This is a really fun story, and may be the best of the Key to Time season so far. It’s a lighthearted adventure cheerfully ripped off from— er, a cheerful homage to— The Prisoner of Zenda, as the search for the fourth segment of the Key takes the Doctor and Romana to the knights-and-damsels fairytale kingdom of Tara.
In a sullen mood, the Doctor decides to go fishing and leave Romana to find the segment by herself. Confident she can do it without getting in all the trouble the Doctor seems to find, she takes the tracer and heads off on her own. Sure enough, unlike the previous three stories, she finds the segment in about five minutes— but before she can return in triumph to the Doctor, she gets captured by the villainous mustache-twirler Count Grendel. It appears that Romana is an exact double of the Princess Strella, who Grendel has locked up in his dungeon while he tries to persuade her to marry him, which will put him in line for the throne.
Meanwhile the Doctor gets himself arrested for fishing on the private estate of the true-hearted rightful king, Prince Reynard. Reynard’s due to be crowned king the next day, but Grendel’s planning to assassinate him first, then marry Strella, then arrange a tragic accident which will leave him as Strella’s widower— and the new king. To avoid Grendel’s assassins, Reynard and his followers have an android duplicate of the Prince to use as a decoy while he gets to his coronation. Unfortunately it’s broken down, and repairing such thing is a peasant’s skill which the nobles of Tara won’t stoop to learn. So if the Doctor could perhaps help with the repairs?
Sound complicated enough? By the time the Doctor and Romana manage to extract themselves from the situation, we’ve had not only the identical Romana and Strella, but easily half a dozen Romana-shaped androids in action, the Reynard android impersonating the Prince at the actual coronation, plots and counter-plots by Count Grendel, an attack on a castle, and (of course) a climactic swordfight between the Doctor and the villain. There’s no alien menace, no monsters (except an unusually unconvincing “beast” that menaces Romana at the start, which turns out to be unimportant to the story), it’s just all about the feudal intrigue and swashbuckling. And it’s all as much fun as it can possibly be.
Details
- Tara has a strange mix of the advanced and the primitive. Aside from the androids (which we’re told have been the planet’s main labor force ever since a plague “a hundred years ago” devastated the population), the nobles fight with swords charged with electricity and the soldiers fire crossbows that shoot energy bolts. On the other hand the nobles still live in castles (and rely on them as fortresses not simply as historic places) and the politics is feudal through and through. If this story was trying to be more serious science fiction some explanation of this would be necessary. Was Tara a primitive planet only recently contacted by galactic civilization, adopting only those bits of technology that fit their way of life? The story never bothers to even ask the question, let alone answer it. It’s too busy having swashbuckling fun and using the androids to have our antagonists trick each other. And while I normally put a high premium on good science fiction world building in Doctor Who (though not much on scientific accuracy) in this case I don’t care. It works as it is.
- In fairness, part of the reason it works is that even without any explanatory backstory, Tara works in the story just as it is— so it is a well-built world after all. We simply don’t need to know how it got that way, or at least not until we’re thinking things over after the story’s done.
- The story looks good, with very rich-looking sets and costumes. Though not an actual period piece, the faux-medieval society gives the BBC designers to rummage through their abundant warehouses of props to decorate their sets with hanging tapestries and ornate thrones, and the costumes are well-designed to match the opulence of the background, while not exactly matching any specific Earth style (there’s a bit of Ottoman Empire in the costume styles, but it’s not especially specific). It all looks very good. Adding to the authentic feel, a great deal of the story is shot on location in and around some actual castle and its grounds (I don’t know which one).
- There is trouble brewing, not with this story but with the Key to Time story arc that’s driving this season: at the end of The Androids of Tara the Doctor and Romana have collected 2/3 of the segments, but there’s been no development whatsoever on the overarching story. In last week’s episode, the Doctor heard a disembodied voice warning him to “beware the Black Guardian” but it was only an occasion for the Doctor to repeat to Romana everything the White Guardian told him, for the benefit of viewers who might have missed the first episode. Now a full story later, still nothing has come of it.
Supposedly, a time is “rapidly approaching” when the White Guardian must use the Key of Time to restore the balance of the cosmos or else some terrible disaster will follow. But— how much time is left? (And what does that question even mean when we’re following the adventures of a couple of time travelers?) What is the approaching disaster? Shouldn’t we see some rumblings of it, building suspense? The Black Guardian is also seeking the Key, for an evil purpose of his own— why haven’t we seen anything of him, or of some evil counterpart to the Doctor?
So far the troubles with getting the segments have had to do only with the situation in each location where the TARDIS lands, not with any actions by the supposed antagonist in this quest. By this point in the season we should have seen some development on all this. For contrast, look at the “crack in time” season of the new Dr Who, where we kept seeing the menacing cracks and, over a series of episodes, learned more about them and the danger they posed. Aside from the pros and cons of each story, the Key to Time arc is running out of time to make something of itself.
Next week:
“The Power of Kroll,” 4 episodes.
