Arbitration

Gallifrey #5.3

Released: 16 February 2013

Listened: 4/25/21

It’s another episode of “politics for the cruel” on Gallifrey. A Gallifreyan aristocrat who supports Romana for his own reasons abandoned a bunch of his slaves to their deaths some years ago, so Leela’s Outsiders kidnap him and intend to put him on trial. Whether he’s actually guilty isn’t really in question; this is Cruel Gallifrey, so of course he is. In fact, it might even have been legal at the time, a point that’s never raised in the story. It all hinges around whether Leela will bend to help Romana, how much Romana will sacrifice to protect Leela, and how far Narvin will go to protect Romana from her own actions. Stir in the fact that our heroes will likely be going home much sooner than they thought, which is supposed to raise the stakes as both Romana and Leela are determined to do the Right Thing before they go, but in fact it just underlines that nothing they do here really matters (at least, Narvin sees it that way). There are a bunch of absurdities built into this story: The idea that Romana could reform a slave-owning society in just a few months, and that Leela suddenly has a history with slavery on her home world that’s never been mentioned before. Probably most forgivable is the idea of a dramatic courtroom revelation that changes all the spectators’ minds; thanks to real-world politics around 2020, it’s pretty clear that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes and ears if it’s politically expedient, so that part of the story falls flat now. And there’s a dramatic last-second cliffhanger that has no relation to what came before, revealing that Series 5 and 6 are really one six-part series, and that most of Series 5 is just filler, unfortunately. The writing and characterization are stronger than what came before, but the story hasn’t really gone anywhere.