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What's the opinion on Trial of a Time Lord? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by julianh@lemm.ee to c/doctorwho@lemmy.world

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Just for fun I started watching it to see what it even is, and so far it's pretty fun! Colin Baker's doctor is a lot of fun, it's interesting to see a doctor who (hehe) is a bit more full of themselves.

From what I gather though, people at the time really didn't like it, but that could have just been because of Colin Baker. Now that general opinion of Colin Baker is much better and we can revisit those episodes without as much bias, I'm interested in what the general verdict on this season is. Do people still hate it? Is it a cult classic? Do people just think it's meh?

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[–] buru5@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it's pompous, over ambitious, and all over the place; and that's why it's so good. i liked it.

[–] MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Agreed on all points!

One thing fans of modern Who are missing out on is the occasional pompous grandeur of the Colin Baker era. Though I give credit to some Capaldi episodes for getting into the same ballpark.

[–] HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Have you reached the end? It's a strange one: the deeper you go into it the less sense it makes. The last episode, which was supposed to draw all of the weird and unreliable events to a sensible conclusion, was withdrawn and had to be replaced by a hurriedly-written script that wasn't allowed to use any of its sensible elements.

So it's all a bit of a let-down in the end, despite some moments of greatness along the way.

More entertaining IMO is the documentary "Trials and Tribulations" which covers the Sixth Doctor's era with a focus on the particular difficulties around the Trial of a Timelord scripts. If you've got the DVD box-set then it's on one of the discs; otherwise you might have to scour the video sharing sites for it.

[–] Feneric@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I think a lot of the Sixth Doctor's TV stories got (and still get) more hate than they deserved. "The Twin Dilemma" was awful, and that sat festering in poeple's minds for the whole off season, and they had set opinions before they even watched the next two seasons. I liked the first and third chunks of "Trial" a lot, and the second wasn't bad. The fourth was kind of a mess, but that's probably to be expected considering its history, having been started by one author and worked on and finished by others in emergency mode.