Introduction: In 1986, Doctor Who was not in a good way. It had been all but cancelled and then revived with fewer episodes, smaller budget and higher expectations. The production team, working in a last minute frenzy, managed to put together a season-long story entitled The Trial of a Time Lord. Disaster struck when the author of the last episode, Robert Holmes, died, leaving it unfinished. Script Editor Eric Saward completed the episode but refused to change a line of it, despite its bleak ending. When Producer John Nathan-Turner complained, Saward resigned and forbade the use of his script. A new ending was commissioned at the eleventh hour.
This year I received the abandoned script by Eric Saward. To be honest, I don't think we lost much, but here is a novelization of it. Changes are made to dialogue, a few story ideas are clarified and the epilogue is entirely my invention, as I present the last story of the Colin Baker era...
Trial's End
by Ewen Campion-Clarke
based (at times loosely) on a script by Eric Saward
Chapter 1: A Sticky End
The Doctor stared at the document, eyes narrowed with suspicion. The paper it was composed of was rough between his fingertips and the ink that made up the words had hardened into a mass of coiling carapaces on the surface. But although the two spluttering candles should have provided his keen eyes more than enough light to read the writing on the document, it remained a very specific form of gibberish.
Old High Gallifreyan gibberish.
And, from those tedious lectures in legal studies by Borusa aeons ago, the Doctor knew enough that the document's contents were very important and distinctly unbreakable. Gallifrey was a place where contracts were less likely to be broken than the laws of temporal thermodynamics. Another reason he hated the place and had spent more time avoiding it than living there.
But now he was back - well, within Time Lord territory at least - and not of his own free will. His adventures throughout time and space had been barely tolerated by the leaders of his people, usually because it gave them an excuse to let him fix their own problems. He'd always known them to be hypocritical and decadent, no matter what President ruled or what legislation was released. And, when something is known from the start of childhood, it becomes a fact and difficult to get emotional about. His leaders were always corrupt; it seemed silly to get upset about that. Next he'd be raging at a sun for setting or the tide going out.
Then his leaders had done something unforgivable.
Not just by a pariah like the Doctor, but by the great time-locked unwashed, by the universe the Time Lords observed with a mixture of pity and boredom.
Their arrogant assumption that they were at the top of the food chain, by both evolution and technology, had cost them dearly. Their data bank of all the knowledge the Time Lords had, the vastest catalogue of information anywhere, everywhere, ever, had been broken into. Gigabytes of data had been copied and stolen by the Andromeda Theocracy, hiding out on twentieth century Earth. They had quite rightly believed that the planet and the events on that planet at that particular point in history were too important, that the Time Lords would not dare act once they discovered the truth.
But the Time Lords had.
They'd changed history, reshuffling it like a pack of cards and violating the Laws of Time. Yes, perhaps legality on Gallifrey wasn't as watertight as he'd assumed. Which drew his mind back to the baffling form that was held in his hands. He looked across the office at the figure that had handed it to him.
A large, rotund man in this declining years, dressed in a frock coat with a winged collar around which snaked a cravat. Perched on the nose of his moon-like face was a pair of half-framed spectacles, a quill pen tucked behind his left ear. The mahogany desk he sat at was equally drab, and the fussy, cramped office it stood in was either dark brown or grey. The table boasted a heap of similarly incomprehensible papers, a copious ledger and an inkstand were placed at mathematically sycophantic angles to each other.
The Doctor didn't fit into the office, a fact that would let him sleep at nights. Not only did the soulless, slavish obedience to order, procedure and bureaucracy chafe at the Time Lord's very soul; his clothes were the only splash of colour to be seen. Ironically, were it not for the patchwork of colours, his coat, waistcoat and watch chain would have made him look like he was dressing like the clerk before him - and only one clerk was needed. Which was odd, because there were too. At least.
The office boasted a door on either side of the desk. The one through which the Doctor had walked though - marked Entrance By Appointment Only - lead to an almost identical office, lacking only one candle and a branched hatstand for a raglan coat to appear the mirror image of the room the Doctor now stood in. Sitting at the other desk was a clerk almost identical to the one before the Time Lord, lacking only the spectacles to complete the picture. It was disturbing but not entirely unexpected.
Because neither the office he stood in, nor the one he had left, was real. The factory complex that contained both offices, made of anachronistic hi-tech vistani alloy walls, was not real either. And it stood to reason that the clerks, one junior and one senior 'Mr. Popplewick' were not real at all. The Doctor was standing, if indeed he was standing in reality, in the depths of the amplified panotropic computer net, a micro-universe that interfaced with the Matrix of the Time Lords itself. Was he walking through this world of unreal illusions, or was all this happening inside his skull?
He'd entered the Matrix in such a way before, and nearly died. In similar circumstances, trying to prove his innocence to his own people. Well, not quite. The last time he had been framed for murder, this time... well, he was guilty as charged. His only hope was to prove that what he had done hadn't been a crime. And before he could do that he had to deal with the elusive figure now hiding in the Matrix behind this landscape of Victorian squalor.
The Doctor glanced back at the document, and then at the Mr. Popplewick before him. 'What is it?' he asked the clerk with frosty politeness.
Mr. Popplewick was already looking back at his ledger. 'A consent form, sir,' the clerk replied absently. 'The corridors in this factory are very long and dark. Should you unexpectedly die, our blessed proprietor, Mr. J.J. Chambers, insists he inherit your remaining lives,' he explained in his clipped, precise manner.
The Doctor grimaced. The document in his hands hadn't suddenly made sense, but in the Matrix, it didn't have to. It just was. Nowadays, he wasn't a hundred per cent sure how many regenerative forms he had left to use, if any, but the fact remained that in this micro-universe, his very essence could be re-edited. He could walk in with six bodies to spare and leave without one.
Or could he? There was every possibility that signing the document wouldn't change a thing and this was just another boring humiliation cooked up by the mind currently running the Matrix world. Maybe that was the point, to see him worry over whether or not to take the risk that the form was genuine. Because it was entirely credible that it was bona fide.
'Obviously the Valeyard doesn't believe the High Council will honour their side of the bargain,' the Doctor announced. Vocalizing his thoughts helped remind him of the reality. The Time Lords had picked, ostensibly at random, a learned court prosecutor Valeyard to appear against him at a trial over the affair on the planets Ravalox and Thoros Beta. And now the trial was almost over, the Valeyard's identity had been revealed and he had fled into the Matrix. The Doctor had followed.
And so had Sabalom Glitz.
A pleasant psychopathic criminal from Salostaphos in the constellation of Andromeda, Glitz had unwittingly been instrumental in discovering the atrocities the Time Lords had committed to Earth and humanity to protect their secrets. An amiable, hirsute man with dark curly hair and neatly shorn beard, Glitz was dressed in a mixture of fashionable canvas and protective coverings. His leather mitten-clad hand grabbed the Doctor's wrist as he took the quill offered by Mr. Popplewick.
The Doctor was wondering why Mr. Popplewick had flinched from letting him take the quill from behind the clerk's ear when Glitz hissed, 'Sign that and you're a dead man!' His concern was genuine, and well deserved - a non-Time Lord mind in the Matrix could sink without trace and the Doctor was the only one able or willing to let him escape. Which, obviously, he couldn't do if he was dead.
'We're in the Valeyard's domain,' the Doctor reminded Glitz grimly. 'He can kill me any time he likes.' The Doctor placed the document on the table and wrote down the next words he spoke. 'I'll sign my remaining lives over to Mr. J.J. Chambers,' he announced and scribbled his signature with a flourish. 'Now,' the Time Lord continued, letting his exasperation show, 'can I see your proprietor?'
Mr. Popplewick reverently took the document and studied it intently. 'The waiting room is that way,' he said, not taking his dull eyes from the page, and waved towards the closed door marked Waiting Room. 'You will be summoned as soon as your signature has been verified,' the clerk explained, placing the signed form atop a pile and returning to his ledger. His two guests were suddenly and completely ignored.
The Doctor strode straight over to the door and grabbed the brass handle. Time was running out. A hand fell on his shoulder and he heard Glitz's borderline hysterical whisper. 'This is madness!'
'Not if it precipitates my meeting with the Valeyard,' the Doctor retorted, twisting the handle and pulling open the door to the waiting room of 'the Fantasy Factory'.
Grey daylight - a noticeable contrast with the foggy night outside the factory - sliced in through the doorway and low moaning wind washed forward around the Doctor. And then he realized the hand gripping the door handle was empty. The handle, the door come to that, had vanished.
The Doctor was standing in a muddy patch of a deserted beach, not far from a cold grey sea that lapped the shores. The sky was a mass of grey clouds, grimly expecting rain to fall. Bar a few patches of reedy grass, there was no sign of life, love or lunacy.
'This is a very odd waiting room,' the Doctor conceded, shrugging off any bewilderment or panic. It wouldn't do to lose his calm in front of Glitz. 'Where are the hopelessly out of date magazines, eh, Glitz?' he quipped, turning to see with no surprise that the Fantasy Factory, Mr. Popplewicks and their offices had vanished. What did surprise him was that Glitz had disappeared as well.
The Doctor was staring at the endless muddy sand dunes stretching to the horizon. 'Glitz!' he called, but there was no sign of anyone in the dunes, or even shelter behind which they could hide. But, through the wind he caught a familiar chuckle.
The Doctor turned his attention to the grey sky, not noticing the patch of mud directly below his feet had begun to bubble and froth silently. 'What have you done with him?' he demanded, completely sick of playing Alice in Wonderland.
The voice replied inside his head. Look to your own predicament, Doctor.
Being stuck on a rainy beach? He'd been threatened with worse.
It was then that he realized something very cold, wet and strong clamped around his right ankle. The Doctor instantly looked down to see an emaciated, skeletal hand, streaked with slime, had punched out of the mud was encircling his ankle tightly. The mud around them was frothing and seething. Another hand burst free of the surface, then another, then another, and another...
The Doctor fought down the rising panic. 'This is an illusion,' he said as loudly and as calmly as he could. He was not in reality, but a computational matrix that reacted to the memory patterns of Time Lords. Living Time Lord brains were logically more powerful than the dead ones that had been downloaded into the Matrix over the centuries. His belief would set him free.
'I deny it!' he boomed.
But, to no avail, as a hand clamped itself around his left ankle and another on his right thigh. Cold moisture seeped through the surface of his trousers. The hands weren't just holding him still; they were starting to pull him down. His sneakers were already sinking into the mud.
'This isn't happening!' the Doctor insisted, feeling the tug on his legs increase. Another hand joined the fight and more still were breaking free of the mud. The Doctor abandoned his attempts to gain control of the Matrix and, forced by blind instinct, moved to rip the hands free, before giving that up and pummeling them with his fists, trying to get them to flinch and let go.
It was a mistake.
The moment the Doctor abandoned his denial of what was happening was the moment it obviously became real. The hands pulled harder, more hands broke the surface, grabbing the tail ends of his frock coat. Bent double, the Doctor was able to keep his balance for a moment, and then he was ripped backwards to land heavily into the mud which gave way under his back.
Cold, bubbling goo frothed over his arms, legs, shoulders, waist. The hands nearest grabbed his hands, wrists, waist, anything they could. And then they pulled. The Doctor fought back with his body, not his mind, and so sunk deeper into the mud.
You are dead, Doctor.
'Not yet,' the Doctor growled. The muddy quicksand added its own strength to the fight. The seething mud washed over the Doctor's stomach and the hands pulled harder.
Goodbye, Doctor. The Valeyard's voice was a child's farewell.
The quicksand now encased his torso and one of his legs. More hands had emerged from the mud and now flailed lifelessly, as if not knowing what to do since they were not needed. The Doctor closed his eyes. Brute force by either physical or mental means was useless. That's what the Fantasy Factory had been for, to annoy and irritate and distract him. He had to think. To understand his way out of this.
'Kill me,' the Doctor shouted over the bubbling mud and the cold wind, 'and you will never gain my remaining regenerations!'
But you've already signed them away.
The Doctor grinned up at the sky as the mud lapped at his blonde curls. 'To J.J. Chambers! Not to you!'
The icy suction didn't seem so strong now. The Doctor craned to lift his head from the mud, eager to hear the response. Was that a sigh he heard? Or a worried intake of breath?
For the sake of this charade I am J.J. Chambers, the Valeyard insisted. I thought you understood - you are in a world entirely of my making!
'Then I deny your world!' the Doctor retorted simply.
It could have been his imagination, but the hands gripping his body were not so tight.
Glitz had jumped when the Doctor had ripped open the waiting room door and disappeared, especially when it seemed the same thing had happened to him. In less than a heartbeat the waiting room and the Fantasy Factory and all the irritating identical skreeds inside it had just sort of, fallen away, leaving him elsewhere. Somewhere bright, shiny and warm unlike the cold gloom of before.
He was in a TARDIS, he knew that much; a large hexagonal chamber made of a matte grey substance. The walls were honeycombed with treacle-coloured discs from which emerged a low, threadbare hum. Directly beneath a spiral light fitting in the ceiling was a hexagonal, mushroom-shaped control console at the heart of which sat a crystalline column Glitz was fairly certain was called a time rotor.
Standing before the console, arms folded, was the Valeyard. He looked different from when Glitz had briefly encountered him in the Time Lord court - wearing the black skullcap and robes of the prosecution. Now, however, he was wearing a black trenchcoat with a blue and white-spotted cravat. A hatstand by the exterior doors boasted a black, wide-brimmed hat and an ebony cane.
'If you wish to survive, Sabalom, I suggest you remain very still and completely silent,' the Valeyard had announced, before turning to operate controls. 'I am the only one who has the power to release you from the Matrix. It is in your interests to obey me.'
'The Doc'll do it for free,' Glitz had retorted carefully, looking around to notice, grimly, that the only other exit - an archway in the far wall - was sealed with a wall emblazoned with the swirling infinity symbol that Time Lords seemed programmed to scrawl everywhere.
'Not if he's dead,' was the Valeyard's reply.
On the other side of the room, in a glass-fronted area that might have lead deeper into the Valeyard's TARDIS, a blue-fringed scanner image had unfurled from the ceiling to show a windy, desolate beach. The Doctor was being dragged into the mud by skeletal hands.
Glitz had found himself, for the first time in a long while, worried about someone other than himself. Reassuringly, he was now worried about himself. He knew the Valeyard had plenty of reasons to kill him, to silence him. How was he going to get out of this without any weaponry or even the assistance of Dibber to act as a human shield?
He realized the Doctor was shouting over the scanner channel, and the Valeyard was replying icily over a telescopic microphone that emerged from the console. The Doctor was yelling something about denying reality, and the Valeyard was anything but impressed.
'So you keep saying,' the Time Lord spoke mockingly into the microphone. 'But you know you haven't the strength! I have perfected the talent for mind control and illusion, which you chose, in your misguided youth, to neglect.'
The tinny voice of the Doctor filled the control room, through the bubbling of the mud and the lonely moan of the wind. He sounded so calm Glitz wondered if the image on the scanner was of someone else. 'Illusion is for the theatre, not real life,' he pointed out. 'Even you must understand that!'
'Illusion is an honoured Time Lord cult,' the Valeyard sneered back.
'Not any longer,' the Doctor replied sweetly. The quicksand was still sucking him down, having consumed his legs now, but the disembodied hands were gone like a passing thought. The simple act of admitting this was all an illusion had given the Doctor more than enough power to postpone his death. Now he had to press the advantage.
'As with mind-linking and levitation,' the Doctor continued to taunt the overcast sky, 'it is only seriously practiced nowadays by children's entertainers... and the weak-minded!'
Feeble provocation, Doctor, the heavens replied.
'Then here's a bit more,' the Doctor continued. 'I don't think that the High Council is in any position to ratify any so-called deal with you, do you? No any more. And since I didn't sign my lives over you, then the High Council is the only way left for you to get my remaining regenerations. Which they won't!'
A lazy smile appeared on the Valeyard's face. Glitz tried and failed to suppress a shudder. 'This charade was merely a way to expedite the inevitable. 'Then I shall merely have to wait a little longer to claim your lives,' the Time Lord replied.
On the scanner, the Doctor wearily shook his head.
'I have an inviolable agreement,' the Valeyard said smoothly.
The Doctor laughed. 'Rubbish!' he boomed over the scanner. 'Such a covenant could only be lodged in the Matrix Core!'
'Correct,' the Valeyard agreed. 'Pledged, signed and sealed by each and every member of the High Council. The moment you die in the Matrix, your unused lives will be transferred to my physical form.'
'If you really believed that, you would have killed me at the first opportunity,' the Doctor pointed out.
The Valeyard's voice dropped to a whisper. 'I wish to savor the moment of my death. After all,' he chuckled, 'how many people survive successful self-murder?'
The Doctor rolled his eyes, ignoring the fact everything below his shoulders was completely submerged. 'Garbage!' he spat. 'I've heard more sense from a lobotomized speelsnape. The truth of the matter is that you've lost your nerve! Too many games have been played with the Matrix for you to be able to trust either it or the High Council!'
I dictated the contract myself, came the bored reply. I know that it is inviolable.
'I'd have another look if I were you,' the Doctor cut in. 'Check the small print - and I mean the small print they inserted after the deal was struck!'
Again, feeble provocation.
The Doctor took a deep breath. 'The Inquisitor of my trial may have been as corrupt as you are, but you weren't expecting the Master to reveal what happened on Ravalox. Now the Inquisitor will have to follow due process of the law or expose her own corruption to the jury. She'll have no option to take the High Council to court over this matter to establish the truth. And, whether you like it or not, you are the chief prosecution witness against them!'
Silence.
The Doctor continued remorselessly. 'When they come to court - as they certainly will - things would be much easier if you weren't around to contradict their lies. Kill me and you kill yourself; that is the only contract the High Council will ratify!'
I control the High Council, the voice replied simply.
'Do you know?' the Doctor gasped with mock surprise, idly noticing a strange crackling on the edge of his senses. 'What makes you think that?'
Because I am the Doctor, Lord President of Gallifrey, Keeper of the Legacy of Rassilon, Protector of the Laws of Time and Defender of Gallifrey. The High Council answer to me, Doctor. My contract is inviolable. You are dead.
That the Doctor hadn't been expecting. But he found himself distracted by the crackling noise, which got louder and louder. Sparks began to dance between air molecules before him. And it was then that the Doctor noticed the tug of the quicksand had ceased.
'What are you doing?' the Doctor called out uncertain.
The crackling was deafening.
Glitz swallowed as streaks of interference slit through the scanner image, breaking up the Doctor's panicked face. The Valeyard was adjusting more displays and controls on the console as the image of the beach was consumed into a mass of static.
'You screed,' Glitz croaked, taken aback. 'Did you just do away with him?'
The Valeyard moved to another control panel. As Glitz stepped forward, the Time Lord turned his pale face to stare directly at the Andromedan space pirate. 'Be still, fool,' he hissed. 'The Doctor is unharmed. For the moment,' he added, and moved to another control panel.
'Oh yeah?' snorted Glitz, staring at the swirling mass of sparking black and white dots filling the scanner. 'Then what's going on?'
'It depends.'
'On what?'
'On whether I can spare the time to tell you or if you could understand me if I bothered to explain. Suffice it to say: another mind is attempting to break into my illusion,' the Valeyard replied, returning to the other side of the control console. He sounded slightly irritated, but not particularly concerned as he adjusted a fresh batch of controls and a sequence of lamps illuminated.
'And what mind would that b---?'
'I said, be silent,' ordered the Valeyard quietly.
Glitz was silent.
The roaring, sparking crackling sound continued remorselessly. The Doctor was struggling to free himself from the mud, taking advantage of the distraction. The Valeyard wasn't talking to him and the source of the strange noise was right on top of him.
The Doctor managed to free one soggy, stained arm and then began to scratch at the sandy surface in an attempt to free the other. At the time he was baffled. The Valeyard couldn't be the President of the High Council... could he? But then, the Doctor had only just learned he had been deposed as President, and still didn't know who had replaced him. And why would the High Council choose the Valeyard of all people to take over the post? The Doctor had an inkling, but it wasn't pleasant.
With his left hand now free, the Doctor redoubled his efforts. He looked up to see a humanoid silhouette had formed above the ditch, flickering in and out of vision as the crackling continued. Suddenly, it was clear and solid enough for the Doctor to identify the figure materializing before him.
'Oh no,' he groaned, shaking his other arm free. 'It would have to be you!'
'Show a little gratitude, my dear Doctor,' replied the form as it finally stabilized. 'I am here at enormous inconvenience to myself.'
The figure was now real and solid standing over the Doctor.
The figure of the Master.