Trial Of A Time Lord

To be fair on the last Episode of the Ultimate foe.... Robert Holmes died leaving just notes.... Eric Saward was asked to finish the script off, but refused for any of his work to be used when they asked him to change his ending.

Pip and Jane Baker were then brought in at the last moment, weren't allowed to see the original outlined ending and had to write a story that could be filmed in the locations already scouted and paid for....

....it was always going to be *beep* given the circumstances...

Have you skipped Revelation of the Daleks?

The Mysterious Planet is very average, in my opinion.
Mindwarp is pretty good and I do love Peri's death, wish they hadn't done the cop-out at the end, but thanks to an audio story called Peri and the Piscon Peradox she actually DID die and it was an alternate version of Peri who married Brian Blessed.
Terror of the Vervoids is good in and of itself, but I do think it's the only one of the first three stories where the Trial scenes hurt it. Although I do highly dislike Mel.
I really do like The Ultimate Foe, though. Part 1 is great and Part 2, with the exception of the whole Peri thing, is good for what it is, but I would have much preferred Robert Holmes' original ending with a huge cliffhanger where the Doctor is hanging from a tower or something like that.

Garbage.

I think it was trying to be a mirror image of A Christmas Carol (the Dickens story, not the Doctor Who Christmas special).

Mysterious planet is the Past adventure. The main conceptual flaw (IMO, obviously) is that there's very little about it to distinguish it from any other 4-part adventure, so, quite why the Valeyard cites it as evidence of the Doctor's wrongdoing I have no idea.

It has more than its fair share of ghastly moments. A society that burns people to death would, presumably, be prepared for the fact that prisoners facing this form of execution are going to try everything in their power to escape. What we actually get is the equivalent of Edward Woodward on his way to the wicker man suddenly saying, "Hey, look over there!" and while the entire population of Summerisle turn to look, he knees Christopher Lee in the goolies and scarpers. There's the scene in which Glitz is going to shoot the Doctor, but doesn't because the Doctor disappears from view. There's the dreadful stoning-averted-by-umbrella, there's the "Will the Doctor die?" moment when we know he can't die because he's in the court room (as we keep being reminded), there's the endless <something>yard "jokes", and finally, the assertion that the Earth and its entire constellation has been moved two light years - astronomical ignorance (in both senses) on a par with The Impossible Planet and Kill the Moon. Oh, not to mention the dreadful cliche of "It was Earth all along!!!"

Mindwarp is the Present adventure. I remember very little about it apart from a lot of wandering about very cheap and unconvincing sets, Brian Blessed making a lot of noise, flashlights for stun guns, and a companion death that felt fake even before they decided it was. (Thinking on it, this was the first of the unconvincing companion/long-term-character deaths.) In its favour there was a rare instance of unseen adventure briefly summarised at the beginning.

Terror of the Vervoids is the Future adventure. The conceptual flaw here is, is the Doctor expecting the adventure to happen now that he's seen it? Does he have to remember his lines, and act surprised at the right bits? Aside from this, and aside from the terrible choice of actress to play the companion (although she wasn't too bad - yet) it's not a bad adventure. Agatha Christie in Space, done well. Shame about the trial stuff.

After that it's two episodes of trying-to-be-surreal runaround. Who'd've guessed the trial storyline was going to go nowhere? The identity of the Valeyard is just about interesting enough to count as a minor plot twist, but the Master's plan is vaguer than ever. Nobody properly addresses the question of how the Doctor can become the Valeyard if he's executed during his sixth life, nor does anybody even wonder what'll happen to the Vervoids if the Doctor doesn't turn up. So the shambling epic ends with the Peri lives copout and the Doctor leaving with the companion he hasn't met yet (addressed in the novelisation, apparently, but should have been on screen).

So yeah, as someone else said, 18 months to come up with that???

So this is permanence, love's shattered pride.
What once was innocence, turned on its side.