It's hard to believe that this story is pretty much the same as The Caves of Androzani. Many of the narrative beats of the hugely popular Robert Holmes Season 21 story are to be found here.
Whilst the writer rated the Davison story highly, he did not like this Season 16 one at all.
The problems began with the failure of the story which was to have filled the fifth slot of the Key to Time season. Ted Willis - the writer responsible for the cult classic Get Carter - was supposed to provide a story for the season but unfortunately a drink problem meant that he failed to submit anything useable.
Holmes, who had only recently managed to escape from Doctor Who, had already submitted a script (The Ribos Operation) for this year and found himself being asked by Graham Williams and Anthony Read to supply another.
He was asked to include the biggest monster ever seen in the series - and one thing he never took kindly to was having to adhere to any "shopping lists" from producers or script editors.
Williams' boss was so unhappy with the design on this story that he ordered that its designer never work on the series again. Set elements highlighted as poor included the close-up of a countdown clock where you could see that a piece of metal had been very crudely cut out, and the very shaky rocket silo set.
(If Tom Baker is going to be expected to hit something with a hammer, it really needs to be pretty sturdy).
Philip Madoc was another series veteran who hated this story - his final appearance in the show. He thought he was being offered the main villain role of Thawn.
Several roles had to be recast as people dropped out.
The Kroll model shots posed a problem as the camera on location wasn't masked off properly - creating a rigid line across the screen, with live action below and model work above.
Probably not a good idea to talk about wiping out the 'Swampies' when you have one of them working for you and he can hear what you're saying...
The Doctor is supposed to respect other cultures and their art and literature - so why does he nonchalantly toss the sacred text of the tribe into a pool of mud?
Why does the Doctor have to touch the body of Kroll with the locator? Couldn't he have just touched a tentacle? How did the segment get onto the end of the wand, and how can a single giant specimen of creature transform into lots of little individual ones? Kroll must have been pretty big in the first place to have eaten the high priest and the disguised segment, so why not transform into other big squids, if that was the original form?
Finally - the Doctor deals with beings which look like people dressed up as aliens all the time, so what was so different about the Kroll impersonator at the end of Part One...? A post-modernist joke by Robert Holmes?
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