What's Wrong With... The Armageddon Factor

Above, Tom starts counting the number of things wrong with the Season 16 finale...

One of the biggest issues with The Armageddon Factor is its role as the finale to a storyline that has lasted an entire season - the Key to Time. In many ways, it is this aspect of it which attracts the most criticism, rather than the plot set out by Bob Baker and Dave Martin.

As a concluding chapter, it is frustrating and unsatisfying. By simply sending all the Key segments back to where they came from, without properly explaining what the Doctor did with them, is anti-climactic.

You wonder what the point of the entire quest was.

Throughout the season, we have seen nothing of the Black Guardian or his agents. Each of the villains of the individual stories is clearly acting towards their own personal ambition - the Graff wanting to regain his throne; the Captain plotting to free himself from Xanxia, who seeks eternal life; Grendel wanting the throne of Tara; and Thawn a genocidal racist, obsessed with one small primitive (in his view) settlement.

Only Cesair might possibly be an agent - a popular fan theory - as she exploits the Key segment in her possession. For me, this doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.

If she was an agent, then why did the Black Guardian leave her with the segment for the thousand or more years she has been trapped on Earth. Why remain stuck on Earth in the first place? Would the Black Guardian really leave his agent languishing on prehistoric Earth, waiting for sausage sandwiches to be invented?

Why has the Black Guardian done nothing to get the segments for himself, or at least prevent the Doctor getting them?

The only thing that makes sense is that other fan theory: that it was the Black Guardian who sent the Doctor on his mission in the first place, disguising himself as his White counterpart.

Where was the White Guardian at the end, if it had been him who sent the Doctor?

If this is the case, however, why set up the Shadow to hinder him right at the point of success?

And if a piece of electronic equipment can identify segments of the most powerful artefact in the Universe, why not the agent of the Black Guardian? He has Astra under his nose the whole time.

If the White Guardian can stop a TARDIS in flight and divert it, why can't the equally powerful Black Guardian? Is Time Lord technology (the ship's defences) really capable of thwarting an omnipotent being?

An oddity about the latter is that the Shadow does not know what the Key segment is, since he captures the Princess and interrogates her about it.

Later, however, he suddenly knows that she is the segment.

As agents of the Supreme Evil One, he's a bit rubbish. He has various people under his power throughout - the Doctor, Romana and Astra - but never exploits the situation.

A simple light stops him getting into the TARDIS to take the Doctor's five segments. The console room is notoriously over-lit at times, but hardly floodlight strength. Why select a henchman who can't walk into a lighted room?

At the climax of the story, he stands there laughing like a lunatic for half a minute - giving everyone time to organise themselves to beat him.

If his Planet of Evil - which looks like a space-station (almost as if the designer didn't read the script) - is half way between Atrios and Zeos, why did the Atrian battle fleet not spot it, and won't it get blown up when Mentalis detonates?

If the Marshal is the military commander, why does he not know how many warships he has, or how to read a computerised battle display?

Performances vary. John Woodvine as the Marshal of Atrios is the best thing here, but he's totally side-lined in the second half, stuck in a spaceship on a video-loop. Shapps is either delightfully camp, or an annoying ham. Merak is just wet. Similarly Astra. From this performance you have to wonder what made Williams and Read think she was Companion material. 

Whilst Drax's accent is explained, you expect something more serious from a Time Lord. Why make him a Time Lord in the first place? Why not just an abducted Atrian engineer, or a Zeon allowed to live until his usefulness is over.

(And why keep him alive in the first place? As the creator of Mentalis, who knows how to deactivate it, he's a liability to the Shadow's plans).

Why leave Drax with so many tools which he could use to escape? And why has he never used any of them?

Talking of liabilities, having the Marshal say out loud his schemes in front of a mirror ain't a very clever idea.

The mind controlling devices are hardly subtle.

The Doctor and Romana discover that there's someone trapped behind the door to K-Block, yet don't mention anything to the Marshal or Shapp - even when they hear that it's potentially fatal to be in K-Block, and there's a Princess missing.

You can see the TARDIS when it's supposed to have gone missing.

Romana is surprised to learn that it wasn't the President of the High Council who sent her - despite the Doctor having already told her this.

The Doctor is surprised to see K-9 spin round, claiming he's never seen him to this before. Yet he did it in The Pirate Planet only four stories ago.

Lastly, if Astra was reconstituted, were all the other segments returned in the same way? The folks on Zanak will get a terrible shock if Callufrax were to pop back into being...

What's Wrong With... The Power of Kroll

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?

What's Wrong With... The Androids of Tara

A lot of Doctor Who stories wear their inspirations on their sleeves - as my regular  "Inspirations" posts have already amply demonstrated. Just think of all the classic horror movies and Gothic novels which Robert Holmes "homaged".

The problem with The Androids of Tara - the second story from the pen of writer David Fisher - is that the source is too apparent...

He has pretty much transplanted the bulk of the plot of the classic novel The Prisoner of Zenda into a Doctor Who setting. Anthony Hope's novel, first published in 1894, has been adapted for the large and small screens on many occasions, the best known being the 1937 movie version starring Ronald Colman.

Not only has Fisher plundered the plot, but he even employs parallel characters, like Zadek replacing Captain Zapt, or Count Grendel replacing Duke Michael.

The Key to Time is at its least relevant here. Not only can the Doctor not be bothered to go look for it, regardless of the threat from both the Black and the White Guardian, but Romana finds it a couple of minutes into Part One, then everyone forgets about it until the last three minutes of Part Four.

Clearly Fisher wasn't all that interested in the arc, and paid the Key only lip service. We saw similar with his previous story for this season.

The one everyone talks about - the Taran Wood Beast. It resembles a man in a furry suit wearing a papier mache mask so much that some fans have theorised that it is supposed to be a man in a furry suit wearing a papier mache mask... 

Basically, Count Grendel gets some lackey to dress up so he can go hunt them.

Grendel has a large complement of men, but the heir to the throne of Tara appears to have just Zadek and Farrah to call upon. Where is his army? Even in their attack on the castle at the end, he seems to have only a handful of men.

Why base himself, practically unguarded, in a remote lodge which seems to be easily accessible by Grendel?

The TARDIS has costumes for different planets - but fashions change over time. Why would the outfit necessarily match the time-zone in which the TARDIS might arrive, as here? The presence of the outfit suggests that the Doctor must have visited Tara before - but there's no evidence on screen that he recognises it. The other option is that all TARDISes come already equipped with outfits for different planets - but again that doesn't explain them fitting the correct time-zone.

K-9's blaster comes from everywhere apart from where it's meant to come from.

Tom Baker clearly gets impatient waiting for the VFX to cut through the wall, so punches the piece out. It may also be in character, but I think we can see Tom's infamous irritability bleeding into the performance.

When Madam Lamia is shot, the guard just happens to hit her right in the middle of the amulet she hangs round her neck - just where a VFX man might hide a small explosive charge...

With Mary Tamm playing four roles - Romana, Strella, android Romana and android Strella - the split-screen work has to be up to scratch. It is - mostly - but we see Grendel's arm disappear in the scene in Lamia's workshop where the android Romana is first unveiled.

What's Wrong With... The Stones of Blood

The opening sequence was only recorded after Graham Williams vetoed a birthday scene in the TARDIS - this being the time of the series' 15th Anniversary, and 100th story. It would have been a nice little scene, with the Doctor pleased to accept from Romana a new scarf, exactly the same as his old one.

Instead we get a recap of the Key to Time set-up. The all-powerful McGuffin appears to be kept in an old fridge in a plain black room. It all looks very cheap.

David Fisher is the worst writer of the season for integrating the Key into his narrative. The opening scene would have been the work of Anthony Read. The segment turns up right at the end, just as though it were simply an afterthought.

Why has it taken this long for Romana to ask about the background to their mission? Surely knowing of the threat from the Black Guardian and his agents would be something that she ought to have been warned about.

Why does Cessair make do with sharing a little cottage when she could continue to own the big mansion?

If it's because she's in a Sapphic relationship with Prof. Rumford, as certain sections of fandom like to think, then couldn't they share the Hall instead?

The Druidic cult is introduced as followers of the Cailleach - who is being impersonated by Vivien Fey / Cessair. What she gets out of this we never know. 

Why continue this for centuries when she's an alien from an advanced civilisation. She doesn't get any benefit from the deception that we ever see.

Why does she kill De Vries? Is it because he was too stupid to recognise a solitary bicycle lamp approaching?

Having authority over the neighbourhood may have been useful in the past, when she was the acknowledged landowner, but these days she's just an ordinary local, staying in a cottage.

What is Cessair doing on Earth all this time anyway. She can flit back and forth to the spaceship anytime, and has the Great Seal of Diplos (really the Key segment) which surely has the power to get it moving again.

Not so much something wrong as personal opinion, but the story seems to lose its way once the action moves to the spaceship. Courtroom drama can be very static and dull, unless you're Hitchcock or Billy Wilder. The first half works better, having some of the Gothic trappings reminiscent of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era.

Why does Romana ask why they can't see the spaceship, when the Doctor has already told her that it's in Hyperspace?

Why does the Doctor have a tea-towel covering his gun-like machine when he fills it? It wouldn't be to hide the fact that the crystals are already in the end piece would it...?

How would falling into the sea destroy an Ogri?

The legal code followed by the Megara is rather silly. Surely even logical machines would know that they had been prevented from carrying out their function by being locked up, and that releasing them isn't necessarily a crime - especially one punishable by death.

Why do they destroy the Ogri when it can't possibly harm them, and one of their responsibilities is to have them taken back to their own planet?

The Doctor dismissing them by simply waving the Seal at them is most unsatisfying. Its particular powers are ill-defined.

Cessair had it for thousands of years - so why didn't she use it to send the Megara away?

Beatrix Lehmann - the real life inspiration for Cabaret's Sally Bowles - struggles over her lines at times. But we love and forgive her for it.

What's Wrong With... The Pirate Planet

Douglas Adams had been submitting stories to the programme for a while before Anthony Read decided to take a gamble.

One of the problems Read's predecessor had encountered was the complexity of Adams' ideas. In many ways they were similar to the first efforts of the Bristol Boys, Baker and Martin, who initially showed a lack of discipline in their writing. Their imaginations did not necessarily align with what was achievable - and affordable - on TV.

Even with Read's guidance, as soon as Graham Williams' boss saw this he demanded that it be scrapped. He particularly disliked the humour and told the producer that Tom Baker would fail to take this seriously and play it for laughs - something which they were trying to reign in.

It was only because there were no replacement scripts at an advanced enough stage that Williams and Read were allowed to continue.

In many ways it's a miracle that Adams was recruited to replace Read only a short time later (though the success of a certain comic sci-fi radio show may have swung the decision).

Unlike Robert Holmes in the previous story, whilst the segment does have a role to play, the Key to Time isn't well integrated into the story.

The Doctor claims that Zanak will be fine in its new permanent location. However, its has been stripped of all of its minerals, and its hollow centre is now filled with the remnants of Callufrax, which have also been entirely drained of mineral resources. Hopefully there's a planet nearby to trade with (and a product someone wants to buy) - except the Captain has suppressed the technology to get them into space, and they don't even know what stars are, let alone how to get there.

Callufrax was described as an icy planetoid - meaning that Zanak's new location must be pretty far from its sun (and yet there's no sign of this throughout the story. We see a bright blue sky and no-one is wrapped up for a wintery climate).

Adams was unhappy with some of the casting, including the Captain.

Some of the performances are a trifle wooden - e.g. "Why? Why? Why, Why? Why?".

There are also some dodgy melodramatic lines - "Bandraginus Five, by every last breath in my body, you'll be avenged".

The trouble with Technobabble is that it is very easy to trip over, verbally. Tom has a couple of fluffs here:

K-9 talks about a power level of 5347.2 on the vantalla cycle scale - to which Tom responds: "543.72?" - and K-9 agrees.

We also have the psychic wavelength of the Mentiads being 338.79 micropars one minute, and 337.98 the next.

There are a couple of gun-fights which depict Kimus and Romana as crack shots. Much has been made of her sheltered background in Time Lord academia, and I can't see anyone outside the Bridge guards being allowed anywhere near a weapon - so where did these marksman skills come from?

Why does the Doctor risk trying to lure the guard away from the aircar in the exact same manner he used before, when he could just have gotten K-9 to stun him?

(And his jelly babies are clearly Liquorice Allsorts).

What's Wrong With... The Ribos Operation

Very little, truth to be told, which is surprising. 

The writer, Robert Holmes, did not like "shopping lists" from the producer / script editor. He much preferred the freedom to do his own thing.

In at least one interview, Holmes cited The Ribos Operation as his favourite story, despite it having to include the Key to Time. Not only that, but it had to launch the whole integrated season.

A few minor issues / questions can be identified however...

For a start, how can a time machine travelling through the Vortex detect the movement of an object travelling in normal space / time? 

Why does the Doctor have to work out what the segment is disguised as? Why disguise them at all? No-one is going to work out what an oddly shaped crystal is / does, and as they're spread through the cosmic history it's highly unlikely anyone would obtain more than one.

Why couldn't the Guardian have just told him what to look for? Is it that even he doesn't know?

Is there an even higher power which scattered and disguised them in the first place?

The Guardian never explains why it is the Doctor who has to go get the segments - and the Doctor never asks.

Why is the Doctor allocated a companion? As he says himself, they can often be an added hindrance.

Where did the Jethrik lump usually live? Why have the locator seek it when it's been placed into an even more difficult to access location? As we'll see throughout the season, the locator appears to pick the time and place when it is most difficult and dangerous to obtain the segments.

Why was Binro persecuted when you have people like the Seer acting as a professional mystic, with magical powers?

The Seer leads everyone to the Concourse but Unstoffe has already left. The Graff isn't to know this: to him she's simply wrong - so why continue to be guided by her?

Where on Earth is Garron supposed to come from? His accent varies considerably.

Why does a hardened warrior-prince like the Graff fall for Unstoffe's Jethrik tale, when it is so obviously dodgy? 

The Graff kills the Seer. She didn't see that coming...