The Power of Kroll - Episode 1

T’was two nights before Christmas and Santa seems to have come early with the penultimate in the Key to Time series. I always forget that Robert Holmes wrote this story so this story might be the third story in a row that might be rated very highly. This is one of the least popular Robert Holmes stories and I think that if it were any other writer then it wouldn’t be such a problem but when you’ve written the sort of stories that he has written then a below par story is going to stand out. Like the previous two stories, there is an extraordinary quality of location filming.  I think that this season has seen some of the best location filming that I can recall. The fact there isn’t a road or a building in sight does a lot to create the impression that this is an alien world.

The first faces that we encounter are humans. They don’t seem to be terrible people but there are clearly the aliens and the ones that are in charge. There are also green skinned people called swampies who have become slaves to the humans. They do have their own group who are very afraid of Kroll. They do business with a human called Rohm-Dutt. Rohm-Dutt is a gun for hire, played very well Glyn Owen. He is perhaps the most interesting of the humans because the people working on the refinery seem to be rather ordinary. John Leeson makes an appearance, probably due to the fact that K9 doesn’t feature at all during this story and this was probably an attempt to keep him busy. Philip Madoc returns to the show but this was never going to be Solon from ‘The Brain of Morbius’.

The sacrifice of Romana seems to go on forever. It actually turns out to be about five or six minutes. The cliffhanger involves Romana yet again and she does something that I don’t recall her doing before and that is scream. She is screaming because something does appear to be attacking her so as a cliffhanger it works and gives the episode the ending that it needed because up until this point the story hadn’t really worked for me. The whole episode seemed like it was plodding along and not really leading to anything. I don’t think that this story is going to be quite as good as ‘The Stones of Blood’ and ‘The Androids of Tara’ but maybe the rest of the story might change my opinion on that.