We got right through Androids of Tara without anyone being sentenced to death: but we make up for it in Power of Kroll. Not only is Romana sacrificed to the man in a squid suit; but in Episode Three, Ranquin decrees that the Doctor, Romana and Rhom-Dutt should die by "the seventh Holy ritual".
In Ribos Operation, we saw that "the caves below the palace" functioned as a physical analogue to the Plot -- a space in which someone could get lost, encounter monsters, meet new supporting characters, and discover new resources. Similarly, in Stones of Blood a literal cliff acted as a concrete stand-in for the idea of cliff-hangers. When the Doctor and Romana needed to be in peril, they happened to find themselves on the edge of it. In this story, Ranquin is a living, breathing plot-device. Ostensibly, he kills people to propitiate Kroll and for political expediency. But it is clear that he really kills them to save Robert Holmes the trouble of thinking up more organic perils and cliffhangers. Ranquin doesn't kill his enemies when he has the chance: he ties them to stakes and straps them into complicated torture machines. And then goes away. He does this because he's cruel; he does this because the holy rituals tell him to; but mostly, he does it so they have a chance to escape.
It's hard for a writer to create a peril which arises naturally and organically from the situation the hero finds himself in. It's even harder for the hero to come up with a plausible way of escaping from an organic peril. So writers in a hurry create villains who create physical cliffhangers and drop our heroes into them. Good whodunnit writers come up with murders that seem baffling but have perfectly logical explanations. Lazy ones come up with mad serial killers who deliberately set difficult problems for detectives to solve.
So: the three of them are strapped to a medieval torture rack, which is attached to some vines, the idea being that when the sun dries the vines the rack will break our heroes' spines, very slowly. It's the kind of puzzle box that Penelope Pitstop and Batman regularly had to escape from: an over-elaborate death-machine with a deliberate weakness. Three good-guys, chained up alongside each other, three-in-a-bed style, while the Doctor banters and tries to take their minds off the situation: it feels like something out of Carry On, Don't Lose Your Head, or come to that, Crackerjack.
The closest analogy may actually be the Mikado, in which white people with yellow make-up talk very casually about extreme cruelty. ("Something I fancy with burning oil...burning lead or burning oil.") But the Mikado was a black comedy for adults: possibly even a satire against capital punishment. Taking the trouble to dream up a system of breaking someone's spine slowly seems to have an element of ghoulishness to it. A ghoulishness which probably appealed to the target audience; the sort of ghoulishness which kept the London Dungeon and the Chamber of Horrors in business.
Mrs Whitehouse complained when Holmes showed us the Master trying to drown the Doctor, pretty graphically. As a result, the violence was "toned down." I am not sure that treating nastiness as a joke, while focussing on pain and the modus operandiI is necessarily much of an improvement. The Princess Bride treated nasty torture as nasty torture, while retaining a PG rating. Westley does a very good job of appearing scared but trying to be brave.
Batman got out of traps by discovering appropriate gimmicks in his utility belt. Superman would suddenly remember a Kryptonian ability he had never previously mentioned. Mr Spock's magic Vulcan eyelids lasted for precisely one story. The Doctor spends some time talking about swampie architecture: there is a small window in the death-chamber, and what we have seen of the swampies makes it fairly unlikely that they would be able to smelt glass. Fair play to Robert Holmes for taking the trouble to set this up, even if he could have done a better job rubbing out the construction lines. But the solution to the death trap -- that the Doctor suddenly remembers that he can sing a really high note and shatter the glass feels like a cheat; like suddenly remembering the shark-repellant bat-spray. And worse, it feels silly; unDoctorish. Despite references to dame Nellie Melba, he doesn't appear to be singing: so much as emitting a high-pitched whine.
There have been other moments in Season 16 which have seemed very silly; but this is the first time I have felt that the programme was indefensibly taking the piss.
During the torture scene, the Doctor begins to say "Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a child..." Was he about to tell Romana the story about the Gallfreyan guru and the daisyest daisy which he told Jo when they were imprisoned in Atlantis?
Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara
Available to Patreons -- The Power of Kroll
Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor
Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.
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