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.

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.

 

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. 

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 (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

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.