The Armageddon Factor - Episode 6

Now we have reached the end of the journey, after twenty five episodes the key to Time would be completed. The previous episode ended with the Doctor being shrunk by Drax. The episode sort of takes a while to get going but the Doctor and Drax carry the early moments of the episode. Merak and Shapp seem to be forming a double act. The Doctor and Drax are a good double act. This is normally the sort of thing that Robert Holmes would have done but it just shows that other people can get away with it to.

There is a moment where Astra announces that she is the Sixth princess of the sixth royal house of the sixth dynasty and it’s a lovely way of pointing things out and it could easily have been a silly explanation as to why she’s special but Baker and Martin have thought this one through. K9 has to pretend to the Shadow that he is still under his control. This is again a moment where K9 is actually interesting and sadly it doesn’t last very long but again like the time when he was a bad K9, it was fun while it lasted.

There is a lovely moment when the countdown of the Mentalis is getting to 0 and Drax is trying to remember which cable is needed to cut and stop the countdown and it does feel a bit like comedy and bit like drama. This means that the Marshall can fire his rockets for the first time since episode three or four and the planet of evil is destroyed and then the Shadow has a wonderful final scene. After Drax leaves the Doctor and Romana there comes a really fine scene where the Doctor pretends that he has become a bit bad now that they have all six segments. This is just the Doctor playing but it’s a wonderful moment when the viewer must be unsure whether he has been warped by the power that the Key to Time has.

The Shadow talks to what appears to be the Black Guardian. Here comes the best part of the episode because the Black Guardian pretends to be the White Guardian. The Doctor does a good job of stalling things and the moment when the White Guardian turns into the Black Guardian is great moment. What isn’t such a great moment is when the tracer is broken and the segments are broken up. After spending twenty six weeks, its basically been reduced to nothing. I cant quite make my mind up about this because on the one hand it’s the epic ending that we needed and on the other hand it does sort of make a mockery of what we have seen.

This is the final episode to feature Anthony Read as the script editor. I cant really fault the quality of the stories that he has been involved with. The Armageddon Factor is the final six part story ever. I cant believe that with over 350 episodes left to watch that it will just be two or four part stories. I cant say that I will really miss the six parters because they are a bit baggy and sometimes doesn’t quite work. The episode was a decent finale but it was an episode of two halves with the first half being the ok stuff and the second half being the stuff with the Black Guardian and the Doctor. The story was ok as well but I think that it could have been a bit shorter but whilst the budget might have been a bit tight, it didn’t show too much on screen and I thought that the story was directed quite well and Bob Baker and Dave Martin managed to make a six parter interesting which isn’t an easy thing to do.

On a final note I have to say that this is May Tamm’s final episode and like Caroline John, she doesn’t get a proper goodbye scene which is a shame because she has been really a great addition to the show and it is perhaps a wise move for Tamm to depart after just one season but when she returned to star alongside Tom Baker in the Big Finish adventures just before she passed away I was reminded as to how good she was and she carried a certain dignity that the role hadn’t really had for a while and Mary Tamm will be missed.

The idea of having a season with an overarching theme is something that is something that I think has paid off. The only story that didn’t work was ‘The Pirate Planet’ but the rest of them had something to enjoy and ‘The Stones of Blood’ and ‘The Androids of Tara’ were the best stories of the season. It wouldn’t be until the new era before we would get a story arc but I think that the Key to Time season was a good one and onwards with the next season.