The Power of Kroll [2]

So: what is right with Power of Kroll?

It's a Robert Holmes story. It's well constructed. It's based on some solid world-building; with even a little smidgeon of political messaging in the background. (This was before wokeness.)

Take a look at Episode Four. We're in a high-tech installation on an alien planet. Human colonists are refining methane, possibly as a food source for their home world. The refinery is being menaced by that ridiculously gigantic squid. The commander of the refinery announces that he is going to nuke the squid from orbit, because that's the only way to be sure. But blowing up Kroll will also wipe out the swampies. 

There are a whole lot of wrinkles. The refinery crew come from Delta Magna: the action takes place on one of the planet's moons. But Delta Magna is itself an earth colony: Kroll and the swampies were displaced to the moon when the earth people arrived, some hundreds of years ago. Plans are underway to expand the refining operation, which would have destroyed the swampies' way of life in any case. 

A nasty gun-runner with what could be a South African accent is supplying the swampies with weapons to use against the colonisers. He's only in it for the money; the guns don't work. And it turns out that he's being paid, not by liberals on the home-world, but by Thawn, the Nasty Commander, to provide him with a pretext to massacre the natives. 

The methane that the colonists are refining is largely being generated by Kroll. (Did I mention that he is really a very large squid indeed?) So the thing which is threatening to destroy the refinery is the very thing which is keeping it going. How ironic! Or, put another way if Thawn destroys Kroll, he will put himself out of business. 

The swampies worship Kroll as a deity. Their leader, Ranquin, is either a religious fanatic or else a cynical politician using superstition to maintain his grip on the population. Or, possibly both. But Kroll is indifferent to the swampies. He's just a squid. (This was before Call of Cthulhu; although it was a long time after Call of Cthulhu.)

This is decent, interesting world-building. I was tempted to type "a complex scenario": it does indeed feel like the sort of thing I would have come up with in my Dungeons & Dragons days. Create a multi-sided conflict in which some sides are nastier than others. Draw a map, with areas marked "the swamp", "the refinery", "the underground passage" and "the temple". Drop the player characters into the middle of it, in such a way that they can't help but disrupt the equilibrium. See if they can navigate it without becoming squid-food. 

So. Thawn fires the nuclear missile at Kroll. But one of the crew, Duggen, reveals his hand. He is a liberal: a member of the Sons of Earth, a cult or pressure group which believes that all life is sacred because it began on Mother Earth. The idea, of "Earth" having a quasi-religious significance for the humans of a diaspora was previously touched on in the Sontaran Experiment. I don't think this implies that the two stories share a universe; merely that Robert Holmes re-used ideas.

Swamps are impassable to robots, so Duggen is played by voice-of-K9, John Leeson. The voice is not particularly recognisable; but something in his mannerisms kept putting me in mind of a children's TV presenter. I had, of course, forgotten that before Leeson was K-9, he had been Bungle the Bear. 

Thawn also reveals his hand: he is an out and out racist and doesn't regard the swampies lives as being of any value whatsoever. Thawn knocks Duggen out and proceeds with the launch. It is a well established fact in the Doctor Who universe that a single blow to the head instantly immobilises a person, but that the person "comes round" in a few minutes with no after-effects. Presumably, no-one involved has ever seen a boxing match. Duggen recovers; presses the Big Red Abort button; and is shot by Thawn. A third crew member, Fenner, accuses Thawn of murder, but reluctantly remains at his post. 

The whole of the story rotates around this scene. It's much more interesting than the human sacrifices, giant monsters and torture devices, because it's about characters doing things because they are the things those characters would do. Duggen and Thawn and Fenner have got points of view and beliefs. The Doctor is only peripherally involved: he has risked his life to disable the bomb; which ironically means that the Big Red Abort button had no effect and Duggen sacrificed himself for nothing. 

"Touch that button and I swear I will kill you" says Thawn. 

"Then kill me" says Duggen, "But you won't kill the others."

"That was cold blooded murder" says Fenner.

It's all terribly dramatic, albeit with a strong emphasis on the "melo". The elements of a decently constructed imaginary history intersect on a single choice by a single character. The Big Red Button is the same kind of thing as the Thermal Exhaust Port or the Golden Snitch. And the situation has some interesting, if not particularly subtle, parallels with the real world. An indigenous population have been displaced from their own land; and are about to be displaced a second time because their colonisers have found valuable minerals in their new home. The Doctor actually refers to the swampies as living in a reservation. And Thawn describes his missile attack as the final solution. (Did I mention that Doctor Who only became woke in 2017?) 

Robert Holmes is a very good writer. And one of the things he is very good at is silly, fiddly, playful dialogue. Think of Hade endlessly calling his boss "your amplification" and "your voluminousness" in Sun Makers. Think of the fussy aliens in Carnival of Monsters complaining that "if you give a functionary a hygiene chamber they will store fossil fuel in it" . Think of that line in Weng-Chiang about South East Asians marching toward Iceland. 

Maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe Graeme McDonald had told Graham Williams to tell Holmes that he wasn't allowed to do jokes. But there are no embellishments: no witty moments or memorable one-liners. There is some characterisation: Duggen nearly loses his temper when called back from his break, but just keeps himself under control and starts doing his job. Garron and Unstoffe (in Ribos Operation) are funny and likeable and well-acted: we'd happily have spent more time with them regardless of what they were doing in the story. Litefoot and Jago (in Talons of Weng-Chiang) were so amusing that they eventually got their own spin-off series. Thawn, Duggen and Fenner are simply the nasty-one, the nice-one and the in-between-just-doing-my-duty-one. They play their role in the story and nothing else. 

Dull stories are often saved by Tom Baker's personal magnetism; but this time, his improv seems to be kept on a tight leash. When the Doctor conveniently discovers a book which narrates the history of the Swampie tribe, Romana asks if it is "holy writ". "It's atrociously writ" replies the Doctor. This is just about as funny as it gets. When Romana and the Doctor were required to explain the plot of Pirate Planet, Douglas Adams made some attempt to make it funny. Holmes presents us with unpolished exposition:

--That shows them being evicted from Delta Magna

--Where they originally came from.

-- That's right. They were given this moon as a sort of reservation. 

and

--If a thing that size takes a nap every couple of centuries, its feeding processes must continue independently, probably through its tentacles.

 -- And Thawn's men vanished while they were taking methane samples, drilling into the sediment.

--Like prodding a sleeping tiger.

---The refinery's heat exchangers must have raised the lake temperature by several degrees already... 

David Fisher presented Tara as a fait accompli and proceeded to have fun with it -- poisonings and sword fights and ambushes and rescues. He never shows us how Tara came to be or how it works, because it obviously doesn't. Robert Holmes is interested in the set-up on Delta Magna: indeed, that's pretty much all he is interested in. The narrative development consists of gradual unveiling of the back story, and very little else. What action there is feels like padding.

Bad story? Bad Doctor Who story? Bad TV? It turns out that Plot, simply served up as Plot without any trimmings or flavourings, is really not very appetising.

In 1996, one Daniel Hooper was involved in a direct-action campaign to prevent a new road being built in an environmentally sensitive area. He would have been six years old when this story was transmitted.

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.