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. 

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 [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". 

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 [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. 

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.