'The Trial Of A Time Lord' had always produced a mixed reaction from me, not least because of the final two episodes in the arc entitled 'The Ultimate Foe'. Beset with problems and disagreements behind the scenes, the final episode in particular felt terribly underwhelming with some large plot holes and a noticeable load of technobabble.
This is a pity, cause at its heart, 'Trial' is an ambitious story with some memorable scenes, so after watching 2019's Season 23 blu-ray set, I got the idea of doing some rewrites to the story, giving a bit more explanation to the plot and adding some unused ideas from Eric Saward's original script for Episode 14 to give a more dramatic finale. I also decided to add in Peri as a witness to the Doctor's trial, as the revelation of her survival after 'Mindwarp' had always made me wonder why the Master did not transport her to the space station along with Mel and Glitz. In addition, I added a new scene in the Matrix with some old foes of the Doctor and I also tried to add a bit more clarity to the Valeyard's identity in order to establish what he is and how he came into being...
Credit for the original story goes to Robert Holmes, Eric Saward and Pip & Jane Baker. The story is written for entertainment purposes only and no copyright infringement is intended in any of the material I've reused.
Now sit back and enjoy as we transport you to... The Fantasy Factory.
THE STORY SO FAR...
To say that the Doctor was having a bad day was an understatement. And at present, it looked set to become a great deal worse.
It had all started when the Doctor's TARDIS was taken out of time and deposited inside a giant cathedral-like space station, where he found himself in a large courtroom, being put on trial by his own people, the Time Lords. The Doctor had been accused of reckless meddling in the affairs of other worlds and the chief prosecutor, known as the Valeyard, strongly recommended that if found guilty, the Doctor should be terminated. The events of the trial were presided by the Inquisitor, an stern, but honest woman, who worked to make the trial as fair as possible, in spite of the Valeyard's constant demands for a verdict of guilty and the Doctor's continuous bursts of protest at the proceedings. The Doctor opted to act as his own defence counsel and strongly condemned the charges against him as being trumped-up, as he began to suspect that there was some ulterior motive as to why he was taken out of time and why the venomous Valeyard was so keen to see the Doctor dead.
Evidence for the prosecution was presented in the forms of data recordings from the Matrix, the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, which were displayed before the jurors on a large viewing screen. These depicted a couple of the Doctor's more recent adventures, which the Valeyard showed as evidence of the Doctor's unbecoming behaviour. It was clear from his attitude that the Valeyard himself was keen to turn this trial into a crusade against the Doctor, painting the hapless renegade as a menace to the entire universe. But exactly why the Valeyard had such a strong vendetta against the Doctor was at the moment unknown.
The first incident shown involved the Doctor's visit to the planet Ravalox, a world two billion years in the future that according to the files on Gallifrey had been devastated by a solar fireball. It was here that the Doctor got caught up in the machinations of two intergalactic conmen, Sabalom Glitz and his partner Dibber, who were seeking to steal a box of secrets from an underground chamber controlled by a power-crazed robot. During his investigations, the Doctor and his companion Peri had been shocked to discover that Ravalox was in fact the planet Earth, that had mysteriously been moved two lightyears away into space, an incident that somehow related to the three sleepers, the now-dead original guardians of the box of secrets that Glitz had attempted (and failed) to obtain. The Valeyard claimed that the Doctor's presence on Ravalox had escalated dangerous events and caused avoidable deaths, though the Doctor argued that he had in fact saved the entire universe rather than directly cause the deaths of innocents.
The second incident shown on the Matrix screen was considerably more damning regarding the Doctor's behaviour, as it showed the Doctor on the planet Thoros-Beta, apparently helping his old enemy Sil in a series of unethical mind-transferring experiments. In the courtroom, the Doctor found he had no memory of the events shown on the screen, due to his being snatched out of time by the Time Lords. He was thus shocked by the apparent behaviour of his past self and he was further dismayed when he saw his companion Peri having her mind wiped in order for her body to house the consciousness of the Mentor leader, Kiv, before her body was subsequently killed by King Yrcanos, leader of the resistance against the Mentors.
Heartbroken by the apparent death of Peri, the Doctor presented in his defence an adventure from his own future, where he and his companion Mel were called upon by the Commodore of the starship Hyperion III, to stop a small race of genetically-engineered plantoid creatures known as Vervoids that had overrun the ship and threatened to cause the destruction of all life on Earth. But as the events played out on the Matrix screen, the Doctor found that certain aspects of the recording had been changed since he had prepared his defence, such as one scene where he apparently sabotaged the ship's communications systems himself with a fire-axe! Having already begun to suspect that the Matrix recordings might have been tampered with during the display of the Thoros-Beta incident, the Doctor was now certain that someone was planting faked evidence in order to condemn him.
Nevertheless, the Doctor successfully presented his case that rather than interfering, his help was directly asked for by the person of authority, the starship's captain, and that without the Doctor, the entire human race would have been wiped out. But while the Inquisitor accepted this argument, the Valeyard countered by pointing out that in defeating and destroying the homicidal Vervoids, the Doctor had effectively committed genocide, a crime forbidden by Article Seven of Gallifreyan Law. With this new charge brought up, it looked as though the Doctor's fate was sealed...