Doctor Who/Recap/S23 E4 The Ultimate Foe

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The Doctor gazes into the abyss, and the audience gazes back

"In all my travels through time and space I have battled against evil. Against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here! The oldest civilization: decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core! Power mad conspirators? Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen — they're still in the nursery compared to us! Ten million years of absolute power. That's what it takes to be really corrupt!" —The Doctor, finally fed up with the Kangaroo Court he's been thrown into, ripping into his own people's despicable acts with a lovely monologue.

"Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice..." —The final line of the adventure; sadly, Colin Baker's final line as the Doctor.

Picking right up where the previous story left off, The Ultimate Foe opens up with the Doctor being accused of genocide. The Doctor objects, and both he and the Valeyard get into a well-written argument that suddenly ends when Sabalom Glitz and future companion Melanie show up almost literally out of nowhere. When the Doctor asks how they got there, the Master shows up to torment the Doctor and everyone else - revealing major plot points like how Ravalox (from the first part) was really the Earth. Furthering his gloating, the Master reveals that the Valeyard is really the Doctor.

Wait, no. Not the Doctor. A piece of the Doctor split off from him around the last of his regenerations. And made of pure evil. Or something. Even when being specific, this origin is incredibly vague.

Either way, the Valeyard flees into the Matrix (no, not that one! We've been over this!) and the Doctor and Glitz pursue. Inside the Matrix, the Doctor and Glitz are tormented by the Valeyard repeatedly until finally winding up in what can only be described as a world that was co-designed by MC Escher and Charles Dickens on PCP and acid. The Valeyard continues to gloat in his own way, while Mel and the entire judge and jury stare at the viewscreen like it's the Monday Night Football game.

Not much later, things go back to the courtroom, where the Doctor is convicted of his so-called crimes and will be executed. Only it's all an illusion, and the Doctor knows it's an illusion, but Mel doesn't know that he knows, so she runs into the Matrix to try and stop it all. The Valeyard gets all pissy about this, deciding to vanish for the time being. Meanwhile, Glitz and the Master decide to steal the records of the Matrix to make some cash in a story that, sadly, goes nowhere.

Finally, the Doctor and Mel find themselves face-to-face with the Valeyard, and his plans to destroy the current government of the Time Lords. Through a brief struggle, the Valeyard spits out technobabble about things not going his way and is finally defeated (OR IS HE...?!). The Time Lords saved, the random Time Lady presiding over the trial tells the Doctor that Peri survived and is living with King Yrcanos after his rambling that she would be his queen... for some reason. Mel and the Doctor leave together, presumably for him to drop her off somewhere for his future self to pick up later (Business Unusual), and the Sixth Doctor goes on to many, many more adventures, where th-

Oh.

Shit.

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The two episodes were written by four different people, though few really notice. The first episode was written by Robert Holmes and script editor Eric Saward together, with Holmes slowly dying from disease. He passed away without finishing the final episode, which was finished off by Eric Saward himself — and then withdrawn when Producer John Nathan-Turner disagreed with it. The final episode was then entrusted to Pip and Jane Baker (no relation to Colin or Tom Baker, who themselves are also unrelated), who had written previously for the series. In fact, Pip and Jane weren't even allowed to see the original script, not to mention they had no clue how the story was supposed to end.

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This story provides examples of:

• Author Existence Failure: Poor Robert Holmes, may he rest in peace.
  • Not to mention he was supposed to write Yellow Fever and How To Cure It for this season (before the plans for a trial). For this reason it's never been novelized.
• Belated Happy Ending: Peri, assumed dead after the events of "Mindwarp," gets one of these.
• Bizarrchitecture with a Steampunk flavour.
• Defector From Decadence
• The End - or Is It?: After the Doctor and Mel depart, the Inquisitor starts organizing the surviving Time Lords with the intent of restoring order to Gallifrey. She gives an order to the Keeper of the Matrix, who then turns to the screen to reveal the Valeyard himself. Cue end credits.
• Enemy Without: The Valeyard is a time-travelling one.
• Evil Me Scares Me
• Executive Meddling: Oh, god, this one had it in spades. First, this was to be a four-part story written together by Robert Holmes and script editor Eric Saward. Then it was turned into a two-part story when Pip and Jane wrote a pretty sweet story. Then, after Holmes passed away, Eric turned in a final script that kept the original plot; in this ending, the Doctor and Valyard are left tumbling through the Matrix, fighting to the death. Producer John Nathan-Turner rightly felt this could give the BBC the excuse they needed to axe the program... so Saward resigned and refused permission for his script to be used. As such, the televised version of the final episode was written by Pip and Jane Baker in a matter of days, without being allowed to know anything about the originally intended version. People, it's nothing less than a miracle that this serial was even finished.
  • The first edit of the final episode ran to some 38 minutes; Nathan-Turner managed to get permission to extend the running time by five minutes, but still had to make it up by cutting out large amounts of material featuring the Master and Glitz.
• Fiery Coverup: The Time Lords are revealed to have engaged in this on a planetary scale, nearly wiping out the Earth and moving it across the galaxy, and then willing to execute the Doctor, who accidentally stumbled across the evidence without even realizing it in order to hide their own embarrassing indiscretions.
• Government Conspiracy: Committed by the Time Lord High Council.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: Colin Baker vs Michael Jayston! Talking all bets, taking all bets...!
• Info Dump: The first fifteen minutes of episode one are basically one long courtroom infodump courtesy of the Master, who reveals the answers to almost all of the questions that have been building throughout the entire Trial of a Time Lord story arc.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: In episode two, as is pretty much par for the course in Pip and Jane Baker scripts. Key example: "there's nothing you can do to stop the catharsis of spurious morality."
• Spanner in the Works: The Master, of all people, derails the whole plot against the Doctor. Not out of any sense of altruism, naturally, but for both the chance to pit two aspects of the Doctor against himself and topple the High Council of Time Lords.
  • For bonus points, he makes himself this as literally as he possibly can, by revealing the plot from within the Time Matrix viewing screen.
• Technology Marches On: The idea that a "megabyte modem" is impressive.
  • Since it's not clear exactly what it means even in context, it's also an example of gratuitous Techno Babble.
• Xanatos Speed Chess