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.

The Stones of Blood

Chapter The 235th, which demonstrates that it is relatively easy to get blood into a stone. 

Plot:

Sometime around 2000BC, the villainous Cessair of Diplos stole the great seal of Diplos, really the third segment of the Key to Time, giving her the power to transform the appearance of people and objects. She then abducts some silicon-based lifeforms called the Ogri from their home planet of Ogros to use as muscle; these creatures look like massive stones and drink blood. Somehow she still gets caught, and is taken off in a hyperspace ship for trial, with the arresting officers, plus justice machines called Megara sealed in one of the ship's chambers. They also transport the powerful seal and the Ogri in the same ship, which is asking for trouble. Cessair escapes and takes her weapon and hench-monoliths with her, leaving the ship stalled, and transfers from hyperspace to the corresponding area of real space: somewhere in rural England. The Ogri pose as part of a megalithic stone circle, and Cessair takes on a variety of aliases over the years so she has control of the land on which the stone circle stands. She could go anywhere and do anything, but she chooses to spend 4000 years pretending to be a Celtic goddess, the Cailleach. In the late 1970s, the Doctor, Romana and K9, arrive at the stones searching for the third segment. Cessair is now posing as Vivien Fay, a research assistant to Professor Emelia Rumford, presumably to sabotage the study Rumford is doing, the latter's curiosity having been piqued by discrepancies in the numbers of the stones recorded over the years. 

The Doctor visits De Vries, the leader of a local (fake) druid society based in a nearby manor house, and ends up the centre-piece of a pagan sacrifice, his blood to be food for the Ogri. Meanwhile, Vivien / Cessair cosplays as the Doctor using the segment's power and tricks Romana into falling off a cliff. Luckily, the 'druids' have second thoughts; plus, Romana manages to hang on. After having failed to sacrifice the Doctor, De Vries is killed by an Ogri; examining the manor house after this, the Doctor and Rumford find clues that help them piece together that 'Vivien' is behind everything. Cessair sends Romana to the hyperspace ship, so the Doctor builds a gizmo to follow her, which Rumford and K9 operate. While on the ship, the Doctor opens the seals on the Megara (who appear as floating sparkling balls), which they inform him is a capital crime. With Cessair in attendance, the Doctor defends himself appealing the death penalty, trying to get the Megara to realise that their escaped defendant is in the room. He fails, but moves near to Cessair at the point when the Megara are going to execute him; the Megara inadvertently knock her out, then scan her brain to check she's okay, revealing her identity. The Megara punish Cessair by turning her into another stone in the stone circle back on Earth. Before the Megara can carry out sentence on the Doctor, he uses the seal (somehow) to banish them back to their ship and the ship back to Diplos. The Time Travellers leave Professor Rumford and carry on with their quest...

Context:

After enjoying watching the last Doctor Who story for the blog on a Saturday morning, I did the same for episode one of The Stones of Blood. Last time, this led to many members of the family coming in and watching for long periods, but absolutely nobody so much as glanced in from the doorway this time. Separately, though, the two youngest (boy of 12, girl of 10) unexpectedly asked to join me for the next Who watch - this was after I'd caught up on parts two to four over the weekend. We'll see if they are still interested next weekend. I watched the story from the disc within the Australian region DVD box-set. (Why the Australian version? See the First Time Round section of The Armageddon Factor blog post for more details, but be prepared for man-baby whinging!)

First Time Round:

This is the fifth blogged of a total of six stories from the Key to Time series, season 16 of the classic run. I first experienced every one of this linked set of stories in the same way: on VHS. The tapes were released in the first half of 1995, two a month between April and June. The Stones of Blood was one of the middle pair released on Monday 22nd May 1995 with The Androids of Tara. Following the usual pattern of my purchases of this era, I would have ventured into central Worthing after work on the day the VHS came out (I was employed at the time in a factoring company based a little way out of the centre near the hospital, and it was just a little too far to go there and back in my lunch hour and still find time for lunch) to Volume One, my supplier of the time. Volume One was a book and video shop with a large cult and sci-fi section. I'd have bought both the two videos and then most likely have stopped to get a burger in Old Nick's Diner, then get the bus home, all the while soaking in every bit of information available on the cover about the new and special delights that awaited me when I was finally reunited with a VCR. This would have included opening up the boxes and reading the inner covers too, as BBC Video at this point had started to print slightly more in-depth sleeve notes on the inside (as pictured below). Once I was back in my old family home where I was still living at that time, I was on my own; my sister was at university and my Mum was living almost full-time at my soon-to-be Stepdad's place. As such, there would have been nothing and no-one stopping me from gorging on all eight episodes in one sitting, and nothing and no-one did. Volume One and Old Nick's Diner are no more, the family home sold, and the video tapes long ago consigned to landfill, but I feel they are in some small way commemorated by my still retaining that VHS sleeve in a plastic wallet in a folder alongside all of its stable-mates.

Reaction:

The most memorable part of The Stones of Blood is a scene late in episode three that is totally divorced from the main action: two campers find Ogri, or as they appear to them massive standing stones, mysteriously and suddenly situated outside their tent. They touch the stones, their hands become fixed causing them immediate terror, and we watch as one of their hands become a skeletal version, flesh and blood absorbed; the screen then fades to red. It's a chilling and effective contemporary horror moment, but it is telling that it stands out, unencumbered as it is with the weight of the ongoing narrative. The ongoing narrative, you see, is absolute pants. The Stones of Blood is nonetheless overall a good example of this period of Doctor Who, but it works as a series of moments, some witty and some horrific, that are connected by a loose plot that essentially involves the characters travelling randomly - and often quite slowly - from one location to another, with a backstory that struggles to make much sense. To see this, you just have to study the text to try to locate any motivation for Vivien Fay / Cessair's actions, and you'll come up blank. She is an escaped convict, and has the Ogri and the power of the seal. She could pretty much do anything she wants, and could certainly leave the immediate vicinity of the prison spaceship in which she was previously incarcerated, Instead, she hangs around for millennia pretending to be a goddess, presumably popping back to the ship occasionally to check it's still in the same state, acquiring a stately home and various minor positions of power over the years, and having herself immortalised in oils for a portrait every so often.

The three missing portraits clue is another case in point; it's a lovely moment when the Doctor investigates this Scooby Doo style clue, but the slightest scrutiny shows it to be absurd. If Cessair is trying to protect a secret identity and not draw attention to her superhuman longevity, why would she have commissioned three separate portraits of her unchanged mug over the decades, why would she exhibit them side by side in her house, and why would she only recently have thought to hide them, leaving very obvious gaps? It's similar to the investigation later when Romana finds out from cookbooks in the cottage that Vivien / Cessair is allergic to lemon juice; this fictional information only helps Romana and K9 to find a fictional planet of origin, through a fictional process of elimination, so could have been literally anything; she could be allergic to Bath Olivers or jelly or Sondheim musicals: go nuts, it's all made-up! The characters don't even use that piece of information in any way, so it was pretty pointless. Still fun, though. If one accepts that there must be some good reason why Cessair needs to continue - or at least enjoys - playing the fearsome beaked deity, her methods still don't add up. If she has the ability to transform into other things, why does she need to dress up (having said that, the feathered all-over number with plague mask is wonderfully scary and memorable). Can she also commune with the birds that seem to frighten De Vries so much? It's not mentioned as a power of the Key to Time nor the Guardians (though they do start wearing dead birds stuck to their heads in later stories, so who knows). Perhaps she has used the power of the seal to turn into the raven, but if so she appears to be in two places at the same time during the early parts of the narrative. How else though would De Vries know that his visitor is called the Doctor if  'the Cailleach' hadn't somehow told him? It's not clear and never explained.

None of this matters much, though: The Stones of Blood moves on to its next nice moment, fleet of foot, and gets to the end with the whole house of cards just about intact, held together by charm rather than logic. This story is perhaps the best use of the Key to Time arc plot in the stories before the season finale - giving the segment some powers that the villain can harness is an interesting twist on the established format, and also serves as a reminder to the audience half way through the quest of what it's all about. Behind the scenes there's a minor innovation too, with Outside Broadcast video rather than film used for the location footage, which happened very rarely in the 1970s. In general, the story is shot well - there's a beautiful low angle scene of K9 at dawn in the third episode. Well, I assume it's dawn. The story's notable for the use of a 'day for night' filter on some of the exterior scenes that doesn't quite work; unfortunately, the night-time lighting of outdoor set scenes that were staged in the studio is much darker, so there's still a visual bump between studio and location even though both are shot on video. The images on location seem a bit soft focus occasionally too, which may have been deliberate, but it's hard to be sure. The humour in the show, which is always to the fore in this period, is just the right side of taking the mickey. The scene where the Doctor takes on an Ogri like a matador, swirling his coat around Paso Doble-style, and tempting the poor stone creature towards the cliff edge, does go over the top (as indeed does the Ogri), but the rest is just slightly more restrained. There's much wit and wisdom, and some wonderful lines, like the Rumford / Doctor exchange: "Are you from outer space? / No. / Oh. / I'm more from what you'd call inner time".

Halfway in, the genre of the story abruptly changes. It's two for the price of one: the horror of the Ogri with their omnipresent heartbeat gives way to some harder science fiction of the hyperspace ship, and then a battle of wits in a (sort-of) courtroom drama.  Again, The Stones of Blood somehow gets away with side-stepping the genre promise of its earlier episodes. Lip service is paid with the occasional cutaway to the stone circle and the Ogri during the second half. One of these cutaways is a very well directed moment: most Ogri scenes see a septuagenarian leaving them behind at a slow walking pace, but the scene of K9 narrating them getting closer and closer to the circle as Rumford operates the hyperspace machine is tense and exciting. The main part of Dudley Simpson's score is good but not distinguished, but the cues accompanying the hyperspace scenes are much more distinctive and give it a lift in the second half. The Megara, flashing blobs vision-mixed into the main action, aren't that bad an effect. The story seems curiously underpopulated; apart from the cameoing campers and the Megara voice-only parts, there's only four speaking roles in the guest cast, and half of them are characters that are barely in any scenes and are dispatched early. The reason this doesn't matter is the other half of that quartet: this story stands or falls on the quality of two performances, Susan Engel as Vivien / Cessair and Beatrix Lehmann as Professor Rumford. Thankfully, they are both superb. Lehmann gives one of the best dotty scientists in the whole of Doctor Who's long history (and that's a crowded field). Engel's restrained and smooth criminality is a joy to watch. The queer coding of the couple gives an interesting subtext too (but its subtle enough to ignore it if you're not convinced and think I'm seeing something that isn't there). This is a female-led guest cast, with a token bloke and a couple of male voice artists; this was rare for Doctor Who in the 1970s. I haven't the time to be exhaustive searching back, but four guest speaking parts for women is probably a record for this era, if not for the whole of classic Who. They should have tried it more often. 

Connectivity: 

Both The Stones of Blood and The Curse of the Black Spot feature a space ship, its original crew dead for many years to the point that their bodies are desiccated, occupying the same place as an area on the planet Earth that is blissfully unaware that the ship is also there, but on another plane or dimension or some such nonsense; in both stories, the initial impact of an alien force on a character is shown by something happening to that character's hand (though it's a lot more grisly in the 1970s story).

Deeper Thoughts:

Target Acquisition - part 1 of 2. In 2021, I completed my collection of at least one copy of every Doctor Who novel and novelisation on the Target imprint, which I blogged about on occasion throughout the year. My collection stayed complete for - ooh - all of seven months. Now, for the third time in recent years, a batch of new novelisations has been published with the usual lovely retro covers; again, there's a mixture of classic and new series stories novelised. The latter category still provides ample scope for new releases, with only a handful of the many stories shown from 2005 onwards having been adapted into books; the former category meanwhile is close to done. With all the classic series stories completed in Target versions last year, the only couple left are two new versions of The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara, the prose written by original author David Fisher. These versions were made for alternate talking book versions, the original novelisations having been penned by Terrance Dicks soon after the television broadcasts; Fisher's versions are now printed on paper for the very first time. The Stones of Blood starts with a foreword by the author's son, Nick Fisher, also a writer, that's a heartfelt tribute to David, who's passed away since writing the adaptations. Another tribute, this time from a colleague, comes in the afterword, where Michael Stevens, the commissioning editor for the audio range, explains how this version originally came about: Dicks's novelisation was during the years where he was working on many titles, and therefore the books were very lean; Stevens wanted something more substantial for audio, and wanted to do something a bit different.

Fisher's prose is a solid and unpretentious as Dicks's work, and he does not deviate much from the story as broadcast except to smooth out some of the lumpier bits of plotting. For example, Cessair is shown to have mental powers from the seal that allow her some control over her acolytes, which she uses to get the original stone circle built. The book explicitly confirms that this also allows her to control the raven, rather than her transforming herself into one. This doesn't explain how De Vries knows the curly haired fellow in his manor is called the Doctor, though; a little bird couldn't have literally told him, could it? Because logistics and budget are no issue in a novelisation, there are many more birds in the narrative, including some gulls that try to push Romana off the cliff during the material that represents the episode one cliffhanger. The discrepancies in the number of stones can be more definite too, without having to adjust to a real world location: in the book, it's been surveyed as having either six or nine stones, depending on whether the three Ogri are on walkabout or not. Fisher returns the Megara to being the floating balls they were in his original script, rather than the sparkling lights of the TV production. There are a few extra lines and gags here and there, and sometimes dialogue is turned into character thoughts. There's not much of the inner life of the characters, though there's a nice couple of pages of Rumford using her archaeological skills to find where the crystals to power the Doctor's hyperspace gizmo might be hidden in Vivien's cottage. Something of a motivation is given for Cessair's actions, but I don't really buy it. She stays near the hyperspace ship in case she can work out a way to pilot it and escape Earth, and has to keep sacrificing people to the Ogri or she'll lose control of them. It's better than nothing, I suppose.

In a note on the text at the end of The Androids of Tara novelisation, Steve Cole, project editor of the Target range, explains that both Fisher and Stevens were keen to do another audio book after the first proved successful, so Fisher was commissioned in June 2011 to create a new version of the story that was broadcast directly after The Stones of Blood. My blog post on the TV version of the Tara adventure can be read here, and it gives away instantly to the reader that this is one of my favourites from the classic years of Doctor Who. Would the prose version meet such a high level of expectation? Not quite, alas. The prose style is the same, and again dialogue exchanges are simplified by being turned into character thoughts or reported speech where possible. More than in The Stones of Blood book, Fisher provides chunks of backstory. The problem is that the Tara story doesn't need it. In a way these two stories are polar opposites; Stones is a very simple plot based on some complicated and sometimes nonsensical backstory; tidying up that backstory in the book is therefore useful. Androids, on the other hand, though the plot is slightly more involved with its doubles and double-crossing, results from very straightforward motivations for all concerned that don't need fleshing out. It's all just about who becomes king of the planet. So, the additional material tends to go into detail about people's family trees and history, and is not so essential.

Like the previous book, The Androids of Tara is robbed of the wonderful performances from the TV, but this seems to hurt it more than its predecessor. It's a souffle of a show, the rise coming from some wonderful actors creating little moments that can't be captured on the page. For example, Simon Lack and Paul Lavers make a lot from facial expressions and tones of voice to create fun and laughter watching them, but the characters on the page are just a couple of dull soldiers. Peter Jeffrey's sly and witty performance as Count Grendel lifts what in prose form is a very stereotypical tyrant. I'm glad this version exists, but it'll never become my go-to version over the TV story; to be honest, though, that was never a likely outcome. Two new series stories came out alongside the two Fisher books in this batch (and I'll review them next time); there was to be a third, Peter Harness's book of his scripts with Steven Moffat, titled The Zygon Invasion, which was announced but then delayed until next year. The rumour, though, is that it will be part of a larger batch planned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who. I look forward to it.

In Summary:

Not quite a stone-cold classic, but very enjoyable (almost despite itself). 

The Pirate Planet

 

Chapter The 187th, which covers a Doctor Who story that amazingly was written by Douglas Adams. Douglas flippin' Adams. That there is even one such a thing should never be taken for granted.

Plot:

On the quest to collect and assemble the Key to Time, the Doctor, accompanied by Romana and K9, attempts to land the TARDIS on the uninhabited and inhospitable planet Calufrax to find the second segment; but, something in the space-time vortex blocks his way. Romana tries a second time and meets no resistance, but the planet that she lands on is not Calufrax but Zanak. Meeting some locals, they find out that the planet is ruled by a half Cyborg Pirate Captain who lives up a mountain on the 'bridge', and is feared and loved by the general populace for bringing new ages of prosperity on a regular basis, and also for his saving them from the tyranny of the planet's previous ruler, Queen Xanxia. The Doctor and friends ally themselves with a couple of rebellious youngsters and a group of telepaths called the Mentiads. They discover that Zanak is a hollow space-jumping planet that materialises around other planets so they can be mined until they are reduced to super-compacted rocks. A new age of prosperity is the arrival at a new planet. The resultant energy release when a planet is mined, affects any psy-sensitive youth, bringing the Mentiads one by one into being. The latest planet to fall victim to Zanak is Calufrax  and the jump coincided with the Doctor's attempt to land the TARDIS.

The Captain is secretly controlled by Queen Xanxia, who is posing as his nurse. She rebuilt him when he crash-landed on Zanak many years before, and has been using him to mine the planets to provide the necessary energy to prolong her life. The real, aged Xanxia is frozen in her last moments by Time Dam technology, and the nurse version is a projection that has almost become solid. The energy needs of the Time Dams increase exponentially however, so the Queen can never achieve corporeality. The Captain has meanwhile been building a superweapon from the shrunken planets to destroy the Queen. Attempting another jump to mine Earth, the Captain and Xanxia find they are blocked by the Doctor, materialising in the same time and place as Zanak as he did earlier. The Mentiads use their psychic powers to blow up the planet's engine room just before the Doctor's TARDIS falls to pieces under the strain. The Queen kills the Captain. The Doctor adapts the Captain's plan to bring the Queen's life finally to its natural close, and then blows up the bridge. The remains of Calufrax turn out to be the second segment in disguise.

Context:

Watched an episode a day with a couple of days off across a short period in April 2021, from the Australian version of the DVD (see the First Time Round section of the blog post here for an explanation of why I own the Aussie box set). I was accompanied for the first episode by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) but they all had better things to do for the other three parts. The Better Half sat down with me for the final part, the first time in a good while that she's watched an old Doctor Who episode. The children watched the first episode in complete quiet, with no restlessness, usually a good sign that they are enjoying it, so it was a surprise that not one of them was interested in seeing any more. The Better Half's only comment was at the end, when the bridge is destroyed. She said "That's a rubbish model"; I think this is terribly unfair - it's a decent model and a good explosion.

First Time Round:

In 1995, BBC video started the release of the 1978/1979 season of Doctor Who. Usually, like this blog, the Doctor Who VHS range jumped around randomly month on month to give the buying public a choice of the many different eras and Doctors in the show's long history. This time, though, it released a batch of stories in chronological order of broadcast. This is because the six stories of the season have a loose overarching plot, each seeing the TARDIS team searching for another disguised segment of the Key to Time; this was an experiment by the producer of the time, Graham Williams. The season and the idea has been criticised over the years, but I rather like it. Each week, as well as the usual story, there is the additional mystery of what exactly will turn out to be the disguised segment and how long it will take the Doctor and friends to find it. The videos themselves played on this collecting theme, with the spine of each designed as a jigsaw-piece like sliver that, once all six tapes were collected, formed a picture of what could be the Key to Time itself floating over the surface of a planet, with some coloured shapes floating above it and birds and a couple of TARDISes (it's not clear what it's supposed to depict if I'm honest). So, the first two stories came out in April, the middle two in May, and the season was completed with the final two in June. Buying up and watching them all (it was the first time I'd seen any of the six stories) was enormously enjoyable. I was a few months into my first job after finishing university, working in Worthing. On the day of release, 3rd April 1995, I would have either walked into town at lunchtime or after work and bought both The Ribos Operation and The Pirate Planet in Volume One (a video and book store in central Worthing which was my chief supplier of Who stuff in those days).

Reaction:

The consensus view of the story structure of The Pirate Planet is that it's a bit of a mess, the work of a talented writer at the beginning of his TV career having trouble fitting all his many leftfield ideas into a coherent whole. I, on the other hand, think it's the best plot Douglas Adams ever wrote. I don't mean just for Doctor Who, either. It is clear from his later career that he never found it easy to fit his many leftfield ideas into a coherent whole. His cleverness in creating Hitch Hiker, in its many different versions in different media, was that it was an episodic structure held together by a loose web of top-drawer jokes (both cosmic and otherwise) that allowed his stories to wander however he wanted to from event to event. I don't mean to take anything away from how much intelligence and graft it took to get this right. The picaresque approach is the perfect fit for the material, and when attempting to impose a different structure to Hitch Hiker, as in in the third novel Life, The Universe and Everything where Douglas reused the plot of an early unused Doctor Who submission, it didn't work nearly so well. It also explains why it was so difficult to create a Hitch Hiker movie; films need a stricter structure than radio or novels. And so do Doctor Who stories. The other big contender for the top slot in his Doctor Who work is City of Death, but the plot structure there had already been provided by David Fisher before he had to abandon the story, and Adams was free to develop it by adding what he was best at, ideas, dialogue and jokes. Outside of Who and Hitch Hiker his fiction work is limited to two Dirk Gently novels and fragments, and one of those novels reused structures from past work (including bits of City of Death) too.

So, now that I've dismissed all the other contenders, I better justify this decision. What do I think it is that makes The Pirate Planet the best? It's only four episodes, yet it contains four or five highly original concepts and three interesting and effective plot reversals (and, to be fair, one slightly less effective plot reversal too). I'll go into more detail on all these in a moment, but just in terms of volume this is much more plot than could be expected in a classic series story (including six-parters). The usual rate for a Doctor Who story would be maybe one or two concepts and reversals, and lots of running around. Now, some people might believe it is a weakness to have so much going on, but it's fine as long as it coheres. It likely took a lot of work by the script editor and Adams to get it to this point, but The Pirate Planet definitely achieves coherence until near the end. By end, I mean the resolution; the climax of the story - the race to get to Earth first, and the Doctor using his TARDIS to block Zanak from materialising, even as it threatens to destroy his ship - is jolly exciting. It's only after that when things aren't optimal, with all the loose ends tied up a bit too abruptly. I'd rather, though, that a script or production was sometimes ambitious and tried to do more rather than always playing it safe.

Those concepts then: first of all, and not to be overlooked or taken for granted, is the idea of doing sci-fi pirates in the first place. The archetypes come straight out of a Peter Pan panto but are given a chrome, plastic and silicon chip makeover. The Captain, as played with gusto in a compelling turn by Bruce Purchase, is Long John Silver without a wooden leg but with a cybernetic arm and eye patch. Smee is spliced with a uniformed Death Star assistant henchman to become Mister Fibuli. The Captain's parrot is a robot! There's a plank and someone is forced to walk off it! Children of all ages must have loved this at the time. Second, there's the idea of a hollow planet that materialises around other planets and sucks them dry, a large-scale and original villain methodology for Doctor Who, or indeed any larger than life adventure fiction.  Bubbling under: a group of telepaths brought into being by the vast explosion of energy created when destruction happens on a planetary scale, compacted super-heavy tiny planets set in a perfect balance to be used as a weapon, and making a planet a disguised segment of the Key to Time. Little touches elsewhere like psychic interference generators and inertia inhibiting walkways are also great. It's an embarrassment of riches.

The reversals: first, the Captain is not what he seems. He is both more clever and more of a victim than he first appears, using his blustering persona to disguise his true nature and motives from his persecutor (and the audience). The moment at the end where he grieves over the dead body of Mister Fibuli, whom he'd spent the previous four episodes shouting at, is a nice character moment. Despite the billing, he's only the secondary villain of the piece. Second of the four reversals is that his meek-seeming nurse is the true End Level Boss, secretly a projection of a younger version of the aged Queen Xanxia. It's nice that the resolution of the part three cliffhanger (how can the Doctor survive walking off the plank) is where this reversal takes place, after much foreshadowing in the earlier episodes. The Doctor was using the same technology as her to project a version of himself. This means that the fourth episode stays interesting by changing focus, and the Captain and the Doctor are - sort of - on the same side. Third, the masterstroke of having the next planet that Zanak is going to surround and destroy be Earth, upping the ante for the denouement. The fourth and less effective reversal is that the Mentiads, who are feared by Zanak's populace, and look like they're evil, are actually the good guys. The script tries too hard to misdirect early on to the point where it's pretty much cheating. The Mentiads wear robes and chant in basements and talk about their having a "Vigil of Evil"; no nice group of people ever does this. Still, even that was a half decent stab. Nothing much is what it seems in The Pirate Planet and that keeps things interesting.

So. why isn't the story more well thought of? Story structure isn't everything, and originality without budget can misfire. Like Bob Baker and Dave Martin, a pair of writers who also started working on Who early in their career, and who also had too many and too big ideas to quite fit into its format, Adams really needed million dollar budgets to do his scripts justice. The production values are wanting in places, and the location filming doesn't merge seamlessly with the studio work. Some things were out of everyone's control, like Tom Baker's scabby lip which is a bit distracting; he'd been bitten by a dog, so the injury had to be explained in the narrative as the result of his banging his face against the TARDIS controls. I suspect, though, that the main problem for people is one of tone. Adams writes some great names (Bandraginus Five, Oolian stone, Magnifactoid Eccentricolometer, Madranite 1-5) but to some they are just silly names. Adams writes great funny dialogue like "It's an economic miracle, of course it's wrong", "I save planets mostly", "My biorhythms must be at an all time low", "Newton's revenge". There's also one of my favourite dialogue exchanges in Doctor Who between the Captain broadcasting his words over a tannoy to his guards, and an interjecting Mister Fibuli: "Someone is using a counter-jamming frequency projector - find it and destroy it immediately." / "Captain, do you suppose any of the guards know what a counter-jamming frequency projector looks like?" / (Beat) / "Destroy everything!".  But, to fans that maybe take their favourite programme a smidge too seriously. there is no room for gags in Doctor Who. To them, this embarrassment of riches just seemed like an embarrassment

Connectivity: 

What is it with Doctor Who and mining operations turning out to be evil?! This is the third story in a row covered by the blog which has that theme. The Pirate Captain's remote-controllable cyborg limbs are a little like the intelligent spacesuits from Oxygen controlling their occupants too.  

Deeper Thoughts:

Targets (part 1) - plugging the gaps. Doctor Who fans, on the whole, hate gaps in their collections; alas, our favourite programme has a few built in, i.e. the missing episodes. One might think, though, that if one collected the Target books, a set of popular paperback novelisations of the classic series stories for which the existence or not of video tapes or film reels wasn't an issue, that one's book collection could at least be complete. Again, no. All the stories missing from the archives were turned into novels before the range completed, but - for one reason or another - four surviving stories weren't novelised. This has finally been rectified over the last couple of years, with the two Douglas Adams penned broadcast stories (City of Death and The Pirate Planet) and Eric Saward's two 1980s Dalek stories (Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks) having been published, in addition to some of the stories shown from 2005 onwards too. Three of these four stories finally became available in a recent batch of paperbacks published in March this year on the Target imprint, with retro covers by Anthony Dry. Also in this batch is a novelisation of the Paul McGann TV movie (previously available as a paperback but not on the Target imprint) and three more modern stories. I've just read all seven, and will share my thoughts on them in the next couple of blog posts. As two of this set of seven were written by the same author, I decided to space them out to allow as much variety as possible. Hence, I started with the first of the two by Eric Saward. Unfortunately, it was Resurrection of the Daleks, which is my least favourite classic Who story.

Saward's text addressed a few of the issues I had with the story (as detailed in its blog post here); some of the more brutal moments have been removed or reworked, and Saward has fleshed out some motivations with detailed characterisation. Throughout, though, there's use of an intrusive - and often flippant - authorial voice. The tendency to use a god-like view of scenes is also not as intimate or effective as would be centering scenes consistently within the POV of a character. The Daleks still don't have one coherent mission but instead have several sketchy ones. Stien's dual identities are still unreconcilable. The issue with the Doctor and Lytton never meeting is fixed by confirming that they already know of each other from some previous adventure(s), but other additions are downright odd: there's a scene with a talking cat (yes, really), an aside about Kurt Vonnegut, and several pages describing the many rooms of the TARDIS interior that smack of nothing more or less than Saward's needing to get his word count up; it reads like a teenage boy's idea of a rich person's house, full of amusements and collections, a private gallery, screening room, library, etc. I've never been convinced that Saward particularly understood the Doctor. He's an explorer, and at a push a hoarder of junk, but not a discerning collector in this way. I'm not even sure that Saward likes the Doctor, as he isn't a mercenary. The TV story's tone of relentless cynicism and hired killers is still omnipresent. Perhaps the one empathetic moment of emotion that existed in the TV script was Tegan deciding to leave the Doctor, aghast at the violence she's witnessed. This is unfortunately undercut when Saward adds a coda where Tegan maybe acquires superpowers (!); the book leaves her as she appears to be heading for some kind of sequel. But it's not one that I would care to read, alas.

Much better was Gary Russell's novelisation of the TV movie, despite his facing a similar challenge of making a somewhat illogical script work. This is a 2021 revision of the text that was published as a BBC book when the TV movie was first shown in 1996. The original text was written from the script in parallel with the shooting, so doesn't always match what ended up on screen; Russell has left things more or less as they were on that score (except for fixing some factual errors and character descriptions). The dialogue is a lot more old fashioned on the page than it ended up in performance, with the actors' input. Eric Roberts particularly sassed up the Master's speech, getting rid of the more old school version of the character as written, who keeps referring to Change Lee as 'my boy' and such. Russell makes some tweaks to make the story flow a bit better, but most of what he fixes is to make the TV movie fit better into the wider continuity of the series. References back to the 1963 to 1989 mythology that were cut in 1996 have been reinstated; the Doctor being half human is de-emphasised to the point where it can be written off as the Doctor's little joke. The prose style is not showy, and is all the better for that. There are much fewer characters in this story than in Resurrection, so it's more focussed, the story being mostly told from Grace or Chang Lee's POV. 

Best of the pre-2005 story novelisations, and linking nicely into this blog post, is James Goss's The Pirate Planet. Again, this is a new version of a book that's been previously published. A 2017 hardback of The Pirate Planet expanded out the story to match Douglas Adams's first draft scripts; these included a lot of material that had to be cut by the time the story reached the screen. This Target paperback version is instead faithful to what ended up on TV in 1978. Goss had previously novelised Adams's other broadcast Doctor Who story City of Death (which was published on the Target imprint in 2018) as well as the unmade Adams scripts for The Krikkitmen; he's well practised at emulating Adams's style. The book also benefits from being an adaptation of a good story, the best of the four 'gap pluggers' I'm writing about today, I think, gifting Goss good characters and a reasonably focussed plot with clever reversals, all of which are conveyed faithfully. Goss's improvements are mostly on the visuals - the Polyphase Avatron is much more mobile than the BBC prop featured in the TV episodes could be, and the cyborg Pirate Captain - whose costume was perfectly good on screen - is presented as a grisly full-sensory experience, the hissing and clanking of gears, the smell of his searing flesh... 

Finally, returning to Eric Saward's work, is his novelisation of the 1985 story Revelation of the Daleks. This is much better than his other effort, with the authorial asides kept to a minimum. It starts from a better place, as the TV version has much better characterisation and dialogue than Resurrection, and this comes over well on the page. The weakness of Revelation's story structure as a screen drama - that it is a collection of subplots all happening simultaneously by coincidence - doesn't matter so much in a novel, as there's less necessity for a strong plot through-line. Saward also improves things by adding another subplot (and a new guest character) to make the Doctor more instrumental in defeating the Daleks at the climax, and also sands down some of the rougher edges elsewhere. The imminent arrival of the president is more of a spur for some characters' actions, for example, which makes things more coherent. Given that the story had a literary inspiration (Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One), it's fitting that it works better as a book than a TV serial. It's also great that the classic series Target run is now complete. Well, nearly. There were three novelisations in the early 1990s (Power of the Daleks, Evil of the Daleks and an adaptation of the radio serial The Paradise of Death) that weren't published with a Target logo on their covers. Second-hand copies are now very difficult to come by. If there is to be another batch of Targets published in future, it would be good if these can be included as well as more novelisations of new series stories. Talking of those, there are three more books in this current batch to write about too, but that's for next time...

In Summary:

Not loved nearly enough given its quality; this pirate adventure has buried treasures.