[Caution: this post contains spoilers for the story]
The quest for the Key to Time reaches its conclusion, and we finally get some attention to the overall story arc— but just barely, and the story itself is distinctly unexciting. It’s hard to know what to write about an episode that largely makes me go “meh.” It’s not really bad, at least not exactly. Not enough happens in the story to fill its 6-episode length, so it spends way too much time inconclusively wandering up and down corridors. There are some very interesting plot twists, but they aren’t properly exploited: they tend to be tossed out right when they happen then the story moves on without much interest. There are some moments of very broad comedy (not just the Doctor being his silly self but random bits of strange slapstick) that don’t quite fit the tone of the rest of the story, which is trying to play it straight.
Overall, you get to the end of it and say “Yeah, that was six episodes all right.” While better than “Ugh that was awful” (as with last season’s Underworld) it’s still not really good enough.
The Story
Searching for the sixth and final segment of the Key, the TARDIS finds the planet Atrios on the verge of losing an interplanetary war with its neighbor Zeos. The survivors have retreated into underground bunkers while the Zeos fleet bombards the planet at will with nuclear weapons, while the military commander, the Marshal, still vows to fight on to inevitable victory and plots to assassinate the figurehead monarch, Princess Astra, on learning she’s been trying to contact Zeos to negotiate a surrender.
The Doctor and Romana immediately conclude the Black Guardian must be behind this— a mysterious conclusion since there’s been no sign of him behind any of the other troubles they always find, but they’re quite correct. An agent of the Black Guardian, known as the Shadow, is actually behind the war, having the Marshal under mind control, while the Zeos attacks are actually automated, controlled by a computer the Shadow had built. While the Doctor has been chasing all over time and space, the Shadow parked himself by the sixth segment and just waited for the Doctor to bring the others two him. Starting a war of mutual genocide appears to be something he’s done just to pass the time while he waits, because the Black Guardian likes destruction (and plans, after obtaining the Key to Time, to use it to destroy all life in the universe).
The sixth segment of the Key is revealed to be Princess Astra herself, who will therefore be destroyed if the segment is restored to its true form. The Shadow eventually does that, but the Doctor manages to get the completed Key away from him and escape in the TARDIS, along the way diverting the Marshal’s last missile attack to destroy the Shadow’s base and save both Zeos and Atrios from mutual destruction.
Then it seems the White Guardian appears to take possession of the Key, but from his callous reaction to Astra’s fate the Doctor deduces it’s actually the Black Guardian, and disperses it back across time and space to prevent the Black Guardian from seizing it (ordering the one segment to return to being Princess Astra, thus saving her life as well).
Details
- In the above synopsis, look at the number of interesting ideas: the Zeos war effort turns out to be run by a computer. Mad computers have a venerable history in Doctor Who but almost nothing is made of this reveal. The Marshal looks like the villain early on but (under orders from the Shadow) plays nice with the Doctor after only a brief initial bit of conflict. Princess Astra is the last segment of the Key to Time; but we find this out, with no foreshadowing, mere moments before she’s transformed. A detail I didn’t mention is that the Zeos computer was built, under duress, by another Time Lord, an old Academy classmate of the Doctor’s named Drax, who is used almost exclusively for comedy (he is the most unconvincing Time Lord we’ve ever met, a probably-offensive stereotype of a blue-collar Cockney who you can picture running a refrigerator repair shop but not piloting a TARDIS— there’s Doctor-style eccentricity, and then there’s… just way, way too ordinary). The Shadow himself is an intriguing creature, a wraith-like figure dressed in black robes with a skull mask, served by silent minions in similar costumes, who claims to have been waiting for the Doctor since before Eternity began, but he’s given little to do other than lurk mysteriously. Any of these things could have benefited from a much longer narrative treatment that could have replaced some of those corridor walks. None of them get more than an “Here’s this, now let’s move on.”
- The Key to Time story barely gets any resolution in the final appearance of the Black Guardian. The quest started when the White Guardian warned that some cosmic crisis was approaching, and he said he had to use the Key to Time to “stop everything” while he corrected the problem. He specifically said the Doctor had to deliver the Key to him. But now the Doctor just disperses it through time again, and the genuine White Guardian never appears. Was it also the Black Guardian lying to the Doctor at the start of the season? Or is the universe still doomed? The Doctor asks at once point if just assembling the Key is enough for the Guardian to act without needing it to be handed over, but he’s asking the Black Guardian in disguise so there’s no trustworthy answer.
- We’re lucky to even get that much: in the original script, written by the team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin (reliable contributors to the series since the Pertwee era, though their last few episodes haven’t been good) the Black Guardian himself never appears. The Guardian’s appearance was added by the incoming script editor (see below) just to resolve the story arc. Sadly, after an entire season devoted to this quest, an afterthought scene added at the last minute is the only resolution to the story.
- That new script editor, who will replace the departing Anthony Read next season, is Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. As I mentioned when Adams contributed The Pirate Planet earlier this season, he wasn’t famous yet when he took the job: though Hitchhiker’s Guide was running on the radio at the time, he hadn’t yet written the novels and the series had yet to achieve its later popularity.
- This was the very last 6-part episode of Dr Who to be broadcast. (A further 6-parter was written for the next season, but never completed: more on that when we get to it).
- It was also the last script by the Baker/Martin writing team, though Bob Baker will contribute a solo script later.
- In the Lore of Doctor Who Department: Drax, after recognizing the Doctor, addresses him as “Theta Sigma” at first, until our hero tells him he prefers “Doctor.” So is “Theta Sigma” the Doctor’s long-mysterious name? There’s nothing said onscreen to contradict that, other than the fact that no one thinks so. Later dialog implies that the Doctor’s choice of title results from the fact that he did, in fact, earn a doctorate at the Academy, so Theta Sigma must just be a title he went by before that. The novelization of the episode specifically says it was the Doctor’s “student ID” at the Academy, though the canonicity of that is questionable.
Left unanswered is why the Doctor doesn’t use a name. The Master, the Monk (from the Hartnell era), and the Rani (who, in order, we haven’t met yet), also use only titles. On the other hand, other Time Lords do use what appear to be names— Romana, of course, but also Borusa, Goth, Andred, Rodan, and others we’ve met in the series’ two previous visits to Gallifrey. Unless these are also titles that just look like names to us, it appears that some Time Lords use names while others use only titles. Why? Is it a preference or does it mean something? The new series has made much of the “secret” of the Doctor’s name— is that unique to the Doctor or something he shares with other title-using Time Lords? Speculate away, a definitive answer is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Next week:
“Destiny of the Daleks,” 4 episodes, the season 17 premiere.
