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)
Ranking: 206
Some Dr Who 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, in a story about a fifty foot monsters with tentacles that’s really a scifi analogy for cultural appropriation. Yes that’s right, it’s basically ‘Alias Squid and Jones’ – a Western in a swamp. There had never been anything quite like it in the series before. There’s anything quite like it ever again.
Most fans are probably
saying ‘thank goodness’ about now, as ‘Kroll’ doesn’t have the very highest
reputation amongst fans. Though written by Who’s most prolific and in so many
ways most popular classic series writer Robert Holmes, it’s become a byword for
all the sorts of dodgy B-movie effects with literal little green men that’s
come to represent Dr Who at its worst. The script turned out to be Holmes’ last
for the show for five years (by far the longest between his debut with ‘The
Krotons’ in 1968 and his death in 1986) and the general consensus is that it 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. There’s also an animal that’s
near-enough harmless in our world turned into monster status by living on a
different planet, just like all those old episodes about overgrown
spiders/ants/wasps/maggots/cats. The big
differences this time are that it’s set round a swamp (unique for Who) and that
the monster isn’t just Human-sized but five miles wide. No wonder the locals
treat him with such reverence really – you would too if you were potential
lunch. What with the sub-plots of colonialism (which is ‘Colony In Space’ all
over again), racism (‘The Mutants’) and people double-crossing each other every
five minutes (‘The Monster Of Peladon’) it’s hard not to see this story as all
the bits of the weakest Pertwee stories that never quite worked, stuck together
in a story that doesn’t quite work either.
Even Holmes himself considered this his weakest script, while fans
generally take it as proof that even geniuses (or at any rate a ‘wise and wonderful person’
as The Doctor half-gets Romana to call him in this story) can have off days.
There are, however,
mitigating circumstances why Holmes might not have been at his best. He was one of those writers who worked best
when he had an open sandbox to work in and all the (reasonable) time in the
universe to get his work done, so that he could tinker with his world-building
and add layers of ideas with every draft. Holmes was never your typical
seat-of-your-pants writer (which is why the role of script editor – basically
problem patcher upper – wasn’t one he ever felt fully comfortable with, however
good he was at it). ‘Kroll’ is by far and away his most rushed script: it was
the last-minute replacement for another idea by ‘Get Carter’ creator Ted Lewis
that fell through at the eleventh hour. Not for the usual reasons of budget,
over-ambition or misreading the brief either:
‘The Shield Of Zarak’ got further than most, with full outlines for a
plot about an evil ‘Robin Hood’ type hailed as a hero (it’s working title ‘The
Doppelgangers’ will show you where the plot was mostly headed). If nothing else
it would have slotted in well with the ‘fairytale’ feel of the ‘Key To Time’
series, with it’s ‘Prisoner of Zenda’ homages and conmen selling planets.
However Poor Ted, known in the industry for being such a quick and reliable
writer, was going through hell the month he got his long-awaited Who
commission: his wife left him, he sank into a great depression and turned to
the bottle, falling into the twilight dimension where time stands still and
deadlines and responsibilities cease to matter. He struggled on with his
scripts, increasingly late, until concerned script-editor Anthony Read invited
him into the office to have a ‘chat’ face to face about urgent revisions and
saw, face to face, how much the poor chap was struggling. So he got sent home
and Read leafed through his contact book for a writer who was free and
reliable. Holmes, enjoying a holiday after the rigours of ‘Ribos’, was still
loyal enough to ‘his’ old show that he took the call and agreed, even though it
meant a quick turnaround and the limitations of a ‘being’ that needed to be a
‘key to time’. It was Read’s enthusiastic idea to provide ‘the biggest monster
that’s ever been seen in Dr Who’ and even though, as a script editor himself,
Holmes shook his head and said it couldn’t be done, he took to writing in his
fifty foot squid and shoe-horning another ‘key’ into the plot in a way the
other five season writers weren’t using.
Holmes had used all his
ideas up, so fell back on ideas that he’d used before. Most notably in ‘The Krotons’
which by now was ten year’s old (back in the pre-video days when the only way
of learning about past stories was to read the often very different Target
novelisation or ask an elder relative with a good memory; both were fallible
ways of finding out what they were actually really like). There are lots of
similarities: a race of people in control of another, a big monster that
‘feeds’ on the few hapless people passed up as a sacrifice and Holmes’ greatest
bee in his bonnet: the prejudiced idea that only ‘some’ people were worthy of
decent education and that they weren’t worth teaching (in a way both these
stories are attacks on public school education systems, although as practically
everyone in the Dr Who office had one back in 1978 it’s left subtle). Just to
add to that sense of déjà vu by coincidence Phillip Madoc ends up with a very
similar shouty part – though not the one he was expecting to play (a mixup over
contracts and industrial action meant the original dates meant that his initial
offer to play Thawn was withdrawn and he was offered Fenner instead; Madoc –
who hadn’t paid much attention to the character name – agreed in error,
thinking it was the same part and only found out in rehearsals what a mistake
he’d made). It says a lot about this story, 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).There’s even, would you believe, a
similar fat joke (although rather than the Krotons making the atmosphere smell
like ‘rotten eggs’ and the creation of stink bombs it’s a colony powered
entirely by Kroll’s methane, which being a 5 mile wide squid is pretty gassy).
You have to say that ‘Krotons’ wins on sheer charm and originality, while I’d
personally take a talking spinning box with scary long arms and some
sympathetic (if rather mature) students over a mute squid and green men in
loincloths anyday, but that’s just me. I mean, it is still quite the spectacle
and it’s good to have a ‘version’ that happens in bright colour (95% of it
green if I’m honest).
So what goes wrong
exactly? Is it the squid itself? Well, the usual story goes that Holmes was doomed
from the start trying to create such a mahoosive monster on a 1970s Dr Who
budget, but actually Kroll him/her/it(?)self is one of the story’s big
successes. I mean, yes it could look a lot better as there’s a massive line
across the screen almost as big as the squid that rather gives away the fact
we’re looking at a model shot super-imposed on live action rather than
something that’s ‘really’ happening (the cause is an unfortunate bit of
miscommunication: the cameraman, not used to working with models, sought advice
from his elders on how to do the shots and they assumed he was talking about
two live action shots, traditionally done by masking out part of the camera and
joining the dots together; actually the intention was always to link the two in
post-production, not least because they were filmed against different
backgrounds of ‘real swamp’ and ‘fake sky’ so had to be edited together
specially anyway). However ignore all that and Kroll itself is a thing of
beauty: it’s impressively squidlike yet also very much in keeping with Dr Who
monsters, while it doesn’t necessarily look like a fake model (if you squint:
it certainly moves a lot more convincingly than, say, a giant spider or wasp
and still seems impressively large – it was, after all, twelve feet high even
as a ‘model’. You get a lot of squid for your quid in whatever way you look at
it). Together with the sound effects and the unpredictability of who it’s going
to eat and when it’s pretty convincing as period monsters go – perhaps the one
part of the whole ‘key to time’ season that didn’t necessarily have the
production team looking over their shoulder at Star Wars’ big Hollywood effects
green with envy.
Talking of green, the
poor extras do look kind of daft. Nobody seems to remember who suggested the
swampies should be green: it makes some sort of sense on paper given that
they’re swamp creatures, with perhaps folk memories of the ‘green children of
woolpit’, almost-Human looking infants with a green tinge to their skin and no
knowledge of English discovering
wandering about the woods of Suffolk, lost (a story so obviously Dr
Who-ish I’m amazed no one has turned it into a Who story yet). In practice? It looks like some poor extras
have been pranked by having a tin of green paint fall on their heads. That
said, though, it was worth a try and that’s not the reason this story falls
apart. I mean there’s nothing quite like it in any other story – and there’s
good reason why they didn’t just copy it again (another of my favourite bits of
Dr Who trivia: it was realised too late that the green dye, designed to be
waterproof after hours in swamps, wouldn’t actually come off with water much to
the chagrin of irate extras. A special solvent using swafurga had to be cooked
up at the last minute. Understandably the hotel everyone was staying in wasn’t
too happy about leaving their precious place green, so the nearest facilities with
a showers were located: as it happens an army barracks, where a lot of hardened
butch soldiers were being put through their paces. The sight of a bunch of
bright green actors trudging indoors in skimpy loincloths then scrubbing each
other in the showers is said to have been the cause of much amusement in the
barracks for some time to come). The loincloths maybe don’t work quite so well
– especially the rather odd decision to raise them to give the impression that
the swampies naturally have longer legs than Humans do (although nowadays it
just makes them look like the alien off-spring of Simon Cowell). One thought
too: where are all the female swampies in matching Leela-like leotards? Come ot
think of it, where are all the female Humans? Despite the unusually large cast
there aren’t any female characters at all, except for Romana of course (and
possibly Kroll of course; I do remember being concerned for 9/10ths of the
story when I saw it the first time round that there wasn’t a five mile squid of
the opposite gender around too – after all, it’s not something you could
exactly miss – though the (spoilers) fact that Kroll turns out to be the key to
time explains that I suppose).
It’s definitely not the
fault of the actors that the story falls apart either: Phillip Madoc (as the
hard-nosed Fenner) is as good an actor as the series ever had (if a bit wasted
in a lesser part of a second in command), Neil McCarthy (as Thawn) gives a
bravura performance as a man obsessed with control who is losing it (so
different to his other Who role, as the naïve criminal Barnham in ‘The Mind Of Evil’) and Glyn Owen gives his all
as the duplicitous Rohm-Dutt (a shame he never worked for the series again). John
Leeson is as good a Human as he is playing a robotic dog; while many fans
pictured him on hands and knees pleading for a Human role (not least because
that’s how he spent every rehearsal as K9) actually he was another victim of
the industrial strike contract delays and a last minute substitution when it
was realised that he was still on a retainer and getting paid whatever happened
(even though K9 was sensibly sidelined given that this was a swamp planet;
legend has it he spent rehearsals finding it really weird to be looking his
fellow actors in the eye after so long staring at their knees). You have to
say, though, there’s not much energy as everyone is playing to be ‘subtle’ for
once: it’s a rare story that needs more ‘dr who acting’ – everyone is
under-selling their part. Even the squid isn’t milked for effect as much as it
might be!
It’s not the fault of the
location filming either, which is big and wide and expansive and while you’re bored
of the swamps by the last (and best, if only because things actually keep happening) episode then
at least the novelty is enough to get you through the first few. Swapping the
usual static sets and dodgy CSO problems for extended filming at the swamp in Iken
Marsh, Snape, Suffolk is a good move. It looks just about alien enough to
convince as an alien moon, even if the ‘real’ one caused problems during
filming (it was Spring when the tides were higher than average but nobody
thought to tell the production crew that: the actors were mostly okay but the production
crew often found themselves waist high while filming from what they thought was
a ‘safe distance’). Admittedly it’s such a very British swamp (muddy, brown and
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, while you can tell that the
filming is such a grind (what with mud and green makeup that won’t come off
without constant scrubbing) that everyone’s spirits are flagging by the end . Still,
at least it’s different. It’s a miracle it turned out as well as it did too: it’s
not credited as such but it’s effectively John Nathan-Turner’s debut as
producer this story, the ‘production unit manager’ filling in for a poorly
Graham Williams and doing a pretty decent job all things considered, as this
was not the easiest story logistically to control, what with it’s extensive
filming and extra problems (notably none of the stories on his watch include
monsters quite this big or make-up quite this green!)
No, the reason ‘Kroll’
never quite comes alive is all down to the script, sadly and nothing more. The
plot is nothing special and been done on Who before, generally better, however
worthy a subject it is. For ‘Kroll’ is, deep down, another tale of
colonialisation and appropriation, of kicking out a native population and
relegating them to a corner of their own empire so the guys with the guns can pinch
their loot. I’ve seen it argued as a Western and it sort of is, only with
green-skins rather than red-skins and native Americans turned into native
Krollians who are pushed back to their moon. However it’s also surely about
colonialisation closer to home and something that would have made a lot of the
English audience watching a little guilty in 1978: Northern Ireland. We’re told
a number of times that Kroll is mostly a vegetarian pinching all the food (who
just happens to get the munchies for swampie, Human or even timelord flesh
whenever the script needs him to) which raises other questions of a) how a five
mile squid can possibly get enough food to eat all the time and isn’t just
asleep on the floor and b) why a being that turns out to be a cosmic key in
disguise needs to eat at all (wouldn’t it change his cells to such an extent
that he would no longer be turned back into the key at story’s end? Where do
all those swampies, plankton and marsh reeds go? Surely it can’t all be turned
into methane? And it can’t be an illusion or where would the power for the
colony come from?) This is, if you will, a scifi take on the Irish potato
famine of the 1840s-50s, when their English ‘masters’ effectively let them die
rather than export food, thus kicking off 200-ish years of rebellion and
outrage. After all, Thawn is very much a ‘feudal’ type boss, complete with
‘lord of the manor’ title, while Rohm-Dutt’s prominent Irish accent is a
typical case of a Who story switching roles round to opposites. Green also
happens to be the adopted colour of Ireland – the shade of blarney stones and
leprechauns, wile ‘The Sons of the Earth’ are surely named for ‘The Sons of
Erin’, an Irish home rule movement big at the time who wanted to kick the
English out. Sadly it works in both metaphors the way that Human workers assume
that the swampies are ‘less than people’ and don’t matter because they ‘don’t
have feelings’ , not worth saving– even though it’s obvious that they do very
much how the cowboys of the Wild West and the English during the famine
thought; it’s also very much what happens with the Ood in the modern series).
If that’s all true, though, it’s hard to work out what the moral at the end
means: Holmes doesn’t appear to like the swampies any more than the Humans
(they’re a back-stabbing bunch of brutes and even The Doctor is as racist as he
ever gets, complaining that their ‘narrow beady little eyes’ means he ‘can’t
hypnotise them’, while they’re illiterate and superstitious in the extreme,
ready to murder at the drop of a tentacle – is Kroll meant to be the Catholic
Church in the eyes of the famously atheist Holmes?) and the ‘problem’ is solved
partly by The Doctor half-heartedly restoring some balance (but not outright
recuing them) and Kroll killing all and sundry, of both sides. Notably The
Doctor and Romana leave the remaining swampies and Humans to it once Kroll is
turned into a key. Are we meant to feel sorry for the swampies? If not then
what are we meant to feel? Or if we are meant to feel sorry then is this why
the story fails – because we don’t? My guess is it’s a story about control and
how pointless it is to try to impinge your tiny views on something so colossally
big: after all, Kroll doesn’t care who is on what side; to him every being is
tasty. Even if not handled as well as it might be, that’s still a worthy subject
for a Who story though and even if it’s one covered better elsewhere it’s still
very much better than an empty story about nothing.
Like ‘Kroll’ itself though
the script isn’t too bad when seen from a distance - it’s what happens in close-up that hurts it
the most: Holmes’ usual flair for writing three-dimensional characters seems to
have deserted him. There just aren’t any
characters you like enough to watch and they seem to spend most of the
screentime shouting at one another. Generally Holmes is rather good at writing
supporting characters who are all different to each other and who all seem to
have their own quirks and personalities, but this lot are all too close to each
other, too ‘wet’ even if most of them are supposed bad-asses. Thawn is snooty
and prejudiced and likes going on little rants, Fenner is cynical and likes
thinking he’s right even when he’s wrong, Rohm-Dutt loves stabbing his work
colleagues in the back every chance he gets, Ranquin is a born liar and even
Dugeen has no backbone, switching sides at a moment’s notice. They’re the sort
of people you try and block out at work (let’s face it, every office of a
decent size has at least one of all these sorts of people) so you don’t
particularly relish spending time with them at work. Throw in some non-talking
extras and a mute squid and there’s just no colour in this story, no one to
root for, no one to emotionally invest your time in, no one to care for when it
all goes wrong (however fond I am of Kroll himself). Even The Doctor and
especially Romana feel oddly written for, as if Holmes has never seen them
before (despite having written for them so well with ‘Ribos’); they 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). The 4th
Doctor is purely manic and seems to be genuinely playing the fool rather than
using it as a clever shield to throw off his attackers the way he normally does
while he gains the sudden convenient ‘super power’ of being able to scream at a
certain pitch to destroy creepers (something that surely would have come in
handy for another story outside this one but is never mentioned again); Romana,
meanwhile, has lost all her stubborn independence, haughty knowing and
‘beginner’s luck’ to become a wet blanket, screaming for help and looking
thankful whenever The Doctor turns up (it’s no surprise that this was Mary
Tamm’s least favourite of her six stories and the moment she says in retrospect
made her mind up about leaving the series). Most of the best lines are
improvised by the pair of them, with parts entirely rewritten (such as the one
where The Doctor is ‘stretched’, something they worried the child audience
would find too damaging unless The Doctor treated it with even more flippancy
than usual).
Unlike some fans who
dismiss ‘Kroll’ altogether there is plenty of worth here (such as a great red
herring when you assume that Kroll is a man in the first cliffhanger, only to
see it’s a five mile wide squid in the second!) – it’s just that not as much
quality as usual made it all the way to the finished product. It is very much
the script’s fault why this story doesn’t quite work as everyone else is trying
their hardest – although it’s not really Robert Holmes’ fault either. You see, the
biggest obstacle in this entire story is the lack of light and shade; with
nearly every scene consisting of people shouting at each other. It turned out
that way mostly because Read, a bit worried by how ‘Ribos’ turned out to be one
of the most tongue-in-cheek stories so far, asked Holmes if he could ‘tone down’
the humour a bit (or at least that’s how the story goes, but it wouldn’t
surprise me if one of his bosses cottoned on to what previous Homes story ‘The Sun Makers’ was really about and
sent in a memo). That left Holmes in a bit of a quandary because he wasn’t
quite sure what to put in its place, so we get a script that’s single-layered
rather than multi-faceted as usual. After all, comedy was always 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 Who 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, which feels like
filling in time and padding as much as anything else (even Holmes, usually
forced to cut a lot of his work to make things fit the time slot, has so few sub-plots
to juggle this story under-runs across all four episodes even with lengthier
than usual reprises; for once it doesnb’t feel as if there’s anything that’s ‘missing’
either – that’s as long as the story runs, a paltry 90 minutes ten or so below
average). The result also feels suspiciously like a first draft, which in many
ways due to the time constraints it was: there’s no time to build up this world
beyond the small part of this we see, the characters are caricatures rather
than the layered characters Holmes usually draws and the dialogue is best
described as perfunctory, give or take a couple of exceptions (such as The
Doctor openly trying to get Romana to praise him). It feels like a peek into
how Holmes’ work perhaps always looked, before being tweaked and moulded into
the gems we’re used to – only with a timeline looking and knowing that most of
the jokes would be taken out Holmes lost interest and stopped where he did.
There’s even a direct lift from the 1933 ‘King Kong’ film, with Romana tied up
with chanting natives outside (not unusual for Holmes in the sense of how many
sources he used to ‘borrow’, but this is definitely one of the most blatant and
unaltered. The fact the swampies are green is the only difference – and for all
we know so were the natives in a black-and-white film). The cliffhanger to
episode two (Kroll’s tentacle bursting through a pipe and grabbing some dinner)
is also perhaps the most blatant ‘Quatermass’ rip-off of the lot, which in this
series is really saying something (it’s from the second film – the one set in
Carlisle, which makes Clara’s rude remarks about the city being dull in ‘Hide’ and The Doctor’s agreement even
more odd given what a Quatermass fan the timelord seems to be)
After all, despite the
presence of the big monster, he was being asked to think ‘smaller’ than usual
it seems, so he did, with an inconsequential story by his high standards,
without the layered barbs and usual criticisms, even if Holmes couldn’t quite bring
himself to write a story without satire entirely. In time Holmes will work out
what to do with this approach of no humour and one basic plot without allegories:
make his humour dark and turn the characterisation and drama up to the level
where it’s a tragedy (even more than ‘Krotons’ this story is a first draft for ‘The Caves Of Androzani’, complete with gun-runners and
lots of characters to hate. Despite that story’s unassailable reputation in
fandom the two aren’t all that far apart in quality – ‘Caves’ plot is tighter,
the dialogue better and the stakes a lot higher, mostly).
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 thing you
find most interesting. There are still some really good moments here and
everyone else is trying their hardest to go all out and make this an epic as
big as the squid at the heart of it. When Sydney Newman started Dr Who he famously
said that he didn’t want little green men clichés on the show. But he would
probably have approved of this morality play where the swampies are just ordinary
people leading ordinary lives who are prejudiced against because of the colour
of their skin. Which just happens to be bright green. After all, telling
stories that couldn’t be told at face value and giving voices to the voiceless
in a scifi genre that’s above criticism of side-taking: that’s exactly what he
created Who to be for. Admittedly it’s not the best use of that idea, but you
can still tell that this is a good writer having a bad day somehow (as opposed
to a bad writer having a good day) and like all the best and even a lot of the
worst Dr Who 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 lizard greengrocers
and a massive squid to look at. What other show gives you that? You surely have
to be a right old dry-foot to hate it in the same way as Who’s true misfires. Ultimately
though, even if I like this story more than most fans do, it’s undoubtedly a
bit of a misfire: a bit of a damp squid, you might say.
POSITIVES + 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!
NEGATIVES – While the
location filming is rather good, alas indoors it’s a different story: a drab
spaceship that’s as boring as space gets. Even the Doctor comments on this,
demanding that the architect be ‘fired’ (though a Holmesian enough joke it
wouldn’t surprise me if this was a Baker ad lib). Graeme McDonald, head of BBC serials, was so
disappointed with it he moved designer Don Giles onto other work after this,
which is perhaps a bit harsh (I mean, nobody got fired for ‘Orphan 55’ or ‘The Web Planet’ to put that in context).
BEST QUOTE:
‘Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll…Kroll’
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