The first Star Trek movie was not very good.
The second Star Trek movie was much better.
The third Star Trek movie was not as good as the second one, but the fourth one was somewhat better than the third, depending on your appetite for self-parody.
So Star Trek fans started to say, first as a joke, then as a proverb and finally as an object of faith, that the even numbered movies were the good ones. Star Trek VI is merely very bad, where Star Trek V, had been very bad indeed, so the theory sort of holds up.
The Next Generation movies weren't numbered. If they had been, we would have to have changed the proverb so it said something like "II - V are dreadful creatures / only I has redeeming features."
I don't really think the proverb works. In fact, I'm rather a fan of Search For Spock. It would make more sense to say that each Star Trek movie was an over-reaction to its predecessor. Not nearly enough happens in Star Trek: The Motion Picture; so far too much happens in Wrath of Kahn. Wrath of Kahn is a little static and dialogue-heavy; so Search for Spock involves literal cliffhangers and starship crashes and exploding planets. Search for Spock takes itself much too seriously; so Voyage Home doesn't take itself seriously at all. Voyage Home doesn't feel remotely like Star Trek, so Final Frontier feels like an extended TV episode. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
I've proposed that we look at the Key to Time cycle as a dialogue about what Doctor Who is, and what Doctor Who ought to become. But perhaps we could also see it as a pendulum swinging wildly between extreme narrative positions. Ribos Operation is an anti-Doctor-Who story, in which the hero is peripheral to the plot; Pirate Planet is an exaggeratedly huge Doctor Who story in which the hero defeats a monstrous plan by a monstrous villain. Stones of Blood is a by-numbers parody of Doctor Who tropes; Androids of Tara rejects the tropes wholesale and shunts the Doctor and Romana into a completely different genre. So it doth follow as the night the day that Power of Kroll is a generic Doctor Who story. An uncritical presentation of the format. A Doctor Who story with nothing added and nothing taken away. Doctor Who, the whole of Doctor Who, and nothing but Doctor Who.
Which makes its status as the worst Doctor Who story of all time all the more alarming.
"But Andrew: isn't all this just a smart-arse way of saying that Season 16 consists of different stories by different writers and different directors? And isn't this equally true of Season 15 and Season 17? The old Doctor Who was an anthology show: more like the Twilight Zone than, say, Saphire and Steel or Blake's Seven."
Up to a point, that's true. But Season 16 is eclectic even by Doctor Who standards. The opening and closing stories of Season 5 -- Tomb of the Cybermen and Wheel In Space -- are clearly two iterations of the same kind of television programme. The same could be said of the Three Doctors and the Green Death (Season 10). Ribos Operation and Armageddon Factor really have nothing to connect them apart from the TARDIS, the Doctor, Romana and sometimes K-9.
You could say, if you wanted to, that there was a lack of creative vision. You could say that Graham Williams was genuinely experimenting with where the series could go; or that he had already decided that "where it could go" was "in lots of different directions at once." If the selling point of Doctor Who is that the hero can go anywhere and do anything, then why doesn't he? And that could be the reason Williams dreamed up the Key to Time. A whacky season in which the series is forcibly dragged out of its comfort zone; with a big perspex cube to reassure us that the six different adventures are all segments of one big story.
If an artist puts two images side by side, the person looking at them will see connections. They'll interpret one in the light of the other. A Union Jack alongside a bottle of HP Sauce means something different from a bottle of HP Sauce alongside a Big Mac. And they both mean something quite different from a photograph of a jar of Branston pickle alongside a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI. The Knight's courtly romance is followed by the Miller's extended fart gag. I'm So Tired segues into Blackbird. These are true facts about the Canterbury Tales and the White Album. If there is such a thing as the Key to Time, then Androids of Tara is part of what Power of Kroll means.
Part way through Episode Four, the Doctor and Romana are arrested by Thawn. "Put your hands where I can see them and walk straight ahead" he barks.
"Haven't you forgotten something?" says the Doctor "Shouldn't you say 'Don't make any sudden moves'"
It's one of the few decent Bakerisms in the story. It would be interesting to know if Neil McCarthy had really forgotten the line and Tom was mercilessly acting as prompter. The whole scene feels slightly improvised. (Tom Baker even fluffs one of his own lines: "Well I forgot -- I remembered that I forgot to say goodbye.")
Graham Williams or Robert Holmes or Tom Baker has made a joke about the cliches of Doctor Who. The Doctor has drawn our attention to the fact that Thawn is a stereotyped Doctor Who bad guy saying the kinds of things stereotyped Doctor Who bad guys always say.
And you could pretty much say that about the whole story. Military fascists doing the kinds of things military fascists do. Savages doing the kinds of things which savages do. And Doctor Who companions doing the kinds of things which Doctor Who companions do.
Power of Kroll is Doctor Who at its most mechanical. Robert Holmes has literally been told not to put in any jokes; Tom Baker's ad libs are minimal. The setting and its conflicts are well-conceived; but the narrative consists mainly in telling us about the back story, rather than letting us see it. Delta Magna is not a place in the way that Ribos was. It's as if we are watching a first draft for a Doctor Who story; a bare structure into which the fun and the drama is going to be inserted at a later date. Yes: it contains the single biggest monster ever to appear in Doctor Who. (Have we definitely measured Kroll and found that he is bigger than the Skarsen?) But it wouldn't have made very much difference if the swampies god had been an alligator or a snake or a gorilla. Size doesn't matter, even if the special effects were better, which they aren't.
And some of us like Doctor Who enough that Doctor Who with nothing added and nothing taken away is still an enjoyable breakfast serial. Some of us enjoy Big Red Buttons as much as we enjoy watching pretty ladies being sacrificed; even when there is insufficient context to make them truly memorable.
So I am reluctant to write Power of Kroll off as the worst story of all time. Or even the worst story in the Sixteenth Season. But I do have a sense of Robert Holmes -- or Graham Williams, or the White Guardian -- saying "You want Doctor Who? Then you deserve to get it. Good and hard."
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