Terror of the Vervoids - Really that bad?

It's actually a fairly decent murder mystery -- and impromptu caper -- with only two real problems working against it.

The first primarily symptomatic of the season's rather troubled production period: the Trial scenes by this point in the narrative, unfortunately, basically exist only as filler and actually confuse the narrative a little by their inclusion. Aside from maybe one or two scenes, if they were removed the story would be able to function on its own merits. Get Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford into ADR over one of the static shots or a bit of model footage and you could broadcast it as a Trial-less rerun.

The other is that we don't actually learn who the initial murderer was. I think it was Edwardes, but he's killed at the end of "Part One" ("We don't want you breaking your neck, not until--"), so it's unlikely that he was working alone. It's possible that Doland was collaborating with him to sell off the Vervoids and someone had to set up that light-trap to trigger them in the first place. Someone with a little knowledge of their biology. My money's on the stewardess, Janet, as a member of the consortium Doland mentions would be interested in purchasing them for slave labour. A gambit not too far removed from what Burke tries to do to Ripley and Newt in Aliens. The Hyperion disappears under mysterious circumstances, the cargo is presumed lost and then her company pops up with a species not entirely unlike the Vervoids. No one to contradict their story of where they got them from.

Buuuut, it's all speculation, though. It's not in the script itself. That said, I still find it a really enjoyable adventure in spite of that. The Doctor's put into the action almost immediately, Mel gets a fair amount to do and there's enough going on with the guest cast that the four episodes just zip by when we're on Hyperion.

Hey, yeah!  All he'd have to do is nip forward into the future, make sure things ran on course, but change a few things here and there to besmirch the Doctor's good character as much he can. What if it was the Valeyard, disguised as Sixie, with the fire axe in the communications room instead?

Well, if thr Valeyard won and stole the Doctor’s regenerations he’d be in the Doctor’s body wouldn’t he?

This was the weakest of the series for me, and yet the Vervoids looked pretty good. There was a cliffhanger that I thought was one of the highpoints of the entire run, which was glossed over pretty quickly after the next episode ...



But the rest was pretty dull. Even a very good cast couldn't lift it, although I remember being very taken with Janet (the late Yolande Palfrey) and hoping she could become a new companion. The low-point was Colin arsing about on the exercise bike - he played the humiliation with gusto as always, but I mean really!

Enjoyable on one level, this is definitely the cheapie of the series which, in a reduced run of episodes, is more noticeable than ever.

Only just recently having watched the Trial of a Timelord for the first time, and it was much better than I had dreaded.
But the previous story was indeed better.
I loved the audio commentary; especially Colin commenting to the writers about the exercise bike scene...

I have to admit that I enjoyed Terror of the Vervoids. But I love old Sixie, so there's that.