‘A hologram! As insubstantial as the Rani’s scruples!’ It’s incredibly linear and straightforward. It’s also colourful and engaging. Whether it belonged on BBC1 in prime time on a Monday evening is debateable – Uncle Jack, which starred Fenella Fielding as the very Rani-like Vixen, was a fixture of children’s TV in the early 1990s, and this might have fit quite nicely in a similar slot. Compared to, say, Earthshock, this all looks very insubstantial.

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‘Quite adept at manoeuvring, aren’t you, Doctor?’ McCoy is largely confined to one room for this episode as various characters come to him. There’s a risk that this could have sidelined him from the action, but I think the script manages to make it seem like events are revolving round him – the Rani is fetching and carrying for him, Mel is desperate to find him, while he pootles round investigating the laboratory, trying to piece together what’s really going on.

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‘I’m a bit worried about the temporal flicker in Sector 13. There’s a bicentennial refit of the Tardis to book in. I must just pop over to Centauri 7, and then perhaps a quick holiday. Right, that all seems quite clear. Just three small points. Where am I? Who am I? And who are you?’ The new Doctor wakes up full of plans. He’s diverted, for a while, by the Rani’s manipulations, but from the off this is an incarnation who intends to get things done. Most Doctors are a contrast to their predecessors, but the seventh especially so. While ‘Sixie’ was bombastic, erudite and confident the seventh Doctor is an underdog, dismissed as a ‘cretin’ by the Rani, jumbling his aphorisms, pratfalling and prone to melancholy: the Buster Keaton of Time Lords.

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‘The performance was too grotesque to be real.’ Given the circumstances around it (the original Saward script being withdrawn and the Bakers not allowed to know its contents), this could have been much more disappointing. It’s by no means a great ending (and the final joke of the Valeyard’s survival inadvertently throws into doubt whether this is all still a Matrix illusion), but it generally works.

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‘Most of what you saw was true.’ Except all the really dramatic bits, like Peri dying. Those were all made up. I think it’s a stroke of genius to bring back the Master as the Doctor’s key witness for the defence, and Ainley doesn’t disappoint as he leers over the court room, gently flirting with the Inquisitor, mocking the Time Lords’ love of propriety, and dramatically blowing open the conspiracy to conceal the theft of Matrix secrets by devastating the Earth. This might have been enough anyway: ‘causing ripples that’ll rock the High Council to its foundations’ and ensuring no-one else has the pleasure of revenge on the Doctor is perfectly Master-ish.

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‘Whether or not the Doctor has proved himself innocent of meddling is no longer the cardinal issue before this court. He has proved himself guilty of a far greater crime.’ The titles of the Trial segments have been settled since the Target books were published in the late 1980s, but I think it’s telling that this one came out as Terror of the Vervoids rather than the working title The Ultimate Foe. The latter suggests a sort of Golden Age detective story – shades of The Final Problem or The Secret Adversary. The title it’s now known as promotes the generic Doctor Who monster plot above the detective element – which is entirely fitting because that’s exactly what the script does.

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‘The Doctor is on trial for his life, yet in his defence he presents us with a situation in which he is deliberately flouting accepted authority.’ This is all lively enough, but it introduces what I’ve always felt is a flaw with the story. If this were a true Agatha Christie pastiche then the focus would be on the murderer and the investigation. But as Doctor Who needs monsters, so here the focus begins to shift to the Vervoids and their plans for the crew, and for Earth. Suddenly, it’s no longer a neat murder mystery but a story about obscene vegetable matter exterminating humankind.

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‘Are we to be subjected to a dissertation on interplanetary politics now?’ This is pure 1970s’ Doctor Who, particularly the scenes of the Vervoids attacking, which are shot POV with a green tinge just like the Wirrrn and the Rutans, and the very obvious CSO fringing around the Doctor and Mel’s hair when they stand in front of the observation dome.

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‘Is it going to be the Doctor’s defence that he improves?’ This is the segment of the trial that nearly everyone says works as a standalone story as if that’s a compliment. The court room scenes show some effort to address Peri’s death (more, in fact, than Adric got in Time-Flight), and to provide a bit of juicy context (this is an adventure plucked from the Doctor’s post-trial future, an idea that doesn’t bear more than half a second’s scrutiny), then it’s straight into the web of mayhem and intrigue aboard the very Season 17-looking Hyperion III.

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‘Die well, my lady.’ It seems to me this goes beyond the bounds of what’s legitimately horrible in Doctor Who. I suspect JNT wanted Peri to die because he envisaged a similar impact to Adric’s death – perhaps a ratings bump and some newspaper coverage. It might have added a couple of hundred thousand viewers for the next episode, but I think that’s a fairly meagre reward for seeing the longest-serving current regular stripped of all her agency: at least Adric died choosing to attempt to save the Earth. She’s strapped down, shaved, gagged and drugged, and then erased like an old hard drive so Kiv can be downloaded into the body (and Sil can make a joke about how ugly it is). I suppose the series has often treated Peri as no more than meat, so perhaps it’s a meta comment. I think it’s nasty, and I’m glad the show ret-conned it almost immediately.

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