Production Code: 7B
Plot Outline from Wikipedia
The Valeyard halts the video to accuse the Doctor of deliberately
shooting the monster, but he replies that the weapon went off accidentally.
The Valeyard accuses the Doctor of placing his companions in great
danger in his adventures.
Crozier starts to probe the Doctor's mind, but at that moment Yrcanos awakes and rampages around the laboratory destroying equipment. Overpowering the guards he departs the laboratory. The Doctor is still stunned but he and Peri follow Yrcanos. As Yrcanos outlines his plans to attack the Mentors, the Doctor says he would enjoy that, before collapsing. In the courtroom, the Doctor tells the Inquisitor that he cannot
remember anything that happened after being attached to the machine.
The Valeyard tells him he is in for a very nasty surprise if he really
cannot remember what has happened. Yrcanos, the Doctor and Peri go to where new slaves are brought into the base. Yrcanos plans to attack the guards and steal their weapons, but as he sneaks into the room, the Doctor calls out to the guards "look out behind you". Robbed of the element of surprise, Yrcanos cannot overcome the guards and flees. Peri picks up a weapon and points it at Sil who is overseeing the consignment of slaves. She calls to the Doctor for help but he ignores her. Peri shoots at Sil's chair, drops the weapon and flees after Yrcanos. Sil asks him why he helped the Mentors, to which he replies the odds were on their side. The Doctor tells Sil he is just like him now, no longer a hero. The Doctor insists that the footage is not of him, but the Valeyard
tells him that the Matrix of Time cannot lie… Yrcanos comes across the wolf-man. He recognises him as one of his own men — Dorf. Yrcanos releases him from his chains. Meanwhile, Peri runs around the corridors and avoiding guards, She comes across Matrona, who allows her to join the Mentors' servants rather than turn her over to the guards. Covered with a veil, she enters the Commerce Room with Kiv's medication. The Doctor is there and when he calls to her to get him a drink, she disguises her voice so that he does not recognise her. When she brings him a new drink, the Doctor uncovers her and denounces her as an enemy to the Mentors. The Doctor begins to remember some of what happened, and tells the
Courtroom that what they are seeing is all part of his ploy. He says
he planned to gain the Mentors' trust so that he might interrogate
her alone so that they might escape. The Inquisitor asks to see the
interrogation scene… The Doctor protests that what is being shown is not what happened,
and when the Valeyard replies that the Matrix never lies, he questions
if that is indeed the case.
Despite all that has happened to her, Peri smashes the gun from Yrcanos's hands allowing the Doctor to flee. In Crozier's laboratory, the scientist prepares to transplant Kiv's brain into a recently deceased Mentor corpse. The Doctor arrives and assists with the operation. Despite some hitches, the operation succeeds. Meanwhile, Yrcanos, Peri and Dorf team up with members of the Alphan resistance. They allow Yrcanos to lead them in an attack of the Mentors. When they go to the resistance arms dump, but they are ambushed by Mentor guards and shot down…
Yrcanos, Peri, Dorf and the resistance members awake, they had merely been stunned. They are taken to cells. Meanwhile in Crozier's laboratory, Lord Kiv is rambling due to the body of the fisherman influencing his brain. Crozier makes plans to transfer the brain into another more suitable body. He asks the Doctor whether Peri would be a suitable host, but the Doctor says he would prefer that she is not experimented on. While the Doctor is sent to find another suitable candidate, Peri is brought to the laboratory anyway. Peri is strapped to the operating table and Crozier begins to prepare her for the surgery. The Doctor goes to Yrcanos's cell and tricks the guard allowing Yrcanos and Dorf to escape. Together they free the remaining resistance members. As they try to access the control room from where all the slaves are mentally controlled, Dorf is killed by a passing guard. They destroy the machines freeing the slaves from mental control. Chaos ensues throughout the whole complex. Lord Kiv is taken to the laboratory and the operation is about to commence. As the Doctor heads towards the lab, he summoned from Time and Space by the Time Lords. The Inquisitor tells the Doctor that he was snatched out of time
on direct order of the High Council as the direct result of Crozier's
experiment would affect all future life in the Universe. She orders
him to watch and observe carefully. The Doctor shocked by what he has seen. The Inquisitor and the Valeyard tell him that it was necessary to end Peri's life to prevent the distastrous consequences of Crozier's experiment on all life in the Universe. The Doctor insists that he was fetched out of time for some other reason … he will now do everything he can to find out what.
Sil is back! And so are his mates. This story allowed the make up and costumes department to go to town on creating a whole race of whatever it was Sil was meant to be. Two of them, Sil and his boss, Kiv, sitting on beds and being attended to by Human slaves, steal several scenes. It was interesting to see that Sil, who had been the chief baddie in the previous story, was in fact only a lackey on his own world, and lived in fear of Kiv. Absolutely mercenary and capable of double crossing each other at the drop of a hat, or with even less excuse than that, the whole raison d'être of the Mentor race is to make a profit. Nabil Shaban once commented that he thought Hannibal Lector was based on his character, but Doctor Who fans have also wondered if the Ferengi of Star Trek weren’t ALSO based on the Mentors. Except even the Ferengi would baulk at the horrendous experiments the Mentors had been carrying out on their Human captives. King Yrcanos’s faithful servant, Dorf, who, having been mutated into a wolf-man begs his master to kill him is one of the most pitiful results of those experiments. Yrcanos’s insistence that he should die in battle against those who had done it to him was, strangely, one that sounded perfectly correct. What many fans had problems with, was The Doctor’s apparent collaboration with the Mentors. Of course, it had a lot to do with the manipulation of the matrix, making it APPEAR as if he had completely sold out. But I think it would have been better for fans, with their faith in him as a good guy, to have had a few clues that he was faking it. That said, Colin Baker played the collaborator very well. It just didn’t seem like the kind of thing The Doctor would do. The fate of Peri, of course, sent ripples through Doctor Who fandom. After their initially spikey relationship, Peri and the Sixth Doctor had reached a certain level of genuine affection for each other by the previous story, and the almost casual way in which she is seen to be killed is disturbing. The Doctor’s horror when he sees that on the screen in the trial room is utterly convincing and conveys the feelings of all watching. Colin Baker shows a very proper level of distress at those events. Peri thus appears to be the third of The Doctor’s companions to die, after Katarina way back in the 1960s and Adric in 1983. Both of those, though, died in ‘combat’, and in some measure, saved the lives of others, including The Doctor. Peri, appeared to be nothing more than a helpless victim of the Mentors with The Doctor powerless to help. It WAS disturbing, and the problem was, Doctor Who fans tend to be loyal, and emotionally involved with the characters, and they weren’t ready to accept such a pointless death. Yes, it does rather suggest that Doctor Who fans have a problem with realistic scenarios. In real life, death isn’t neat, isn’t heroic, isn’t fair. But that’s why we watch Doctor Who. For a break from real life. And I think the attempt to bring in the sort of shock endings of more gritty ‘realistic’ drama was a mistake. We NEED a cosy place where our emotions WON’T be torn apart. Of course, we now know that was one of the manipulated scenes from
the matrix, but at the first broadcast it looked as if Peri was dead.
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