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 be thought of as the swindle that the two swindlers are trying to pull off.

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The Pirate Planet

This story is the debut of writer Douglas Adams, who went on to be very famous for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The Doctor and Romana are in search of the second piece of the Key to Time. It is on the planet Calufrax, so they set the TARDIS to go there, but when they arrive the detector rod seems to point to everything as being the piece of the key, and the planet they are on is not Calufrax at all. Very strange. There is a Captain who seems to be running everything but he is quite over the top with his threats to kill anyone who displeases him. Then there are the mysterious Mentiads who have psychic powers but seem to be good. Eventually they discover that the planet they are on is Zanak, and that it jumps from planet to planet, engulfing the victim planet and mining it of all useful minerals. And Calufrax was just engulfed by Zanak. And the odd signal of the detector rod shows that Calufrax itself was the missing piece.

You can definitely see touches of Adams’ humor in this script. It is a good fun romp. And Romana has some useful contributions to make. But there are subtleties to this blustery Captain that make the story more interesting.

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The Stones of Blood

The opening is a Hammer Horror type scene of Druids pouring blood on a stone, which then pulses with light in response. Meanwhile, the TARDIS lands near an ancient stone circle, of which there are a number in Great Britain, Stonehenge being the most famous of course. The Doctor and Romana are drawn here by the signal of the Key of Time piece, but the signal seems to be there at times and not be there at others. They meet an elderly professor, Emilia Rumford, and her friend Vivien Fey, who are studying the stones. And Professor Rumford is an absolutely delightful character who tells the Doctor about a group of so-called Druids that are very interested in the stone circle. The Doctor investigates, and they are definitely hiding something. Then the Doctor is knocked out, and is tied to a stone at the circle where he is to be sacrificed.

Some of the stones, you see, are not really stones, they are creatures called Ogri, from the planet Ogros, and they require something only found in blood as nourishment and energy. Then they discover that Professor Rumford’s friend Vivien is actually a lot older than she first appears. And she is the goddess that the Druids have been worshiping. And she has access to a ship in hyperspace and kidnaps Romana to take to the ship. So the Doctor whips up a device that will take him there, where he frees Romana, and then frees a couple of floating “justice” entities called Megara that seem to be judges and lawyers. This leads to a very comedic sequence where the Doctor is on trial, and pulls a barrister’s wig from his pocket so that he can conduct his own defense. Doctor Who the program was moving in the direction of more comedy, and this is a good example of it. In the course of this they discover that “Vivien” is actually an alien who stole the Great Seal of the planet Diplos which is of course the missing Key of Time piece. It registered badly on the detector because it was frequently in hyperspace.

All in all I found this a very enjoyable episode. Not one of the classics, but a very good one you could enjoy rewatching.

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The Androids of Tara

This story is loosely based on The Prisoner of Zenda, and indeed once bore the title The Androids of Zenda. Tara is a feudal society resembling medieval Europe but with Androids and electronics. And it has the 4th segment of the Key to Time. Romana obtains it very efficiently while the Doctor goes fishing, but then they get caught up in the fight for the throne. Romana found the segment on the grounds of the estate of Count Grendel, who immediately kidnaps her and locks her up in his castle. Meanwhile the Doctor is found by the forces of Prince Reynart, heir to the throne of Tara. He is supposed to go to the throne room of the Palace to be crowned, and has to be there at a specific time or he forfeits his right to be crowned. And of course Count Grendel will do whatever it takes to prevent the Prince from reaching the throne room, including killing him on the way. But the Prince’s people have a plan, they have an android duplicate of the Prince that needs to be put in order, and they get the Doctor to fix it up.

Back at Grendel’s castle, Romana is taken by them to be an android, and the reason is that she is the exact double of Princess Strella. When they realize she is a living being, that opens up other possibilities. From here you have android doubles, exact duplicates, and mayhem all over. The finale features the Doctor outfighting the finest swordsman on Tara (count Grendel). We are through 4 parts of The Key to Time, and so far no sign of the Black Guardian. I’m expecting him to make an appearance in accordance with Checkov’s Rule, which states that if there is a gun appearing in the first act, it must be used by Act Three. So the fact that the White Guardian warned the Doctor in the first story should make it mandatory that the Black Guardian or his henchmen will appear. I thought maybe Grendel or Lamia might have been agents of the Black Guardian, but no evidence of that in this story.

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The Power of Kroll

The TARDIS has been directed to a world called Delta Three, the third moon of the planet Delta Magna. It is full of swamps, in which there is a race of green people who are derisively called Swampies. They originally lived on Delta Magna but were moved to this moon by the ruling race of Delta Magna,. Now the Delta Magnans have discovered rich methane deposits on the moon, and now the Swampies are an inconvenience that some want to get rid of. You should really think of this as the experience of indigenous Americans when the United States was formed. They live in the swamps, and worship the god Kroll, which is supposedly a giant squid, but frankly looks more like an octopus. The thing is that Kroll actually exists, and is immense. Then there are the humans who have set up a methane refinery, which hurts the Swampies and annoys Kroll. The Swampies want to kill the humans and drive them off the planet. Then there is a group that are referred to as The Sons of Earth, who are offstage throughout but are a group that think the Swampies are just people and that they have rights. The boss of the methane plant regards them as enemies, just as he does the Swampies, and eventually Kroll. The Doctor and Romana walk into this powder keg and are soon fighting for their lives.

The Doctor finds clues that lead him to believe that Kroll started out as an ordinary squid, but ingested the 5th segment of the Key to Time, and it made the squid giant sized. At the end the Doctor manages to use the rod recover the segment from Kroll, which in turn makes Kroll break down into many ordinary squids. Because so much of the action takes place in a swamp, K-9 cannot appear. As a result John Leeson, the voice of K-9, got to play the part of Dugeen in this story. He is one of the humans in the methane refinery, and opposed the leader in his plan to kill the Swampies, so is shot dead. He was the operator of the scanners, and played the role without his glasses.

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The Armageddon Factor

This is the usual 6-part finale so it is longer story. The detector rod takes the Doctor and Romana to the planet Atrios which is engaged in a nuclear war with the planet Zeos. Atrios is losing that war, but they capture the Doctor and Romana and try to get them to help. Atrios is being led by an insane Marshal who pushes for war at every turn and is a megalomaniac. There is also a Princess Astra that is the theoretic ruler of Atrios, but she is completely controlled by the Marshal. It turns out that the two planets are actually linked by a transmat connection, but there is also a third place, which looks like a space station from outside, but like caves from inside. The Doctor thinks that going and talking to the Zeosans might allow for peace, but of course the Marshal won’t hear of it. But on Zeos they discover that the whole war has been fought by a computer.

The third place is the home of the Shadow, who has been placing people under control by means of small devices attached to their throats, and the Marshal is one of them. And the Shadow is an agent of the Black Guardian, who seems to be purely evil and loves death and destruction as an end in itself. And when the sixth part is located and the key is complete, the Doctor manages to steal it back from the Shadow, who is blown up by bombs. He has failed, but the Black Guardian has one more trick to try. He tries to disguise himself as the White Guardian, but gives himself away with his callous disregard for those who died, so the Doctor orders the pieces of the Key to re-disperse. Apparently giving it to the White guardian to reboot the Universe was not all that important after all. But then, it was a Macguffin all along.

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