The Power of Kroll

Chapter the 271st, Kroll Kroll Kroll!!!

Plot:
Seeking the fifth of six segments of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana arrive in the TARDIS on the third moon of Delta Magna, sometime in the future when Earth-people are colonising planets. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as he'd be no good on the swampy terrain, and immediately get involved in local politics. After having turfed the native Delta Magnans (Swampies) from their home planet and rehoused them on this moon, humans then discovered voluminous methane deposits in the swamps of the moon, and set up an experimental refinery to process them. The commander, Thawn, now wants rid of the Swampies altogether so he can expand his operations, but faces opposition, not least from the anti-colonialist Sons of Earth movement. Thawn engages a gun-runner Rohm-Dutt to sell the Swampies faulty weapons for an attack on the refinery, purporting to be donations from the Sons of Earth. This will then be Thawn's pretext for wiping the Swampies out. Romana is almost sacrificed to the Swampies' god Kroll in a pre-battle ceremony. Kroll emerges from the Swamp, woken by the refinery's operations, and turns out to be a giant squid (and the source of the methane). Most people, humans and Swampies alike, are killed by Kroll. The Doctor pieces together from some ancient texts that Kroll's size was caused by its swallowing the fifth segment, disguised as a religious artefact; he bravely goes out armed only with the tracer and converts the segment, destroying Kroll in the process. He also stops a malfunctioning automated process in the refinery blowing them all up. Then, the quest continues...

Context:

I watched from the DVD an episode every evening on my own in early July 2023. This is another story that completes a season of Doctor Who's blog posts. Bit by bit over eight years the blog has collected every segment of the Key to Time season in random order, starting with the final piece by posting about season finale The Armageddon Factor, only my fifth story blogged, way back in 2015. Like the Doctor when he completed his quest for the Key, I can't pause for long before I resume my random wanderings. I have now completed 11 out of the current 39 seasons of combined classic and new Who (3, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 6 and 13). In the same way as when collecting the novelisations and the videos over the years, there's an excitement in slowly closing the gaps. A huge swathe of Tom Baker stories from The Masque of Mandragora continuously through to Meglos are now completed, and I only have three more of his to go. When I reach the last of Tom, I'll no doubt be a bit bereft. Of course, a history of collecting teaches one that you can always put off completion by hook or by crook. For example, around the time of writing, a new novelisation of a Tom Baker story has been published, despite his era having been comprehensively covered in book form for a while now (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details).

First Time Round:

Having recently rediscovered a box of my old diaries (see the First Time Round section of the recent Cold War post for more details), I first checked there to see if I had recorded anything from around the time I first saw this story (which was when the VHS tape was released in 1995). I kept a diary for the first few months of the year, but seem to have given up in late March, just before the first tapes of the Key to Time stories were released, and long before the 5th June 1995, when The Power of Kroll (and The Armageddon Factor) came out, completing the overarching story. What I usually say here, remembering this period of my life, is that I would have bought them in Volume One in Worthing on the day of release, probably after work but maybe at lunchtime, taken them home on the bus as soon as work allowed, and watched them straight away, one after the other. It was probably something like that, but looking at the entries around early February and March when other videos came out, I see that it was not always that simple. I spent a week early in February looking every day for releases before realising that I'd got the date wrong and they wouldn't be out until the second Monday of the month. On the 6th March, Volume One had sold out apparently, so I had to get the couple of titles released then on the following day, presumably from somewhere else but I don't specify where. I do remember when I finally watched The Power of Kroll, whenever it exactly was, I found it quite good compared to its preceding reputation.

Reaction:

Many a clever commentator on these kind of things over the years has pointed out, as part of some treatise on how differing approaches to material can produce wildly divergent results, that poll-topping fan favourite story The Caves of Androzani contains very many plot elements in common with the same writer's earlier story The Power of Kroll (a very much poll-bottoming fan unfavourite story). The writer, Robert Holmes, does indeed include in both a couple of factions and gun-running funded by an unlikely person with Machiavellian intent, all based on a smaller inhabited world in the shadow of the society of a larger nearby planet. These superficial similarities, though, may disguise how much a talented pro writer like Holmes is in control of tone. Androzani is not more serious than Kroll just because of different (better?) direction and production design. Holmes constructs his earlier script to be more of a fun knockabout story not taking itself too seriously. His gun runners in the later story are a nasty bunch, and this is showcased in some dramatic scenes. Rohm-Dutt, the gun runner from the Kroll story, is deliberately written to be a much less serious character, and is therefore showcased in more comedic scenes such as some verbal sparring with Romana. In both, Holmes is working with a different script editor with different requirements. The Caves of Androzani was made when the production team was establishing a pacey action-oriented template; The Power of Kroll was made at an earlier time when the series wanted to accentuate the lighter and the comic, steering away from the violence and horror; as such, it was - for that time - just what the Doctor ordered.

The superficial similarities between the two stories could well be a subconscious offering from Holmes. The Androzani story was the writer's return to broadcast Doctor Who after five years away, the last script he'd had produced for the show being The Power of Kroll. Perhaps that brought gun-runners and such back to some part of his mind. Many, including Holmes talking about himself, have accused him of being 'Who-ed out' by the time of Kroll, after having written at least one script per year since the 60s, and having been script editor for a long period too. I don't feel watching it that the story betrays any exhaustion or lack of ideas. Maybe the execution has some issues, but the script is fine. Well, the script is fine except for one ruinously ambitious component, and that was insisted on by the production team. Saying the giant squid monster is the elephant in the room of this story doesn't do it justice: it's the giant squid monster in the room. Still, it's not that bad; the split screen superimposition of the model over the location footage has a very obvious dividing line, but there have been worse effects in Who's history. Arguably, the Magma creature in the Androzani story is less forgivable - what's in the script is much easier to realise than a giant squid, and the finished article is as bad as anything in The Power of Kroll. I'm happy to forgive both. The tentacles we see interacting directly with the cast in live action scenes and the model Kroll attacking the refinery are hard to reconcile with one another as they appear to be different scales; again, though, it's a minor issue, and more to the point - giant squid monster! I think a Doctor Who that attempted this is much more fun and rewarding than one that didn't.

The Swampies are actors painted green with green wigs, yes, but I think they look okay. The night filming of their sacrificial ceremony, all chanting and formation jogging on the spot and spear waggling, is great. The sets are a bit drab, but the performances are solid. John Lesson, not voicing K9 but still under contract, is a fresh and bright presence on camera; someone as good as Philip Madoc is playing second in command (reportedly accidentally accepting the role as he thought he was getting Neil McCarthy's role as Thawn); another guest actor that kept coming back to Who John Abineri plays lead Swampie Ranquin with aplomb. There's some expert world building with Robert Holmes creating the Sons of Earth, a movement in conflict with the authorities, in very few lines of dialogue. A hovercraft zips about on location. The Doctor larks about in the climactic struggle to defeat the giant monster (Tom famously said in the Tom Baker Years video interview that he was "making a meal of it" but it's lots of fun), and the script has another surprise when the danger isn't over and an explosive orbit shot still needs to be dealt with. The colonialism theme is a bit heavy handed, but different Swampies are at least allowed differing opinions rather than being presented as a monoculture, and there's a nice open ending where Fenner's fate (as the only colonial left with the natives) is left to one's imagination. Long recaps for episodes two to four maybe show that the scripts were underrunning a bit, but that happens with Doctor Who stories fairly frequently. It also seems a bit off that there's long scenes of build-up of the refinery staff seeing hints on their monitors that something big is coming after the monster has been revealed to the audience. These are minor quibbles, though.

Connectivity:

Both The Power of Kroll and Fugitive of the Judoon feature a gun going off in its user's face (due to decrepitude of the weapon in the former, and booby-trapping in the latter).

Deeper Thoughts:

Searching for the next segment (part 1). Only for its first ever home video release on VHS did the Key to Time recreate its collecting quest narrative for the consumer; each story was released separately, and could be hunted down to form the whole. Subsequent DVD releases were always a full box-set, and no doubt an eventual Blu-ray release will be the same. It's a shame not to capitalise on this time in the Doctor's history where he became a completist collector like his fans. It's not, though, as if there aren't many other opportunities for collection open to the Who connoisseur. The original Target novelisations, for example, at the end of the classic era had covered almost all the broadcast stories: there was scope for the collecting to continue, as it eventually did in more recent years with the publishing of books to close those remaining gaps, and to novelise some stories from the new series too. Recently, with the gaps all closed, the focus has moved to new series stories, though a couple of titles have been re-novelised, with completely new adaptations of the original TV stories released. This has happened again in the tranche of books released in July 2023 (all available as smartly designed paperbacks with covers by Anthony Dry). Five titles have been released in all, and one is a reworking by the original screenwriter (and, though he was using a pseudonym back then, the original noveliser too) of the story Warrior's Gate, Steven Gallagher. To refresh your memory of the plot of the story, see its blog post here.

The changes Gallagher makes are interesting in that they are not made in significant areas of the narrative, nor in sweeping fashion: there's an exciting opening not seen on TV where a pilot deliberately shoots the slaver ship in such a way that it will end up in the void where the story is set; this, though, was part of the original novelisation that Gallagher wrote in the 1980s (which I dug out for comparison) too. The new changes he's made instead are multiple smaller ones to the order of events, or which character meets with whom and when, slightly restructuring things, as if it is a version based on an earlier draft of the original TV screenplay. It's also much longer than the original book, Gallagher having written more material back then but not having been granted an increased page count; he's able to reinstate it in this new version. Comic characters Aldo and Royce, renamed in the TV version and faithfully monikered thus in the original novelisation, return to being Aldo and Waldo as per Gallagher's original conception. Some aspects from TV and the original novelisation - like the giant MZ gun used in a futile attempt to destroy the gateway - are dropped altogether. It all adds up to a different but similar story in the spirit of the original. Only if you're wedded to very specific moments (for example, missing is a favourite moment of mine when the Doctor knocks over an overfilled cup of wine and says "This is no way to run an empire") will you be in any way disappointed.

The book is called Warriors' Gate and Beyond because also included are two short stories. The first is a prose version of an audiobook released in 2021, The Kairos Ring, a story of Romana, K9 and the Tharil Laszlo fighting an army of the undead. The second is exclusive to this book, The Little Book of Fate, and features the Paul McGann version of the Doctor investigating a traveling carnival in the North of England between the wars, and finding a Tharil featuring in its freak show. Both are interesting curios, and it's good to have them collected together in one bumper volume. The next novelisation in this batch by broadcast order is from nearly 40 years later: Keith Temple's adaptation of his 2008 Tenth Doctor story Planet of the Ood. Temple is adapting the shortest programme of all of the five; turning a 45-minute episode into a 160+ page book has posed a challenge to many authors in the last few years as new series stories have been published. How to add additional material without impacting the story's pacing? Temple does this in the most traditional way to date, diving into the internal dialogue and history of characters to flesh out individual moments shown on screen (much like Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke did before him in the early years of the Target range). This slows things down a bit, but that suits the story, which underneath the trappings is a pretty traditional tale. One of the sales rep characters (all Ood fodder without many or any lines on TV) is named and gets a backstory and memorable death; plus, an extra scene is added that beefs up the Doctor and Donna's contribution to the denouement.

Phil Ford takes somewhat of a similar approach in the prose version of his and Russell T Davies's The Waters of Mars (broadcast in 2009), but the inner thoughts and history of the characters are kept relatively short to retain the TV version's velocity. Some of the material around Ed Gold's relationship with his CO is softened, and the ambiguity of his final words (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Waters of Mars blog post) reduced. Ford slows things down only in the middle, before the eruption of carnage, by including some new material. This comprises a much longer flashback sequence of the 10-year old Adelaide Brooke during the events of earlier story The Stolen Earth, expanding the Dalek cameo seen on TV, and a scene integrating the history of the Ice Warriors (previous inhabitants of Mars in Doctor Who lore) with the Flood infection. They are both essentially fan service continuity-fests, but nonetheless enjoyable. Nothing much could harm The Waters of Mars, anyway. No offence to Warrior's Gate particularly, and the other three stories, but The Waters of Mars on television - in this chronicler's humble opinion at least - stands hands and shoulders above them as one of the best Doctor Who stories made to date. That wasn't guaranteed necessarily to translate to prose, though, so it will be interesting next time to see how The Zygon Invasion and Kerblam! are transformed when converted to the written word. To be continued...  

In Summary:

Listen not to the unbelievers! It's intended to be a fun story, and it - mostly - succeeds in being just that.