The much-maligned Season 23 deserves some credit
After resting for eighteen months, there was hope that the show would return to our screens refreshed and reinvented. Sadly, much of the ‘Trial’ season feels stale and self-indulgent. The central premise – that the show was on trial, and so the lead character should be too, isn’t an inherently terrible idea. Neither is using the plot of Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ as a basic structure. As was so often the case with ‘Doctor Who’ in the mid-1980s, the problems arose in the execution when translating ideas to the screen. However, some aspects of the season have aged well. There is a return for acclaimed writer Philip Martin, whose story ‘Vengeance on Various’ had been a high point of the previous season. ‘Mindwarp’ is about as sinister and uncomfortable as ‘Doctor Who’ ever became. Ending as the Sixth Doctor began with Peri, his behaviour towards her is abusive – but only assuming the Matrix isn’t telling the truth, or that the Doctor isn’t behaving erratically because he’d had his brain scrambled. Confused? You should be. As with his hit from the 1970s, ‘Gangsters’, Martin writes parts for a multi-ethnic cast, which was a move ahead of its time and a glimpse of things to come. Nobody could have guessed that an instalment written by Pip and Jane Baker, who had previously given us ‘The Mark of the Rani’, which was directed by the generally uninspiring Chris Clough would be the highlight of the season. But I’d say there’s a strong case to claim that…
