Doctor Who: 11 Previous Stories That The Peter Capaldi Era Should Learn From

6. The Trial Of A Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe

Sure. We all know how it worked out now, now that the whole sorry business was twenty-eight years ago. But at the time, we believed. It's hard to describe for those that weren't there at the time. In the previous year we thought we'd seen our beloved show being murdered. It wasn't, of course, nor was that ever the plan, but we didn't really understand that at the time. What we did understand was that we used to believe that Doctor Who was going to last forever and then suddenly there was the threat that they were going to stop making it. So, when the series came back after 18 months and promised a season-long plot line that would address the whole affair, we believed - really believed - that it was building up- to something. There was, of course, no way for us to have know at the time that Robert Holmes was going to sadly die. In that pre-internet age we barely understood who Robert Holmes even was. We'd certainly never seen the Krotons or understood that he's created the Sontarans. Unfortunately, as much as we believed that the season was building up to a pre-planned conclusion, the season believed otherwise. There's no shortage of blame to be found on this one. John Nathan Turner never really considered the writers to be an important part of the process. Eric Saward went out of his way to burn as many bridges as possible. Pip and Jane Baker were just phenomenally untalented writers who were willing to put the work in and get scripts submitted on time. And Robert Holmes died between the scripts for episodes 13 and 14. Which meant that the sum total of information available to the production crew going into the season finale which was meant to wrap the whole season up was - 'There was a building in it that was supposed to be round. Try and do something with that.' It was an unfortunate confluence of events. But the good news is that it's an unfortunate confluence of events that's unlikely to happen again.