the end, and even though there's the coda involving BRIAN BLESSED later, we never really get a proper conclusion to Mindwarp, so it just doesn't make any sense. What happened after the Doctor left that planet? How did Peri un-bird herself? etc etc etc
Terror of the Vervoids. I liked the brief scene of the Mogarians playing holographic Galaga. Someone interviewed on the making-of special suggested that the Hyperion III is a 1980s-themed retro luxury cruise liner, and I kind of like the idea. The whodunit plot is a bit of a change of pace from the usual (even if The Robots of Death did it better), and the show lampshades it by having Professor Lasky lounging around reading Murder on the Orient Express in a couple of scenes. Cute. I like Mel's energy, and setting a serial in the Doctor's future is a little different, though it seems from the next story that the two already know each other somehow in the current time. Is there any supplemental material that portrays their meeting?
This book by Gary Russell, apparently, though I've not read it. Also as you probably can imagine, Big Finish has played around with it, most notably with
The Wrong Doctors, which I've yet to hear, but I want to listen to it just to see what they do with it. No idea if that's any good, either, unfortunately.
Also, are you Scott Sharkey? lol
As one of the officers is leading Mel into the hydroponics lab, he says "I'll go first. Wouldn't want you to break your neck, at least until--" and then he touches an electric fence and dies. How was that sentence possibly going to end?
I... hadn't noticed that, somehow. I guess Mel was planning on killing him, until the electric fence did her job for her? lol
The Ultimate Foe. A megabyte modem!!
It's so weird. What is that device actually even
doing? Dialing up a BBS? Downloading some ascii art? It's so weird they made it a
modem.
The Valeyard is a truly strange concept that I'm surprised wasn't revisited somehow in the modern series... or even dealt with in a throwaway line to explain that the Doctor's timeline has changed somehow and his existence is no longer a possibility. I guess there wasn't enough time in between establishing that Matt Smith was secretly the Doctor's final life all along and giving the Doctor his new regeneration cycle. But if they did, he's supposed to be "between" the twelfth and final incarnations, right? According to Moffat's counting, that'd line him up with the spare Tenth Doctor from The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. (This is a bit of a tangent, but if any incarnation of the Doctor was ever to turn "evil," I've always seen Tennant's as being the most likely candidate, given how often he walked the line between light and darkness, and how he raged in The End of Time at realizing he was going to regenerate. If something ever happened to Rose in Pete's World I could see him going mad with grief and turning to desperate measures. The Valeyard Victorious? But he was human... Oh well. In terms of a foil to the Doctor, we already have the Master, so the Valeyard seems a little surplus to requirements anyway.)
I don't usually recommend looking up production history stuff, but the documentary on the DVD called "Trials and Tribulations" does a pretty good job of explaining why Trial happened the way it did. It mostly comes down to that last episode that Pip and Jane Baker had to write in like a weekend, with Saward having quit after Holmes' death. The whole season was a colassal clusterfuck.
Some fans like to think the spare Tenth Doctor eventually becomes the Valeyard, re-enters our universe, and then begins the Trial. I just... like to not think about the Valeyard, to be honest lol.
The Sixth Doctor's final words: "Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice..." Glad I picked up The Last Adventure.
Even more ignominius than "keep warm!"