The Power Of Kroll - Ranking: 206

   The Power Of Kroll

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 23/12/1978-13/1/1979, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Norman Stewart) 

'Hi there, I'm looking for the fifth key to time. You haven't seen anything...odd around here have you? People painted green, a giant squid several miles wide... Yeah we're probably in the right place then. Yeah, we could probably help you out with that too while we're here. Kind of 'squid pro quo' really when you think about it'. 

Ranking: 206

 

 Some DW stories give you thoughtful philosophical conundrums to solve. Others give you a glimpse into how your life might be had something turned out differently and you’d been born on another world or in a different time. Some allow the writers to work out their fears anger and paranoia at events all the audience can understand through the lens of fiction. Others are emotional powerhouses of feeling and soul with the power to knock your socks off. Some are just gloriously entertaining bits of escapist telly. And then there’s ‘Power Of Kroll’, where lots of extras are painted green and hop from foot to foot chanting ‘Kroll!’ for what seems like hours. Robert Holmes’ last Who script for a while shows why he was probably right to take a breather from the programme as it’s the sort of thing you come up with when you’ve stayed up late at night staring at the typewriter for six weeks straight and you need to write something or risk losing your commission. It’s the age-old tale of a primitive tribe of people worshipping an alien creature as if it’s a long lost God, even though what it takes to be magic is really just science beyond their years, an idea that’s almost as old as science-fiction itself. The big differences this time are that it’s set round a swamp (unique for Who) and that the monster is a giant squid that lives in the sea – Holmes was asked from the outset to came up with ‘the biggest monster we’ve ever seen’ and Kroll certainly takes that awardm being ‘several miles wide’. The usual story goes that ‘Kroll’ was doomed from the start trying to re-create this on a DW budget but actually Kroll him/her/it(?)self is one of the story’s big successes. Yes there’s a bit of a wavy line where the model shot meets the action filming, but by 1978 BBC budget standards it’s a triumph for the effects team as you get a lot of squid for your quid. It’s what happens in close-up in this story that never quite works: Holmes’ usual flair for writing three-dimensional characters seems to have deserted him and even the Doctor and Romana don’t get to say anything terribly clever and spend most of their time getting in and out of scrapes (and, I mean, this is the Tardis pairing who are usually so far over their heads they can be a bit too clever in other stories). It’s not the fault of the actors: John Leeson is as good a Human as he is playing a robotic dog (he got the role when another actor dropped out and the production team realised K9 didn’t have much to do, so they might as well get their moneys’ worth out of him) and Phillip Madoc is as good an actor as the series ever had (it says a lot, though, that this is his one DW role where he looks like, well, Phillip Madoc rather than his unrecognisable stints as Eelek, The War Chief and Morbius). It’s not the fault of the costumers either, as the green dye is really distinctive and totally unlike any other story – and there’s good reason why they didn’t just copy it again (another of my favourite bits of DW trivia: it was realised too late that the dye wouldn’t come off with water and a special solvent had to be used – the nearest facilities were an army barracks where a lot of soldiers found the sight of green humans in skimpy outfits hilarious). No it’s the script that lets this one down all the way – although it’s not really Robert Holmes’ fault either. You see, he was asked by the production team to ‘tone down’ the comedy, which was one of his strongest suits; that’s like asking Mark Gatiss not to do horror or Douglas Adams not to be quirky, it just takes away the one thing that made them distinctive, the part that makes them want to sit at a typewriter and make money creating and exploring imaginary worlds in the first place. With the comedy removed Holmes is just like every other DW writer and loses interest so much he pares the story down to basics, so there’s a lot of escaping and recapturing. Every time things just seem to start moving it all comes to a grinding halt for yet another ‘Kroll’ tribal war dance too. Oh well, that’s writing for you: even the greatest geniuses can have off days and never more than when a deadline is ticking and your editor’s just asked you not to do the factor you find most interesting. There are still some really good moments here and everyone else is trying their hardest to go all oput and make this an epic as big as the squid at the heart of it. You can still tell that this is a good writer having a bad day somehow (as opposed to the other way around) and like all the best and even a lot of the worst DW scripts there’s always something to raise a smile, a lot of good actors, Tom Baker on top mad form, more of the colour green than in a greengrocers and a massive squid to look at. What other show gives you that?

+ The Key To Time umbrella arc (perhaps the first one that DW really had across stories, rather than across episodes) has been oddly used this year, some writers really taking to it and others ignoring it. While some stories used it well (‘Pirate Planet’ where it was, well, a planet and ‘Armageddon Factor’ where it was a pirate, sorry, no, a princess) others botched it completely (‘Androids Of Tara’ gets the finding the key bit out the way three minutes in and Romana basically says ‘oh look, here it is’). ‘Kroll’ makes the best use of the key though: back in antiquity a normal squid swallowed this object of great power and ended up mutating to several times his normal size. You think that the Doctor can never defeat this huge monster and then (spoilers) it turns out all he has to do is press his key to time tracer up to the squid’s tentacle and revert everything back to normal. Sorted! 

- Usually I love location filming in DW as they take away from the staticness of the studio sets and make alien planets seem a lot more, well, alien. The filming at the swamp in Snape, Suffolk though looks so decidedly English (muddy, brown, overcast) it’s a wonder Kroll isn’t wearing a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella when we see him, mile-wide squid or not.