The Krotons

Chapter the 268th, where brain power meets acid (it was the Sixties, after all).

Plot:

The planet of the Gonds. Generations ago, a Kroton ship crash-landed on the planet, and after a brief battle the crystalline Krotons used a weapon of mass destruction, creating a wasteland. Since then, the Gonds have avoided the wasteland and served the Krotons without question despite never seeing them again. Their culture and even part of their city is built around the Kroton ship, including a learning hall where the Krotons pass on selective knowledge to the populace remotely, but never come out. Every so often, a ceremony is held where the two brightest students go in to the inner section of the ship and are never seen again. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive in the wasteland just in time to witness one of these valedictorians ejected from the back of the ship and killed. The Krotons need brain power to launch their ship, and because two of their four-strong crew were destroyed, they are only at half strength and need two more "high brains". All the pairs of students killed over the years were not clever enough to enable the escape. In order to investigate, the Doctor and Zoe have to take a test in the learning hall, and are accepted into the Kroton ship. After many scrapes, with the Krotons even coming out of their ship and trying to destroy the TARDIS, and after some navigation through the machinations of Gond politics, the Doctor and friends with help from some Gond allies attack the Krotons with home-brewed acid and destroy them.

Context:

This is a story I've been anticipating coming up (see First Time Round section below for why). My enthusiasm wasn't shared by any of the family such that they would want to watch, though, so I viewed it on my own from the DVD, an episode a night during some time off from the day job for half term in late May and early June 2023. After the watch, I poked around on the DVD and watched a great documentary about the whole of Patrick Troughton's time, Second Time Round, that's included on there. There's no documentary about the making of The Krotons, though; the nearest is a filmed fan discussion in a strand called The Doctor's Strange Love, which appeared on a handful of stories towards the end of the range, reserved for those stories that are mostly unloved or felt to be 'so bad they're good'. My enthusiasm for The Krotons, it seems, isn't shared by many people.

First Time Round:

This story is close to my heart, as it was the first ever Doctor Who story I watched. It's my Doctor Who fan origin story. As mentioned on the blog passim, I took a while to get over my fear of the programme in my early years, though I caught the odd glimpse here and there. I then stumbled across a repeats season of vintage Who stories on BBC2 in an early evening slot during the autumn of 1981. More details of that stumbling can be found in the blog posts for An Unearthly Child (which was the first story shown, and which I joined partway through) and Carnival of Monsters (that followed The Krotons, and was the first colour story I ever saw). By the time The Three Doctors and then Logopolis rounded off the season, I was well and truly hooked. Having now blogged them all, it's a significant milestone. For me, I mean. I acknowledge it's likely not significant to anyone else! My love for Doctor Who may not have been quite at first sight, but it was definitely love at first story. 

Reaction:

The Krotons is the first of a short run of stories I like to think of as Doctor Who's 'Scooby Doo Where Are You?' period. The Doctor and friends land in a new setting, from a varied and eclectic parade of places after having been stuck mostly indoors or underground in besieged bases for all the previous year, they then sort out a mystery of some kind (they even break up a smuggling ring and reveal the unsuspected person operating it in The Space Pirates), and it ends either on a corny joke (The Space Pirates again) or else on the trio's signature move of sneaking away before anyone starts asking who they are or how they came to be there. I have written on the blog before about some of the key differences between season 5 and 6 (see The War Games post for more details), but one detail I hadn't highlighted was the more free-standing nature of the stories. For a year or more before The Invasion, stories mostly flow into one another, the end of one leading to the beginning of the next to a lesser or greater extent - a singular adventure in space and time. After The Invasion and before The War Games finale, the stories The Krotons, The Seeds of Death and The Space Pirates do not link into one another, and could be shuffled into any order without causing issues. Behind the scenes, the reason for this was that the production team had to abandon commissioned stories or scripts for different reasons, and rush to create replacements. Overarching storytelling was not a luxury they had.

Why were so many scripts falling through? It may have been the relative inexperience of producer Peter Bryant and script editor (but by this time effectively co-producer) Derrick Sherwin. From writings about that time, and from interviews with Sherwin and others since, I get the impression they didn't really want to be there, and would have been more than happy to produce a different show altogether. Also on the team, though, was someone who fit with Doctor Who much more snugly, to the extent that he would thereafter make a lifelong creative contribution to the programme in one form or another, Terrance Dicks. Dicks had started as assistant script editor, but was more and more being credited as sole script editor as Sherwin's role changed. While other scripts for season 6 were going nowhere, he'd been off to one side working up a story with a writer new to Who, who would go on himself thereafter to make a lifelong creative contribution to the programme, Robert Holmes. The Krotons came to the rescue to plug a gap. As the first collaboration between these two titans, it probably seems a bit underwhelming, but it still has a lot of great parts that make it more worth celebrating than I think most of fandom gives credit for. One thing that is great about The Krotons is that the plot isn't arbitrary and instead arises from the characters of the regulars. The story wouldn't work for any other TARDIS team, with two of them being very smart and the other (Jamie) being, erm, talented in different ways. The script uses this for drama and for comedy.

The Krotons themselves come in for some stick, but I think they're great. The great concept of a crystalline creature that can return back to a vat of liquid when not actively monstering, the designs (which are great, particularly the spinning heads, even below the waist where the skirt section wobbles a bit when they walk isn't that bad), the voices with their South African accents and little catchphrases - "This is a warning" "Direction point". On location, director David Maloney gets some impressive long shots of barren landscapes including the great initial TARDIS materialisation. The plot and characters are pretty generic - the leader, the usurper, the hothead, the romantic couple, the professor - but the cast give it their all nonetheless (with Philip Madoc particularly good as Eelek - they should definitely ask him back). Holmes might have been writing slightly down to his audience, not quite finding the right tone for a programme to which he was new; his characters would be much more interesting in his next script and would get better and better thereafter. The story includes some honest to goodness schoolroom science too, with its Tellurium compounds and their nasty smells. Add to this some witty lines, and a set of regulars absolutely at the top of their game, and you've got a very entertaining way to spend four times 25 minutes. It's one of my favourites, and I honestly can't work out why more people don't love it.

Connectivity:

Both The Krotons and The Infinite Quest involve the use of corrosive agents by the Doctor and friends in their battle against the baddies (acid in the Troughton story, a fungus stored in a spoon in the Tennant animation).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Fourteen (ish) Faces of Doctor Who. It's so close to my heart because of its involvement in making me a Doctor Who fan (see First Time Round section above for more details), so I have to step back, distance myself and concentrate on it to see how unobvious a selection of stories the Five Faces season was. Obviously certain criteria were forced upon Doctor Who's 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner in putting it together. Each story had to be four episodes long to fit the stripped across Monday to Thursday weeknights scheduling, and - of course - any story had to exist in the archives. In the early 1980s, that meant only The Krotons fit the bill for a Patrick Troughton story. In order for there to be a glimpse of the fifth titular face, the most recently broadcast story Logopolis, in which Tom Baker regenerated into Peter Davison who then appeared for the final few frames of episode four, had to be there too. As a counterpoint to the most recent story, also including the first ever story An Unearthly Child must have seemed irresistibly symmetrical. It's also an excellent story, is four episodes long, and - luckily - existed in the archives in 1981. The other no-brainer decision was to include The Three Doctors, the only anniversary story where multiple versions of the Doctor team up that had been created at that time. The only real choice left was which solo Pertwee story to choose. Here - though there were still archival challenges - there were at least a few options.

It's intriguing that they didn't choose a Dalek story from Pertwee's time, but there may have been other restrictions. Archive repeats in those days required a lot of additional contractual paperwork; the intended inclusion of The Masque of Mandragora as a stand-alone Tom story fell through. Perhaps the Daleks were too expensive to sign off. Whatever the reason, it meant that the selection of stories contained no returning monsters, and featured only one returning villain in the Master (although in a brand new incarnation that had only just debuted the previous year). Apart from the last few minutes of Logopolis, there were no significant instances of game-changing lore (The Three Doctors doesn't qualify, as it's really just a fun runaround). The season instead showed off what the series can do in self-contained stories with interesting concepts, that feature journeys to the past, alien planets and sideways moves to weird scenarios (and that was all just in Carnival of Monsters). It did this without leaning too heavily on its greatest hits history of Daleks, Cybermen, etc. That was perfect for hooking in people like me and getting them to watch the next series when it debuted, which is all the producer must have wished. Perhaps it was more by luck than judgement though (Nathan-Turner dipped into the series history and lore more in that next series, and would increasingly thereafter).

As I'm writing this in a 60th anniversary year, I can't help but speculate on which stories I'd choose for a similar set of repeats this year, to lead into the three specials to be broadcast in November. If I follow the same restrictions, I'd only be looking at four episode stories or the equivalent. For the new series, that would mean splitting longer-length episodes or specials into 25-minute chunks and introducing unplanned cliffhangers (as has been done to the feature-length The Five Doctors, or the double-length Colin Baker stories in years gone by). That sounds like fun, to be honest, and if I check on youtube I think it's probable that someone out there has done such an editing job already. I'd also stick with the restriction of not including anything that doesn't exist in a state close to its broadcast format in the archives, which means no modern animations of stories, as fun as that might also have been. I would probably go with the same format as in 1981 for the beginning and end: start with first ever story An Unearthly Child, and finish with most recent The Power of the Doctor, split into four, to show the regeneration into the fourteenth Doctor in the final scene, and ensure the Fugitive Doctor is represented. I'd then need at least one for each remaining Doctor. For Patrick Troughton, the only new choice within the criteria that's opened up since 1981 is The Tomb of the Cybermen, and that would make a good inclusion. I'm assuming that my fantasy budget can take the inclusion of more famous monsters. For Pertwee, The Time Warrior is nice conceptually, and showcases the Sontarans.

For Tom Baker, there's an embarrassment of riches (self-contained four-parters forming the majority of his seven year run); for sheer quality alone, I'd make it City of Death, so everyone can enjoy the Parisian location footage and witty one-liners. It's just personal preference, but I'd go with Kinda for Peter Davison's pick; people love The Caves of Androzani and Earthshock, but we've already got one regeneration and one Cyberman story in the mix. For Colin Baker, it's a bit of a cheat, but I'd go with the version of Terror of the Vervoids prepared for Blu-ray that removes the overarching elements about the Doctor's trial. When made stand-alone, it's the most fun of any Colin story, and it's not bogged down in excessive lore. We haven't had a proper Dalek story as yet, so I'd select perhaps the best ever one, Remembrance of the Daleks, for Sylvester McCoy's story. The TV Movie edited into 25-minute chunks would follow for Paul McGann. Then, we're onto the new series. Assuming that we're avoiding regeneration stories, there's two choices for Christopher Eccleston. I think The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances edges it over the Slitheen two-parter. I guess an edited version would have to be called The Empty Child parts 1 - 4 rather than The Empty Child part 2 being followed by The Doctor Dances part 1, as that would just be too confusing. Tennant is another with a solid set of two-parters that work as standalone stories; the best one is probably Human Nature / Family of Blood, I think. Matt Smith had fewer two-parters, and they're all pretty lore-heavy; probably his very first one The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone is the best fit.

That just leaves Capaldi, and I think Under the Lake / Before the Flood is nice and stands alone, though the first episode's title is a little prosaic to cover the story as a whole. Throw in all the anniversary multi-Doctor meet ups too, which would ensure the War Doctor is represented, and you get the following: An Unearthly Child, The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Three Doctors, The Time Warrior, City of Death, Kinda, The Five Doctors (1-4), Terror of the Vervoids (Trial-Free version), Remembrance of the Daleks, The Enemy Within (or whatever, 1-4), The Empty Child (1-4), Human Nature (1-4), The Time of Angels (1-4), The Day of the Doctor (1-4), Before the Flood (1-4), The Power of the Doctor (1-4). A nice selection; though it would take four months to get through the season. At the time of writing this in mid-June 2023, they need to get a move on and start the season on BBC4 asap, or we'll run out of time before the big anniversary (don't hold your breath!). 

 

In Summary:

Even though this is essentially my 'love at first sight' story, I still think I'm objective when I state that it is unfairly underrated.