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.

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.