Friday, 24 January 2025

What's Wrong With... The King's Demons


As with Time-Flight, we have to ask why the Master is wearing a disguise when he can't possibly know that anyone who might recognise him is going to turn up.
No-one in 1215 England knows him, so why such an elaborate disguise - holographic mask and silly accent? All he had to do was put on a suitable period costume and he could have dispensed with the rest.
Why use this mask technology, when good old rubber ones have worked well enough in the past?
Ainley's attempt at a French accent is not always easy to understand. One can't help but be reminded of the French knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

When the Doctor himself draws attention to the "small time villainy" of the Master then you know you're in trouble. It wasn't that long ago that he was blackmailing the entire universe, and in his earlier guise he was working alongside Daleks and making deals with the Devil.
Interfering with Magna Carta ("Did she die in vain?!") wouldn't necessarily lead to anything which the Master could exploit and benefit from.
Why bother with Kamelion at all? It doesn't have a personality of its own, so the Master would have to be in constant control over it to achieve anything with it. Why not simply take on the role himself and cut out the middle (robot) man?
He's an accomplished hypnotist, so why not just hypnotise the real King John and get him to do what he wants? At some point he's going to have to deal with the real one anyway.

The Doctor challenges Sir Gilles to a duel. The scene plays as if he's then shocked to discover that this is the disguised Master - which means that the Doctor deliberately provoked mortal combat with someone.
Sir Ranulf switches allegiance far too easily. He simply accepts whatever anyone tells him - even if it's someone who he was happy to see executed 20 minutes ago. He changes his opinion of the Doctor four times, and this is only two episodes long.
The Iron Maiden is totally anachronistic. You'll see it has a ruff around its "face" - meaning that this design could only have originated in the Elizabethan or Jacobean eras.

Finally, why was Kamelion taken onto the TARDIS at the conclusion of the story? The producer and script editor already knew that the prop did not work properly and it was causing serious delays in studio, so why did they persist with it? If they knew they weren't going to use it, and didn't want it left with the Master, then why not simply have it destroyed at the conclusion?
It can look like anyone, so if they were going to take it forward then they could have got anyone in to play Kamelion, using just a static head and shoulders shot of the prop to show it transforming into the actor.

1 comment:

  1. King John was famously irascible and stubborn. He was probably immune to the Master’s hypnotism - as the Third Doctor said would likely be the case with the Brigadier.

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