"The Ultimate Foe" (The Trial of A Time Lord Parts 13 and 14)
"I am he as you are he as you are me."
Seen: 29th November and 6th December 1986
The Long Way Round
Robert Holmes died on 24th May 1986. The conclusion on the 1986 series of Doctor Who, commissioned as "Time Inc", re-titled by its author on the single episode he completed as "The Fantasy Factory", and destined to be transmitted as The Trial of a Time Lord Parts 13 and 14, was being rewritten and completed by Doctor Who's erstwhile script editor, Eric Saward. Saward had resigned from the BBC when Holmes was taken ill, the incapacitation of his friend and mentor a final, emotional blow to a man who had been unhappy in his work and with his colleagues for months.
Saward was already deep in disputes over the content of the Part 14 arguing by phone call and memo with producer John Nathan-Turner, now doubling as the series' script editor in addition to his other responsibilities. Of particular concern was the cliffhanger ending, in which the Doctor and the Valeyard, revealed to be a later, and corrupted, incarnation of the Doctor himself, toppled out of the TARDIS and into a time vent, in a manner reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty in The Final Problem (1891).
This ending was doubly Holmesian, the only verifiable piece of the dead writer’s intentions for the season ending finale that Saward had asked him to supply, trusting him to do so without providing detailed notes or any sort paper outline for the story. The unstoppable force of Saward's desire to honour Holmes' intentions met the immovable of object of Nathan-Turner's unhappiness with what could be seen as an invitation to cancel the show. The producer felt strongly that a final scene that announced that Doctor Who was "back in business" was a better option.
Outraged by what he saw as an insult to the very recently deceased Holmes, as well as an unforgivable reneging on a long ago agreement over how to end the 1986 series, Saward withdrew his script from consideration for production and ceased all direct communication with the Doctor Who production office. He'd written two drafts, and the script had been formatted for rehearsals and distributed to cast and crew. But such was the speed with which it had been required, he had never been formally contracted to write it. No longer a BBC employee, there could be no question that the script was de jure the corporation's property, as it was subsequently ruled his (substantial) revisions to Holmes' penultimate episode had been.
It was at this point, and for the second time in six months, that Nathan-Turner reached out to Pip and Jane Baker, asking if they could provide him with a replacement script at absurdly short notice. He sent them Saward's revised version of Holmes' Part 13 on the back seat of a taxi, and once the cab was moving telephoned them to ask that they read it, and come to see him the next morning. When they did, he explained the situation, and that for copyright reasons he could not let them read Saward's script, or tell them what had been in it. If they accepted the commission, they had a week to write the episode, and they were on their own.
The Ultimate Foe is amongst the Doctor Who stories I’ve written a whole book about. This presents a small problem to those of us involved in this issue of Psychic Paper . Pretty much every thought I’ve ever had, probably any thought I’m capable of having about these 55m of television, and their relation to wider Doctor Who is here. What do I do? Fob you off with an extract from the book? Tell the story again in brief? Repeat myself even more than I do already?
As hopefully the introduction above makes clear, a good three quarters of these episodes were written at least twice, and by at least four hands. In the book I am able to compare multiple scripts and multiple versions of the same scripts, to track the changes to serial's drafting and the impact those have on the end result, and any meanings the piece as a whole might impart. I can't really do that here without cutting and pasting, and even then I wouldn't have the space.
Of course none of the production situation was in any way evident to the contemporary viewer of The Trial of a Time Lord, nor could it be. Neither can it be used as an excuse for any deficiencies in the television programme that resulted. This was something that Jane Baker understood, pointing out that when they accepted the commission to write Part 14, they could hardly ask for an onscreen disclaimer informing the viewer that they'd only had a week to write it, and no one had ever told them what was meant to happen. The audience could not be asked to make, or accept, excuses.
I was part of that contemporary audience, and for me the conclusion was satisfying. But then I was eight. The Colin Baker era ended with the catharsis of a well produced explosion, rather than one of the "spurious morality" referred to in the dialogue. As a kid who enjoyed the juxtapositions provided by Doctor Who's historical stories (I would not, of course, have phrased it in those terms at the time) I found the pseudo Victoriana inside the Matrix particularly thrilling. I also rather enjoyed the "game-within-game" scenes in which the Doctor is taken to a false trial room inside the Matrix, with those in the real trial room watching aghast as they're impersonated on their own evidence screen.
Oddly, I have what I now suppose to be a false memory concerning the end of this story. I distinctly recall reading the Radio Times entry for Part 13, and asking my Mom what "penultimate" meant. She told me, and also informed me that her late father, who I'd never met, particularly disliked the word. I mention this partially because it seems to me unlikely I'll ever have any other forum in which I could plausibly air it, and also because having recently seen the Radio Times for that week, I know Part 13's entry contains neither the word "penultimate" nor the photograph I remember being on the same page.
There seems something really appropriate about this, of my only (as far as I can tell) quantifiably false memory of old money Doctor Who being in relation to a story of unreliable narrators, which takes as a major theme the desire to assert a narrative over events. That's something that already seems to pass from the story to the process of its production and back again, via a permeable membrane in reality. As if Saward's decision to reflect the fact that he felt Doctor Who the series was "on trial" by putting Doctor Who the character on trial broke the fourth wall entirely, leading to life imitating art imitating life imitating art.
Making the villain of that serial, the first made with a genuine threat over Doctor Who's existence as a continuing television series for fifteen years, an embodiment of the Doctor's future is a curious one. What does it say? That Saward was afraid of the future? That the future, like eveything in his world view, is bleak? Is it further indulgence in his habit of creating alternative Doctor figures for serials? Or a knowing inversion of it? Can things, in the end, only really get worse?
But then that's something else that went by the wayside, around the time that Saward quit Doctor Who. The Valeyard of the final serial is not the definitive future Doctor of Holmes' draft of Part 13, a logic that underlies the Part 14 that Saward wrote and then withdrew. In Pip and Jane's replacement he is instead a never-quite-articulated "dark side" of the Doctor. He's from the future, yes. But he's more Hyde to the Doctor's Jekyll than Matt Smith in a black hat.
Yet, in place of Saward's cliffhanger we get another, itself never returned to on television, in which it seems that the Valeyard survived the destruction of his booby trapped death machine and will return to plague the Doctor in the future. (He never did.) Those critical of this undeniable damp squib might instead choose to see it in less literal terms than the scene itself invites you to. Perhaps what it means, or at least means now, is that conceptually the Valeyard and the dark side of the Doctor which he represents, remains out there? That the threat he represented had not been expunged.
Because, for all of Nathan-Turner's determination to leave viewers with "a degree of safety" following the "hiatus" and the trial format, the Valeyard turned to camera and laughed exactly three years to the day before Sylvester McCoy's final speech. Three years? That's no time at all.
The truth is, Doctor Who would never be safe in the twentieth century again. The spectre of the Valeyard was real enough. The Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come.
