The search for the fifth segment of the Key to Time takes the Doctor and Romana to the swamp-covered third moon of Delta Magna, where a conflict between the crew of a methane refinery and the tribal natives called “Swampies” (a derisive name used by the refinery crew, but we never get to hear any other) is interrupted by the appearance of Kroll, a Godzilla-sized giant squid the Swampies worship as a god.
The script is by Robert Holmes, penning his second story of this season, but has to be considered a disappointment. Partly it’s betrayed by expectations: if any other writer’s name was on the episode, I’d say it was a run-of-the-mill outing for Dr Who at this period, but Holmes’ previous brilliance has led me to expect more than run-of-the-mill work when I see his name in the credits. The episode shows little to none of Holmes’ trademark brilliance in creating memorable characters and deftly-drawn science fiction worlds. The characters here are largely dull, stock figures, and the world barely realized.
The situation is a rather ham-handed allegory for the historical treatment of Native Americans, but with little effort to create a proper fictional world for the metaphor and, strangely, even less effort to make the Swampies sympathetic. Holmes essentially makes both sides into villains— or at least, none of them are very nice. The primary villain of the piece is Thawn, the director of the refinery, who is scheming to commit genocide against the Swampies (and is delighted when it briefly appears Kroll might do the job for him).
But on the other side, it’s hard to get as worked up over this as we should, because the Swampies are almost equally unpleasant. There are a lot of scenes in their supposed village but we don’t see a single woman or child, or even one of the background male extras doing any kind of “life in the village” activities. The entire population consists of warriors with spears. This lack of background realism can partly be blamed on the production, but Holmes could have included something in the script to call it out: a scene of the Doctor commenting on something he sees, or trading a line with a Swampie child, or something. There’s nothing.
Meanwhile the warriors just follow their High Priest, as one dimensional a character in his way as Thawn is on the other side. He’s determined to make the Doctor and Romana into human sacrifices, and our heroes are more in danger from the Swampies than from the ostensible villain of the piece. There’s no question that Holmes views the Swampies’ hostility as justified and that of Thawn merely villainous, but he seems to have been diverted by the fact that in many Dr Who stories (as far back as The Aztecs) the “dangerous primitive cult” could serve as the main threat. Too interested in putting the Doctor into this familiar kind of peril, Holmes manages to forget that in this story, one side or the other needs to be sympathetic.
As for the monster of the story, the less said about Kroll the better. Pre-CGI Dr Who just cannot handle a Japanese Kaiju (the term for the Godzilla/Mothra/Rodan type of monster). We see some miniature shots of Kroll attacking the refinery, and some completely unconvincing shots of Kroll seeming to rise up from behind the horizon in front of terrified extras, but these shots completely fail to connect in any way with the foreground action of prop tentacles sticking through walls or up out of the swamp. Holmes knew this would be a problem but he had no choice about it (see below).
Details
- Script editor Anthony Read gave Holmes two mandates when he hired him to write this story:
- Cut back on the level of comedy. Producer Graham Williams came on board the series with a mandate to replace the horror of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era with more light-hearted adventure and humor, but Read apparently felt they’d gone too far in that direction. Holmes turns in a script that does have this virtue: he hits the right formula for Dr Who’s humor/horror balance, including restraining the excesses of comedy the Fourth Doctor had lately been getting into (while not making him entirely humorless, which would have been equally wrong).
- Feature the largest monster that had ever appeared in the series. Thus Kroll the Kaiju. Holmes, who had previously shown himself an expert at crafting stories that could work, and even paint an entire invented world, within the limits of Dr Who’s tiny budget, knew perfectly well that the series could never pull something like that off, but it was no use arguing: the directive came from higher up in the BBC, where somebody for some unfathomable reason though it would be a good idea. Holmes knew this effort was doomed for the start (which might well explain why he ended up not putting out his best effort for the rest of the story).
- Holmes knew the episode was a failure and ranked it his least-favorite of all his contributions to Dr Who.
- The Stones of Blood (a couple of weeks ago) was Dr Who’s 100th broadcast story. Since stories weren’t necessarily produced in broadcast order, it could be that at some time during planning, the BBC thought this would be the 100th, and this in turn could explain the directive to “go big” with a giant monster. But that’s pure speculation on my part. In the event, no one ended up publicizing the fact of Dr Who’s one hundredth (although a mercifully-deleted scene from The Stones of Blood had Romana giving the Doctor a birthday cake).
- K-9 is confined to the TARDIS by the swampy ground for this episode, and never appears. But the actor supplying K-9’s voice was not sidelined: John Leeson plays one of the refinery crew, his only appearance on screen in Dr Who. His normal voice has no recognizable similarity to K-9’s at all, so without seeing the cast list at the end you’d never guess the connection.
- Five of six segments of the Key to Time now in the Doctor’s hands, and still no trace of any development on the overarching threat that supposedly set this quest in motion. It’ll all have to rest on the final episode of the season, which is:
Next Week
“The Armageddon Factor,” 6 episodes.
