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.