The Trial of a Timelord: Terror of the Vervoids.

“Carrot Juice?!” – The Doctor

I love a good ‘whodunit’, I love the idea of living plants, I love the Doctor’s new neck tie and controversially, I love Mel. Terror of the Vervoids therefore is an absolute box-ticker for me. The story presented from the Matrix comes about after the Doctor’s bereavement over Peri’s death. The story takes place in the Doctor’s future in the hopes of showing he has improved, and indeed it has. The relationship between the Doctor and Mel is wonderful, much more light and humorous than the quite abrasive double act he shared with his previous companion.

The mystery comes about from the Doctor’s opening monologue which states one passenger will be a murderer. The mystery onboard begins to thicken as people begin to die, and a strange table full of those pebbles women love sticking in bowls for coffee tables. For some reason everything seems to centre around hydroponics…

The mystery thickens as it becomes apparent that the matrix has been tampered with. On several occasions the Doctor makes pauses to note the narrative he is displaying, not helped much by the Valeyard’s now more apparent rants, it begins to hint at a possible villainy, but won’t conclude until the next part of the narrative.

The death of Edwards is one of the more spectacular ones in Classic Who, instead of a simple electrocution we’re treated to a mass of explosions upon which the Vervoids begin to emerge. A good joke could be made that it’s Mel’s ear splitting screams that made the place go up, and whilst I’d love to call it true, alas I can’t.

The Vervoids live, and that’s when the really weird shit starts happening. The murders go up about ten fold and we get a good slathering of decently veiled murder and intrigue, as killings are going on behind shower curtains to the complete ignorance of maids and cabin staff. Where this serial does drop slightly is in giving the Vervoids a voice, which diminishes them somewhat by having daft rasping whispers instead of no speech at all. I mean, where does a new born plant learn the English language from?

The JNT era companions all seemed to have an ulterior motive, whether it was trying to get cheap flights or lure in Americans, with Mel I’m gonna take a guess and say he wanted his boyfriend to lose weight, as all Mel ever seems to do is be in the gym and drink carrot juice, still it’s nice for a companion to have a hobby I guess.

The Vervoids design is a little too humanoid, it doesn’t seem to make sense for a plant to have hands or be such adept walkers, so already these guys don’t have much on the Triffids. The Doctor’s way of dealing with them however is a good show of genuine regret in a pretty inescapable situation, however as the Valeyard neatly points out, his admittedly clever plan does carry the unfortunate consequence that he has committed genocide.

This episode is just a treat to watch and easily my favourite in the Trial of a Timelord arc, it’s probably the strongest we see the universally loathed Mel and the Doctor is calming down quite a bit. It’s a shame that the previous series was so disastrous that they had to shoehorn this in to rush the Doctor’s evolution, and now that we get to see this calmer galactic Joseph, it’s a shame they fired him.