The Ribos Operation
(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 2-23/9/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: Robert Holmes, director: George Spenton-Foster)
Rank: 156
'Pssst. Wanna buy a phone box cheap? One careless owner, a quadzillion and four miles on the clock (plus a few billennia). Very spacious - on the inside anyway - vintage model. It just fell off the back of a lorry. Literally - I went back to the start of 'Evil Of The Daleks' to get it. Whaddaya mean you don't need it you've got the internet nowadays? I shall feed you to the shrivenzale personally with an attitude like that! p.s. I might not be around tomorrow for my usual bargains. I'm popping down to 'Cash My Jethryk'. p.p.s If the British Royal family crown jewels have gone missing it was nothing to do with me!'
Congratulations! We made
it to the halfway point in our journey across time and space (at least in the
original reviews which were done in ranking order!) Which also means that its
(approximately) halfway between Christmas and new Doctor Who! Fantastic! So
here we are in the middle of the list and while that should mean everything is
distinctly average, we left the ok stories behind a long time ago and are now
deep in ‘really really good but flawed in some way’ territory. That’s perfect
for ‘The Ribos Operation’ where the best description is ‘lots and lots of
promise that’s never quite fulfilled’, or perhaps ‘a very talented writer who
hates the new commission but is having lots of fun all the same’. It is, in a
way, a ‘con job’ from a writer who wants to tell a very different story to the
one he’s being asked to tell and smuggle it in right under everyone’s noses,
only Bob Holmes is such a skilful writer that he gets away with it. The result
is a story that’s not quite one thing nor the other – a serious tale of Dr
Who’s first ever powerful Gods trying to restore balance in a universe full of
grave peril that only the Doctor can fix and a silly comedy laugh-a-minute tale
about a superstitious planet that’s stagnated because everyone turns to
religion over science. The two don’t quite cancel each other out, but it’s safe
to say that everyone working on this story is pulling in slightly different
directions so that what we have as an end product is a form of compromise, brilliant in parts rather than a whole.
You see, the grand vision
for the story doesn’t belong to the writer but the producer. Graham Williams
wanted to plant his own stamp on the series and had the idea to make it more
than just a collection of stories, to have it closer to what American science
fiction was starting to do, with one long running story (this is the era of
‘Space 1999’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and the ‘gee I really hope we get home
and find our ancestors on this next planet. Oops no that one’s full of killer
Cylon robots’ storyline). His idea was to give the season more of a sense of
urgency, to have each story bringing The Doctor and his new assistant closer to
their goal before time ran out rather than just hopping about between planets.
The trouble was British audiences didn’t watch scifi and certainly not Dr Who
in the same way the Americans did (at least, not yet). It was a show a lot of
the audience dropped in and out of, depending what they were doing, and to
follow a longer storyline meant they’d be lost. One of the series’ unique
selling points, too, was that it was a series about the unexpected, with a
format elastic enough to cover everything, that people turned into for
variety’s sake. So Williams got together with script editor Anthony Read to hash
out a plan that would be the best of both worlds and between them came up with
the idea of an immortal God who would send The Doctor on a quest, a sort of mad
dance across the universe for hidden relics, arriving on a different planet
each story where they would have different standalone adventures that still
added up to an overall bigger picture. So far so good – even though that
concept is itself not that original (Williams and Read, not yet up to speed
with Dr Who lore, appear not to have known about first season story ‘The Keys Of Marinus’, of which this is just an
extended version with the prize now freedom of the universe rather than freedom
of getting the Tardis back).
Only The Doctor, by now
fed up of working for the timelords, was too much of an anti-authoritarian to
take orders readily from just anyone so they devised the idea of having two
Gods overseeing the universe in immortal balance. Only for some unexplained
reason in this particular era the balance is starting to unravel and The White
Guardian hires The Doctor to discover the scattered remnants of something
called ‘the key to time’ that, once locked into place, will put things right.
The Doctor knows of these Gods from his childhood days reading myths and
legends (it figures he’d have read everything in the Gallifreyan library) and
is oddly subservient, reluctantly agreeing to the job even though what he
really wanted was a holiday, with The White Guardian treated as a sort of
English public school headmaster (even more so than the actual English public
school headmaster of ‘Mawdryn Undead’).
He seems really nice but with an edge, the new testament idea of God without
the beard (so what will the black guardian, unseen for another five stories
possibly be like? Well, a hammer horror villain with a raven on his head since
you ask, but that’s a disappointment for another day). The interesting but
unworkable original idea for them is that one can’t exist without the other
because you can’t have true ‘good’ or true ‘evil’, so sometimes the White good
guardian will have the upper hand, but he can do the wrong things and let the
Black ‘bad’ guardian win for a bit, only for him to secretly have a part of him
that’s good and saves everyone just in the nick of time. It’s an interesting
idea, one that builds on Taoist principles about how the Earth is in a
perpetual state of balance and forever moving in cycles between the two (think
of the famous ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ black and white image where both are wrapped
round each other with a dot of the opposite colour) and given how much of Dr
Who is based on Buddhist principles it’s worth a go swapping it for a similar
but different idea for a season. Only there’s no easy way to do that sort of
subtlety on screen (the original idea was that the two Guardians would turn out
to be…one and the same, a hint utterly ignored by future producer John
Nathan-Turner when he brings them back for season twenty in 1983 and finally
has them on screen at the same time), or at least not like this. Drama series
like Dr Who needs friction for the plot to move, even if it comes from
misunderstandings rather than absolute evil. We need someone to be ‘bad’ and by
the time The Black Guardian does turn up Bob Baker and Dave Martin have ignored
all ideas of him having any good in him at all, while The White Guardian’s
‘badness’ is reduced to the mild empty threat here (he’s passive-aggressive
where the Black Guardian is aggressive-passive, getting other people to do his
dirty work for him).
The thing is, though,
that if they’re fallible these two Guardians can’t work as proper true ‘Gods’.
The other thing is that having a concept of Gods at all is such a fundamental
change to how the series works that it undoes everything that’s come before it,
a sort of early version of the hated ‘Timeless Children’ arc (though it was
never received that badly). So far this series has been science fiction with a
foot in either camp, with a plausible amount of science that makes each story
possible if imaginative rather than impossible (give or take the odd trip to
the Land of Fiction, revived dinosaurs or Giant Robots anyway). Adding Gods
into the mix, though, is the start of a slippery slope that runs to this day:
What place do Gods have in a series that’s very much rooted itself to science?
Why do they need someone else’s help when they’re the all-powerful beings of
the universe who ought to be fighting over control of the universe themselves? Why
does the White Guardian even have a tracer prop – if he’s all powerful and
all-knowing shouldn’t he have coordinates already? You can’t be omniscient and
get someone to do your dirty work for you, that just doesn’t fit. And how come
something as physical as the key to time exists to solve a dilemma this
existential? It’s a nice idea that never quite come off, even though Read
clearly has great fun writing for the Guardians
(that’s his scene at the beginning, with the White Guardian lounging in
a chair sipping cocktails while telling The Doctor what trouble they’ll be in
if he refuses – actually a rather good little scene so it’s a shame that this
is the only one Read writes for Who rather than re-writes; this is notably the
only time The Doctor has ever called anyone ‘sir’ willingly, without sarcasm).
Someone who’s clearly not
convinced, though, is previous script editor Bob Holmes, brought in as a safe
reliable pair of hands to get the season started (and who even in this era has
already written more Dr Who stories than anyone). Just notice how much the mood
changes the instant The Doctor goes back inside the Tardis and starts playing
around. You see, Holmes has spent his writing career attacking authority
figures and he’s not about to stop now just because he’s been asked to. Holmes
was a committed atheist: not someone who had fallen out with a particular
religion but someone who thought they were all stupid, that there was nothing
out there but Humans (and possibly other aliens) all trying to bumble along
without really knowing what they were doing. He patently thinks the idea of two
Gods keeping the universe in a Taoist balance (one almost good, the other
almost evil) is ridiculous. He started his Dr Who career with ‘The Krotons’, a story that pokes fun at the
idea of immortal beings and which use their special powers of intelligence to
keep the local population stupid so they don’t ask awkward questions; moves on
to ‘The Deadly Assassin’, a story
that makes The Doctor’s own race of vaguely Godlike timelords out to be a bunch
of flawed scheming frauds ;and later on in this same series he’ll have a
superstitious people worshipping a giant green squid in ‘The Power Of Kroll’ to show what he thinks of
religion. In Holmes stories outer space is just the things that are already
happening down here, just with noisier guns (see the ‘miniscope’ of ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ or the
‘Sontarons are just Medieval brutes’ setting of ‘The Time Warrior’). So to hand an idea
like this one about powerful immortal beings to Holmes and giving him free
range for what the actual story consists of is just asking for trouble.
Holmes decides to take
the series back to the Middle Ages, giving us a planet that’s on the brink of a
Renaissance. Only Holmes, famously, was far happier being an imaginative writer
rather than a research one, so instead of re-creating the Medieval era with
pinpoint accuracy he chooses the bits he likes – a lot of them from Medieval
Russia. The people here believe in religion and don’t yet know what science is,
with twin Gods of fire and ice that chase each other’s tails across the skies
(the closest he can get to the Black and White Guardians) while the world is
filled with mystics, ‘seekers’ and astrologers. They also have divine right of
Kings on this world, only the person that their ‘God’ has picked is one of the
worst people they could have picked – a boorish oaf who would rather be
fighting a war than helping his people get peace and is happily leaning on
memories of old days in battle rather than doing anything about the suffering
going on around him now. Ribos (a possible anagram of ‘Boris’, a traditional
Russian name: nowadays its natural to think of ‘Boris’ and ‘con job’ in the
same sentence, but at this point he’s a fourteen-year-old schoolboy nobody’s
heard of. Lucky things) doesn’t even believe in other planets and thinks the
stars in the sky are ice crystals. The only character who really knows what’s
going on, Binro, is labelled a heretic and stuck down a mine-prison, labelled
an idiot even though he’s the smartest person on the planet. You see, says
Holmes without actually coming out and saying it, this is why The Doctor
shouldn’t be subservient to Gods – because without people like The Doctor we’d
have never learned science and thought ourselves of this way of thinking, we’d
have been left at the mercy of every invading alien race there is.
So Ribos becomes a story
of ‘snake oil in space’, the planet easy pickings for a couple of conmen who
aren’t bright by any means but know just enough science to trick the locals and
get by, a story about sleight of hand on a cosmic scale (so of course The
Doctor name-drops 19th century magician John Nevil Maskelyne just to
keep up, best known for a book of explaining how card sharks cheat: he’s
basically telling these two ‘I’ve clocked your number’ and seeing how bright
they are if they know him; to be fair most of the TV audience don’t either). Garron
and Unstoffe are what fans like to fondly call a ‘typical Holmesian double act’
and spend much of the story together, as part of their scam to sell the local
King a planet. They’re the sort of people that on Earth in the 1930s would have
been selling public bridges to naive simpletons, or maybe selling timeshares in
the 1970s or health drink pyramid schemes in the 21st century, the only
difference being that they’re selling planets that aren’t theirs in return for
crown jewels. Holmes, typically, just exaggerates things in an outer space setting
for the Dr Who equivalent but we all know spivs and chancers like them. Oh and
for anyone wondering when The Doctor was going to get sick and have, say, his
middle appendix removed or something the way did when I first saw this story
aged seven, an ‘operation’ is slang for a ‘con job’. Garron, especially, is a
great character who’s sayings would make a great book of quotes one day: on
dying ‘I always said it was the last thing I wanted to do’. ‘Who wants
everything? I’ll settle for 99%!’ plus my favourite ‘I did have a struggle with
my conscience…Fortunately I won!’ Everyone else sees him as the crook he is,
but he’s explained it all away by seeing his thievery as a real job and one he
takes pride in, a sort of ‘Robin Hood’ who ‘evens up the economy’ by spreading
the wealth around – even if it gets no further than his own pockets. Rather
like the Aztecs in Mexico where Gold was so plentiful it was an everyday metal,
Ribos has a large supply of jethryk which turns out to be the most expensive
and valuable mineral in the universe. Only, inevitably, part of the key to time
has been disguised as a lump of it, cue a story of Garron and The Doctor out-duping
each other and their Graffe ruler (‘Graf’ means ‘count’ in German) across the
course of this story. Unstoffe too is a strong character who goes from conman’s
assistant to rebel and Binro supporter naturally across four episodes as he
learns to think for himself (he’s the only character who actually develops
across this story) and is another bit of Dr Who stunt guest casting that worked
out surprisingly well, played with just the right complexity by Nigel Plaskit,
a man best known for being sidekick to another rogue of children’s TV, Hartley
Hare. In a story filled with such big characters he’s impressively muted and
thoughtful, going from straight man to the only straight thinker on the planet.
Usually in stories like this you’re meant to sympathise with the poor victim
while loathing the con-artists but Holmes has too much fun with them and
subverts the tradition on its head by having the ‘mark’ boorish and unlikeable
and the conmen clever and funny.
The thing is though,
hilarious as Garron is and as fun as his put-downs of his poor hapless
assistant Unstoffe are (we’re back in ‘Talons
Of Weng Chiang’ territory and Jago and Litefoot, where the bright one that
should be in charge is playing second fiddle to their more extroverted
flamboyant partner) this sort of knock-around fun doesn’t belong in a story
where The Doctor has only just been given the most important quest he’s ever
been on. The viewers are led to believe they’ll be quaking in their boots by
the end of this story, that we’ll see some sign of the universe imploding –
instead we see a bunch of fools outsmart a bunch of dimwits. It’s not actor
Iain Cuthbertson’s fault, who gives a tour de force performance as Garron, because
that’s the part as written, but everyone around him starts having fun to match
him and keep up with his guffaws. Tom Baker, always up for a joke, decides he’d
quite like to be in on the laughs too and soon everyone is doing what
nay-sayers of this series call ‘Dr Who acting’: not to say that anyone acts
badly or under-performs (the way they do in, say, ‘The Time Monster’ or indeed parts of ‘The Keys Of Marinus’) so much as they’re enjoying a
day out, not taking the threat in this story seriously in the slightest. So
what we end up with is a compromise, a typical Dr Who runaround over small
scale conmen and one dimensional Kings of the sort we’ve seen before straight
after we’ve been promised a cosmic fight in the Heavens between two Gods (you
don’t even see the Black Guardian till the finale, another way they mucked up:
if they’d done it more like ‘Knightmare’, with a similar mixture of ‘white’
dressed goody Merlin – prolific Who guest star John Woodnutt – being spied on
and chased by ’black’ dressed baddy Lord
Fear in an endless game of cat and mouse) it would have felt much more like a
coherent series arc. Instead viewers got bored. This is, after all, a very
talky story where people fight with wits rather than guns or swords.
Nobody seems to be
playing for laughs more than the new assistant Romana, who is played with a
perpetual wry smile by Mary Tamm throughout, as if she knows the punchline to a
really funny joke that you don’t. Even when screaming at the end of the first
cliffhanger she never quite loses that sense that it’s all a game. Though her
character will come together in time (especially when she regenerates into
Lalla Ward the following year), Holmes doesn’t quite know what to do with her
yet other than make her glamorous in contrast to the Doctor’s eccentric style
(just look at the way she’s introduced, quite unlike any other companion: The
Doctor, kneeling next to K(, sees her as the camera pans from her ankles up in
a sexy white dress that makes her more like a playboy bunny than the usual
‘childlike orphan’ assistant). Romana is a tad over-written in her first
appearance, the script relying too heavily on Mary Tamm’s 1940s Hollywood looks
and love of glamorous costumes (though Elisabthe Sladen was suggesting costumes
by the end this is the first time we’ve had an actress actively work with the
wardrobe department to choose their look for each individual story; oddly,
despite his acted ogling, it was Baker who insisted she tone her costumes down
in future stories which were all meant to be the same style but in different
shades) to be anything more than a film star diva. She is, you see, another
Graham Williams invention where you can see where he was going but handed to
the wrong writer to flesh out. In the producer’s head Romana was the Doctor’s
equal-but-opposite, booksmart but not streetsmart and a stickler for the rules
who struggles to cope in real life events that he can bluff his way out of.
There is the very telling comment that she’s just graduated from the Gallifreyan
academy with a triple A while he scraped through with a 51% pass on his second
attempt (so that’s why he kidnapped two schoolteachers when we first met him,
he was getting his own back! Though it makes you wonder how poor Susan’s marks
must have been for him to insist she stays on at school, even a backward one on
Earth. Or maybe she loved learning and he didn’t approve?)
In William’s head, too,
he wanted a companion to be as opposite as Leela as possible, so instead of a
primal savage running on instincts he made her an ‘ice maiden’ who comes from a
place of thought and never betrays her emotions – the original intention was
that Romana is never flustered, never calls for help and never ever screams,
something blown as early as the end of the first episode. It’s also a neat
twist on the master-pupil relationship the 4th Doctor had with Leela, but they’re
much closer in ability now that she is a timelord too as if he’s now teaching a
level higher or gone to tutor the head girl rather than help out the promising
student who’s fallen to the bottom of the class through no fault of her own (sadly
they cut one of the story’s best lines, as Romana says the timelord warned her
that The Doctor ‘is an eccentric some of the time and iconoclastic all of the
time’, as good a summary of this particular regeneration as any and
particularly relevant to this story, all about the importance of coming to your
own conclusions and breaking outdated belief systems like religion; the line
got dropped to hedge their bets on how much Romana knew about her ‘quest’ in
case later writers wanted to use it but they didn’t, not really). Romana’s a
really good idea that, again, was given to the ‘wrong’ writer to flesh out. As
we’ve seen, Holmes is no good at writing authority figures unless poking fun at
them. He isn’t interested in a haughty maiden so instead he turns her into The
Doctor’s annoying younger sister, always there to point out his mistakes and
laugh at everything he says except the jokes he thinks are funny. Mary Tamm is
really good at the part Holmes has written for her to play and at times their
double act is the best thing about this story – but she doesn’t fit the idea
Williams was aiming for and at other times their double act threatens to swamp
this story as they have so much fun out-doing each other even more of the
inherent threat of the key to time arc is lost (talking of swamps Holmes will
have worked out how to write for Romana by the time of ‘The Power Of Kroll’, a
story that gets her first regeneration right better than anyone except perhaps
Douglas Adams, but the other writers took their cue from this story as it was
the first). The real problem is that, by putting two intellectual giants
together, the story has nowhere for the regulars to go except look down on
everyone they meet, which becomes wearing however much fu they’re having. You
can’t be scared in the Romana stories because with two of them convinced they
can outwit everyone they should never be able to get in trouble. Mary Tamm, by
her own admission, was here for the giggles and the career promotion anyway and
never really ‘got’ Dr Who (she was, by chance, drama classmates and had
remained good friend with Louise Jamieson, who advised her against the part but
gave her lots of tips about how to cope, especially with Tom, who she was told
to stand up to – he, clearly, is having a whale of a time having a glamorous
blonde on his arm in a way her predecessor would never have tolerated, even if
Mary did stand out by being the only interviewee to refuse to sit on the
actor’s knee to read out a ‘love scene’ during auditions, something she worried
might have cost her job but only made the production team want her more as
someone they thought might stand up to Tom).
As for the lead actor
he’s on manic form, making the most of the sillier-than-usual atmosphere by
throwing out gags left right and centre, some of which work but a lot of which
fall flat. While he gets the better of the banter with Romana you can tell he’s
frothing at the but when Garron gets all the best lines and he was reportedly
in another of his bad moods (he didn’t want a new assistant and The Doctor’s
angry refusal is ‘real’ as much as acting, something he slowly overcomes when
he finds out that Mary was a happier drinking companion and social butterfly
than Louise ever was). If he seems a bit flat in places, too, that’s because he
had an ‘accident at work’, even if in true eccentric Tom Baker style it’s the
sort of accident almost no one has. Paul Seed, playing the Graffe, brought
along his dog to rehearsals and was showing off a party trick of ‘look at him
take this sausage out of my open mouth!’ Tom wanted to have a go too but the
Jack Russell wasn’t used to doing the trick for strangers and instead bit him
on the lip. Make up cover it up as best they can but that was painful added to
the gaping wound (you can see it most in silhouette when The Doctor is walking
out into the light of the White Guardian).
Ribos is an intriguing combination
of Earth past and scifi future, one that’s 1920s Russia-esque where it seems to
be permanently cold and the Royals are out of touch, holding on to power
through their ice-covered fingertips. The Russian link is intriguing,
especially at the near-peak of the cold war. Though he was more subtle in the
script, the costume and set designers pick up on the local currency of ‘opeks’,
so close to the Russian equivalent ‘Kopeks’ and go all out with Tsar costumes
and funny hats. In the context of the times its easy to see this as a bit of
gentle war propaganda , that Garon (a born capitalist if ever there was one)
gets one over on this bunch of weak-kneed superstitious peasants who all
worship their King blindly and are communists in all but name. Except that
Garon is just as fooled by The Doctor. So is Holmes’ point that we should be
thinking for ourselves and that both sides are equally brainwashed? (That would
certainly be more in line with his other stories, ‘The Sun Makers’ especially). One thing
that doesn’t seem quite ‘right’ though, whether through artistic license or
Holmes being adamant in not doing any research: this isn’t yet Communist
Russia, it’s Tsarist Russia, which is quite a different thing as the planet
still blindly supports a monarch who is making their life worse. This is Russia
in 1917 not the Middle Ages, at the point when Lenin comes to power and
(however briefly) makes the country more equal and free. So is Holmes’ point
really about monarchism versus a science-based Republic? In which case he’s
actually laughing at ‘us’, the English, again. Which makes the fact The White
Guardian is treated as a very English sort of old school empirical headmaster
either clashing or even funnier depending how you look at it. A shame, though,
that such a potentially serious point gets lost in all the comedy.
It’s hard to be cross
with a story that makes you laugh this hard this often. Even if this isn’t the
story you’re expecting and even if it doesn’t hang together all the way through
there are moments when this story shines brilliantly. Most of this script are
people down the intellectual food chain conning the one below them without them
realising in what’s perhaps the best Holmesian topsy turvy world of them all,
where the clever people are locked up in the dungeons and the idiots reign supreme.
The Graffe really is ever so easy to fool, but he thinks of himself as an
enlightened clever man. Garron thinks of himself as the perfect crook, but he’s
no match for The Doctor. And it’s a
stalemate between The Doctor and Romana: sometimes she gets into trouble
through her naivite, but equally his need to do things his way, through
original means, makes things far more complicated then they need to be. This is a script where everyone punctures
each other’s pomposity and everyone, thick or clever, is Shrivenzale food in
the end anyway Some of these scenes are hilarious. And yet the very best scenes
are the deeply serious ones that come out and take you by surprise, for like
Donald Cotton’s scripts for ‘The
Gunfighters’ and ‘The Myth Makers’
this isn’t a comedy where bad things can’t happen but a tragedy flipped on its
head, made all the worse because of the farce that is unnecessary incompetence.
The best scenes of all are the ones between Unstoffe and Binro when the story
takes time out to discuss the story’s deeper themes, about whether it’s best to
stay cosy and safe but ignorant or be clever and discover the truth but get
into trouble for it. You see, the hierarchy of the world (and in Dr Who the
universe) isn’t what it should be, with the clever people in charge – usually
it’s the thick people who shout the loudest who have control of the armies
because people are frightened of intelligence and electing people smarter than
them. So we go through the same cycles, of being afraid to change or update our
knowledge, making the same mistakes over and over again. In that respect it’s
very much a jokey re-write of ‘The Krotons’,
where intellect is power: Holmes, for whom the education system was his biggest
bee in his bonnet, still comes firmly down in the Doctor’s favour with original
thought however). It’s in those moments where ‘The Ribos Operation’ truly
shines, when the jokes stop coming long enough for Homes to drop the façade and
tell us what he really wants to say. The fact that he’s doing this in a story
that introduces Gods to the Whoniverse and tells us that there are more
authority figures still is all part of the joke (I understand they wanted to
start the series with a safe pair of hands but, honestly, the solution is
obvious: keep Holmes back for the pomposity
puncturing season finale and have
the Gods turn out to be fallible and more in keeping with past stories).
Everyone is superstitious
and gullible, whether by order or design or through a need to keep your head on
your shoulders. One interesting character is ‘The Seeker’ – like Cassandra in
‘The Myth Makers she’s a seer who’s eerily accurate and everyone trusts
automatically while they shy away from scientists and facts. Holmes has an
interesting take on the character: like Cassandra she’s essentially right but
gets treated in Who terms as if she’s ‘wrong’ throughout and backing the wrong
horse. It’s as if she has the correct information but doesn’t have the
intellect to use it properly: for instance she knows that Unstoffe is hiding in
the catacombs with the jefryk: she’s bang on the money, but it’s to her
detriment that she doesn’t realise that he can move and so when the guards go
there and find them empty she gets it in the neck anyway. Equally she thinks
that her vision that everyone in the room will die but one will keep her safe,
but it ends up leading to her death when the Graffe is afraid it means he will
die and make sure she dies ahead of him (actually it’s The Doctor who survives
anyway).All these characters try and use their superstition for power and
deserve to be in prison for it, whereas the irony is that Binro was trying to
use his science for the benefit of everyone, to let Ribos prosper through his
understanding. This is a world that all makes perfect sense taken as a whole,
given our own superstitious past even though to us modern(ish) audiences it
doesn’t make any sense at all – the sort of complicated convoluted juggling
Holmes made his own. Lots of fans miss the one great irony at the bottom of all
this though: Holmes encourages us to laugh at the superstitious locals by
having us root for Binro. Only, given the macguffin about the Guardians, he’s ‘wrong’
and the locals are ‘right’. Because we’ve
now been asked to buy the idea of all-powerful Gods anyway. The joke is on us.
Or perhaps on the producer for introducing this contradiction Holmes clearly
doesn’t approve of. How much you get out of ‘The Ribos Operation’ is directly
correlated to how successfully Holmes makes you believe both things at once: ‘Ribos’
is a Schrödinger story that asks to both belief and disbelieve in Gods and both
believe and disbelieve the science, depending which scene we’re in.
One thing that helps sell
the illusion, though, is that everything looks so good on screen. There’s an
aesthetic that runs through this story that makes it feel like a real ‘world’
where everything connects for once, partly through Holmes’ script (which gives
us more backstory for Ribos than most – apparently every planet has a ‘Medieval
phase’ while this one has stayed backward partly because of its lengthy
elliptical orbit, making seasons last 32 years so the people here really aren’t
used to change) but also through the costume and set design that feels as if
they are working together for once. This is a world so vast and so naturally
unliveable that everyone huddles throughout the story, surviving rather than
thriving and with no major sense of community beyond the subservient armies as
everyone feels cut off from their neighbours and the universe. The theme
throughout is ‘white’ – white guardian, a white planet (that’s covered in snow
for long periods – the first time we’ve had any since ‘The Tenth Planet’ so no wonder the 9th
and 10th Doctors get so excited about it later), even Romana is
dressed in white furs. Was the original idea to move slowly to black, the
colour scheme of ‘The Armageddon
Factor’? If so it doesn’t really come off, though ‘The Pirate Planet’ is a
sort of metallic silver, ‘The Stones Of Blood’
a sort of scarlet red and ‘The Power Of Kroll’
a sort of bright green. Even though you have to make certain adjustments for
the fact that this is a story made on the cheap in a TV studio in 1978 (Holmes
was asked to keep the budget down so some would be left in the pot for later,
with the promise that his second story in the season could have location
filming if he kept to studio sets for this one – a side effect of things being
so behind in this era that BBC studios were easier to book at short noticed
than contracted third-party film sets) ‘Ribos’ looks better than a lot of
stories in this era and somehow the clash of 1930s Russian costumes and scifi
garb makes for a more interesting less uniform world rather than one of
clashing ideas. All this despite –
typically for this era – another union strike and a row over whether lighting
the ornamental torches was a set, a props, a lighting or an electrician duty.
The original plan too had been to make everything look ‘bigger’ through
chromakey (especially the Shrivenzale) but after wasting hours arguing about
lighting nobody wanted to lose more time aruing about who should erect the
‘green screens’ needed for such shots so it got dropped. You don’t really need
it, that said.
‘Ribos’ is a nice idea,
then, with some lovely scenes and some classic lines. It’s lovely to look, very
funny to listen to and plenty enjoyable, but it’s also quite hollow: you get to
see lots of people being clever but the only person you ever feel an emotional
connection to Is Binro (and he doesn’t turn up till episode three). Mostly it’s
a story of people outsmarting each other and as such is a hard episode to love,
as if Holmes is giggling over his typewriter going ‘I can’t put that, can I?!’
and nobody quite knowing how to stop him or sure if they should. It’s as part
of the series arc it really doesn’t work: the ‘wrong’ writer was asked to write
the first of this new arc and he undermines it straight away, to the point
where people have long stopped caring about the key to time by the point we
return to it, all sense of urgency gone after four episodes of fun and games. Of
the two times classic Dr Who tried this, the key to time works a lot better
than ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ ever did, but it still doesn’t feel quite ‘right’
somehow. The 4th Doctor, especially, is a wanderer who is free to go
anywhere and we watch him enjoy his freedom while often enjoying him bringing
that sense of freedom to others. To those of us stuck in a routine and daily
grind, longing for such freedoms ourselves, it’s a form of escapism. Having The
Doctor running errands like a schoolboy feels wrong somehow, while the lack of
threat means the story arc is something that quickly fades into the background
anyway. Equally, though, its all done with such panache and with so many good
jokes that it’s a hard story to hate. Everything here is played to perfection,
a ‘romp’ that’s silly and fun and frivolous and makes you laugh like few other
stories. Plus the big beating heart at the centre of this story is a good one,
asking many deep questions about faith, both that of the Guardians above and that
of Binro below. The fact that it’s all done with the atmosphere of a bawdy
pantomime makes it all the more confusing though. Which in its own way is kind
of Dr Who-y too. In other words, ‘Ribos’ is a story that comes right down in
the middle, like the two Taoist Guardians at the heart of it all not all good
but certainly not all bad either.
POSITIVES + One of the
best scenes of Who that never gets talked about, certainly in this era, is the
one where Unstoffe kindly tells a dying Binro that he believes him – that he’s
right, that the sun doesn’t revolve around Ribos and there are other inhabited
planets out there, and he knows because he comes from one of them. Binro’s
dying relief, that ‘I was right!’ after so many years of sticking to his convictions
despite everyone assuming he was wrong, is powerful stuff and one of the most
moving scenes of all. Binro is just an innocent pawn in all of this, but like
the rest of the story it’s about power so the state can’t possibly allow people
to believe about other planets: that might mean that other planets have their
own Gods who rule by divine right of different Kings and then people would
question the Graffe and then where would we be? On its own this scene is moving enough; in the
middle of a laugh out loud comedy it really cuts through the rest of the story
and the surprising thing is that it’s not the Doctor passing on the message but
a conversation between the only two people taking this planet (and life)
seriously. It’s surely the inspiration for showing Vincent Van Gogh how famous
he became after his death in a far more famous DW scene (see ‘Vincent and The Doctor’, which by a quirk of
space and time just happened to be the story reviewed next to this one).
NEGATIVES - The Key To
Time is a poor season all round for monsters (the most realistic and least
silly being a giant squid several miles high) and the Shrivenzale particularly
feels like a last minute addition who’s there purely because Dr Who stories
always have monsters and they nearly forgot to put one in. Ribos’ equivalent of
a corgi, running around the Royal headquarters and sort-of guarding the crown
jewels, it’s a large green stupid lumbering reptile leeching off the state
(insert joke about Prince Andrew here). Not what I would choose as my first
pick as guard animal, given that the legitimate people who need them can’t get
near the crown jewels either, but as it happens rather useful for keeping out
stray criminals and timelords after the key to time as well. Especially looking
like that: it beats The Myrka as Who’s first ‘pantomime horse’ by six years,
with two stuntmen in the suit communicating when to walk and talk by, umm,
walkie talkie (newboy Nick Williamson is in the front and old hand Stuart Fell
is at the back; neither enjoyed the experience much) and it moves much how
you’d expect that set up to look. I still want one as a pet mind, even if in
practice it would probably eat me or stand on me with its big clod-hopping
feet. If I don’t stand on it with my clod-hopping feet first that is.
BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘You
want me to volunteer, is that it? And if I don’t?’ The White Guardian:
‘Nothing’. Dr: ‘You mean, nothing will
happen to me?’ The White Guardian: ‘Nothing will happen to you. Ever’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Big
Finish have really taken to the ‘Key To Time’ idea and it crops up in several
of their audio adventures, some of which have already been covered during more
specific stories. Here’s where I’ve bunged the general sequels though, starting
with a trilogy of 5th Doctor stories (2009), numbers #117-119 in the
main range, cleverly titled the ‘Key2Time’ range. ‘The Judgement Of Isskar’
starts with The Doctor searching for Peri (she’s been moping and taking some
time out for herself since her Egyptian pharaoh friend Erimem left at the end
of ‘The Bride Of Peladon’) but is most surprised to instead come across a
planet where time stands still. He meets a baby and even more surprised when he
meets her grown-up self who enlists his help as her ‘companion’ in regaining
the key to time. She ends up taking the name ‘Amy’ after asking the Doctor to list
all the names he can think of in chronological order (this is two years before
he has a companion named Amy on TV; what’s wrong with Alana then eh?!) Her
tracer takes the Tardis to Mars, but the Doctor’s having one of those days
where things are always weird, because there’s only one Ice Warrior and he has
a touch of amnesia and doesn’t remember what he is or what his race are called.
It seems that The Tardis has landed in the Ice Warrior’s pre-history, when they
were a peaceful race known as the Valdigians. It all gets complicated fast, in
case you hadn’t already guessed, but the plot involves another person sent
after the key to time who turns out to be Amy’s sister, Zara (her favourite
name from the Doctor’s chronological list starting at the end of the alphabet!)
The pair are interesting characters, played with panache by Ciara Johnson and
Laura Doddington who both start out a blank slate and gradually morph into The
Doctor as they both learn from him (a little like Romana, but then again she
was quite a strong character when they first met and only gradually learned his
way was sometimes best!) Only the twist is that they both pick up something
slightly different from The Doctor, with Amy inheriting what are traditionally
thought of as his better traits and Zara his worst. The plot itself doesn’t
quite hang together though: sadly the origins of the Ice Warriors, something
I’d been dying to see (well, hear) all these years rather left me, well, cold
and the key to time itself is even less interesting and hard to follow than it
was as a concept the first time around. So far the Guardians only turn up in
flashback.
‘The Destroyer Of Delights’ fares a little better,
mostly because David Troughton makes a surprise appearance as the Black
Guardian (and playing him in just the sarcastic way he did Dr Bob Buzzard in ‘A
Very Peculiar Practice’ opposite Peter Davison’s Dr Stephen Daker rather than
his usual Who roles!) Their banter is the highlight of a sillier than expected
story where the next segment of the key to time seems to have disappeared, with
no trace of it anywhere. Unexpectedly the Tardis finds itself in 9th
century Sudan where t’Tardis ends up embroiled in the fight over the legate of
the Caliph. Only things aren’t what they seem as (spoilers) the caliph turns
out to be The White Guardian (as played by Jason Watkins) and Ali Baba The
Black Guardian. Where Jonathan Clements’ script excels is the idea, only hinted
at in the original, that the two Guardians can’t exist without the other and
that there’s a little good in even the worst of people and a little bad in even
the most good. Otherwise its business as usual, as Amy gets captured and turned
into a slave to a prince, while the Doctor is intrigued to hear of an actual
genie granting wishes who - this being
Dr Who - turns out to be from an alien race named a Djinn (of course he does!)
‘The Chaos
Pool’ wraps everything up with what seems like needless speed, with a final
showdown set in the title place, somewhere even The Guardians can’t go. There’s
a new group of aliens, the Teuthodians, who are Tractator-like slugs (only from
the beginning of time not the end), fighting a war against an unseen race from
the end of time. How does that work? I’m not quite sure. I’m also not quite
sure how the big twist at the end of the story works: mega huge spoilers so
look away now…Romana’s back! Only she seems a bit odd because…she’s Princess
Astra from ‘The
Armageddon Factor’. She can’t possibly be the final
segment of the key to time again can she? Well, as it turns out no because it’s…Romana
who was created to be the final segment all the time! It’s a great twist, a
bold move for such a beloved character and at the time the fact they actually
brought Lalla Ward back to Big Finish for the first time in a Dr Who story
rather than a ‘Gallifrey’ spin-off (playing both parts) was quite the coup!
(She’s done a few since). It’s a confusing yet poetic ending, as both Guardians
and Amy and Zara have to put their growing differences aside to save the
universe, with The Doctor and Romana somewhere in the middle, everyone
realising that you can’t have good without evil or vice versa. It’s a worthy
end but might have had a better pay-off had this series run for longer with the
themes spread out a bit more as they do feel quite rushed at times. Still, this
was arguably Big Finish’s most ambitious story to date and it’s a brave stab at
doing something colossal that ever so nearly comes off.
‘The
Prisoner’s Dilemma’ is also set during the ‘Key2Time’ season and also came out
in 2009, even though there are two big differences: one is that it’s in the
‘companion chronicles’ range rather than the main one (and so ‘read out’ by a
single performer rather than performed by a main cast) and the other is that it
features another Doctor, the 7th! This is primarily Ace’s story and
is set during the brief moment Zara has been put in prison for her crimes: Ace
is her cellmate! Of course the Whoniverse’s favourite tomboy was always going
to get on like a house on fire with a character who reflects all her best
friend The Doctor’s worst qualities – in fact setting alight to things is quite
high up the list of what they want to do when they both escape. Only there’s
something about her new friend that strikes Ace as not being quite right: she
takes things too far and Ace has learned, after years at The Doctor’s side, to
be better than that. The planet they’re on, Erratoon, is a bit too much like
Perivale for Ace’s liking: sleepy and peaceful and far too well behaved. No
wonder she got so bored she ended up in prison. The only question is will this
pair trust each other enough to bide their time in a cell together or rat out
each other’s secrets? A brave stab at doing something different, this would
have been a great release if the two back stories had lined up a bit more, but
instead it’s told one then the other, rather than side by side, with neither
story feeling that substantial and both over before they really begin, with not
enough to link the two. The few times we do hear Sophie Aldred and Laura
Doddington interact are great though and there’s definitely room for a spin-off
featuring the pair sometime.
A two-parter from the ‘Fourth Doctor Adventures’
suggests that The Black Guardian still got his revenge on The Doctor, Romana
and K9 after all, despite their randometer. ‘The Pursuit Of History’ and ‘Casualties
Of Time’ (2016) are rather hard to explain without the intricacies of not only
this story but several previous ones to set up but we’ll have a bash. Basically
the 4th Doctor and Romana keep coming across a character named
Cuthbert, played with menacing relish by David Warner (see ‘Cold War’),
a rich businessman who seemed to own most of the planets the pair landed on.
Alas Mary Tamm died before that series arc could be finished but a few years
later it was finally revived and given the (modified) intended ending, with
Lalla Ward’s Romana the companion instead. Cuthbert (and this is a mega-huge
series-ruining spoiler right here, so be warned) is really…a trap set by The
Black Guardian, again played with menacing relish by David Troughton. The
moments when the two Davids are squaring off against Tom Baker are exceptional
– the moments when the plot is slowly clicking into place before that are
rather ponderous and tedious, alas.
‘The Key To Key To Time’ (2022) is maybe a spin-off
too far, the finale of the box set ‘Destiny’ which features Colin Baker not as
The Doctor per se but as ‘The Warrior’,
a sort of parallel universe re-telling of the time wars but with Sixie
in the ‘War Doctor’ mode, a spin-off of the ‘Unbound’ series of other Doctors
who might have been. It doesn’t quite work: great as Colin is playing a
straight baddie he doesn’t have quite the gravitas of John Hurt (or Paul McGann
come to that). The plot is a bit of a mess too: the Black and White Guardians
were conspicuous by their absence in the ‘original’ time war given how much it
must disrupt the balance of the universe, but here The White Guardian is all
over it, offering the Warrior a way out that seemingly undoes everything the
three stories have been leading up to in one great duex et machine Russell T
would be proud of (Whitey also adds the detail that the universe has been
around so long that everything will eventually become disguised as the key to
time…including this book, so there, treat it kindly!) More interesting is the
sub-plot of Davros being alive and well and at the head of the Dalek army,
ruthless as ever with Terry Molloy at his best in the role. Even so, overall
personally I’d give this one a miss.
It’s worth mentioning the fairytale ‘Snow White And
The Seven Keys To Doomsday’ from the 2012 Dr Who annual too, which tells the
origins of the key to time, created by a Gallifreyan named Snowana cast out of
Gallifrey, originally built as a deadly weapon until she contained it within a
forcefield that trapped her alongside them. Though short, it’s a really good
read, the second best thing in a ‘modern’ Dr Who annual after the origins of ‘Blink’.
More on this tale under the episode that actually mentions this book and lots
of other fairytales, ‘Night
Terrors’.
Previous ‘The
Invasion Of Time’ next ‘The Pirate Planet’
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