The Armageddon Factor: Ranking - 252

  The Armageddon Factor

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 20/1/1979-24/2/1979, producer: Graham Williams, script editors: Anthony Read and Douglas Adams, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Robert Holmes, director: Michael Hayes)  

Rank: 252

''I am the most powerful being in the whole universe and even rock a crow on my head just to prove it! How could you ever defeat me? Oh, just by tricking me and using a fake key and scattering the real one across the universe apparently. Well, that was easy. I'm just going to sulk for a few seasons instead of, I don't know, turning you into a frog or something...'

Welcome to the Key to Time season! The one that starts out as an epic battle between white and black, right and wrong, good and evil, with beings of great power that even the Doctor seems scared of, that give him a task of monumental importance to the future of the universe...and which ends here in part six, 26 episodes later, with a trick that means the entire season has all been for nothing. Before that we get a whole 150 minutes featuring another cold war parable, smooth talking cockney timelords and a timeloop that means the actors repeat everything just as things are getting interesting. Just as its getting interesting, everything is repeated. Just as its getting interesting. Everything. It’s all repeated. It ought to be the most epic story Dr Who has ever seen. It ought to have us on the edge of our chairs. Instead ‘The Armageddon Factor’ ends up being, well, ‘armless. There was more drama when I lost my keys and they weren’t responsible for saving all of space and time…Err I think (honestly, the synopsis of the White Guardian asking the Doctor to go looking for his keys suggests a rather fun stag do while drunk rather than a quest to solve the universe. Which might also explain why he rocks a bird on his head the way he does). What happened?

Well, writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin really drew the short straw when it came to this story. They were the longest serving Who writers who were still semi-regulars by 1978 and so should have been logical, reliable choices to come up with the grand finale. Only that’s not where their strengths lie. They’re the gonzo creative imaginative writers who want to recreate the entire universe inside twenty five minutes and get bigger still in the big finale. They’re not the sort of writers you go to for a six parter that’s meant to wrap up lots of plot points when the budget has been stretched beyond breaking pint (with 1978, though these things are hard to judge, arguably the cheapest, episode on episode, adjusting for inflation, of the entire run thanks to a late 1970s recession). Things were made worse by the fact that neither could attend the one and only ‘tone meeting’ set up between the other writers of the season and as the first people to get their scripts in on time they hadn’t got a clue what the other writers had come up with. The ‘Key To Time’ season is one of Who’s most varied seasons, in terms of quality and tone, but Baker and Martin just write their usual style of story – a little bonkers, a lot abstract - perfectly acceptable for the middle of a season, but a bit of damp squib as a finale. Particularly in a series that’s meant to be at least partly ‘realistic’ (or at any rate as close as a season about two all powerful Godlike beings can be): to take a small point note that in the other five stories this season the key is a physical object  that can be physically retrieved, whereas for Baker and Martin it’s a mystical object full of abstract powers that become a person – something that contradicts every other story this year where it’s something physical and tangible that doesn’t change. And why would it be so hard to find? This is a treasure hunt, with objects intended to be found again one day, not an impossible logic problem. Not least because, if you think about it, having the key as a person is daft: (spoilers) if the key is really Princess Strella then presumably she’s been around for many more than her years and yet nobody has noticed or comments on it in the story. You’d also expect the crystal to change properties every time she eats or cuts her hair or her nails – once again it could have been a clever plot note if a rumour had gone around that she was an immortal being herself who’d never been seen to age and who was never seen to eat or sleep, but no: the writers don’t seem to have thought this through (originally the key to time was meant to be The Shadow’s shadow, an idea changed after the first draft was submitted for being too ‘clever’, but it makes much better sense to me; especially the theme across this year of good being hidden within bad and light within shadows – and the idea that The Shadow can be defeated by the Tardis light seems fitting too, the beacon of hope across the universe cutting through the darkness, a poetic touch from two of the show’s most poetic writers). But this is not the year to be poetic, it’s the year Dr Who does ‘science’ so this story seems way out of place. Maybe it’s understandable these writers didn’t completely have their eye on the ball this year: their long-term writing partnership, which stretched back much further than their Dr Who contributions,  was naturally breaking up as both men went their separate ways, which meant re-writes could be awkward and slow as both writers had to agree to any changes. Not to mention the simple fact that they’re one of those writing teams bursting with ideas who get bored very easily – they would have been masters in the olden days of two-parters but struggle to get to the end of four intact; giving them six to fill was just asking for trouble. No wonder this story loses track badly by the end: they’re writers who love exploring the wilderness so letting them loose without a firm hand on a detailed plot-driven story that needed one more than normal was a really bad idea.  

Which is a shame because there’s a worthy story in there somewhere – arguably two. The opening couple of episodes are really quite gripping, as we’re introduced to the militaristic Atrions and get hints about the shadowy Zeons who are locked in a  stalemate battle. Dr Who was a cold war baby, with that the most regular theme that runs through the original ‘classic’ series from its start in 1963 (when cavemen are in a stalemate just like superpowers in the present day) to the end, near enough (when ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ sees a Russian who should be on ‘our side’ turning enemy – mostly thanks to a benign alien influence that stretches back to The Vikings). Usually, though, its subtle, a sub-plot or a metaphor lost amongst other elements or a warning in the future of what might befall us one day. ‘The Armageddon Factor’ is not subtle about it at all: The Atrions are clearly America at its most gung-ho and interfering (complete with a bald eagle logo) - for all their Marshall leader seems to be a cross between Winston Churchill and a South American dictator (the script throws in ‘Napoleonic gloom’ as third hint, though this doesn’t come across that well on screen) while the Zeons are sort-of Russia, controlled by a central command whose far less direct, shadowy and vague, both as bad as each other. There’s a great twist (spoilers) when we find out that the Zeons all died out long ago and the attacks are all coming from their ‘leader’ Mentias, a computer programmed to get to the end of the war and kill come what may, the logical result of a war that can’t be won. Atrios is a nuclear hellhole, with the surface unliveable and yet still the Atrions fight over inhospitable land that couldn’t possibly be of any use to anyone, still preaching that victory is just around the corner from their underground bunkers. Even though secretly everyone knows it’s hopeless.

There are some classic jokes at both sides’ expense, such as the Marshall’s claims that the only way to get peace is to blast the opposition into smithereens, which are really quite biting given what was really going on in the cold war back then (the president of Afghanistan was assassinated in a communist coup in April that year, with Vietnam invading Cambodia in December; The Marshall’s idea that the only use for deterrent weapons is to use them, this not understanding what the word ‘deterrent’ means, feels scarily close to actual American foreign policy of the day). And the propaganda: this story might have one of the best starts of any 1970s Dr Who story, as we open on what is being ‘sold’ unto us as a real event, complete with ham acting, before the camera pulls away to show the bigger picture that we’re just watching a military recruitment film. And what’s more we’re the only people watching it: to everyone else whose seen it so many times across a five-year-war, it’s like wallpaper, no one taking the slightest interest in it at all. Both are really clever ideas and there are lots of little nuggets like those sprinkled through the script. I do wish, though, that the budget had stretched to include at least a few Zeons as per the original idea (ignorant that their leader was a computer): we need an equal and opposite people for the Atrions to fight against. They are though a clever idea too  – especially when the Dr Whoyness comes in and pushes the cold war stalemate to its logical end, two sides locked in a timeloop at the point of mutual destruction, permanently on the verge of blowing the other up. Of all of Baker-Martin’s scripts, this might just be the smartest. When they do this once anyway. Alas then the timeloop keeps going and going  and going until before you know it we’ve spent four episodes watching people fire at each other over and over. Over and over and over. And over again.   

One aspect that works particularly well is the extension of a long running Dr Who theme that’s more usually seen in the 1960s stories: that of the stupidity and hopelessness of war. The conversation ebbs and flows across certainly this show’s original run (and sporadically in the 21^st century series too) but the gist of much of it is the fear that there will be a third world war and that the children watching this show twenty years after WW2 will end up fighting their own war twenty years after WW1. ‘The Armageddon Factor’ is the one Who story of the 1970s that picks up from the thought, left dangling at the end of ‘The War Games’, that wars are the inevitable by-product of a society that’s stopped caring about its people and that every era has to have one as part of the bumpy roads to civilisation, manipulated by outside forces. Only in this story it’s a cold war that will last forever with two diametrically opposed but equal forces locked in a stalemate forever, because that’s the only result you’re going to get with two equal forces diametrically opposed. It’s a message that must have hit hard on first broadcast. Even though these are both alien races they’re both uncomfortably close to Earth in the 1970s right down to the medals on the Marshall’s chest. The Marshall himself is a great character, totally out of his depth but never visibly breaking sweat and all the more threatening for being stock-still in a season of particularly shouty baddies. He’s a natural born leader and was probably bossing his peers round in nursery school and yet even he turns out to be just a puppet in the hands of The Black Guardian, adding to what a threat he is again before we see him (and feel a little disappointed, good as Valentine Dyall is: after all, it’s hard to be the toughest biggest most awful being in Dr Who up to that date when you have a crow for a hairdo). The two civilisations are being manipulated by the Black and White Guardians in a fight that really is between good and evil, only neither side can see it in their quest to wipe their enemy out. The Marshall (spoilers)whose a secret pawn for the Black Guardian has no idea that if his ‘boss’ wins then ‘his’ war, that he’s staked his whole life on, will be irrelevant. It’s surely significant that we never even hear what this war is being fought over (most wars on Earth tend to be about territory, but surely that’s a moot point in a civilisation that can travel in endless empty space).Alas, that promising story gets put on hold halfway and only gets resolves in a throwaway scene in the last episode, so we never get the resolution we need from this story, The Marshall’s shock that he’s being manipulated by a war leader far crueller and more violent than he is and that he’s wasted his life being matched in moves by a computer, his foe having died out years ago, ought to be the crux of this story, not a detail solved off-screen. 

The Guardians are far more interesting here than they will be in their ‘comeback’ for the 5^th Doctor in the 1980s. There’s a massive hint, entirely in keeping with the rest of the story, that they aren’t as ‘black’ and ‘white’ as they make  out – that, indeed, they might be one and the same person, the caretakers of a universe filled with good and evil that can’t exist without the other to define them. It’s notable that we never see them on screen at the same time (indeed, it’s most odd all round that we don’t see The White Guardian at all this series past the opening of ‘The Ribos Operation’, given that he sent the Doctor on this quest in the first place). Or at least that’s what producer Graham Williams intended when he first came up with the concept (he really should have written the ending himself) – Baker and Martin, instructed to leave the very end of the very final episode for the script editor to write, did just that and are surely heading to that same conclusion too given their cold war setting here and the moral that your enemy isn’t any less or more worthy than you. Probably script editor Anthony Read would have got there too, but he was busy and worn out with all the other sticking plasters he was trying to place over the rest of the season – instead he left the very final scenes to his ‘junior’ Douglas Adams, who following his submission for ‘The Pirate Planet’ was being groomed as the full-time script editor the following year (not least because he was the one writer Tom Baker seemed to admire, even as the most junior member of the Dr Who writing team as he was back then). Only, for perhaps the only time in his life, Douglas drops the ball in his eagerness to make his stamp on an actual series he grew up watching: he adds a characteristic but unsuitable ‘comedy’ ending where the Black Guardian tries to dress up as The White Guardian and the Doctor sees through his disguise because evil is always obvious. Except it isn’t: not in the rest of this season anyway: we’ve had five stories about good people who turn out to be shifty and shifty people who turn out to be good. In the end the Doctor scatters the key to time across the universe anyway, preventing either side gaining control, which is better but still a weak ending for everything that’s come before it, making the whole six adventure series seem like one big waste of time. After all, it makes what’s to stop the Guardians sending some other being on a quest to do exactly the same (The Master, surely, would be happy to go along with the promise of power then try to hold it over the rest of the universe – if he can beat The Rani, Davros, Cyber Controller  etc, to it). Even the much-lauded idea of the ‘randomiser’ is daft because they never use it again and The Doctor travels pretty much by random anyway (honestly it’s a surprise the Guardian spends so long trying to track The Doctor down again for a rematch, given that his next stop-offs are on Skaro and 20^th Century Earth, like a good half of Dr Who stories). The ending of ‘The Armageddon Factor’ disappoints not just because its poor after so many weeks watching but because it contradicts the good work in this very story alone. Douglas, whose only just joined the team at all (and is still so new he doesn’t even get his name on the credits just yet) should have known better or at least had a glance at the other stories in the season –although that said, why was he left in charge of such an important decision largely unsupervised anyway? This was Graham Williams’ baby, with Anthony Read heavily involved too – why hand things over to a junior midwife at just the point when the season is being born? Give Douglas the scripts for ‘Androids Of Tara’ or something far more in keeping with his style and let him cheer those up instead! 

      
Sadly the second half of this story is nowhere near as successful as the first. It’s hard to work out why – maybe the writers were butting heads a bit too much by part four, or maybe they were asked to make the revisions more about characters who were less interesting to fit the ending in, or maybe they were just the wrong writers for a six part epic story. Or maybe it was Douglas misunderstanding the story and wanting to get involved again? Whatever the cause we follow two new characters who are far less black and white than, well, the Guardians and leave you guessing as to their motivations throughout. It would have been very in keeping with Dr Who if ‘The Shadow’ had proved to be the goody after all (what with the constant running theme of not judging by appearances) but no he is a baddy – just a not very effective one sent by The Black Guardian to slow the Doctor down as much as anything (The Black Guardian claims he knows that his ally is going to be outwitted somewhere down the line). He’s supposed to be representative of all that is evil in the universe, responsible for all the worst things in creation: Brussell sprouts, Council Tax, The Spice Girls and probably Brexit too and well, he doesn't do a lot except bumble around being outsmarted really. That’s a shame because, as much as ‘The Shadow’ ends up being a sort of comedy stooge, in his early appearances he’s really quite frightening with his hooded mask and raspy voice (he’s the closest to a character that looks like the grim reaper in Dr Who so far) and his capturing of Atrions while aptly lurking in the shadows makes him feel like he’s going to be more of a threat. Similarly Drax starts off well, a timelord petty criminal who recognises the Doctor from school and who shares his penchant for Earth after years in exile there – only he’s something of an anti-Doctor without his strong morals and it comes after years locked up in a prison cell having tried to nick the crown jewels (or so the writers’ back story for the character have it – we never find that out on screen). What starts out as a shifty character, a Sabalom Glitz of this portion of the galaxy, is so obviously a ‘good’ one by the end that he rather loses his extra dimensions too and ends up another comedy sidekick in a story full of them, accidentally causing the big crisis going into part five (through his own stupidity, shrinking the Doctor at just the wrong moment). How frustrating that this, of all stories, about how you can’t judge things in such black and white terms, ends up with two characters who start off so ambiguous but who end up being caricatures by the end. With a different ending,  with a different pair of closing episodes, this story could have really been up there with some of the show’s best because the potential’s there in the early days and gets wasted.

Not least because Baker and Martin are so good at writing for the regulars. They’ve been writing stories since the Pertwee era and know the 4^th Doctor as well as anyone by now, really capturing his aloofness, eccentricity and big heart hidden behind a sharp brain. We know Tom re-wrote a lot of his scripts by this point in time (proprietarily claiming that he knew the character better than anyone five years in) but this duo were always good at writing for this doctor and get lots of chances to make him  the authoritarian outsider that no one listens to. Romana is new but they ‘get’ her too – she’s the same Romana we saw at the beginning, all textbooks and rule-following, but moved on a bit, now more of a team and able to hold her own with the Doctor so that she can second-guess a lot of what he’d be doing in his absence. Both stars shine greatly when they’re on the screen separately but you have to say there’s an odd atmosphere when they’re on screen together, with Tom barely making eye contact with his co-star the whole six episodes (officially not a reason why Mary Tamm left at the end of the story, but you have to wonder – that said they’re getting on fine in the ‘deliberate blooper’ recorded early on in this story and sent to the annual Christmas technicians party, where – in between K9 singing a Christmas Carol and doing a bit of swearing – Tom lusts after her quite openly, much to her hysterics).

You have to say Romana Mark I gets a very poor ending indeed too even if, uniquely, she gets replaced not by a different character but by a different actress in the same role: Mary Tamm was adamant that she wouldn’t be staying on for another year but everyone around her seemed to think they could change her mind with the promise of more money and reliable work; they couldn’t and so the story ends with her still there and then picks up with ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ seven months later with Lalla Ward in the role, regenerating off screen apparently for fun (something we’ve never seen a timelord do before or since: it seems odd that nobody thought to even ask Mary to do a regeneration scene the following year which she always said in interviews she’d have been up for if asked, out of loyalty to the show). Lalla was Mary’s (not entirely serious) suggestion as a replacement, the two having got on well during filming. Very aptly too given that it feels as if Princess Strella is written to be a ‘Romana as she used to be’ in this story to contrast against who she has grown into: haughty, reserved, a little naïve with flashes of insight and courage. Note how frustrated Romana gets with Strella on screen for blindly following rules and traditions, in much the same way The Doctor was with her in ‘The Ribos Operation’, a neat bit of character development. Again, though, it’s typical of this story that such a strong idea gets somewhat lost in the background, a detail over (if you excuse the pun) shadowed by more nonsense with the Black Guardian and his cronies rather than being front and centre: this whole season should be at least as much about Romana as the key she’s been searching for, about how she was sent to the Doctor by the timelords as an apprenticeship to keep an eye on him and learn how not to behave – and how out in the real universe she ended up the opposite, this stickler of rules adapting to a changing universe by working out what the Doctor would do and following her instinct instead. After all, Romana plays a much bigger part in resolving this story in the last two parts than the Doctor does, faffing around as he is with being shrunken by a used car salesman timelord. Producer Graham Williams saw how well Lalla slotted in with the cast and pretty much asked her then (not least Tom Baker who fancied the pants off her even back then – he’s said to have followed the actress home to spend some quality time together after a ‘goodbye’ meal with Mary and her husband). The matter of who should be the companion at all was becoming a big sticking point in this era: as the longest serving member of the production Tom was keen to have input on who it should be, favouring at different times Miriam Margoyles (who finally got her Who debut as the voice of ‘Beep The Meep’ in 60^th anniversary special ‘The Star Beast’), a naked feral child with a ‘snaggle-tooth’ who couldn’t speak, a parrot similar to the polyphase avitron in ‘The Pirate Planet’ and a talking vegetable. It got so that, despite his love-hate relationship with Graham, Tom threatened to quit if he didn’t get a say in who the new regular would be (which would have been a huge shock to a show still finding its feet under the new producer) and both star and producer were hauled into the BBC director general’s office and told to ‘sort it out’ like two naughty schoolboys. Compared to all the other suggestions doing the rounds, hiring an actress Tom clearly got on well with seemed like an easy solution all round.  
Unusually, it’s K9 who comes out best in this story. This is the first time the two writers have been back to write for their pet creation since creating the metal mutt in ‘The Invisible Enemy’ and they do a lot more with him than most other writers think to do, where he’s either a computer or a gun or sometimes a comedy sidekick. Here he’s an equal player, even getting his very own cliffhanger for the one and only time in the series (when he’s in danger on a metal conveyor belt heading into a furnace – and don’t tell me at least one writer on ‘Toy Story’ weren’t watching this cliffhanger, with their K9 toys in their arms, worried about what might happen next week as there’s a spookily similar scene at the end of the third film). K9 even gets possessed by the baddy at one stage, surprisingly the only time this happens, despite it being a great plot point: you wonder if the dog’s creators were trying to show that, despite the grumblings that the character just enabled the Doctor to get out of trouble by being so clever and reliable, he could potentially be the most deadly enemy of all, given how hard he is to stop when taken over by that week’s villain. It really ups the ante, too, that even a machine can be manipulated and used against the Doctor. John Leeson has great fun playing an evil variation of his usual character, despite the tough task of trying to create an ‘evil’ version of a character who by rights shouldn’t be changing his voice at all, being a computer. This was, for a year, Leeson’s last hurrah as he moved on to acting work where he could actually be a human again and he pulls out all the stops here, delivering a performance that shows of all sides of K9: comedy sidekick, heroic lead, logical computer and his loyalty, proving himself to be a timelord’s best friend in all the best ways.

K9 is also a ‘Trojan Dog’, a plot point whereby the Doctor and Drax can sneak into the Shadow’s lair. While on screen it all comes across as a bit slapstick, with comedy lines told by voiceover, this too is a clever addition to a script that’s all about a cold war: after all, the Trojan-Greek war was the first ‘stalemate’ unwinnable battle in so many ways (till the Trojans got sneaky) and not unlike this conflict given that princess Strella is kidnapped and held against her will (though as far as I know the Trojans weren’t working for The Black Guardian and to be honest Ancient Greece doesn’t seem that fussed about getting her back if ‘The Myth Makers’ is anything to go by). I wish the writers had made more of this link, instead of just turning it into a typically wacky 4^th Doctor gag. Ditto the Shadow’s communication device using crystal skulls – surely the single most obvious Dr Who plot we haven’t had I the series properly yet. After all, the key to time itself is made out of crystal, an abundant natural mineral which has ‘properties’ of storing information (which is why it’s used in so many electrical devices today and even back in 1978 was in watches) and which out of all the many wondrous things in nature seems one of the most incredulous and unlikely and surely some of the best evidence of a superior life ‘force’ above us all (note that in the return The Black Guardian communicates with Turlough directly through another crystal). It feels as if the skulls are going to be a big plot point, planted across the stars by the Guardians so that their agents can do their bidding, but nope – all we see is The Shadow talking to one. There’s a neat metaphor of one-way mirrors too, with characters able to see other people without them being able to see out – that feels like it’s plot point that’s crying out to be made into something bigger too, as the two planets fight each other without being able to see the bigger picture of those under Guardian control. But like so much in this story the detail is there but never properly utilised, as if the writers came up with it, forgot about it and never went back to it. Or maybe it got diluted in the re-writes?

That happens a lot in Baker-Martin scripts, which are all full of wonderful ideas and promising storylines that never quite connect into a story that’s brilliant all the way through. That’s particularly true for ‘The Armageddon Factor, a story that promises so much with so many great and worthy and very Dr Whoey ideas that just never quite hangs together properly: like the people under the Guardians the details are all there but it’s as if they’ve lost sight of the bigger story in what they were trying to say. So what should be a gripping cold war parable where us versus them becomes us and them versus beings with powers we could never dream of just dissolves into a muddled comedy story of cockerney timelords, muddle-headed villains, quirky Doctorisms and timeloops that feels as if they last indefinitely in all the worst ways. There’s always been a lot of talk about how good Dr Who could be with more money and more time and I don’t generally agree: part of this series’ charm is that it looks ‘real’ on screen and has to rely on script and actors in a way lesser scifi series never had to (which is why a lot of them never last as long, because audiences get bored of effects and the makers get lazy and rely on them). ‘The Armageddon Factor’ though would be one of my front runner stories that would be so different and so much better had everyone involved had an extra month and a couple of thousand pounds to throw around, not least because the end of a long running series arc about the two greatest powers in the universe needs to be more than Valentine Dyall with a crow on his head. It’s more than that too though: everyone’s visibly exhausted in this story: the regular cast are running on empty with Mary Tamm and John Leeson both about to leave, script editor Anthony Read is empty and already halfway out the door, the writers are breaking up a decades-long partnership, Graham Williams is at the end of his tether trying to keep this show on the road and on budget and everyone is tired, tetchy and counting down the hours till the season’s over and everyone can go home rather than putting that little bit extra in to make this story soar (there’s a story that Graham Williams, generally so gentile and polite, lost his temper with the star so badly he ran from the control room intending to knock his block off, before the long journey to the studio floor made him imagine the news in all the papers and how it might kill off his career at the BBC, making him have a ‘quiet word’ with Tom instead). This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story made under trying circumstances and it certainly won’t be the last (the show’s other season-long arcs ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ and the ‘Bad Wolf’ of series one were both troubled years behind the scenes too, funnily enough) but more than most ‘The Armageddon Factor’ is a story that shows the disillusionment and simmering tension on screen. The biggest problem with ‘The Armageddon Factor’ is that people are so desperate just to get through it in one piece that they miss the bigger of what this story could truly be. Which feels like something the ‘real’ Guardians would do to hide their cover…
Because there is a great story in here, about missing the bigger picture ironically, a smart idea in a story that somehow ends up being remembered more for all its (many) stupid moments. The cold war metaphor works well now but must have hit in an altogether sharper way in 1978, while the twist of having a computer calling the shots on behalf of a civilisation that dies long ago is one of those dark, bitter, twists of social commentary this show was born to do. Alas, the key to time stuff gets in the way, even more than it does in the other five stories this year, taking away from what was a far more enjoyable story by the need to tie so many big themes up. And then, just as things are hotting up, the timeloop means the script repeats everything just as it's getting interesting. Just as its getting interesting, everything is repeated (wait, what? Now we’ve been infected too!) As a story in its own right its poor – as the end to a 26 part series arc it’s a travesty, the Doctor undoing all those weeks of tension and effort that the audience has so invested in with the decision to break the key up again just as he’s put it all back together again. Our first real series arc since Ian and Barbara tried to get home ought to be bigger than your usual season finale, not smaller – literally given the hijinks with the shrinking machine (just two years after the series last did it in ‘The Invisible Enemy’, something the writers must have known…given that they wrote the flipping thing!) We were expecting fireworks when the key was finally repaired and instead it’s the dampest squib possible. The title alone promises a Biblical showdown, a wrestle to the death between good and evil, not a villain who is outsmarted as easily as The Master ever was. What a swizz. At least when the next season ended equally disappointingly with ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ it was a mistake caused by a strike. This is just one of those stories where everyone is out of time, out of money and out of luck – though its saving grace is that it’s never out of ideas and arguably has a few too many for its own good.             

POSITIVES + Yes I’ve mentioned it already, but seriously this twist is one of my favourite in the whole series and it never gets nearly enough credit I don’t think. Where else would a cold war stalemate end up than with a computer programmed to kill from beyond the grave, a last act of petty revenge by a species who have absolutely nothing to gain from the war anymore except the destruction of their competitor? After all, it’s the logical end to a war being fought by logic, each move being matched by both sides. Suddenly all those Cold War documentaries actually make sense. regarding our current situation, could I be right in thinking the invasion of Ukraine is all because Putin upgraded to Windows 11?

NEGATIVES –Wait, so there's a barrow boy timelord whose a bit of a tea leaf, one who knew the Doc when they were China plates at Gallifrey academy together, only he got stuck doing bird and lime in London, hence the accent (though if timelords sound like the place they stayed in the longest William Hartnell should be part-Roman, part-Coal Hill, Matt Smith should sound like 'Christmas' and practically all Doctors should sound like they come from Skaro). Anyway, that Drax is having a bit of trouble and strife with the Black Guardian, would you Adam and Eve it?! But he turns out to be good by the end, a pearly king in fact. Also, it’s not often noted that despite all the fuss over what The Doctor's real name might be on Trenzalore and here Drax casually gives it as 'Theta Sigma' (fans presume it’s a college nickname now, but that's not what the writers meant when they came up with it. I like to think the Doctor's real name is something incredibly embarrassing like Slarty Bartfast or Marjorie Slopbucket or Ian Duncan Smith). Even in an era when it was fun to puncture the myth of all-seeing timelords, though, Drax feels a stage too far the other way, making the timelords but to not just be like ‘one of us’ but a particularly reprehensible ‘one of us’ at that. After all, he’s not smart in a way every other timelord in this series is, even the bad ones, all too easily conned. To be honest, he's a bit of a Khyber Pass.

BEST QUOTE: K9 – ‘Optimism: the belief that everything will work out well. Irrational, bordering on insane’.

Prequels/Sequels: This is part six of the ‘Key To Time’ season that follows the same long-running plot arc of the Black and White Guardians as ‘The Ribos Operation ‘The Pirate Planet’ ‘The Stones Of Blood’  ‘The Androids Of Tara’ and ‘The Power Of Kroll’ 

‘Luna Romana’ (2014) is a real oddball story: multi-Doctor stories are two a penny and there’s even a few multi-Master stories out there now but this is the only multi-Romana story! Big Finish were so head with their ‘companion chronicles’ series that they still had this left over, Mary Tamm’s last performance in the role, released posthumously a full two years after her death (with Juliet Landau, Big Finish’s third incarnation of Romana heard on their releases ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Ascension’ filling in the parts she hadn’t recorded – sadly there are quite a few gaps, as well as a lot of dips into the archives). Hearing her spar with Lalla Ward’s Romana is great though however they do it: they both clash with as much sarcasm as any Doctor reunion and the actresses (friends in real life) have fun trying to out-haughty each other! The first Romana is busy trying to track down the final key to time segment in Ancient Rome but is getting increasingly frustrated by The Doctor’s flippant attitude: he’s much happier watching the latest Plautus plays and hanging out with their author rather than trying to save the universe (a play that expresses his true feelings in a way he never would directly). Could it be that he doesn’t want to say goodbye to his new friend and fears Romana won’t want to stay with  him after their mission is complete? Meanwhile a post-‘Warrior’s Gate’ Romana II is having an adventure of her own in Rome – technically a revival of Rome in a theme park on the moon (!) - one that threatens to undo her own timelines. Such a shame Mary Tamm didn’t live to complete this audio but it’s still something special and a great tribute to her character’s first regeneration which, in all likelihood, we’re not going to hear on Big Finish again.