Review by Cavan Gilbey
Earlier this year we saw the release of The Quin Dilemma, a story which celebrates the rich audio history of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor. Now it’s the turn of Season 22 and 23 to get a homage with The Trials of a Time Lord, a fortieth anniversary celebration penned by the team of Rochana Patel (episodes 1 and 2), Katherine Armitage (episodes 3 and 4) and Stewart Pringle (episodes 5 and 6). Now for context, Season 22 and 23 are among two of my favourites from the classic era of the show so I naturally had a lot of expectations for this story to be a proper celebration of that era. Did it deliver? Yes, and then some!
This story has the interesting structure of being a traditional six parter serial where each major chunk is written by a different writer; now this worked really well for the previous anniversary release as that adopted an anthology like structure. However I am happy to say this structure creates no issues here, the quality of writing is amongst some of the best these writers have done and they work so well together to maintain a clear and consistent tone and pay off each other’s plot suggestions wonderfully. The script here feels so quintessentially Season 22 with it’s strong media satire, creative use of familiar monsters and slightly edgy streak but much of the strengths of the Big Finish Sixth Doctor clearly work so well within this frame work. These three writers have a great grip on what makes Colin’s Doctor so appealing, especially with the way they write his sense of humour and his sense of justice.
Each chunk of the story does a good job at introducing their new concepts nicely. The first pair of episodes actually end up telling a brilliant little Cyberman story where the emotional nature of the David Banks (who is doing an amazing job here with his Cyber-Leader performance) incarnation of the baddie gets to be delved in to and explored. Patel worms a good bit of body horror in to this one with the character of Tiffany Jenkins and her fate during these first episodes, plus the way that Patel rationalises the emotionality of these Cybermen is brilliant. Patel also has the hard job of setting of the tone and for a while, before the reveal that we are in an intergalactic reality show, manages to get you feeling a sense of discomfort as everything seems just a little bit too staged or too easy for The Doctor and Mel to solve.
This momentum manages to be maintained perfectly across all three parts as Armitage and Pringle begin to sprinkle in the media industry criticism with plenty of jabs at the morals of reality television producers and how those shows manipulate audiences in to dehumanising the lives of the people they end up watching. There’s one bit of satire which I think could have been explored a lot more than it was, but to reveal what that it is would spoil a moment of actually well done comedy. Speaking of twists, there’s plenty of moments in here that I really did not see coming. From the reveal of a surprise villain to the way that the Doctor and Davros develop their relationship, there’s something in here that is going to surprise every type of fan I think.
Our cast for this story is brilliant. Baker, Langford and Bryant are giving it their all here and you can tell that this must have been one of the scripts they had the most fun with; especially Colin. I think Rufus Jones was one that stood out to me because he feels like he’s giving a performance that feels ripped straight out of Vengeance on Varos, getting the comedic cowardice of his corporate stooge Brot down perfectly. Aruhan Galieva brings some humanity and tragedy to her performance as Tiffany, especially during that second episode of the serial where she gets some great interplay with Baker. Terry Molloy naturally does a great job here as Davros, although there’s an interesting impishness to his performance here that I think managed to find something new to do with a villain this familiar to listeners.
I loved this story, I think it’s one I could go back to over and over again just to get those hits of Sixth Doctor perfection. An amazing way to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of this Doctor. A strong contender for my favourite release of 2024, it covers a great deal of stuff I like to look for in a story with it’s great character work and strong satirical focus. A brilliant release through and through.
10/10
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