Finally we come to The Ultimate Foe, the conclusion of the season and it's an absolute mess, though in fairness it had a lot to do with elements outside the control of the writers and the actors. As I mentioned before, Robert Holmes had written part one with a rough outline of part two, but died before he could write it in full. Eric Saward stepped in to finish the story but angrily quit the show following disagreements with JNT. Originally Saward wanted a darker cliffhanger ending to the season with the Doctor and the Valeyard falling into the time vortex, while JNT wanted a happy ending. So when Saward left he took the rights to the script with him, meaning Pip & Jane Baker weren't allowed to know what was in the original script, they basically had to come up with an entire finale off the top of their heads. It's honestly a bloody miracle The Ultimate Foe even made it to TV to begin with. For as bad as Trial of a Time Lord is, I do give it props for keeping the show going for another few years, being held up with string and sticky tape! I honestly put it among the most important Doctor Who stories ever written and there has been good stuff in the season. For The Ultimate Foe we get the big twist with the Valeyard making him on the Doctor's most personal villains, his own Mr Hyde! We get a surprise appearance from the Master who's always fun to watch with Anthony Ainley's performance and I do enjoy some of the craziness of the matrix.

But the climax is complete garbage, after all that buildup, almost six hours of storytelling and this final confrontation with the Valeyard, it comes down to the Doctor smashing a box with flashing lights with little to no struggle from the Valeyard. I'm sure Pip & Jane Baker were lovely people, but they just weren't that good at writing, and being the ones to finish off the final works of the best writer the show's ever had just blows my mind even today.