The Krotons
(Season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 28/12/1968-18/1/1969, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: David Maloney)
Rank: 43
'Other soups available include:
Sontaron Potato-Head and Dal-Leek Soup,
Exterminatecudella,
Fish People Soup,
The Ghoulash of N-Space Soup,
Vervoid Nettle Soup,
Nimon-tail Soup,
(Sorry there's no such thing as Cream of Macra-Crab Soup)'
Oh wait, sorry, news from the kitchen - there's just been a revolution and the Gonds have overthrown their Crouton overlords. I guess soup's off!'
Ah ‘The Krotons’…Or ‘Gond With The Wind’ as they should have called it. I have a real fondness for this story which, thanks to the 1981 repeat, was the first complete Dr Who story I ever saw. They say that your first story informs how you view the rest of them, by giving you something to compare the others to, which means that my default for the series is lots of great character interaction, a political allegory, a set that’s falling apart and a bunch of monsters that you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with but which even I could probably outrun. If you’ve read any of the other reviews in this series then you’re probably going ‘figures’ about now because they do tend to be the stories I like the most. But that aside I’ve tried hard to objective with each of these reviews, as if seeing each story for the first time and yet it seems for this one I can’t. For there’s a chasm between how I see this story and how most everyone else does. I’ve read the guidebook, read all the reviews of these stories I can and out of all of them the ones for ‘The Krotons’ are the ones I disagree with the most (they’re usually just a list of complaints). I mean I sympathise with some of them – the sets are falling down and the monsters are just the right side of ramshackle – but I mean it’s all so good isn’t it? Well isn’t it? Honestly there’s nothing here a little more time, money and love wouldn’t cure (and I could say that about a good 50% of Who stories down the years). This story still has so many of the things I think of as being prime Dr Who in one place: it’s scary and funny, neither one taking away from the impact of the other. There are big political debates about control and freedom that you just can’t get anywhere else. You get the thrill of justice as an oppressive regime is overthrown. An alien race that’s utterly unique, whose easily the best of the many post-Dalek attempts to create a non-legged species and who communicates through its own unique radiophonic workshop soundtrack and hoover attachments. There’s a new world that’s as plausible and detailed as any seen in the series. You get to see the Dr-Jamie-Zoe Tardis team, one of my favourite partnerships, at the absolute peak of their powers, at their funniest without crossing the line to being silly. And above all a plot that’s an elaborate pun. What more could you ever ask for than that?
Not bad for a story that shouldn’t exist, commissioned as a ‘filler’ if another story needed replacing, worked on by new script editor Terrance Dicks as a ‘hobby’ away from larks with Cybermen and Ice warriors and dealing with the fall-out from ‘The Dominators’. For the writer was an unknown named Robert Holmes who was, at the time, a 42-year-old reporter who’d got bored rubbing shoulders with irritating humans and had his mind on bigger things. He’d broken into television by writing scripts for medical drama series ‘Emergency Ward 10’ but that wasn’t fulfilling either – what he really wanted was to work with a different kind of ‘Doctor’ and play around with bigger ideas about the meaning of life, real concerns you just couldn’t write about in ‘realistic’ series weirdly. Holmes first wrote this story as a standalone without the Doctor in it at all (it was a straight-up drama between Eelek and Selris, the two main protagonists of this story) but was clearly thinking of The Daleks when he came up with his legless non-humanoid machines. After trying it as an aborted film that never got made (bits of which were recycled for ‘Spearhead From Space’) and for the superlative if woefully inconsistent scifi anthology series ‘Out Of The Unknown’, which was perceived at the time as Dr Who’s quirky cousin, made with a bigger budget for an older, more intellectual audience over on BBC2. Only Holmes miscalculated: he hadn’t realised that ‘Out Of The Unknown’ was almost all based on adaptations of existing scifi short stories by established authors. If truth be known ‘Unknown’ was a little too up itself to know what to do with a script that was all one big joke too. Instead the script got passed around as a standalone play without much interest until BBC head of serials Shaun Sutton recommended it to the Dr Who office instead, a production team who certainly did have a sense of humour. Alas, bad timing meant that it landed on script editor Donald Tosh’s desk at the same time he was grappling with The Mechonoids in ‘The Chase’, a similar race all around and he wasn’t going to try another one after all the problems they were giving him. So he thanked the writer, explained his reasons, encouraged him to send in some more work and stuffed it in a drawer; Holmes got other work and forgot about it, until 1968 when he was moving house and found it in a drawer. Figuring he had nothing to lose he sent it along to the Dr Who office again with the instructions to throw it out if they didn’t like it as it was cluttering up his office: sitting on high and judging like The Krotons themselves, producer Derrick Sherwin wasn’t keen and turned it down, but new script editor Terrance Dicks, who would go on to become one of Holmes’ best friends, immediately loved it and saved it for the ‘rainy day’ pile if a script fell through where it was third choice for a four-parter slot and never expected to be used. Only In season six there were more rainy days than sunny ones in the production office and before long two stories commissioned by the departing production team had dropped out as being unworkable: ‘The Dreamspinner’ by Paul Wheeler, about an alien that could imagine new worlds into existence on a whim (dropped when it was realised just how much it was going to cost) and ‘Prison In Space’ by Dick Sharples, a feminist world where women are in charge, the Doctor has to wear a dress (Jamie’s kilt means he’s already ahead) and where Zoe has to be spanked into ‘normality’ to break the brainwashing (dropped for so many reasons it’s hard to know where to start; rumour has it Ronnie Barker heard about it and came up with the joke serial ‘The Worm That Turned’ for ‘The Two Ronnies’; Big Finish re-made it for their ‘Lost Stories’ range in 2010 and. boy, what a ride that was. It took several showers and a donation to a feminist organisation just to feel clean again). Both projects were hell for young Terrance who was still in his early thirties and comparatively inexperienced who had to tell much older writers their ideas were…unsatisfactory (if not downright bonkers); by contrast working with Bob in secret on tweaking his scripts was easy and straightforward and almost fun. Sherwin, increasingly desperate for anything useable, was ecstatic when Dicks said that actually he’d been working on a backup script unpaid and even though he’d had his doubts earlier the producer was desperate enough to let ‘The Krotons’ go ahead.
It was a match made in heaven: almost by accident (given that it was never written as a Who script) ‘The Krotons’ is very much the sort of ‘glorious revolution’ story the series had dabbled with during the Hartnell years, combined with the sort of ‘base under siege’ stories the Troughton era had made its own with the political anarchy of the 3rd and 4th Doctor eras to come. It’s also as close as any story ever came to re-creating the feel of ‘The Daleks’ story that was Who’s breakthrough (including all the times Terry Nation himself tried to write a sequel): this is another case of pacifists taking down an alien warlike threat, by turning the wonders of their technological city against them – an alien threat that just happened not to have any arms or legs. Oddly no one seems to have noticed this but at the time the story comes very close, even re-creating scene by scene the power struggles between the Gond-Thals and the alien-ness of the Kroton-Daleks. And I’m not whether that was always Holmes’ intention or whether he added this plot point when he re-wrote the script for Dr Who (we know he was a fan who already watched it a lot, albeit one of those fans who rolled his eyes and wished the series could be better, more scientific and realistic): we do know that it was originally much more of a ‘three hander’ between Beta, Thera and Vana, most of whose lines went to The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe respectively. At first, in its 1965 incarnation, ‘The Krotons’ was a simpler tale of a base under threat in 1965, then revised it in 1968 as a sort-of spoof of two of the era’s biggest films: ‘Logan’s Run’ where a closed off community are killed off after reaching a certain age in case they get so bright they overthrow their masters (a great idea that’s delivered almost unbearably po-faced on screen) and Arthur C Clarke’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, the late 1960s’ big scifi film hit about mankind’s evolution. I’d love to know if both influences were there in the original 1965 script and which were added later; it’s worth remembering that both were huge books in the years before they were films before someone points that out about the dates. Only instead of benevolent aliens pushing mankind on to greater things from the very beginnings of our existence, Holmes wrote about an alien race made out of crystal who created The Gonds, ‘us’ (or people like us) in our natural state for their own ends (because they lack the opposable thumbs needed to repair crashed spaceships) and who float above mankind, siphoning off their most intelligent citizens for their own ends. For, if you didn’t get the pun, The Krotons are, if you will, croutons floating in the bowl of primordial soup that is their dynotrope spaceship that’s organically grown to take over the entire (un-named) planet. They’re square too, a bit like croutons, just to rub the joke home (although not quite what Homes had in mind in the script; he had something more crystalline in mind).
The cleverness of the
story though is that even if you didn’t get the soup-based joke there’s another
whole layer beyond that: the Krotons are basically your television turned inside
out, communicating through wire attachments that come out of the machine and
kill people (although they end up looking more like vacuum cleaner nozzles on
screen). They communicate by spying on people and taking pictures of them too,
recording their images before latching onto them to kill them: death by camera.
In the days before CCTV surveillance this was still quite a new concept
although it also enlargens on things Dr Who had done before: at one with The Celestial Toymaker using TVs to spy
on Steven and Dodo and The Elders in ‘The Savages’ effectively tuning in to
watch Dr Who every week as they had a machine that tracked the Tardis’
flights). Here, though, it’s not just to spy to see what people are up to, it’s
symbolic of how you’re never going to be allowed to be free if someone is
keeping an eye on you and checking what sort of freedom you’re up to. More than
that, though, it’s about television being used for ill and brainwashing not
directly but by choice of words and bias: something that was one of the reasons
Holmes became disenfranchised with the journalism business. As Selris puts it ‘all
science, all culture, everything we have comes from the machines’ – and if you
get anything all from the source, from the same people, you’re not going to get
a clear picture of what’s really going on. The metaphor of mankind using TV to
siphon off humanity’s best minds to stop them getting too clever while still at
school and ‘spoon-feeding’ the masses who
only learn about what their masters want them to know, is a great central idea.
For The Gonds have not been allowed to grow beyond what their masters have
allowed them to learn and while they think their benefactors have been
benevolent and provided everything they needed, the truth is that The Krotons
only care about The Gonds in so far as it takes them to rebuild their
spaceship, using the mental powers of their best two per generation to convert
into energy (and no, I’m not sure how that works either, but whose to say an
truly alien race wouldn’t be able to do something like that?) One other thought:
the big ‘X’ The Krotons show on screen when they mark someone is very like the
sort of cross you put in a ballot box. So are The Krotons the politicians we
vote for every year as part of our own ‘intelligence test’? For other writers I
would happily dismiss this as a coincidence, but just look at the vitriol with
which Holmes later writer ‘The Sunmakers’.
The idea of taking the
brightest boy and girl every year, like Logan’s Run, makes them seem to all
intents and purposes like the head boy and head girl of every year. Which makes
me wonder if Holmes wasn’t also up to something else with this script, making
it a damning critique of the educational system. For The Gonds are tested each
and every year with giant headsets, their brains fed into a giant computer and
if they’re bright enough they’re picked by The Krotons to be absorbed, to
become ‘like them’. If you went to a school anything like mine then it might
have struck you how much your head boy/girl changed on being given the job:
they stopped becoming like the rest of you and more like the teachers, the
adults, with responsibilities ready to shop out their peers if it helped them
get on and add something to their CVs ready for an adult world.
We’ve said before lots of times how Dr Who was a family show, one of the few places seen by parents and children together and one of the few places ready to have a debate about the generational divide (which was never as strong as wide as it was in the 1960s, before or since): here is Holmes firmly on the side of the children: becoming an adult, passing their tests and growing like them, is to be killed or at least turned catatonic, taken away from what you once were. Now, Holmes wasn’t against learning per se. You can see in the vast majority of his later Who scripts that Holmes was a very clever man and loved learning – not in a classroom setting and not for any particular end but in a ‘gosh isn’t the world a fascinating place?’ kind of a way. way but in a ‘gosh isn’t the universe an amazing place?’ sort of a way. His scripts are full of hidden titbits of knowledge smuggled in as entertainment, including this script’s riffs on chemistry and how a planet with a sulphur atmosphere would smell like rotten eggs. Holmeslikes characters who are bright (he writes better for Zoe and her mixture of intelligence and gullibility better than anyone else), he likes his characters to become bright (usually after spending time with the Doctor) but above all else he loves people to think for themselves. The Gonds haven’t been allowed to think for themselves: they’ve been spoon-fed their intelligence so that they don’t ask awkward questions about their lives or, say, discover that The Kroton outer casing is susceptible to certain acids. What’s the best way of defeating them? To think for yourself, to learn things you’re not supposed to know and thumb your nose at reckless authority that asks you to obey without question. For, despite the intelligence of both The Doctor and Zoe, the story is saved by Jamie, his simple ruse to use a rock that’s a bit like The Krotons to jam their door (something so obvious their great minds have overlooked it) and his making of the thing that schoolboys have used for every generation to cause chaos in their classrooms: the ‘stink bomb’ (which literally corrodes authority and dissolves The Krotons’ outer shell).
And even more than that,
it’s a joke on a whole other level that’s probably been lost to most viewers
since first broadcast since 1968. You remember how we keep saying that so many
of the 1960s stories are about parental worries about what sort of a world it
would be when their peacenik hippie children become adults and take over?
Holmes has been thinking that too – and unlike some other writers he’s firmly
on the side of the kids. For while people see that this story is yet another
fight between a warlike Gond and a peaceloving Gond they miss the twist that
the ‘wear generation baby’ who wants to blow things up is the hot-headed
youngster Eelek, while the hippie who wants to bring peace on earth is Selris,
a man who looks as if he’s past pension age. Krotons aside, it’s hard to tell
who the ‘baddies’ in this story actually are – like all the best complex
morality plays you sympathise with everyone in turn: Selris who want to appease
the Krotons because they’re afraid of a giant massacre and think its better to
sacrifice themselves in ones and twos and those like Eelek who just want to
risk everything in one big mass fight. You could argue that Eelek is right,
just as the Thals were ‘right’ to be coached by the Doctor into blowing up the
Dalek city in 1963/4: the Gonds are under control and ought to be fighting
back. Except I don’t think that’s what Holmes is saying: the defeat comes not
through fighting per se but through fighting smart, to learn things for
yourself and use your knowledge to exploit your enemies’ weaknesses, especially
if it’s knowledge they don’t want you to learn. And what else was going on in
1968? Hippie student sit-in revolutions, peaceful protests where students
refused to leave their desks in protest at ongoing wars in Vietnam and Korea,
at nuclear weapons, at America’s appalling treatment of civil rights. You name
it, if there was something the government didn’t want you to know about and
hoped you’d go along with, then the hippies were learning about it and not
simply agreeing to your demands because you were an authority figure. And then,
at the end, they defeat the establishment by turning on turning in and dropping
out, of turning off the intelligence machines and literally ‘dropping acid’ – admittedly
it’s the sort of acid you sprinkle on chips and a barrel that gets dropped and
not a hallucinogenic drug as such but
then if it had been there was no way it was going to get onto telly in 1968;
instead it feels as if this is the closest Holmes can get, sulphuric acid
burning through the Kroton casing as this world is ‘shaken to its foundations,
man’. The Gonds’ dress sense too is, erm, unusual and logical for what a child
of the 1960s might be wearing as an adult in another thirty-forty years (compared to, say, ‘The Dominators’ at least
its practical). It’s all one big joke, a warped version of what the future
might be like as seen from the 1960s, the pupils growing old and finally turning
on their masters and going their own way as adults, made for a series that most
people were still thinking of in 1968 as children’s television. And it’s
fabulous. And very Dr Who. There’s one line where Doctor is asked ‘we’ve been slaves
for a thousand years, do you really think you can free us in a day?’ But of
course he can. He’s the Doctor. Putting wrong things right is what he does,
joke situation or not.
And if you didn’t get
either joke (a lot of fans still don’t) then this is still one of Dr Who’s
funniest scripts, driven by the characters rather than the plot as in all good
drama. IT’s amazing to think that this story wasn’t a Dr Who tale from the
start because Holmes writes for the regulars so very well. The story wouldn’t
work as well without Zoe, arguably the cleverest companion the series has ever
had thanks to her training on ‘The Wheel In Space’ and surely the companion
most likely to become head girl from, say, Zebedee University or Totally Dr Who
Academy or somewhere where they all train. The joke is that she’s more than
smart enough to pass the Krotons’ intelligence tests with perfect marks which
even the Doctor doesn’t get but she’s not smart enough to see that taking a
test offered her by a series of killer robots who’ve just killed a load of
locals who took it is probably not a good idea (her university training is not
good for her, as per ‘Wheel’). The opening scenes, with a quarry in the Malvern
Hills, doubling as an alien planet, are really fun, the Doctor using then
losing his umbrella and putting over it even in the face of death and
destruction. Wendy Padbury and Patrick Troughton are so good in their scenes
together, as the Doctor gets flustered at getting his own test wrong and Zoe
laughs at him, before they bicker about who got more answers right and who had
the time to answer more questions (while the joke about their names now being
re-christened as ‘Zoe-Gond’ and ‘Dr-Gond’, much to the Doctor’s disgust has
been making me laugh out loud since I was seven. Hey, not every great joke is
intellectual). The Doctor does seem awfully tactile in this story too compared
to later ones, always hugging his companions, but actually that’s for practical
reasons: Wendy Padbury’s thin PVC suit kept splitting in all sorts of
embarrassing places and repairing it cost time the show didn’t have, so he’s
trying to shield her from the cameras! Poor Jamie ends up becoming the butt of
all the jokes (he’s not the brightest companion the Dr’s ever had and thicker
than all the Gonds put together) but Frazer Hines sells Jamie’s long-suffering
frustration at being teased by his smarter friends so well you really feel for
him and he comes out the hero by story’s end. This isn’t my favourite era
necessarily (a lot of the scripts are so up and down) but I really do think
this trio are my favourite ‘team Tardis’: the actors all bounce off each other
so well and you can tell they love adore each other and can’t wait to go to
work, while their characters are all believable contrasts who love each other
underneath it all, unlike the rather barbed attempts to re-do this sort of
thing with companions based on conflict who seem to hate each other in the days
of the 5th and 13th Doctors. It goes without saying that
all there actors are word-perfect, by now wearing their characters as easily as
a coat.
A lot of fans laugh at
The Krotons for different reasons, seeing them as secondhand Daleks (they do
look rather like ‘The Trods’, who are the Lidl brand equivalent of the Daleks
in the ‘TV Comic’ Dr Who strips when Terry Nation took his licensing rights
away, while a longstanding rumour went round for years that they were the
winners of the 1968 Blue Peter design a monster competition: that was actually ‘Aquaman’,
a square box that could travel underwater and was clearly drawn by a child
disappointed at the amount of fish people ballets in ‘Underwater Menace’ when
they wanted more robots) but I love the Kroton design too: so many Dr Who alien
races that are meant to be all-powerful look as if a strong breeze would blow
them over but they are chunky, impenetrable, square (as befits a monster
modelled on a crouton) and the wires that come out like tentacles, feeling
their easy around the set, are brilliantly creepy. I love the way both they and
their world are based on hexagons, as if it’s the only shape of importance in
the universe. I even like the way their heads spin around, much mocked but
which make them seem even more alien (I mean, where is the actor’s head?
Actually I know now from guidebooks that it’s underneath, with the heads props
on metal runners with slats in the skirt so the actors can breathe, but like
The Daleks there’s something far more plausible about an alien monster where
you can’t see where the actor ends and the ‘costume’ begins). Their distinctive
design comes from wood and wire frames covered in vacuum-formed plastic panels
with plastic fibreglass on top made by a company specialising in racing cars. They
weren’t originally meant to be quite this bulky: this was a mistake in the
dimensions given to regular freelance prop builders Jack Lovell Ltd, who made
them too big: realising the actors’ legs would show that’s why they were
hastily given their under-skirting. They look like The War Machines and The
Mechonoids had a love-child, while their voices are deep and scary and
authoritarian, like a cross between the Daleks and Mondasian Cybermen, warped
and distorted and cross, like a teacher having a nervous breakdown. If I bumped
into one standing still on Earth they would look ridiculous sure, but on a
planet that’s been designed to fit round them making that noise and ‘stealing’
my image for its screens? I’d be petrified. Which admittedly might say more
about me than the Dr Who design team but nevertheless they’re the only Dr Who
monster outside the Daleks that ever actually gave me nightmares. If there’s a
weak link then, yes, The Gonds individually are a pretty faceless bunch -
unusual for Holmes who usually shines in the way he writes for the supporting
cast and even more unusual for Phillip Madoc whose as memorable as they come in
his other Dr Who roles but who struggles to make Eelek more than just a shouty
man (a lot of reviewers pick on James Copeland’s Selris too, but honestly
that’s what that part is: an unruffled quiet man trying to stay reasonable and
not let his emotions cloud his judgement; they might not work too well
individually but they make a great contrasting pair, the start of a lifelong
career of Holmes sticking oddball characters together in pairs). A lot of fans
comment on how old these students are, too, but that’s sort of the joke:
hippies are perpetual students who refuse to become part of the establishment
and want to learn things for themselves, so they’re going to grow into old age
like that (so says a writer in 1968 anyway). Weakest link or not The Gonds are
still one of the better drawn alien cultures in Dr Who too I think, one with
its own traditions and customs that feels as if it’s been around for several
centuries before the Tardis arrives (after all, most of the Gonds are stuck
doing the same thing for generations out of habit and because they’ve never
thought to do anything another way until the young start asking questions; you
can easily believe this has been their way of life as far back as their history
goes, when The Krotons took their planet over). Even the fact that this planet
has two suns, and all the extra details that means (like the amount of crystal
on this planet and an atmosphere rich in sulphur and ozone) and the way the
Kroton spaceship has ‘over-spilled’ suffocating the rest of the planet in a
symbolic gesture for what they’re doing to the Gonds, all very clever examples
of worldbuilding from a writer whose actually thought about this world instead
of just writing a script and getting a commission.
Best of all is the
soundtrack. Grateful as I am that this is the one Troughton four-part story
that survived the wiping years intact (what with ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ turning
up in 1992) - the only reason it was picked for that 1981 ‘Five Faces Of Doctor
Who’ repeat in 1981 that my dad was clever enough to record before I was born – it is undeniably one of
those stories that sounds better than it looks and its reputation might well
have been stronger if it was one of those stories we could only hear. With
budgets tight for the middle of the season and recognising the wordplay of
Holmes’ work the production team took the unusual decision (of the era) not to
commission a score as such (the only ‘music’ in it as such is the Doctor
whistling a few bars of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’). It works, mostly because
we’re told so many times across this story that the Gonds have not been taught
any of the art forms (including music) so we see this story as ‘they’ would
understand it, not as a TV viewer in 1968 (when music was even more a staple of
TV than it is now). Instead Brian Hodgson of the Radiophonic Workshop is asked
to come up with a series of beeps and boops and alien chimes and whistles which
are perfect: they make The Krotons seem even more distant and strange and yet
at one with the sort of ‘government’ establishment sounds a viewer of 1968
would have been used to (like one of those government alert things for your
phone crossed with a sonar machine, but played underwater). It’s a key
part of the first episode cliffhanger the memory of which I will carry around
with me forever, in which The Krotons, having worked out that the Doctor is the
cleverest person in the room, capturing his image on screen and sending their
tentacles out to get him while pinging alien noises at him, to my grave as one
of the best and scariest bits of television ever made (by contrast none of the
things that gave Mary Whitehouse kittens ever got to me at all). I mean I know
it’s a hose and I kind of knew that when I was little but, what is it/ What
harm can it do? Can it think? Why does it want to harm the Doctor? How the heck
is he going to get out of it, having scrabbled back against the floor of the
Gond great hall? Thrilling.
If there’s a problem it’s with the ending. The ending should be a revolution in all meanings of the word, as the oppressed turn on their oppressors and destroy them, blitzing their spaceship and everything they stood for. Instead this is the politest, most received pronunciation revolution ever – something that I suspect wasn’t Holmes’ intentions in the script (though he was too junior to say anything about it or be around when his story was made, boy will he find his voice on later stories). There’s an odd amount of slapstick in this story too that doesn’t quite fit the seriousness at the heart of this story (particularly when Jamie and Cully take time out from making acid to fall over and cough a lot), almost as if Holmes was asked to re-write this script for Dr Who and thought ‘aha, it’s for the tots, I’d better make it more kiddie-friendly’. Vana, the lone female Gond here, goes through one hell of a lot in this story (she nearly cops it in episode one) and yet a mere few hours later she’s running round looking after all the boys with a smile: one thing Holmes apparently didn’t envision in the great hippie revolution was equality between the sexes (although compared to the Sharples story it replaced ‘The Krotons’ is practically a feminist anthem). Unusually for Holmes too (though at one with his next script ‘The Space Pirate’') it can be quite dull in places too, with long stretches where people do nothing except talk and the plot doesn’t move on at all – there’s no sub-plots to pique or interest and nothing else to get interested in beyond the main tale.
Even so, I adore ‘The
Krotons’, the bits that work, the bits that don’t work, all of it. Everyone
talks about it as an early Holmes story before he got going and wonder how
anyone saw his worth after this and how director David Maloney called this
story ‘an unmitigated disaster’ when he saw it go out, but as the moral of the
story says we really need to think for ourselves and not just accept other
people’s opinions. I mean, they’re clearly wrong: this is a colossally under-rated
story, one with scenes of pure terror and others of pure comedy, that has a lot
of intelligent things to say but says it in such a delightfully fun way. I know
that you’re always influenced by the first story you first saw and, yes, all of
the stories in the ‘Five faces of Dr Who’ repeat season are all firmly in my
top 100, which suggests either that I’m not as immune as I thought or that John
Nathan-Turner chose his stories very well. Nevertheless I think it’s more than
that: ‘The Krotons’ is a (mostly) clever story that’s (mostly) well told and
(mostly) well acted with monsters that are (mostly) terrifying – and if that ‘mostly’
part is the one that’s bothering you then, well, I have bad news about some of
the other Dr Who stories around. It is, in short, very much my soup of the day
from the great banquet that is this series and even if other choices are more
nutritional or filling I don’t care: this one gets the balance just right for
me.
POSITIVES + The computer
graphics. Now that might sound a little weird, given that they’re such a part
of everyday life and we have hundreds of the things every episode in Dr Who
story nowadays but this is, ‘War Machines’ aside, the first time we’ve seen a
baddy that works like a computer actually communicate like a computer would.
Back in 1968 computers were still science-fiction for most people watching, the
sort of things big corporations used not everyday people and they were huge ones
that controlled everything. The thinking machines too: they were the first
thought that struck me on walking into my high school’s language labs, set up
with headsets and a cassette tape droning on in a foreign language I wasn’t
interested in learning; going from French to IT, with those computer graphics
on every screen, really did make me feel as if my teachers were Krotons in disguise. It’s quite
astonishing that a piece of TV made in 1968, a quarter century or so earlier seemed
so prescient. So is the concept actually: machine-learning really wasn’t the
thing in 1968 it is today, though it’s a logical progression from what Holmes
really hated: classrooms full of impressionable imaginative minds being fed
certain repetitive boring facts but were kept ignorant of others, ideas taught
because that’s what the machine told you to think rather than enjoying learning
for learning’s sake and information used to control people and keep them in
their place rather than giving them the tools to think for themselves. Watch it
in 2023 and, hippie references aside, it seems more relevant than ever.
Sometimes people’s dystopian visions really do come true.
NEGATIVES - Fans
generally complain of the incompetent production torpedoing the script, but
actually there’s only one shot in the whole story that’s bad. Unfortunately it’s
the very first one, of the Krotons opening up a hatch in a corridor to gas that
year’s latest hapless Gond recruits which sticks badly and should have been
re-shot. Of course everyone sees that and remembers it more than if, say, it
was hidden away in the middle of episode three and assumes the worst from then on in, even
though nothing else goes quite that bad. The HADS (the Tardis’ Hostile Action
Displacement System) is also a shocking copout to one moment of drama when you
think the ship has been destroyed, given that no one thought to ever mention it
before.
BEST QUOTE:
‘These Krotons must have enormous scientific powers – you can’t defeat them
with axes!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS:
‘Return Of The Krotons’ (2008), originally one of Big Finish’s subscriber-only
‘bonus releases’ but released as a standalone release in 2009 and as part of
the collected 6th Doctor adventures in 2019, is one of the range’ s
biggest disappointments. I had such high
hopes: a re-match between the opinionated 6th Doctor and the Krotons
(who always sounded good and so ought to have been perfect for radio) never
really comes alive. The story is set on
a dead mining world, Onyakis, and features a new bunch of characters (although
one of them, Rag Cobden, is played by Phillip Madoc). Where The Krotons were
smart on TV though, scheming machines who literally fed on intelligence, this
lot are just skulking computers going through the motions, without any of the
charm or creepiness of the original. At his best on audio the 6th
Doctor is a more thoughtful, generous soul, prone to philosophise and think his
way out but here he’s back to the arrogant shouty and often unlikeable Doctor
of old. At the equivalent running time of an old-fashioned three-parter, too,
the plot is both too short and overlong. In short, I’d give this one a miss.
Previous ‘The
Invasion ’
next ‘The Seeds Of Death’
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