Destiny of the Daleks

The randomizer takes the TARDIS to an unknown planet where the Doctor and the newly regenerated Romana face the Daleks and a second race of machines, the Movellans. Both sides are locked in a conflict that has been going on for centuries, with not a shot fired on either side. Both races are waiting for their computers to predict a moment of maximum advantage for attack, but the Daleks, having realized that there is an impasse, have returned to Skaro to retreive Davros where he was left for dead. The Movellans have followed, and realize that if Davros could help the Daleks, then maybe the Doctor would be an asset to them...

Oh the poor Daleks. Physically they look like hell in this one; there are four primary units used for the show and all of them are in terrible disrepair with bits falling off, paint missing and casings patched back together with whatever could be found. Sad. They do, however, have a new laser effect which doesn't require turning the whole screen to a negative now; it is confined to the individual being exterminated. The Movellans, as far as looks go, are perfect humanoids with a definite Egytptain influence, right down to their ship looking like an inverted pyramid. Those white spandex suits, though, they must have come right from Buck Rogers.

So Romana has regenerated, with no apparant reason given for it, and now she looks like Princess Astra of Atrios (played by Lalla Ward, who Tom Baker would marry eventually. and then divorce. Her relationship with the Doctor takes a much lighter route than it did with the first Romana, starting with a comic scene where the Doctor originally disapproves of her new body and she goes off to re-shape it, going through some extremely tasteless (no offence to the actresses hired) choices before returning in her new shorter, blonde haired version. Unlike the Doctor and his varying extremes of personality from body to body, Romana more or less retains her character, but perhaps losing a bit of the snobby supermodel edge that Mary Tamm brought to the role. She is clever though, managing to bluff the Daleks into thinking she knows nothing about them when they capture and interrogate her, and she even takes on the Movellan commander in a knock down drag out mudwrestle in part 4.

Ah Davros. This is pretty much what everyone was afraid would happen; by using Davros before, the Daleks would now become tied to him in future stories, although at this point he does not exactly trust them and isn't entirely on their side. Still, how would you feel if your children tried to kill you and then came back and not so much admitted you were right but asked for your help. This time it's a different actor playing the role, although I would have preferred Michael Wisher to have done it. Despite the efforts of future actors, I still think of the original Davros as the best. At least Michael Wisher didn't bounce around in his seat while trundling the Davros wheelchair about.

You can tell the script editor had changed at this point; the Doctor was now doing crazy stuff but Tom Baker was pulling it off brillaintly, with exclaimations of "Oh look, rocks!" when operating the TARDIS scanner, and being the first to openly criticise the Daleks for their lack of climbing ability.

And there is no K9 this episode. John Leeson wasn't going to be able to do the voice this season and as K9 was by and large this obstacle on the set that most writers didn't enjoy writing for, it was easy to sideline him for this episode, citing a bout of laryngitis as the reason for his absence. Just as well, really; K9 in a firefight with the Daleks would have been just too quick a fix for some situations where the Doctor would have in past relied to his own cunning and guile to outwit them.

Does this episode do much for the Daleks? I'm not entirely convinced it does. As I said before, now that Davros has been hauled back into life (how he didn't decompose over all that time I'll never know.. it's very Dorian Grey) there comes a danger of him being the focal point of every Dalek story to come; in effect making everything a Davros story and forgetting that for years before he was shown the Daleks were the force to be reckoned with. But ah, the people behind Doctor Who are for the most part brilliant, and if indeed Davros did become too central a figure for the TV series at the time, in future things would be different...

NEXT EPISODE : CITY OF DEATH

It's In The Blood

This one is one of my own creations, so bear with me while I talk abut my own idea rather than review someone else's. I wanted to submit something to the Canadian Doctor Who fan fiction magazine and my original idea went something like this: the Doctor and Romana arrive on a garden moon owned by a royal family and take a break from their travels there. While the Doctor visits with the hosts, Romana is stung by some sort of insect in the flower beds, and the poison it carries starts to slowly kill her. Once the crew return to the TARDIS, Romana goes to her room and quietly regenerates, maintaining her calm through the process and even managing to to influence her final appearance.

This is my own take, of course, as when we next join the show, Romana emerges from her room already regenerated . Who knows how much time really passed between The Armageddon Factor and Destiny of the Daleks; the Doctor and Romana could have gone to all sorts of places in that time, allowing them to form a bit better of a bond than the one they have at the end of the Key to Time series.

My second draft of the story, though, went a bit longer and changed substantially; the TARDIS arrived on a weapons satellite in deep space which is on a locked-off course. K9 estimates that the craft was in flight for centuries but cannot determine where it is going, and when he attempts to patch into the flight computers his systems are infected with a virus that renders him inactive. The Doctor and Romana explore the satellite and come across all sorts of biological weapons stores, and Romana is accidentally exposed to a chemical that she feels working its way through her blood like a toxin. The Doctor, unaware of Romana's situation, presses on and realizes that they have found a Minyan weapons cache which seems to be on course for Gallifrey, and the weapons inside are all biological weapons developed centuries ago to kill the Time Lords in an act of revenge for their botched attempt to elevate the Minyans from barbarism. Romana manages to keep her situation a secret from the Doctor while he steers the satellite away from Gallifrey and onto a course for the planet's sun, and once within the TARDIS she regenerates.

I prefer the second draft, and hopefully if the first hasn't been published yet I might get a chance to slip it in and put a better foot forward.

NEXT EPISODE : DESTINY OF THE DALEKS

The Armageddon Factor

The quest for the sixth and final piece of the Key to Time takes the Doctor, Romana and K9 to the warring twin worlds of Atrios and Zeos. Atrios has been brought to its knees by overwhelming opposition and the fanatical Marshal will stop at nothing to rally his people to fight back from their seemingly doomed position. When the TARDIS crew arrive, the Princess Astra has been kidnapped by what are first assumed to be Zeon agents, but a third party is revealed lurking between both worlds; the sinister Shadow. Where the Doctor has been sent on the quest by the White Guardian, the Shadow is in the employ of the Black Guardian and has been sitting waiting for the Doctor to arrive. The Doctor may have collected the first five segments already, but the Shadow seems to know where the sixth and final piece is, and its secret is somehow linked to Astra, the sixth princess of the sixth royal house of the sixth dynasty of Atrios...

Whereas The Power of Kroll had very little mention of the Key to Time until almost the very end, The Armageddon Factor, the six part season finale, is concerned with nothing but finding the final piece. Almost all of the key players in the tale have something to do with it, and the showdown that everyone knew was coming to posess it starts in earnest in episode three when the Doctor and the Shadow meet face to ... well... skull. With a nylon over the mouth. And how is the Shadow as a foe? He kidnaps and terrorizes Astra. He plunges two worlds into war just to keep a death toll running. The captures and tortures Romana. He captures K9 and places the robot under his control, turning him against the Doctor. Yeah, he's bad.

Jay and I undertook this viewing together, although we didn't have as much to say this time as we have before. I was almost passing out from being up late the night before and Jay was actually engrossed in the adventure, but after a short break for the plight dining of the Gerard Square McDonald's, the commentary track was back in full force. Neither of us was particularly enamoured with Romana's white version of an Elvira dress, although we were amused at how she forced open a door to a transmat relay despite being unable to do so a couple scenes before. And then she overpowered the Atrian surgeon, Merak. K9 was smug as usual, which we will allow him after his traumatic experience of being lured into a recycling furnace by a glowing projection that looked like the Canadian Film Board logo. And we loved the Doctor's manic performance in this one, with him taunting the Shadow, mocking the Marshal, going power mad for a moment with the completed Key to Time before him, and finally telling the Black Guardian where to go.

As with most six part stories we are once again faced with a story within a story, with the war between Atrios and Zeos falling into the background eventually, but there is no definite split as with previous stories where the first four episodes were one plot and the final two were something else; The Armageddon Factor evolves its way along, never feeling slow or draggy, but with the introduction of another rogue Time Lord, Drax, in episode five, things do suffer a bit where pacing is concerned. Some of the sets suffer a bit from lack of funding, probably from the money running out towards the end of the season. Jay and I had to laugh at the tape-drive computers of the Atrian war room, and the circuit boards pulled from Speak N Spells stapled to the walls of the Zeon computer room (which are reminiscent of records hammered into the wall at a dump called The Happy Tap, but that's different, the blandness of the Zeon corridors and even the layer of dust on top of the time rotor in the TARDIS. And on the subject of the TARDIS, the continuity people need to be fired; in the previous episode the police box prop had the white light flashing on the roof when it materialized, but in this one it was the spinning blue lamp again, making me wonder if maybe they had a TARDIS for studio and a different one for location.

Once the whole Key to Time plot is resolved, though, the Doctor and Romana are left facing a greater threat than before: the wrath of the Black Guardian. The Doctor has been threatened before but this time he takes things a bit more seriously and fits the console with a device that will randomly select destination co-ordinates and effectively keep him on the run from the Black Guardian for a while. When the next season would commence, the randomizer would be working its magic and throwing the Doctor and Romana headlong into danger.

But before going there, how's about a piece of fan fiction?

Good.

NEXT EPISODE : IT'S IN THE BLOOD

The Power of Kroll

Much to the dismay of K9, the next segment of the Key to Time is located on a swamp moon orbiting the planet Delta Magna, and the Doctor and Romana venture out into the marshes on their own. The largest lake is now home to a refinery set up by big business to pull raw nutrients from the moon to feed the people back home. This may sound like business as usual to most, but to an extremist organization called the Sons of Earth this is exploitation of a natural resource, to the natives - charmingly known as the Swampies - this is an act of sacrelige agsinst their god, Kroll, and to gun runner Rhom Dutt this is a moneymaking opportunity. And to the sleeping menace that is Kroll, it's dinner time.

As Jay pointed out somewhere in the middle of the show, this is the one adventure of this season that is not totally focussed on the Key to Time; the Doctor and Romana are caught up in the tide of events as usual, with Romana being offered up as a sacrficie to Kroll and the Doctor being taken captive by the refinery crew and its ruthless commander, Thawn. Thawn's racist attitudes towards the Swampies evokes old colonial days when Britain controlled India, claiming to be doing everything for everyone's own good but still looking with suspicion and hatred at the natives. The Swampies resent the presence of the refinery as they have already been relocated from Delta Magna to this moon once, and now they face invasion once more by the culture they refer to as "dryfoot". With what's going on down in Caledonia, Ontario these days the plotline has relevance to the present day, which is something Doctor Who has always been good at.

Then there's Kroll. Oh yes. The giant squid monster. Jay started to get itchy to see the monster early in the show, not wanting to wait until the climax at episode 3 as is the norm. So it showed up in episode 2. And Jay whimpered "Why?" when he saw it. The design of the creature isn't too bad on its own but the awful bluescreen effect used to get it on the program is something entirely different. We only see it as a bluescreen effect a few times, though; the rest of the story it is alluded to and represented by the odd tentacle dragging someone off to their doom, be it a dryfoot technician or one of the Swampies, who look like nudists from Mars with their green skin and their lionclothes. This has to be the most male skin every flashed on Doctor Who in this era. Jay and I were unsure of any of it was erotic, though, at least from our personal points of view. Might have something to do with the green skin. Not that we're racist. We're just not sure about green cock.

And somewhere in there, they find the fifth segment of the Key to Time, almost as if it was an afterthought. And that leaves on segment to go.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ARMAGEDDON FACTOR