The Armageddon Factor [II]

1 September 1979 [21 minutes]

“I believe this planet is called Skaro.”

The Movellan tells the Doctor what planet he is on. The Doctor is surprised; we are not. The Doctor says something under his breath. The BBC sub-title department think it might have been “Good God!” but I don’t think that’s how the Doctor talks. Tom Baker would have said something a lot stronger. All his frivolity drains away. He starts talking with his serious face. “Why are you here on Skaro?”

There are relatively few recurrent planets in the Doctor Who universe. The Doctor has been to Earth dozens of times. He’s made three visits, so far, to Gallifrey. Two trips to Peladon. Two side-trips to Metabelis Three. Telos has been mentioned several times, but the Doctor has only been there once, when the Cybermen were mostly dead. I make this his fourth visit to Skaro. We know the place like the back of our hand. Like the back of our sink-plunger. It may look like a quarry, but we’ve seen the maps in our Dalek Annuals, radiation mountains and swamps of mutations and all. 

Counter-earth, round the other side of the sun? Capital of a galactic empire? Somewhere in the next universe but two? 

The radiation should have given him the clue. The Doctor’s  very first encounter with his arch-foes began with the needle on the TARDIS radiation detector switching to “Danger” and a mad scramble for anti-radiation gloves. But this moment surprises him. Takes his breath away. He has programmed the TARDIS to select locations at random. And he has arrived on the home planet of his bitterest, most iconic enemies. According to the principle of pot-luck.

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 Armageddon Factor [I]

8 September 1979 [23 minutes]

“So that’s what the Daleks have been looking for...Davros, the evil genius who created them.”

It’s an awesome moment. Four years since we last saw Davros on TV. Centuries since Davros died. His body covered in cobwebs; like a forgotten object in an old lady’s attic. The Doctor turns away. Davros hand begins to twitch. We see it but the Doctor doesn’t. The light on his head comes back on. 

We knew it was coming. The Earth Dalek warned us in advance. But it’s still one of the great episode endings. 

There are three more Dalek stories to come after this one. The revived Davros on trial. The revived Davros turning dead humans into Daleks. The revived Davros and his new Daleks at war with the original Daleks. Dalek schisms and Imperial Daleks and Dalek Civil Wars. Unlimited rice pudding. The Daleks as a former power: post-colonial pepper-pots. 

Actors don’t like acting to props; and writers don’t like writing staccato robot dialogue. That’s why K-9 and Orac are both sarcastic robots. The invention of Davros gave the Daleks a face and a voice. But the facelessness and the roboticness of the Daleks is the very thing which made us love them so much. 

A pivotal moment. From now on, there will be no more Dalek stories. Only stories about Davros and his mechanical minions. 

Once before, the Doctor was sent here, unwillingly, by the Time Lords, at the exact moment of the Dalek's creation. But this time he has arrived at exactly the right place at exactly the right time....according to the principle of pot luck.

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 [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.

 

Androids of Tara [3]

There is a moment in the Fawlty Towers episode 'The Kipper and the Corpse' when Polly refuses to be part of one of Basil Fawlty's face-saving schemes. "If you want to be a Marx Brothers movie, that's up to you..." she tells him. She is thinking of Love Happy which did, among other things involve the concealment of a dead body. It also, entirely irrelevantly, featured an early walk-on by a so-credited Norma-Jean Monroe.

It's a curious moment of lucidity. Polly is the one naturalistic character in a world of extremes and grotesques; she anchors the sit-com in reality. But at this one moment, she seems to see what is happening: she understands that she is the straight woman in a farce, and she tries to run away from it. If she had actually been in a Marx Brothers movie, she wouldn't have known. The boys were at their best when they brought their mayhem to melodramatic storylines which were played relatively straight: surrounded by politicians, opera impresarios and police officers who don't know that a Marx Brothers movie was what they were in. Margaret Dupont based a career on never seeing the joke. (As a matter of fact, she saw it very well.)

Tom Baker, with his grin and his hair and his pockets and his props, is often compared with Harpo Marx. The duel with Grendel in Episode Four of Androids of Tara strongly recalls Harpo's duel with "Kurt" in Night at Casablanca, particularly in the early scenes where he is nonchalantly fending off the sword-master's attacks. The BBC have borrowed a nice castle for the actors to run around, but it can't afford enough cameras or editors or stunt-men to stage a really impressive cinematic sword-fight. So, pretty sensibly, they make it about character: the villain is villainous while the hero won't take the villain seriously.

If you want to press the point, you could say that the Doctor's repartee and one-liners come out of Groucho's play-book -- although without Julius Marx's quick wit, they tend slightly more to cynicism. And I suppose Chico was often portrayed as a good-natured hobo, drifting from job to job and generally coming to the aid of some innocent party. Which may make Romana Zeppo.

The Doctor goes fishing. He goes fishing on Prince Reynart's land. The novelisation says that he doesn't have a licence. Zadek the sword-master zaps him with his electric lightsabre and tries to physically restrain him.

 

"Do you mind not standing on my chest?" says the Doctor "My hat's on fire."

Did that line come from David Fisher, the skilled TV script writer? Was it an addition by script editor Anthony Read who we suspect approves of silliness and is functioning as a proto-Douglas? Or did it arise from Tom Baker's disruptive, Marxist foolery? Is the actor not taking his role seriously? The script editor not taking the script seriously? Or was the script not very serious to begin with?

I was once lucky enough to watch Tom recording an audio episode (Hornets Nest). On the day I was in the studio, he was convinced that the line "Benton, lend me your handkerchief!" would be hugely improved if he was allowed to change it to "Benton, lend me your trousers!" ("What's wrong with trousers? Go to the BBC and you'll find it's full of people wearing trousers!") He was entirely professional and allowed himself to be overruled by the producer and the script writer, and of course, audio allows for a lot more improv than TV. But it is clear that the Fourth Doctor is sometimes created in the moment by Tom Baker.

The Doctor wants to be a Marx Brothers movie. He's the anarchic, farcical element erupting into a TV show and a universe which takes itself far too seriously. Next season he will be cut lose. The season after that, a new producer will ask him politely if he wouldn't mind sticking to the script. And the whole show will unravel.

William Hartnell put his back out and missed Episode Four of the Dalek Invasion of Earth. (Also Episode Three of The Tenth Planet, and nearly the whole of Celestial Toymaker.) Frazer Hines caught chicken pox and was temporarily recast during the Mind Robber. William Russell ceded a whole episode of Sir Lancelot to Brian the squire; Bud Collyer spent a whole week locked in a box with a lump of Kryptonite. So perhaps, in the world of counterfactuals, the Doctor really did just go fishing and Romana really did carry the whole of Androids of Tara by herself. She went into the adventure full of confidence; gradually got into more and more trouble; escaped by the skin of her teeth; realised that being the Doctor was not nearly as easy as it looked; but still reported back to the TARDIS saying how straightforward it had all been.

But in our universe, that is not what happened. What happens is that Romana goes for a pleasant stroll. Androids of Tara is filmed on location in the grounds of Leeds Castle; so we have to swallow an alien planet which looks like an English Heritage site. But at least it looks consistently like an English Heritage site: there is no jumping between BBC sets and location shots, no juxtaposing of interiors and exteriors. In those innocent days when no-one could flip the channel or look down at their phones, the director is allowed to linger on the visuals, and there is a picture postcard loveliness to many of the scenes. Romana in silhouette trips through the woods and over some stepping stones. One almost thinks of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin.

She comes upon a statue. St George and the Dragon, or St Michael and Satan, or the Taran equivalent thereof. The dragon part of the statue if the Fourth Segment. Romana changes it to the puzzle-piece, and picks it up. And there you have it: all done and dusted in eight minutes.

"Romana locates the fourth segment of the key to time with ease" says the Radio Times.

And again, skip through the path we did not take and through the door we never opened. Romana takes Segment Four back to the Doctor. She joins him on his picnic. There were episodes of Z-Cars and Hill Street Blues in which the protagonists sat around waiting for a 999 call that never came. Whole dramas have been based on that kind of premise. A layabout sanitation engineer and a hard light hologram, sitting under a tree, filling the time waiting for someone they know will never arrive. The Doctor and Romana's dialogue would have been funny enough to fill an episode. The BBC has never gone in for clip-shows; but maybe the Doctor and Romana could have traded flash-backs about past adventures?

Of course, this isn't what happened. Probably no-one watching even noticed that the premise of Doctor Who was being mucked around with. No-one expects post-modernism in the gap between Larry Grayson and Basil Brush.

What if they gave a Doctor Who story and no-one came? What if the Doctor and Romana simply opted out of the plot? Romana is attacked by literally the worst monster ever to appear on Doctor Who. To call it a Muppet would be overgenerous: it looks as if it is going to demand a bowl of Sugar Puffs. And suddenly a caricature knight, with a helmet and a literally flashing blade pops up and scares it away. The Doctor has told Romana to be the hero of this week's story; but she falls straight back into the role of damsel in distress. Count Grendel (for it is he) literally lifts her up in his arms and carries her back to his castle of evilness. Before long, she is tied up and his android engineer is about to cut her head off with a buzz-saw. (She draws a dotted line on her neck to make it easier.) Romana, to her credit again, doesn't scream; she is as disdainful of the proceedings as the Doctor would have been under the circumstances.

Meanwhile, the Doctor falls in with Reynart's people. They are definitely nicer than Grendel's team; but the Doctor is uninterested in the power struggles on Tara. He keeps trying to leave; but Reynart's faction refuse to let him go.

What would happen if the Doctor and Romana opted out of the plot? Then the plot would have to come and grab them. Just as it has every Saturday for the last fifteen years.

In Episode 4, the Doctor, passing through Grendel's android laboratory, picks up something and puts it in his pocket. As they are about to leave, Romana suddenly admits that she has forgotten the Key to Time: exactly what she accused the Doctor doing in Episode 1. After a brief panic, it turns out that the key was what the Doctor picked up in the lab. Fisher, like Adams, is an honourable scriptwriter who believes in fair-play foreshadowing.

The message could hardly be less subtle. The Umbrella Theme was a terrible idea. No-one cares about the meta-plot. The last thing Doctor Who ever needed was a McGuffin.

A guard with a crossbow walks across a castle wall on a moonlit night. A man paddles a boat across the moat. Two double doors swing open; a man in a red uniform holding a helmet strides through and addresses a hunch-back.

"There must be no hitches"

"No master."

We could absolutely be watching a BBC 1 teatime historical serial. Except for one thing. The man in the boat has a silly scarf. And a robot dog.

Androids of Tara is not a Doctor Who story. But at this point in the show's trajectory, the word "story" hardly applies. The story -- personified by the Guardian -- is the adversary; the thing which the Baker-Doctor rejects and refuses to take seriously. The plot is a boundary for the Doctor to push against; the universe is his straight man. Not exactly self parody. Not exactly camp. Joyful, mad, incongruous absurdity. Anthony Hope with Robots.

One of these things is not like the other one.

"Could you move your foot; my hats on fire."  The BBC did Prisoner of Zenda straight in 1984: I bet it was no where near this much fun.

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.

 

Androids of Tara [2]

As the curtain rises on Episode One, the Doctor is playing chess. Not deep in concentration across a table, but lolling on the floor of the TARDIS, one end of his scarf wrapped around K-9.

There is no reason for the scarf to be wrapped around the dog: the Doctor has done it pointlessly, like a teenager wearing his school tie as a headband. He's being more than usually petulant. He makes a rude face at K-9 after making what he thinks is a clever move. He patronises K-9 when the robot makes what he considers to be a terrible one. When, inevitably, the Doctor loses, he unsportingly claims that chess is predictable and uninteresting.

We saw the same dynamic at the beginning of the Sunmakers. K-9 is good at chess and the Doctor is a bad loser. We're on K-9 and Romana's side: it's funny when the show-off Doctor is hoisted on his own multi-coloured petard. But one can't help thinking that the format is undermining the hero.

Why chess? Is this week's story going to be about whether it is better to follow textbook tactics or think outside the box? Is it going to be about the limits of artificial intelligence -- about whether organic life-forms can out-think artificial ones? Will we see the people of the universe reduced to pawns in a game between the Black Guardian and the White?

None of the above. In fact, the chess game has no relevance to the rest of the action. It's filler; there to represent down-time. George Lucas also showed an alien playing chess with a machine in order to indicate a transition between two adventures. Chewbacca, like the Doctor, is a terrible loser.

It's also there to indicate the Doctor's mood. The Doctor is signalling to Romana -- and to the White Guardian, if he is watching -- that he is bored with the quest and wants to opt out of it. And David Fisher is making very much the same point to us viewers; and very possibly to Graham Williams as well. The Key to Time theme has been an abject failure; and we're all heartily sick of it. Androids of Tara is about what happens when the hero (and the writer) opt out of the meta-plot. The Doctor is playing chess at Romana. One thinks of Marvin phoning up Zaphod in order to wash his head at him.

*

In Stones of Blood, the voice of the White Guardian popped up in the TARDIS to remind us that Season 16 was all about the Key To Time. In Androids of Tara, it falls to Romana to do so. And she uses some very interesting language:

"Aren't you forgetting something."

"I don't think so."

"What about our task. The Key to Time, remember?"

"Oh that old thing."

"Yes, that old thing. The Guardian did stress the need for urgency." 

The idea of the Doctor forgetting -- or pretending to forget -- his mission is distinctly odd. I suppose Sir Galahad might conceivably have said "My task is to find the Holy Grail" and Princess Leia might possibly have said  "My task is to deliver the secret plans". But it is strange for the Doctor to describe the quest for the Key to Time as a "task" -- as if saving the universe from eternal chaos is a chore; a bit of busy-work that he can't quite be bothered to get around to. He calls the most powerful artefact in the universe "that old thing". Arthur Dent used the same words to describe the eponymous Guide.

In previous seasons, the Doctor has been motivated by his innate sense of right and wrong; and his innate wish to find things out. But he doesn't have "missions" or "tasks": he wanders the universe quixotically getting involved in whatever is happening. When he is given a mission, by the Time Lords or the Brigadier, he resists it and complains about it. Going around the universe collecting plot coupons -- however valuable -- is a chore.

And it's a chore for the writers too. We can see Mr Fisher and Mr Holmes reluctantly working the Key into their stories, before getting on with the tale they would have told in any case. Only Douglas Adams seemed interested in finding ways to use the Key as a jumping off point for a narrative that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been there.

So. The Doctor goes on strike. He opts out of the story. He delegates the job of finding the Fourth Segment to Romana. She has been acting as a kind of stand-in Doctor for the past twelve weeks in any case. He announces that he is going to go fishing and leave her to it.

Romana doesn't know what fishing is. Are there no fish on Gallifrey? Not even singing ones, in pools of liquid gold? Or are Time Lords vegetarians -- or opposed to even the mildest of bloodsports? (Romana has also never heard of horses.) The Doctor claims to have learned about fishing from Isaac Walton -- of course -- so maybe the sport is unique to earth. For once, he doesn't say that he taught Walton all he knew, so perhaps this particular name-drop is even true. On the other hand, Romana appears to be a pretty advanced chess player, able to spot checkmate a dozen moves ahead by glancing at the board. Is she so brilliant -- is chess so simple? -- that she can play like a master after observing a single game? Or is chess another of the things that humans learned from Gallifrey?

Romana goes to a wardrobe and selects a new dress. The Doctor goes to a cupboard and selects a fishing rod. Romana's cupboard contains a selection of clothes, in alphabetical order; the Doctor's, naturally, is full of junk. 

Why do we need to see where the Doctor got his fishing rod, or indeed, where Romana got her frock? Last week, the Doctor produced a lawyer's wig out of thin air: if he had just emerged from the TARDIS with a fishing rod in his hand, we wouldn't have questioned it. When we first met Romana, she was wearing an elegant but impractical white gown. We didn't particularly wonder where she got the more sensible pink dress she was wearing in the Pirate Planet. But David Fisher apparently did wonder, because he dropped a tiny "Romana gets changed" sequence into Stones of Blood. She asks the Doctor if he likes her natty peach trouser-suit: the Doctor, of course, ignores her. So in this story, we actually see her choosing her dress.

I remember a bit of ephemera: a strip in a Countdown or TV Comic Summer Special in which the Third Doctor asks Jo Grant to change her clothes before travelling to the Olden Days. "My own clothes are suitable for any time period" he explained. Which makes sense. The Fourth Doctor's get-up is presumably equally inappropriate wherever he goes in the universe. 

It lampshades a problem that has never occurred to us before. very like Sarah-Jane suddenly wondering how she understands renaissance Italian. Maybe the same Time Lord Gift ensures that travellers always blend in with their surroundings. Or maybe it's a mechanism of the TARDIS: the Tomorrow People used to have Chameleon Circuits fitted into their spacesuits, I seem to remember. Back in the day, we tackled the question of "what does the Doctor eat" -- the TARDIS has a futuristic replicator which produces food-flavoured tablets. Much later, we learned that the TARDIS had a bathroom; although not, of course, a bathroom. The TARDIS was never just a travelling device: it is clear in Unearthly Child that the Doctor and Susan regard it as their home.

So: there could have been a futuristic Clothes Replicator which materialised genre-appropriate costumes at the push of a button. It could have been called the Loom. And I expect that canon-conscious fans would say that it does. The TARDIS can be what it likes, inside and outside, and it just so happens that, this week, the Time Lord Clothing Loom Interface has been configured to look like an old fashioned wardrobe. The console room in New New New Who seems to reconfigure itself on a season-by-season basis. 

But to me, that spoils the moment. Old Who is at its most sensible when it least makes sense. The TARDIS is a magic box, but it's also a rickety old machine that doesn't quite work. It's a piece of fabulously advanced Galifreyan technology; but it's also a sprawling, Hogwartian Gormenghast.

It certainly does have a wardrobe: Sarah-Jane once found one of Victoria's old dresses there. She also found a whole room full of wellington boots. The very first time we saw the interior, there were antique chairs, hatstands, and what looked like a wooden peacock positioned around the ultra-tech console. The TARDIS is very big, and the Doctor has been travelling for a very long time so of course he has acquired a lot of stuff. We first met him in a junk yard.

The final episodes of Invasion of Time weren't a one-off aberration. That's now what the TARDIS looks like. It's not a spaceship or a machine; it's where the Doctor and Romana go when they are not in a story. There is a sense that we are peeling away a backdrop, looking at a shabby bag-stage reality. Chess, fishing, clothes, bickering. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are killing time until the writer thinks up something for them to do.

It's silly. It will get sillier. It could validly be seen as undermining or parodying the premise of the show. Up until Ribos Operation there was a viewpoint character, a human in the TARDIS. Now there is the Doctor and the lady Doctor. So if we get to glimpse their off-stage existence, it has to be weird, surreal, ridiculous. Soon enough, things will swing the other way and Peter Davison will reduce the TARDIS to a time travelling Premier Inn. 

There was a popular children's TV series about a little man who tried on historical costumes; and found himself transported back in time to the period of the clothes: the Wild West if he was trying on a cowboy suit; Ancient Rome if he was trying on a toga.

"Romana gets changed." At the beginning of the next series, we will see Romana emerging from a changing room in a series of different bodies.

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.