Name
Space Station Zenobia
Type:
Space station
First Seen In:
The Mysterious Planet
Space Station Zenobia was a Time Lord space station operated by the Celestial Intervention Agency. (The Eight Doctors)
It was massive and equipped with technology to create a time corridor, as well as to pull people and spacecraft through time and space to the station. (The Trial of a Time Lord)
A courtroom was located on-board with a screen that allowed the court occupants to view and access the Matrix. The Seventh Door, a gateway to enter the Matrix, was directly outside the court. The Sixth Doctor was taken from Thoros Beta on 3 July 2379 and placed on trial on board the station. (The Trial of a Time Lord)
The space station was later brought into the orbit of Etarho when The Valeyard was put on trial. (Trial of the Valeyard)
It was later commissioned to be destroyed by Storin. (The Brink of Death) Though by the time of the end of Romana II’s presidency it was still in existence for Livia to send Gaal to have a trial there. (Enemy Lines)
BEHIND THE SCENES
Though the space station was first seen in theTrial of a Time Lord, it was not named until the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Eight Doctors.
The model of the space station was six feet wide. The 45-second-long opening scene of it from the Mysterious Planet was the first use of a motion-control camera on Doctor Who, took a week to film, and cost over £8, 000 making it the most expensive Doctor Who sequence to date. John Nathan-Turner justified the sequence’s cost as it was the first new scene shown to viewers after the programme’s hiatus, and by reusing parts of it as establishing shots for the rest of the Trial stories.[1]