Power of Kroll [5]

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."

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.

 

Power of Kroll [4]

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.

 

 

Power of Kroll [3]

The first episode of Power of Kroll repeats the format of Androids of Tara. Romana takes charge of the Story Arc: the Doctor is uninterested in it. He doesn't actually go fishing this time; but he does sit in a boat, pluck a hollow reed, and idly play a tune on an improvised flute. Romana walks purposefully around the swamp, pointing the Tracer at things. That's her function, both as a character and a plot device: she's a Doctor who wants to follow the plot, to counter balance the Doctor who wants to ignore it. Romana by herself would grab the Key and leave; the Doctor by himself would forget about it altogether.

As in Androids of Tara, the two of them get separated, and become independently involved with the two opposing factions. The Doctor is mistaken for Rhom-Dutt, the gun-runner, stunned, and taken to the refinery. Romana encounters Rhom-Dutt himself and is assumed to be a spy: she's handed over to the Swampies and sentenced to be sacrificed to Kroll...

...whereupon the episode turns, quite consciously and explicitly, into a pastiche of King Kong. Quite a good pastiche. The Swampies do a ritual dance, which looks unfortunately as if they are jogging on the spot. They chant "Kroll! Kroll! Kroll!" very much as the Skull Islanders chanted the name of their pet monkey. There is a gigantic wall with a gigantic gate and gigantic steps leading to a gigantic altar.

King Kong lived on a peninsula which jutted out of Skull Island. (Don't tell Dr Sigmund Freud.) If your peninsula is infested with dinosaurs and giant gorillas, it makes sense to construct a gorilla-proof wall. Anti-squid walls make a lot less sense. Robert Holmes thinks it would be fun if Kroll were a bit like Kong -- which it is -- so he presents the Swampies as King Kong Kosplayers. A Kong Kargo Kult.

But this generates a serious rift in the story. Holmes has constructed a light-touch allegory about colonialism and the mistreatment of native peoples. (Old Doctor Who was never woke.) But he has patterned it after a black and white monster movie which takes it for granted that dark-skinned people are bloodthirsty, superstitious savages.

We know, because we have been told, that the writer of Talons of Weng-Chiang didn't have a racist bone in his body. But the Swampies are a tribe of aboriginal, non-technological supporting characters with green skin: and their first reaction to meeting a white woman is to sacrifice her to their queer pagan ju-ju spirit. We should be relieved that they didn't put her in a cooking pot. (This was before Ewoks.)

Romana is incredibly patronising towards them; although in fairness, Romana is incredibly patronising towards everyone. The racism is baked into the genre. You can't do Kong without saying that people from Abroad who don't wear as many clothes as English people do have a quality about them called "savageness". Thawn is a bigot; he's a bigger monster than the refinery-eating squid. But the narrative structure sees the Swampies from his point of view.

In Androids of Tara, Romana was mistaken for an android and nearly had her head cut off by an engineer. This time, she is forced to join the Fay Wray tribute act. And she tries: she really tries. When Rhom-Dutt threatens her, she retorts with academic psychobabble, just like Romana would have done. ("Emotional insulation is usually indicative of psychofugal trauma.") When Ranquin leads her to the stake: she is sarcastic to him, as Romana would have been. ("I suppose your are enjoying this.") Inches from death, she gives herself a lecture ("It's all nonsense; primitive spirit worship".) She tries her hardest to be the girl-Doctor. She tries her hardest to be Romana. But in the end she can't be. The format won't let her.

Terrance Dicks said that you can only bend the formula so much: however much the writers might have wanted Sarah-Jane to be a modern independent career-woman, she still ends up strapped to a conveyer belt three inches from a circular saw. Romana is the White Guardian's surrogate; cleverer in some ways, than the Doctor himself. But she is also the dolly-bird assistant, something for the Dads, the Doctor Who girl. And the Format wins the day. After seventeen episodes, she finally screams.

It is the night before the night before Christmas in the year after Star Wars. A thirteen year old boy is watching TV. The swampies are jumping up and down, shouting the name of their squid. The priest raises his arms in front of the gate. The gate closes; the priest genuflects towards the altar. It's all rather well composed. The point of view changes. The priest looks into the camera, out of the TV, and chants "Kroll rises from the depths!" with an impressively straight face. Two claws attack Romana. She screams.

Look into the head of that thirteen year old boy; and imagine what went through it.

a: "Romana is in danger: will the Doctor rescue her?"

b: "Claws! A monster!"

c: "Those claws look a bit fake, but that's okay, because Doctor Who is my favourite programme, even though I know that it no longer has the Elusive Magic."

d: "Oh gosh, that monster looks ridiculous, everyone is going to take the piss out of me for liking Doctor Who on Monday morning."

e: "Ha! It was meant to look ridiculous, because it's only one of the Swampies in a monster suit. I win! Ha!"

You have to be a very good singer to make a joke about people who can't sing. Am-Dram groups have got to be very careful with A Midsummer Night's Dream: only very good actors can act acting so badly it's funny. Next week, we are going to see Kroll, and Kroll is going to be one of the least convincing monsters in a long history of unconvincing monsters. So a double feint involving a deliberately unconvincing squid is quite a risk to be taking. And it isn't even convincingly unconvincing. There have been serious Doctor Who monsters which look considerably dafter: the mushroom men in the Chase, the giant prawn in the Invisible Enemy and the Pantomime Horse in Warriors of the Deep, to name but several.

If the man-in-the-squid-suit had been the actual monster I would have known how to mount a defence. "Obvious theatrical iconography is better than failed realism" I would have said. "Doctor Who is much more like a quite good stage play than a very bad movie" I would have added. " As a costume, it isn't at all bad; and like Shakespeare told us, we should eke out their imperfections with our minds." None of which I could say with conviction about the giant split screen marionette. It's a decent model: but like Camelot, it's obviously only a model. The man-in-the-squid-suit could have stood as a symbol.

Perhaps that is Robert Holmes' point. Perhaps he is telling Graham Williams that "physically largest monster of all time" was a silly and impossible brief and they'd have been better off with tried and tested men in rubber suits. Just possibly, this was what Kroll had been originally envisaged to look like. It's quite an elaborate costume for half a minute of screen time.

Ranquin, the Swampie priest, says that "when the servants of Kroll assume his guise, they are part of him". That's not a terrible take on ritual magic. Your Frazers and your Campbells are full of examples of religious systems where "God" is whoever is dressed up as God this week. Human sacrifice isn't only about feeding pretty girls to carnivorous deities; it's also about an acolyte taking on the role of the God-King, sacramentally re-enacting his annual death to make sure that his annual resurrection happens next year. But that point would been better made if the costume had been more obviously symbolic; a tragic Athenian mask or a Hopi Kachina figure.

The Book of Exposition conveniently fills in the gaps in the back-story. It seems that Kroll became ginormous because he swallowed a "sacred relic" belonging to one of the previous High Priests. If the Doctor and Romana connect this with the Key to Time, they don't say so.

Douglas Adams' pitch document proposed various ways in which the Key might have made the Doctor's life difficult. And it is easy to see how the key swallowing squid could have caused the Doctor problems. The premise would be "What if the natives' deity drew its power from the key?" That would create a clear and interesting dilemma "How does the Doctor remove the key without depriving the natives of their perfectly harmless god?"

But this is distinctly not the direction the story goes in. The Doctor doesn't even say "The monster has swallowed the key: we'll have to stay here until we get it back." The Doctor and Romana stay on Delta Magna because they are the Doctor and Romana . The Key's only function is to act as the monster's achilles heel: in the final instalment, the Doctor uses the Tracer to reclaim the Key, reducing Kroll to normal squid size. Once again, the story seems to have gone to some effort to ensure that the Key doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

Power of Kroll was shown in the last weeks of 1978. King Kong was released in the spring of 1933. We are almost exactly as close in time to Power of Kroll as Power of Kroll was to King Kong.

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.

 

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.

 

The Power of Kroll [1]

The Power of Kroll is not very good. 

The Power of Kroll, is, in fact, pretty bad.

The Power of Kroll is a pretty bad bit of TV, and it's a very bad Doctor Who story.

But what do we mean by "a bad Doctor Who story?" Do we mean that it is a Doctor Who story done badly -- a poor implementation of the kind of story which Doctor Who exists to tell? Do we mean that it is bad at being a Doctor Who story -- that it fails to understand the rules and doesn't do the kinds of things that Doctor Who is supposed to do?

Or do we mean that it is just outright bad -- that stories about superstitious natives sacrificing pretty ladies to monsters are inherently silly and not worth telling? Which comes perilously close to saying "Power of Kroll is bad because it is a Doctor Who story." Power of Kroll is bad because Doctor Who is bad.

What's wrong with Power of Kroll?

The monster, the giant squid, Kroll himself, is plainly ridiculous. But Power of Kroll is hardly the only Doctor Who story to be spoiled by a ridiculous monster. And Kroll isn't catastrophically misconceived, like the Nucleus of the Swarm or the Murker. And he isn't as jarringly terrible as the Weng-Chiang rat or the Kinda snake. He's just not particularly well done.

Classic monster movies like King Kong and Godzilla sometimes struggled to convince us that their model monsters and their human actors were part of the same world. Back projection used to inadvertently create an impression that there was an invisible glass wall separating Carl Denhem from the Stegosaurus. The Power of Kroll is not even that sophisticated: it uses a horizontal split screen; with a squid puppet waving its tentacles in the top half of the picture, and terrified extras running around the bottom half. No-one tries to convince us that the two elements are part of a single picture. Someone unfamiliar with 1970s TV could easily think that the producer was juxtaposing two different pieces of action for dramatic effect, like Ang Lee's art-house Hulk movie.

ITV used to use a split-screen to show us the two teams on University Challenge: some of us used to imagine that Trinity College Cambridge had climbed up a bunk-bed ladder to get into their kiosks. 

Then there are the Swampies. Alien humanoids, coded as "primitive" and "savage" (and not even particularly noble), they have green skins, and green braided hair attached to green shower caps. They look as if they might run a lucrative side-hassle selling tinned sweetcorn.

Green-face is not black-face. Having subjected us to Talons of Weng-Chiang two seasons ago, Robert Holmes resists any temptation to populate an entire planet with obvious racial stereotypes. But green make-up doesn't give the impression of someone with green skin. It gives the impression of someone who is wearing green make up. Tongues and mouths and eyes remain obstinately pink. It is perfectly clear what the green skin is a euphemism for; and even if you can get past that, it still looks ridiculous. 

It is said that the special soap which was supposed to clean the make-up off didn't work, and the actors had to deal with green bed linen and a sickly complexion for weeks afterwards. That sounds altogether too much like something out of a Jeeves and Wooster story. One that is generally omitted from modern collections, I understand. 

But both these issues could be trivially fixed. Imagine a version of the Power of Kroll from a world where the BBC had a higher budget and a bit more time on their hands. A little foliage and some model huts could have smoothed the join between the top of the screen and the bottom of the screen. It wouldn't have made Kroll look "real" but it would have helped us to suspend our disbelief. A more expensive make-up team could have done a better job on the swampies' faces. I imagine that in 1978 there were ways and means of making white skinned people look like green-skinned people, as opposed to people who have had an accident with a paint pot. 

They don't even necessarily have to be green. I don't think their colour is a plot point. There could have been some other signifier of not-humanness. They could have had pointy ears or ridges on their noses like every single alien in Star Trek. You could even have cast racially similar non-white actors in the roles. That would either have made the whole thing less racist; or else make the racism more obvious.

As long as we are playing mind-games, let's go further. Let's get rid of Tony Harding's marionette squid altogether, and replace it with a modern computer generated special effect. Doubtless CGI and green screen is just as artificial as stop-motion and back projection. The End of the World is already starting to look a little clunky and dated. So is Toy Story, sadly. But it's kind of what we expect Doctor Who monsters to look like nowadays; it wouldn't scream "look at me I'm a terrible special effect" in quite the same way. While you're at it, fire the entire swampie cast and replace them with green-face computer smurfs, like the Na'Vi in Avatar.

There are a couple of other issues, but they can all be fixed. The electrical storm looks like the opening credits of Thunderbirds; the alien methane refinery looks like an Airfix oil rig and we keep seeing tentacles which are pretty obviously not to scale with the rest of the monster. All of that can be fixed, in our heads, if not in an actual Special Edition. Ian Levine is probably working on an AI version as we speak. 

So: in our heads, we have ironed out all the flaws. We can now sit back and enjoy the Power of Kroll as the classic classic Doctor Who tale it so clearly is.  

James Burke voice: "Or can we?"

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.