16 – Sixteenth Season – Tom Baker

The Key To Time

Producer Graham Williams had wanted to do a season-long arc, and this season he took the opportunity to do so. The overall story involves something called The Key To Time, and the Doctor has to find all six pieces of it. Of course, they are disguised, and he may have competition in the search. In point of fact, the Key is a classic example of a MacGuffin, defined by Alfred Hitchcock as “the thing that the characters on the screen worry about but the audience don’t care about”. The search mostly gives the Doctor and his new companion Romana a reason to be chasing things around the universe. Conveniently, the Key has 6 pieces, neatly matching the 6 stories of the season. And a true test of it as a MacGuffn is that you could pretty much reshuffle the stories and it would make no difference.

The Ribos Operation

The Doctor is taken to the White Guardian, and given his assignment to find 6 pieces of the Key to Time. He is also warned that there is a Black Guardian who wants it for evil purposes and will be competing to get it. And he is given a new assistant, a lady Time Lord (Time Lady?) named Romana. She has a device that among other thing can locate where the pieces are, and it seems to work like a Geiger counter. They find it is on Ribos, a primitive planet that knows nothing about other planets or stars. They meet a team of swindlers from Earth who have found a mark in a wealthy nobleman from a stellar Empire near the Magellanic Clouds. The swindlers have a blue stone that seems to be made of a rare and highly valuable mineral, and they use this as bait to tempt the nobleman to part with one million in gold pieces. And it soon becomes clear that blue stone is missing piece of the Key to Time. From there, the MacGuffin has everyone chasing it and many of them end up dead except for the two swindlers, the Doctor, and Romana.

This is basically a standard Doctor Who story which means it is fine but not outstanding. A good competent Robert Holmes script does what it needs to do, and you could easily rewrite it to eliminate the Key to Time parts and it would work just as well. Which is another characteristic of a MacGuffiin.

The Ribos Operation of the title should b e thought of as the swindle that the two swindlers are trying to pull off.

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