Armageddon Factor (VIII)

10 Feb 1979 

“Now no one knows where we’re going. Not even the Black Guardian.”

It isn't possible, is it, that Graham Williams embarked on the Key to Time saga without a clear idea of how he would end it? 

It isn't possible that he sent the Doctor off on a scavenger hunt for the ultimate weapon, and then handed the final episode to a couple of decent but plodding Who scriptwriters and said “Finish this off however you like”?

We know about the terrible fate that befell the Trial of a Time Lord: how Robert Holmes died and Eric Saward walked out and the fourteen part saga had to be wound up by two equally decent but equally plodding scriptwriters, on a set which had already been built, with a lawyer standing over them preventing them using any of the original scenario. 

No such shenanigans seem to have befallen the Key To Time. Graham Williams handed the ending of the saga to Bob Baker and Dave Martin of his own free will.

Did Williams always conceive the Sixteenth Season as a cosmic shaggy dog story? Did the back of his original envelope say “In Episode One, the Doctor is told by the Guardian to collect the segments of the Key. In Episode Twenty Six, the Doctor refuses to hand the segments over and disperses them again"? 

That could have been the plot. The Doctor could have been told to assemble a weapon that was too powerful for any one person to control. Each story could have turned on one person being tempted or corrupted by the awesome power of the Key. In the final story the Doctor himself would have been tempted by it. So he would have cast it into Mount Doom. 

The sudden revelation that the Doctor might have misidentified the Guardian could have been foreshadowed. Imagine if, in the Ribos Operation, after the Doctor had been sent on his cosmic errand, Cyril Luckham had turned to the audience and said “little does he know that I am really the BLACK Guardian, not the White one. Bwahahaha!” The question “Will the Doctor realise he's been fooled?” could then have hung over each story like a thing which hangs over a story. Each Segment would have tempted the Doctor to act against his own conscience; but in each story he would have found a solution which enabled him to retained the moral high ground. 

But as it is, Armageddon Factor ends with a cosmic reset. The Doctor proves that the White Guardian is the Black Guardian. Very probably he gets killed on the next zebra crossing.  

The psychotic Marshall fires his last nuke at the planet Zeos. But the Doctor diverts it, and it hits the Planet of Evil, the lair of the Black Guardian’s evil minion. It isn't quite clear if he uses the TARDIS to generate the force field, or if he uses the Zeon’s own war computer. He definitely does not use the Key to Time. Which would make a kind of sense, and given the story a kind of unity. 

Romana assumes that the TARDIS is returning to Gallifrey.There is a major plot glitch here, I think. Romana was told to fetch the key by the President of the Time Lords on Gallifrey; she naturally assumes that she has to return home and deliver it to him there. So when the Guardian appears, she is surprised. The Doctor reveals that the President of Gallifrey had been the Guardian all along!

But Romana already knows this. The Doctor told her, in the entirely pointless TARDIS interior scene in Stones of Blood. 

We now know that that scene was a very late addition to the script, hurriedly written when the “birthday cake” sequence was deemed too silly. It appears that the ending of Armageddon Factor was written before that change was made. We think that Douglas Adams wrote the Armageddon Factor epilogue and Anthony Read wrote the Stones of Blood prologue. Is it possible that the incoming and outgoing script editors simply failed to compare notes.  

I wonder... 

The final story in Season 15 was set on Gallifrey. It was all about the appointment of a new President. There is a snooty Time Lord lady called Rodan, who is not entirely dissimilar to Romana. And it includes a sub-plot about the Great Key.

Could it be that the Key to Time saga was originally going to be trailed at the end of the Invasion of Time? Is it possible that, after Leela announced her intention to stay on Gallifrey; Borusa was going to order Rodan to join the Doctor in the TARDIS to help him on a mission of utmost importance? The scenes in Armageddon Factor and Stones of Blood could then be explained as ret-cons made necessary by the sudden introduction of the two Guardians. 

Certainly, Borusa imposing a new companion and a new mission on the Doctor would have been a dramatic way to end to the previous season--much superior to Tom Baker gurning over his  flat-pack K-9 Mark 2. But it fell through because  Hilary Ryan didn't want the gig. 

Total speculation. 

But in the extant script, Romana believes she was sent on the Quest by the President, not the Guardian; she's disabused of this misconception twice; and it has no bearing whatsoever on the story. 

The White Guardian appears; and asks for the Key. The Doctor spots that he is now being played by an actor generally associated with evil roles, and refuses to give it to him.

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Armageddon Factor (VII)

10 Feb 1979

“Key to time I command you...to stay exactly where you are...”

The Doctor says that he has complete control over the Key to Time, that it gives him power over every particle in the universe; that he can make Romana do whatever he wants and that from now on there is no such thing as Free Will. 

We have conceptualised the White Guardian as an authorial self-insertion; the personification of the Plot. But the Doctor's possession of the completed Key gives control of the Plot back to him. He can decide what happens in the universe; he can decide what other characters do. For some time, he’s been aware that he’s the main character in a TV show; in recent stories, he’s become increasingly aware of the audience. Now he’s in charge of the Whoniverse itself.

This development came at a time when Tom Baker—by his own admission—was becoming insufferable. He was aware that Doctor Who was now his own show; he knew how to set up shots better than some of the producers; he improvised dialogue of his own and refused to say certain lines in the script. And he had distinct ideas about where the series should go next. Not all his ideas were terrible: a Victorian street urchin or a portly comedic lady would indeed have been interesting departures from the traditional companion persona. The idea of a talking alien cabbage that lived on the Doctor's shoulder, not so much. Towards the end of Season 16, Tom started to make veiled threats that he would quit the show if his suggestions were not taken up; reasoning that the series couldn't continue without him. 

And while all that is happening behind the scenes the on-screen Doctor appears to turn evil and demand complete control over the universe.

Tom Baker plays an excellent villain. He flaps his eyelids and goes cross-eyed and overacts shamelessly. He’s more compelling than he’s been at any time in the last six episodes. 

But he’s only bluffing.  

“Are you all right?” asks Romana

“Well of course I'm all right”, says the Doctor, “but what if I wasn’t?”

For a brief moment, it seems as if something interesting is going to happen: something that would have made the whole Key to Time saga worthwhile. 

Imagine that this was an end-of-season cliffhanger. Imagine a Season 17 in which Romana was the main protagonist, and a corrupt, Key to Time wielding Doctor, the main villain. (This was before Dark Phoenix.) Gandalf wouldn't take the Ring, not because he thought that it would turn him evil but because he knew that he would try to use its power for good. “Gandalf as ring-lord would have been far worse than Sauron", wrote Tolkien.” Imagine a universe in which the Doctor himself had become the Guardian of Time. 

The Doctor once had the power to destroy the Daleks in his hands. He decided not to use it. He agonised: he was torn. The audience felt that their hero was facing a genuine moral dilemma. Tom brought his considerable acting ability to bear on the scene. A writer I respect and admire once called it the greatest moment in the greatest episode of the greatest story of the greatest TV show of all time. But the denouement of Key to Time is tossed out lightly and played for laughs. The Doctor is not tempted. The Doctor was never tempted. The joke is on us and Romana for briefly supposing that he might have been. 

The Planet of Evil blows up. The Black Guardian’s minion grovels that he has failed in his mission and that the Doctor now possesses the Key. But it turns out that the Black Guardian intended the Shadow to fail. “Your death is already encompassed in my designs” he rants “The Doctor will deliver the Key to Time to me."

As Evil Villain plans go, it’s not a bad one. The Doctor has spent six months rushing all over the universe collecting the Segments. The Black Guardian could have engaged in a race, sending the Shadow to hunt down each segment before the Doctor could get to them. But instead, he has sat back, allowed the Doctor to gather the five Segments at his leisure, and sent his Minion to grab the last one before the Doctor gets there.

The sequence in which the Segments are collected seems to be significant. The Sixth segment is not merely “the sixth segment which the Doctor went looking for” but “the segment with a built-in quality of six-ness about it”. Astra is “the sixth child, of the sixth dynasty, of the sixth royal house of the planet Atrios". Presumably, as long as Dynasty Five remained in power and the King and Queen only had five little princes and princesses, the Key was irretrievable. (Did the Swampie Holy Relic only become the Fifth Key when the squid swallowed it, I wonder? Do keys exist in particular places, but also at particular moments?) 

But the Black Guardian has been even cleverer. He was bluffing from the beginning. He never meant the Shadow to get the Sixth Segment. He intended the Doctor to complete the Key. The Dark Side positively wanted the Light Side’s agent to obtain the Ultimate Weapon, so that they could steal it from him. The Doctor was unwittingly playing into the Black Guardian’s hands the whole time. If he succeeded, he would have failed. 

The Doctor doesn’t fall for the bluff. He breaks the Tracer and sends the pieces back to their original locations. I was going to say this renders the previous twenty five weeks pointless; but that’s not quite true. Key or no Key, the Doctor overthrew the Pirate Captain and freed the Swampies from their colonial oppressors. He did, in fact, exactly what he would have done if he’d fetched up on Delta Magna or Calufrax without any Tracer telling him where to go. The best way of defeating the Black Guardian would have been to ignore the segments altogether. 

The entire quest, and the entire season, has been a complete waste...of Time. 

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The Armageddon Factor (VI)

June 21 1978

“How do you know the secret of our planet?”

A Dalek appears in a TV studio in the twentieth century. It claims to have abandoned earth; to have no more interest in it. It is menaced by a golden retriever with the highly original name “Goldie". (One wonders how a Cybermen would have fared.) It encounters an Earth Dalek, constructed over a three year period out of cardboard and, many of us suspect, sticky-back plastic. The Earth Dalek seems, if anything, shinier and more convincing than the actual Dalek. The Dalek regards the location of its home-world, Skaro, to be a great secret and is surprised that the Earth Dalek knows its name. It warns us that it will be returning to TV, fighting its old enemy the Doctors, and drops a broad hint about the plot. “Davros, our creator, programmed us to conquer the universe.”

It is 21 June, 1979. Season 17 of Doctor Who will begin on 1st September. The Doctor doesn't know that he's going back to Skaro. He certainly doesn't know that he's going to have a rematch with Davros. But we viewers have been told. By an actual Dalek. Two months in advance.

Clip

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The Armageddon Factor [V]

12 August 1978

“Daleks? Never heard of them.”

And so the Key to Time saga comes to an end. 

As endings go, it kind of works.

The TARDIS is in a forest, on a planet with purple sky. 

A voice calls the Doctor's name. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS. He complains about having been    disturbed. The voice tells him that he is going to meet the Daleks again. The Doctor first claims not to know what they are: but then he turns serious and demands more information. The voice won't tell him. 

“Forewarned is forearmed: you will now forget.” The Doctor loses all conscious memory of the warning; but the voice laughs and the TARDIS de-materialises.

Whose was the voice? It could be the White Guardian, giving him insider information about his future. The 

Doctor did complete his mission, after all, so perhaps the Guardian feels he owes him a favour. Or perhaps the Guardian is sending him on a new mission. He doesn't just say that the Doctor will meet the Daleks; he says that he will be “pitted against them.” Perhaps that's why he laughs: the Doctor has installed a randomiser on the TARDIS, but the Guardian is still directing his flight. Pot Luck is as big a plot device as the Tracer. That would be a good joke. 

But the laughter sounds evil, so perhaps we have heard the voice of the Black Guardian, sending the Doctor off to face his arch-foes as a punishment for denying him the key? 

We never find out. The Doctor forgets all about the meeting. 

And that's not the strangest thing about this vignette. The strangest this is that the Doctor complains that the voice has woken him up “in the middle of August". And as the TARDIS departs, we see that there is a sign hanging on the door. 

“Do not disturb until September 1st."

There is much in the Big Book Of Doctor Who Lore which we do not know. We have never seen the Doctor's bedroom in the TARDIS; the only time we've seen him asleep is when he's been in hospitals of various kind. Odin—at least in Stan Lee's version—sometimes sleeps for weeks at a time. It provides Loki with endless opportunities to usurp the throne of Asgard. So maybe Time Lords hibernate. It would be no weirder than the multiple hearts and the body swapping.

We have never tackled the question about whether or not the Doctor goes to the loo. 

The deleted birthday scene in Stones of Blood would have merged the Watsonian Doctor and the Doylist Doctor into a single figure: it would have said, beyond a peradventure, that the Doctor is a character in a TV series called Doctor Who, and knows he is. This vignette pushes the device to its logical conclusion. The fourth wall has finally been abolished.

The 1970s hadn’t quite ended. The shops still lose early on a Thursday and all day on a Sunday. There is a clear demarcation between the football season and the cricket season. In the summertime, the Blue Peter team go on holiday; the Why Don't You Kids materialise on weekday mornings, and there are bumper issues of 2000AD and TV Comic. Doctor-Who-The-TV show is off air between March and August. And whatever is true of Doctor-Who-The-TV show is true of Doctor-Who-the-Character. If it's the birthday of Doctor Who, then it's the Doctor's birthday. If Doctor Who is not on TV,  then the Doctor himself is asleep, If there is an inter-season minisode then the Doctor has been woken up.

In one way it makes the show less “realistic": the fourth-wall breaking Doctor Who who shares his birthday with the TV show that shares his name can't really be accommodated into a believable Whoniverse. But in another way, it gives him a different kind of reality: a self contained reality, a reality that exists behind that piece of glass in the box in your living room. Everything is part of the story and all stories are true; even trailers and Blue Peter items. Dougal the dog sometimes said “hi” to Bert Ford because the weather forecast came on after the puppet show. Val Doonican once claimed to be pals with Starksy and Hutch for the same reason. George and Mildred and the Six Million Dollar Man can share a turkey because both of them are in the TV Times over Christmas. 

"You will be pitted against a race known as the Daleks.” 

And so the Key to Time saga comes to an end. It began with the Author sending the Doctor on a mission. He was given a plot device that told him which planet to go to; and what to do when he got there; and a companion to remind him to stick to the plot. And the Doctor obtained the ultimate plot device, the device which made him, potentially, the Author of all the stories. And he threw it away, broke the plot device in two; repudiated the Story Teller and announced that from now on his life would be guided by nothing but random chance and his own curiosity. 

And while he was sleeping, the Author spoke to him again and told him that the very first thing that Random Chance would take would be to the home of his greatest enemies. The same place that the Time Lords once sent him, oh so unwillingly. Because, after all, the Doctor was always guided by random chance and his own curiosity; chance and curiosity —and the Doctor himself—were always there to drive the Plot. 

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Rings of Power (2)

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The Armageddon Factor [IV]

1 September 1979 [1 minute 41 seconds]

"You can't go around wearing copies of bodies."

Tom Baker has acquired an annoying tick whereby he says the same thing over and over again. 

“It was a pleasure, Romana, Romana wasn't it a pleasure?”

“We're very proud of it, Sir, aren't we Romana, proud of it."

He is discovered tinkering with K-9.

“Laryngitis? Laryngitis? How can a robot get laryngitis? What does he need it for? Romana, the dog's got laryngitis.”

We first met K-9 in a story about a microscopic virus; there was an implication that the Nucleus of the Swarm might have invaded K-9s robotic mind. But the idea of a robot with a sore throat is obviously absurd. The term “computer virus” wasn't yet current. 

K-9 doesn't have a larynx. How does he speak? Terrible.

We last saw K-9, some six months ago, in the Armageddon Factor. He isn't in Destiny of the Daleks. He won't be in City of Death. In the remaining stories of Season Seventeen, John Leeson will be on a break and K-9's voice will be provided by one David Brierly. That’s a ten month gap. It's a safe bet no-one would have noticed that the robot's voice was slightly different. 

Romana emerges from a side-room, off the TARDIS control room. She looks like Princess Astra. The Doctor thinks she is Princess Astra. 

"What are you doing?” 

"Regenerating". 

The Doctor isn't surprised, or even very interested. He carries on tinkering with his robot. His only concern is that Romana is “going around wearing other people's bodies”. Romana doesn't dispute the clothes analogy: she says that “it looked very nice on the princess.”

She proceeds to appear in a series of incarnations: a very short figure in a Buck Rogers sci-fi suit; a Valkyrie; a very tall Greek figure. The Doctor—who has pointedly never taken the slightest interest in Romana's wardrobe—continues to talk about the bodies as if he was talking about clothes. “You could try lengthening it.” “What you need is something with a bit more style which will wear well.”

Finally, she emerges as Astra again—wearing an exact replica of the Doctor's costume. He says it’s ridiculous: the only time he has noticed her clothes. So she changes into a feminine pastiche of the Doctor's outfit: a pink jacket, with big lapels, and a long white scarf. 

Maybe the scene is intended to recall the one in Robot, where the Fourth Doctor tried on lots of different clothes (a Viking, the King of Hearts, a clown) before settling on the long coat and scarf. Maybe it is meant to make us think of the scene in War Games when the Time Lords let the Doctor chose his new face. ("Too old; too fat; too thing; too young; too old.") And maybe that in turn recalled Patrick Troughton's behind the scenes casting call when he first became the Doctor. He wasn't going to impersonate William Hartnell; but it wasn't clear what he was going to do. He dressed up as Jaffar in the Thief of Baghdad, he dressed up as a Victorian sea-captain, he blacked-up as Captain Nemo; before Sydney Newman had a brainwave and they went for the tramp look. 

Imagine that the Destiny of the Daleks had begun at the five minute mark: with the Doctor and Romana arriving on they mysterious planet and wondering where they could possibly be. That would have been a perfectly good place to begin the story. It may very well have been where Terry Nation's original script began, before Douglas Adams got to tinkering with it. The audience clearly would have noticed that Romana had been recast: that the severe, elegant, supercilious woman from Season Sixteen was now a bubbly, girlish figure, with an infectious rapport with the Doctor. The wardrobe scene signals to the audience that Mary Tamm has been replaced with Lalla Ward; and the “laryngitis” gag signals to the audience that John Leeson has been replaced with David Brierly. 

Signals: but doesn't explain. Romana is played by a different actor because Romana is being played by a different actor. K-9's voice has changed because K-9's voice has changed.

Remember when the Doctor un-boxed K-9 Mark II to signal that the effects department had created a more streamlined prop? Remember when Leela's eyes got zapped because Louise Jameson was tired of her tinted contacts? Remember, come to that, the days when retiring Blue Peter presenters were sent off to do documentaries about Venice but invited back to open their Christmas presents? Or when Dougal and Florence walked around the Magic Garden trying to work out what looked different about it? (The series had just gone to colour.) 

When Katy Manning quit the show and Elizabeth Sladen joined, there was a story: the story about Jo Grant and the Welsh hippy scientist who seemed like a younger Doctor and how the Doctor felt sad and jealous and also maggots. When Jon Pertwee quit and Tom Baker came along there was a story; the story about the Blue Crystal and the Doctor's hubris and how the script editor had become a Buddhist.

There is no story about Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward. There could have been. Romana could have gone home to Gallifrey, and snooty aristocrat Princess Astra could have stowed away on board the TARDIS. Rocks could have fallen on Old Romana, and the Doctor could have struggled to take her back to the TARDIS and she could have regenerated and spent the story suffering from regeneration fever. A big white zombie could have hung around at the margins making sure that the moment had been prepared for. 

The TARGET books stated clearly that the First Doctor's physical appearance was “transformed” when he discarded his worn out body in favour of a new one; and that the Second Doctor's “physical appearance was altered by the Time Lord when they exiled him to earth in the twentieth century.” Doctor Who Weekly always insisted that Hartnell>Troughton was a rejuvenation and Troughton>Pertwee was a change in appearance and Pertwee> Baker was properly the first regeneration. Certainly, Planet of the Spiders was the first time we heard that periodic changes of form were a natural part of being a Time Lord. “When a Time Lord's body wears out, he regenerates, becomes new". The term is taken for granted in Deadly Assassin and Underworld (although not, surprisingly, in Logopolis.)

Regeneration is a very big deal. The death, in way, of a beloved character; the exit of a beloved actor. But Douglas Adams has made it trivial: the Doctor hardly looks up from his construction project. I suppose that's part of the Doctor's character. Making light of big things and treating trivial things as if they are of the utmost significance.

It will be recalled that fans (#notallfans) were offended by the Deadly Assassin. The Time Lords had been a central pillar of the Doctor Who mythos for, er, six and a bit years, and in that story Robert Holmes failed to treat them with due reverence. And fans (#notallfans) were similarly offended by the TARDIS interior scenes in Invasion of Time. The TARDIS is another central pillar of Doctor Who; and Williams and Read were again treating it irreverently. The President of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society said in an editorial that it represented the shattering of part of the Doctor Who legend. 

“It seems that over the years there has been an attempt to [sic] brainwashing us into thinking the TARDIS is useless and no good” he wrote. The magic of Doctor who was being eroded.

Familiarity breeds contempt. When Ian stumbled into the TARDIS in 1963, he was awestruck: by 1979 “bigger on the inside” was the punch line of a joke. When William Hartnell turned into Patrick Troughton, Ben and Polly's minds were boggled, and the audience wondered if the show had gone a step too far. By the time of Deadly Assassin and Underworld, regeneration had become a plot device. And now it's a gag, a gag about women who can't decide what to wear. 

Of course Douglas Adams and Graham Williams weren't brainwashing fans. But neither were they subtly “revealing” hitherto obscure facts about the Time Lord life cycle. They were just acknowledging a fact about a TV show as slickly and as entertainingly as they could.  

“I'm being played by a new actor now. New actors are cool". 

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The Armageddon Factor [III]

1 September 1979 [5 minutes] 

“Not the most inviting planet.”

Romana isn't impressed by the quarry. 

They step out of the TARDIS. The Doctor and Romana: he dressed as the Doctor, she dressed in a pink jacket with a long white scarf, hanging in exactly the same way that the Doctor's does. Both of them in matching maroon thigh boots. It's a good visual gag; the physical design falls into step with what was obvious last season: Romana is not a companion; she's a female analogue to the Doctor.

When Sue Lawley stood in for Sir Robin Day on Question Time, the costume department gave her a very feminine bow tie.

The boy Doctor starts to talk in TV clichés. “I've a feeling I've been here before. A pervading sense... An air of....”

The girl Doctor is for leaving. But the boy Doctor is driven on by curiosity. Pot luck brought him here, but now he is here he wants to know where “here” is. If he didn't find out, he would always be wondering. He would “never sleep again.”

Never sleep again. That's an interesting way of putting it. Does the Doctor sleep? When did he wake up? 

What the Doctors are experiencing is painful dose of dramatic irony. They have no idea where they are.  But we know. We know because it says Destiny Of The Daleks at the end of the title sequence. We know because we have read the Radio Times. We know because the Earth Dalek warned us. And the Doctor should know too. 

At the end of the episode, there will formally be a surprise. A very beaten up Dalek prop will push through a paper wall and say “do not move” seven times and “you are our prisoner” twice. We won't be surprised. And the Doctor shouldn't be surprised, either. 

He has been forewarned. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

I am famous, again, apparently

The wikipedia page on "The Round World Dilemma" has a chart citing "Bratman's analysis, after Rilstone".

David Bratman apparently referenced my review of The Nature of Middle Earth in an academic paper (at Mythcon, I think).

I said:

There is no single, finished thing called Middle-earth to talk about the nature of; only three differently unfinished works in progress.

There is, if you will, Middle-earth I, the setting of the Book of Lost Tales, back when Beren was an Elf, Sauron was a cat and minstrels had names like Tinfang Warble.

There is Middle-earth II, the world of Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion, when Hobbits, Dwarves and the sunken island of Numenor had inveigled themselves into the long-standing Elf-mythology.

And there is the projected Middle-earth III which would have made the world of Lord of the Rings more consistent with real-world geography, real-world astronomy and real-world theology. It would have ret-conned out the flat-earth, the sky done, and the literal sun-chariot, and made Eru and Morgoth theologically consistent analogues for the Catholic God and the Catholic Satan.

Maybe Numenor-Atlantis never sunk beneath the waves, muses Tolkien at one point. Maybe it just had all the magic sucked out of it and turned into America.

Mr Bratman says:

Critic Andrew Rilstone, an intelligent Tolkienist though not a scholar, has postulated “three differently unfinished works in progress.” First, the purely mythological Elder Days, the “setting of the Book of Lost Tales, back when Beren was an Elf, Sauron was a cat and minstrels had names like Tinfang Warble.” Then, the mixed mythological-historical one we’re most familiar with, “the world of Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion, when Hobbits, Dwarves and the sunken island of Númenor had inveigled themselves into the longstanding Elf-mythology.” The stylistic difference between these two stages is primarily a growth in majesty 6 and seriousness: Tevildo and Tinfang disappear; the fey Tinwelent becomes the towering Thingol. And then the only partially sketched third purely historical and scientific work, “which would have made the world of Lord of the Rings more consistent with real-world geography, real-world astronomy and real-world theology. It would have ret-conned out the flat-earth, the sky dome, and the literal sun-chariot, and made Eru and Morgoth theologically consistent analogues for the Catholic God and the Catholic Satan.” Rilstone’s division makes sense to me, but though specific aspects of this have been discussed in formal scholarship, so far as I know, no scholar has really investigated the overall pattern of these alterations of the fundamentals of the legendarium over time.  

Not sure if it is actually the cleverest insight I have ever had, but nice to know someone is paying attention.

Not a scholar, indeed.