Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 502: The Armageddon Factor – Part Three (3/2/1979)
I was expecting to find this one a chore, so I’m delighted that it’s very tolerable. The Shadow is a brilliant villain. He lacks the verve of Count Grendel or Vivien Fay, but makes up for it with a gloriously moist and menacing voice, and a very poetic turn of phrase: ‘Your jackdaw meanderings’; ‘there is a want of patience in your nature’. His willingness to sit and wait for a thousand years for the Doctor to eventually make a mistake makes his monstrousness a cut above anything we’ve seen since Sutekh. His torture of Astra is cruel in a way the show rarely is in this iteration. And he looks pretty grisly as well – although I’m not sure why they didn’t just bring back the Master to be the Doctor’s dark mirror (I’m much more convinced this is the crispy Master in a mask than I am the War Chief is actually a pre-Delgado regeneration).
Doctor Who episode 501: The Armageddon Factor – Part Two (27/1/1979)
As a follow up to a surprisingly good opener, this is a bit of a mess. On the one hand, the Atrios/Zeos War works: the Marshal is a recognisable type of Doctor Who villain, the “victory at any cost” warmonger, and Merak’s search for the peacemaker Princess Astra has a touch of the Star Wars about it (it also results in one of the greatest moments in Doctor Who as he declares ‘I love her’ and Romana and the Doctor look a bit embarrassed).
Doctor Who episode 500: The Armageddon Factor – Part One (20/1/1979)
The opening is laugh-out-loud funny: a propaganda broadcast in the style of bad sci-fi TV (complete with obviously botched bluescreen), glamourising the heroics of war. Meanwhile, the planet Atrios is being bombed back to the stone age by its twin Zeos, as its Marshal does his best Winston Churchill impression (John Woodvine even parodies the cadences of the PM’s wartime speeches as he claims, ‘Our ships… Dominate… their skies’) and the earnest, outspoken Princess Astra, who’s clearly had to visit one bombed-out hospital too many, pleads for peace and secretly negotiates with the enemy (and gets called ‘Your highness’ a lot – more Star Wars influences).
Doctor Who episode 499: The Power of Kroll – Part Four (13/1/1979)
This is more like it: a properly exciting, race-against-time (complete with two, Goldfinger-style countdowns – an obvious reference since the first stops on 003). Everyone gets a fairly poetic comeuppance, and the threat of Kroll is resolved in a way that satisfactorily ties in with the Key of Time theme. The big difference is that the Doctor is back in the refinery, which means that the tarsome spacechat of the middle episodes is replaced by some actual drama as the Doctor confronts Thawn and spends the next few minutes winding him up (‘Maybe it’s saving you for pudding’).
Doctor Who episode 498: The Power of Kroll – Part Three (6/1/1979)
Tom gets some good lines (‘This is no time to start talking about noses’; ‘He’s got narrow little eyes. You can’t hypnotise people with narrow little eyes.’) and I particularly enjoyed the Doctor’s focus on the details of Swampy architecture while Romana and Rohm-Dutt fret about their impending deaths. And it’s a much better exposition scene than the endless refinery sequences in Part Two. Sadly, though, we’re not past those: here there are lads of discussions about the logistics of blowing Kroll up. ‘How many pages, Graham?’
Doctor Who episode 497: The Power of Kroll – Part Two (30/12/1978)
‘Soon you will wish you had died on the Stone of Blood,’ says a Swampy to Romana at one point. Fair point, but I suppose then she would have missed out on The Androids of Tara. Robert Holmes is positively tempting fate with the above and exchanges like, ‘A sort of Holy Writ?’ ‘I think it’s atrociously writ’; ‘Too glib by half’. It’s not as bad as all of that, but this is definitely not vintage Holmes. Double acts are in short supply and exposition scenes (like the one where Dugeen and Thawn stare at a screen) go on forever without any good jokes to lift them. I suppose the whole plot revolves around Kroll’s farts, which are generating the methane for the refinery: I expect that had Holmes sniggering at the typewriter.
Doctor Who episode 496: The Power of Kroll – Part One (23/12/1978)
I wouldn’t say that the production of Season 16 has been a great leap forward for the show. It’s a massive improvement over Season 15, but there’s been nothing that looks quite as impressive as a Douglas Camfield or David Maloney serial. But there’s been a shift into that late 1970s BBC space opera aesthetic – capes, frocks, tunics, blouses – perfected by Blake’s 7 but very evident on Ribos, Tara, and even Zanak. Strangely, the first thing I notice about The Power of Kroll is it looks like a Pertwee story, with the occupying Earth Empire in space uniforms and the native “Swampies” green and loinclothed like refugees from Uxarieus. Even the Doctor and Romana are dressed less exotically than usual (the Doctor’s new coat, presumably a replacement for the grey tweed one, is very nice but it’s got no swirling velvet tails) Only Rohm-Dutt brings a bit of Han Solo to the party, and he’d still never make it as one of Blake’s crew.
Doctor Who episode 495: The Androids of Tara – Part Four (16/12/1978)
Doctor Who has never been as swashbuckling as it gets here. Tom Baker looks the part, long coat swirling as he locks swords with Count Grendel, crashing the midnight wedding of the King and Romana in an eleventh-hour rescue. This looks as good as anything since Graham Williams took over: the night filming is a lot more effective than The Stones of Blood’s day-for night, the use of Leeds Castle for Castle Gracht helps sell the setting, and – perhaps aside from the intimate throne room – nothing in studio is beyond the bounds of the BBC budget.
Doctor Who episode 494: The Androids of Tara – Part Three (9/12/1978)
This is a rare example of the third episode of a Doctor Who story improving on the first two. Mainly, it’s because the stately pace of the first half, which allowed David Fisher to set up some of the plot convolutions and characters, all begins to coalesce here, and what might have been final-episode pay-offs, like Madam Lamia’s death, instead become part of events spiralling out of Grendel’s control.
Doctor Who episode 493: The Androids of Tara – Part Two (2/12/1978)
Wisely, for a story with so many doubles, David Fisher keeps the fairytale plot very straightforward. Less impressively, some of the dialogue seems to have been duplicated – the Archimandrite (yay, Cyril Shaps!) has the same conversation, about having to choose another king should the Prince not show up, twice in quick succession with Count Grendel: even making allowances for the “casual viewers” this feels a bit like overkill.
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