499 - The Power of Kroll: Episode 4

Episode 499 is one that I wasn’t really looking forward to if I am being honest and that’s because of the last couple of episodes which haven’t been the finest in Doctor Who but I was hoping that something would get me back into the story and I am happy to say that this does happen. There is at least some excitement to start this episode with and it comes when Kroll starts to pick off some of the swampies.

The humans are trying to wipe out the swampies and vice versa which just shows that this is the final episode of the story. The shot of Kroll above the Doctor and Romana in their boat works ok but there is another shot of Kroll on the horizon which looks a bit unconvincing. Also there is a shot of Kroll attacking the refinery which really looks disappointing. This is the time of the season where money starts to run out so this is where quality starts to take a dip. There is a bit where the Doctor goes up a wobbly ladder to mess with a little circuit board and when he slaps the lid back the rocket wobbles. It’s always good to try and argue that walls rarely wobbled in Doctor Who but times like this it makes my job of arguing harder.

There is a shot where John Abineri is talking to a tentacle prop as if it the head part of Kroll. It’s due to the fact that Abineri is such a good actor that it doesn’t come across more ridiculous than it could have done. Whilst I haven’t been totally thrilled with the humans in this story, I thought that they made up for it in this episode because there was a nice bit of friction between all three of them and at one point K9 Dugeen gets shot by Thawn. His death is sad but I thought that Thawn’s death was quite shocking and surprisingly gory considering that Philip Hinchcliffe isn’t the producer.

Kroll is the fifth segment which perhaps shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. Due to the size of Kroll it was always going to be difficult for the Doctor to save the day against something that doesn’t speak and doesn’t communicate but somehow it works. The fact very little has been mentioned about the fifth segment seems to be a good way of covering up the fact that Kroll was the segment and one could argue that it was obvious when the Doctor and Romana were talking at the beginning of episode two.

One stat for today’s episode and that is this is the 52^nd episode to be written by Robert Holmes which ties him with Terry Nation. It will be a while before Robert Holmes returns to the show but I think that he managed to save the day with this episode. I feel slightly more positively about this story than I did at the end of the previous episode. I still stand that this wont be Robert Holmes’ best story but I think that Norman Stewart did a very good job of battling some tricky moments and making good use of the location filming.

The Power of Kroll - Episode 3

This episode was the first to be broadcast in 1979. There that is about as interesting as this entry is about to get.

I know that I have commented that this isn’t a great story, I think that this is the worst episode of the serial. The problem with the episode is that it just doesn’t really get going until the final five minutes. The Doctor and Romana start the episode about to be stretched to death. They spend nearly half the episode in this situation which does seem like a lot of padding was needed for this story. The Doctor is the one that saves the day by using his high pitched voice to shatter a window and use rain to stop the vines stretching them further.

It is perhaps the most obvious case of padding by having the leading characters do pretty much nothing of worth. The humans on the refinery do nothing apart from sit around and talk about things and the swampies also do very little. The only saving grace for the episode is that we do get some good location filming. Norman Stewart’s previous Doctor Who credit was ‘Underworld’ where he did a remarkable job in making that story work. He does the best he can but the problem with the story is the script so where the scrip allows it, the directing helps saves the day.

The performances from this episode are the sort that I would expect to see if nobody can see a reason to take centre stage. Not even Tom Baker’s comedy tone can help save him and if there was a time that his humour would have helped me get through an episode then it would have been now. As I mentioned the episode only really gets going in the final five minutes as the Doctor, Romana and Rohm-Dutt are escaping from the swampies. The cliffhanger is of the Doctor and Romana sitting in a boat just in front of Kroll. If they were going to have the sight of Kroll looming over people then it would have been better if we hadn’t seen it already in pretty much the same way as we see in in the cliffhanger.

This is one of the weakest episodes for sometime. I have rated this episode 7.00 and it’s the first time that an episode has received this low a rating since episode two of ‘The Face of Evil’. That was back in July. Out of the five episodes of this season it is just about in third place ahead of ‘The Ribos Operation’ but out of Tom Baker’s entire run it is currently in 23^rd place out of 28 stories. It’s tied with ‘The Invisible Enemy’ on 7.30. Hopefully the final episode will do something that makes me think this story has some hidden secrets just waiting to be shown to us but I could be wrong.

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’.

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.

Underworld - Episode 4

I tend to have a little tradition when watching these DVDs and that’s watch the special features when I get to the final episode. This helps to try and put any of the stories flaws and positives into context. I have been looking forward to this one as it shows a lot of the blue screen that the actors would have worked against. Watching the documentary its clear just how much blood, sweat and tears went into this story and it makes me appreciate what they do. The set used for the Oracle is the same as the one that we saw in episode one and its used much better for the oracle because it’s much darker and the colours used are also quite good. The effect used to represent the oracle is quite good because I suppose if they had gone for something physical then it would have looked rather ropey.

There was a lot more going on in this story but compared to the previous episodes is not as big a statement as it first seems. The main thing about this episode is getting two small gold canisters which is the quest that the Minyans had been looking for. This seemed like it wouldn’t take very long and wouldn’t create much tension but credit to Bob Baker and Dave Martin did a good job in making something interesting come out of this. There was a nice case of there being two versions of these canisters. One had the genetic bank for the Minyans whereas the others had a bomb in it. There was a bit of fun with the Doctor making his way back to the oracle to hand back the canisters and telling the guards that the ones he had were the bombs but they didn’t believe him. The Minyans get the proper canisters and that’s the end of that.

I don’t think that this story has been anywhere near as bad as I have previously thought and whilst there have been problems from start to finish, at least they tried and they pulled it off. Star Wars Episode IV was released just before this serial started to air and its fair to say that this basically rewrote the rules on sci-fi production values and other areas of the genre. When you compare the movie which had a budget of around $11 million compared to this serial which probably didn’t even have 1% of that spent on it then this story isn’t going to come across good. The story does have links to Greek mythology and Jason and the Argonauts and if only more of that had made it into the story then I would have liked this years ago.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this entry for episode one, this was the last Doctor Who story that I watched in its entirety. It was painful for me to watch as I just couldn’t get past the CSO. However I failed to appreciate the good things that were in this story and as a result over the course of four days I have revaluated this story and think that out of the five serials I have watched for this season, this is probably the third best. Out of Tom Baker stories so far (this being the 21^st), this is the 17^th best story but before I started this marathon I would have placed this at the very bottom. That shows that this isn’t the best but neither is it the worst.  Now I wait for Louise Jameson’s final story and the final story of the season.

Underworld - Episode 3

My attempt to read the target novel alongside is going well. I think that Terrance Dicks is doing a great in the book of making this story. It’s a shame that after reading a bit in the book that I reminded of the flaws in this story. Oddly enough though the CSO is not what is going off like a siren, it is the fact that there are weird long shots and it’s a very short episode so I feel like this review should be equally short.

The start of this episode is where the Doctor is trying to stop the gas from flowing and he collapse just as the gaps stops. This comes across better in the book. It feels a bit close for comfort in the book whereas it happens too quickly on TV and with the short running time, they could easily have spent a minute cranking up the tension. There is a map called ‘the tree’ and the Doctor refers to it as the tree at the end of the world which sounds more impressive in the book. On TV it looks a bit disappointing yet in my head the book made it sound like a map that could have come out of the Lord of the Rings films. Something that looks better than it sounded in the book is where the Doctor, Leela and Idas floating and they just ‘push’. The book makes it sound basic and on TV the CSO is used to quite good effect.

This episode runs to just over 21 minutes which I think is slightly longer than the previous episode and like the previous epoisode there was a fair amount of long shots. This is what frustrates me about this whole story. There is a good story trying to fight its way out. I cant quite figure out why they went with the idea of prolonged shots over expanding certain elements of the story. I know that I am perhaps comparing the TV version against a novelised version written two years after this aired and written by one of the greatest writers for Doctor Who but I cant help think that if they had asked Bob Baker and Dave Martin to pad it out that they could (and would) have come up with something.

The cliffhanger is the best one that there has been so far but that’s not really a compliment. I think that the story is slightly (and I mean slightly) better than I had given it credit for in the past. I think that the story is heavily flawed but there should be some credit to everyone involved for managing to salvage something from this story and at least having a go.

Underworld - Episode 2

I am still reading the target novel as I am going along and at the moment I have read seven chapters and the phrase “The Quest is the Quest” has been written eight time and two similar lines were written. I must admit that whilst reading this book I have developed a new enthusiasm for this story but I suspect that Terrance Dicks is doing what they couldn’t do on TV and this is the episode where if my memory serves me correctly is where the story goes downhill. It takes three minutes for the problems with this story to appear and the benefits of the book are evident because things that are said and done make sense. Sadly not one can really get over some of the production problem.

The idea that the new planet has a people and not just that but there is a people who are slaves and there are those that are basically bullies. There is a good story here but sadly its all forgotten because my attention is taken with the CSO. Some credit should go the actors because they all did fantastic in at least looking like they knew what they were doing and where they were going. That’s a tough job making it look convincing.

This has to be one of the shortest episodes of Doctor Who ever and I think its fair to say that there was a fair amount of padding. There are very long shots of gas pouring out of vents, for longer than we would normally see in a more packed episode. I think that even though it has a really short running time. I wish that Terrance Dicks would have written this story for TV because reading the book there is enough material that could easily have run to about five minutes.

The problem with CSO apart from the fact that there is fraying around the heads and bodies of those on screen, there is the issue of that the background looks fake. During normal location filming, there is a sense that the actors and the scenes are together whereas in this story when the actors are walking down the tunnel, there is no sense that it’s on uneven ground even though what we see shows that it’s not smooth.  As a result of the prolonged shots of the gas vent the cliffhanger is rather lacklustre but despite very little happening in the episode I actually found this episode to be perfectly fine and I am ‘enjoying’ this story more than I have ever done before in the past.

Underworld - Episode 1

When I first started this marathon, this story was one that I was dreading. It was a story that until 2010, I hadn’t watched all the way through. I would get till the second or third episode before giving up. This is the first story of 1978 and also the first story with Anthony Read as script editor. It is also Louise Jameson’s penultimate story as Leela.

I have decided to read the Target novel of this story and just reading the prologue has got me looking forward to it. The novelisation was written by Terrance Dicks in 1980 and so two years or so earlier, it fell to Bob Baker and Dave Martin to write this story. The opening scene is just as good as I read it in the novel. This is as about as far as I got in the book. I might make a comment about the book versus the TV versions during this story but I will have to wait and see. There is a nice speech that the Doctor gives about being the first people to see a planet formed. It’s delivered like a child about to see something for the first time after hearing about it for a long time.

The set used for the Minyon’s ship is quite good. It’s clearly designed to be the showpiece of the serial and its clear that this is where the budget went for the episode. I think that the guns they use aren’t quite as impressive as they are too cumbersome and has just a silly little screen to look through.

The Timelords are treated as gods by the minyons because the Timelords gave the minyons all the knowledge and then they were betrayed which leads to their rule on non-intervention. This is quite an interesting premise for the story. The Minyons that we meet are after another ship (which in the book is carrying more minyons). They are after P7E which is their ship. This is where the focus of the episode is and the build up is gradual but it’s a good thing because the tension builds up. The effect of the rocks building a planet around the ship is quite impressive. If only they hadn’t done it then the rest of the story wouldn’t be so CSO heavy. The final shot is of the new planet getting bigger and bigger. This episode has always been my favourite one of the four but that’s because the number of people in the episode is so small and also the CSO doesn’t really get in the way. That’s all going to change in the next episodes but I think that at very least, this story is going to be sort of like ‘The Sun Makers’ at that’s average. Not terrible but not great.