The Power of Kroll - Episode 2

Today’s episode is the final episode of 1978. It’s been quite a year as far as the show has been concerned with some quite intriguing stories (such as Underworld). One companion has left and another replace her. I think that in terms of quality the show hasn’t really changed that much in a year. This is episode 497 and is close to celebrating it Quincentenary episode (500^th) and that means that I am over 60% of the way through the marathon. I am still on course to finish this marathon on August 2, 2015.

The opening episode was a bit of a disappointment and I commented that this story wasn’t going to be one of Robert Holmes’ best stories. The cliffhanger had Romana do something that I don’t think she does very often and that’s scream when something does seem to attack her. Sadly its not the for mentioned Kroll but someone dressed in a clam costume. There’s a nice mystery that’s set up during an early scene between the Doctor and Romana when the Doctor questions who is paying Rohm-Dutt when the Swampies don’t have money. Sadly this is dismissed quite quickly by Romana.

When the stories move to the refinery I just find myself being slightly bored with what going on. I never thought I would find myself saying that a scene with Philip Madoc being boring. Madoc, Leeson & Neil McCarthy (previously in ‘The Mind of Evil’) spend the episode looking at some screen trying to decide what to do.

I forgot that John Abineri appears in this story. I forgot because he is caked under green makeup and plays one of the swampies. Like Philip Madoc, Abineri has had some impressive previous performances in Doctor Who. I think that his best performance was in the 1970 story ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ when he played General Carrington. But its still a good performance and I think that he does the best with the green make up.

We get to see the Kroll of this story and its quite a good design and looks quite disgusting but it is certainly one of the largest monsters ever seen in Doctor Who. The effect used to show it infront of the swampies is perhaps a little basic but it could have looked a lot worse and it must have been quite difficult to achieve on location. Even though I know that Kroll turns out to be the fifth segment, its still quite good as how they get round the fact that they don’t know what the segment is by having all this drama about sacrificing and that’s quite a clever thing to do.

This is definelty a stronger episode than yesterday’s. The story feels like its actually going somewhere and building up towards something which wasn’t the case yesterday. I am still more won over with the location filming and the swampies than anything else but my opinion of the story hasn’t changed I think that this is the weakest of the Robert Holmes stories. That said I think that there is something about this story and its certainly stronger than ‘The Pirate Planet’ and also ‘The Ribos Operation’.