The Armageddon Factor (IX)

7 Feb 1979

 “Then Mentalis will go into it’s Armageddon sequence, and we’ll be bits of dust flying round the cosmos.”

Ribos Operation, Pirate Planet and Androids of Tara are, in their different ways, excellent Who stories. Power of Kroll and Stones of Blood are pretty poor, but with redeeming features. Armageddon Factor is outright bad. 

The first episode contains a tolerably interesting set-up. Two planets are engaged in an endless war. A pacifist Princess and her boy-friend are secretly making contact with the peace movement on the other side. There are odd flares of inventiveness: the story opens with a painfully romantic scene which turns out to be a war-time propaganda movie; while hopelessly biassed news-broadcasts play in the background. John Woodvine is good value as the warmongering Marshall, but his attempts to evoke Winston Churchill in his speeches tip into parody. His bumbling henchmen Merek is pure panto. After the embarrassment of Power of Kroll the special effects are rather decent. The visual effects team know how to do model spaceships. Star Wars is now firmly lodged in the Zeitgeist; the shots of the Marshall and Merek in the cockpit of their flagship evoke the Millennium Falcon a bit too specifically; and it's compulsory for cameras to pan the underside of big spaceships. 

If I were going to attempt what Other Bloggers call “a redemptive reading", I would say that the failure of Armageddon Factor is the point of the story. Power of Kroll followed the Doctor Who template just about as closely as anything possibly could. The opening episode of Armageddon Factor suggests that Bob Baker and Dave Martin are going to do the same kind of thing: a generic Doctor Who space opera with an anti-Cold-War message. (This was before the series became political.) 

It is the presence of the Key to Time which disrupts this perfectly good idea: which causes the action to stop dead for two episodes. What might have been a story about the Doctor brokering peace between two warring factions becomes a quarrel about the last plot coupon; with a strong female character reduced the status of playing piece and finally an interestingly shaped crystal. 

The Key, simply by existing marks the end of Doctor Who; the end, in fact, of all stories. That’s what the Guardian said at the beginning, after all. If the Doctor refuses the quest, nothing will ever happen to him again. An over-arching plot device means the end of all plots. So this final story has to fail: it has to show us what Doctor Who would be like if the Quest succeeded. The Doctor’s rejection of the Key resets the format; returns us to the premise of a wandering free-agent Doctor.

There is a third factor in play in the war between Atrios and Zeos: a planet of evil on which a villainous villain called The Shadow villainously lives. He answers directly to the Black Guardian and is trying to get to the Sixth Key before the Doctor does. He mind-controls the Marshall from behind a mirror.

The Shadow has no motivation whatsoever: he is just evil. He has no back story or history and is not even very interesting to look at. 

Couldn't we at least have said he was the Master? The Master working for the Black Guardian while the Doctor worked for the White one would have had a certain obvious panache. 

The Shadow can't finish a single sentence without engaging in evil laughter. When the Black Guardian turns out to be Valentine Dyall, there is a serious danger of an Evil Laughter arms race breaking out. (This was before the television version of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, but after the LP version: it's complicated.) [*] The idea that an Evil Force and a Mad Computer are keeping two sides at war unnecessarily doesn't really say a great deal about the nuclear arms race, or indeed about anything else.

I won't say that Lalla Ward looks anything like Carrie Fisher or even that her hairstyle looks like Princess Leia's; and the Shadow certainly looks nothing like Darth Vader. But when a princess-shaped McGuffin is menaced by a card-carrying Dark Lord, you can’t help picking up a certain post-Star-Wars energy. Like Leia, Astra is simultaneously a self-assured independent woman and a damsel in distress. I’m not sure how great a feminist statement that is. 

The Doctor is able to infer the shape of the final segment of the Key from the other five, which feels a bit like solving a Rubik Cube by steaming the stickers off. (This was before Rubik Cubes.) Is the physical shape of the Key what gives it it’s power? Bob and Dave extrapolated this development from the previous five stories: it’s not implicit in Graham Williams cosmological brain-fart. The Doctor is able to use the five-and-a-bit segments to literally stop the story; to entrap the only interesting character in a time loop for the whole of episodes four, five and six, while he flits between the two planets, interacting with a mad computer, a temporarily mad K-9 and a maddeningly unfunny cockney Time Lord. At the beginning of Episode Six he gets shrunk really small; from which nothing interesting follows. 

The evil Shadow's evil planet of evil resembles nothing so much as a room in the Clacton seaside haunted house. The Doctor and Romana are ferried between Zeos and Atrios by trans-mat, without the remotest sense that the two planets are different. We might as well be running down corridors on different sides of a large office block.

Many bad stories have been redeemed by a cast who are having fun; but Tom Baker seems to phone in his performance; his Thespian wit reduced to a sustained, disengaged sulk. It might be that the Doctor resents the fact that the White Guardian still controls him. It might be that Tom Baker resents the fact that he's been denied his talking cabbage. It might simply be that Tom Baker is a very good actor, and five years is too long to be stuck in a single role. But no-one seems to be putting in the slightest effort.

It is the presence of the Key—the McGuffin which everyone is looking for—which kills the story. The presence of the Shadow —the villain who is just there to be villainous—invades the centre of the Zeos/Atrios plot and stops it developing. The Doctor's partial control over the Key ensures that for three episodes, nothing happens. When Drax the Time Lord garage mechanic crops up, we feel a bit like the Samuel Beckett's tramps when two additional characters arrive in Waiting For Godot: “Reinforcements! Now we're sure to see the episode through.” Drax has a funny accent, but a funny accent is not sufficient to redeem two whole episodes of narrative impasse. 

There could have been a plot: there was supposed to have been a plot. 

It turns out that Princess Astra herself is the Sixth Segment: in order for the Doctor to complete the quest, a human being has to be imprisoned in a glass cube for eternity. She herself is more or less okay with the idea this because it is her Destiny. 

Now, this should have created some tension and jeopardy: a bona fide moral dilemma. To save the universe, the Doctor must effectively kill Princess Astra. Has he that right? This was the sort of dilemma which Douglas Adams had in mind in his original brain-storm document. 

But nothing really comes of it: it’s simply the clue which allows the Doctor to spot that the White Guardian must really be the Black Guardian because the White Guardian couldn’t be quite that callous about a human life. 

So was the Quest was impossible from the beginning--could it only be completed by the sacrifice of an innocent life, something the Doctor would never, ever permit? Has the Black Guardian been terribly clever, hiding one of the keys in a form that was morally inaccessible to the forces of goodness? 

Imagine a more interesting ending to The Armageddon Factor. Imagine something truly apocalyptic. The Black Guardian is winning. The Universe is degenerating into chaos. Earth is about to be destroyed. Mary Tamm is going to be vaporised. And the Doctor can end it all and restore order. All he has to do is slay Lalla Ward. 

WWTDD?

The Indian Epic Maharbarat, or at any rate the Peter Brook movie, ends with the hero Arjun reaching the gates to heaven. The Hindu equivalent of St Peter welcomes him, but says that Heaven has a strict “no dogs allowed” policy. Arjun refuses to enter heaven: he won’t accept enlightenment if even one creature remains in darkness. So, of course, he is allowed in: the dog was the final test. 

In the great universe of counterfactuals, perhaps there is one in which the Doctor saves the universe by refusing to sacrifice Astra. Perhaps the Black Guardian’s entire scheme was to destroy the Doctor by making him transgress his own morality. I think that even faced with eternal chaos, the Doctor would have been one of those who walked away from omelas.

[*] Dyall played the medical student who lends Trevor Howard his apartment keys in Brief Encounter: I never knew that.

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.