650 The Trial a Timelord Part Five (Mindwarp Part One)

EPISODE: The Trial a Timelord Part Five (Mindwarp Part One)
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 650
STORY NUMBER: 146
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 04 October 1986
WRITER: Philip Martin
DIRECTOR: Ron Jones
SCRIPT EDITOR: Eric Saward
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4.8 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Trial Of A Time Lord

The Valeyard presents evidence of the Doctor's most recent adventure before his summons to the court room. The Tardis materialises on Thoros Beta, a planet with bright pink skies & seawater. The Doctor shows Peri an advanced device he obtained from some Warlords which was manufactured on Thoros Beta. When they venture into the caves they are attacked by a huge creature. The device goes off in the Doctor's hands killing the creature and they are captured by guards but escape into the tunnels where they encounter first a mutated human creature and then glimpse Sil and his boss Kiv on their way to a conference. Kiv has been taken ill with extreme headaches and has summoned Crozier to Thoros Beta to solve his problems but the creature having attacked the Doctor has thrown Crozier's plans into disarray. The Doctor & Peri find Crozier's lab where he is experimenting on the captured king Yrcanos, but they are in turn found by Sil who orders the Doctor attached to Crozier's machinery for interrogation.

Effectively this is a Vengeance on Varos sequel so back come the writer & director of that story Philip Martin & Ron Jones and also back is Nabil Shaban as Sil. I really didn't like Sil in Vengeance on Varos. Here we discover his boss Kiv doesn't particularly like him either! A bit hard to work out what's going on on the evidence of this episode especially since the flow of it keeps getting interrupted by the dreadful courtroom scenes. I am getting so annoyed by the shots of the Timelords and Inquisitor turning round at the start and end of every court scene, couldn't they have located the stupid screen in a better place on the set?

My main memory of this when it was broadcast was that the video effects work done on the location material, filmed at Telscombe Cliffs near producer John Nathan-Turner's Brighton home, drove our then television crazy causing the picture to distort whenever the pink sky was present!

Crash Zoom on Colin #4 in 5 episodes!