Victory Of The Daleks: Ranking - 251

 Victory Of The Daleks

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 17/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Andrew Gunn)

Rank: 251

'If you are going through Skaro, keep going. Exterminate them on the beaches, exterminate them on the landing grounds, we shall exterminate them in the fields and in the streets, when running up and down corridors of space and time. Just watch out for the lack Kornovista of depression...'

Back when they were promoting this story on BBC America, as part of Steven Moffat’s plan to make Dr Who big in America, the writer was asked what might happen when The Tardis had landed in every single important place and been to every single event around the world. Moffat said that it wasn’t his problem as the series had ‘a good 500 years yet’ before that was true. Even so he seems to have helped delay that little problem by commissioning yet another story set in WWII. There was a time, in the classic series, where it was the only place the Tardis wouldn’t land. It was too soon, within living memory of a lot of the parents and grandparents watching and it was unofficially considered bad manners in the production team to have The Doctor fight Hitler on the same level as Daleks and Cybermen (you wouldn’t believe the amount of unsolicited stories about the war that script editors used to get in all eras). Only when Andrew Cartmel came along did Who break that trend, with ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ in 1989, as he considered that in Sylvester McCoy’s darker edgier portrayal he’d finally found a Doctor worth fighting Hitler – and even then ‘Fenric’ ended up being less about the German Nazi troops than the Russians. In the 21^st century series though they just can’t keep away and Moffat himself will set two stories there (‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ and ‘Let’s Kill Hitler!’) ‘Victory’ was Moffat’s idea too, inspired by taking his two boys, Joshua and Louis, round Churchill’s real-life war cabinet and watching how fascinated they were with the exhibits. However he already had his stories mapped out for the year so he gave this one over to his great friend Mark Gatiss, who was himself a war buff. ‘Write me something in Churchill’s bunker with Daleks that will keep children every bit as fascinated as my pair’ he said.

But here’s the thing: Churchill’s war cabinet rooms are fascinating for all sorts of little reasons and details, as a time capsule from the 1940s and as evidence of just how few resources our leaders were working with back then but for one overwhelming big thing: it’s a true story. World War Two might well have gone a very different way had it not been Churchill sitting in that war room making the decisions he did surrounded by the staff he hand-picked. The rest of the country, the rest of Europe, were affected by decisions made in that room that still reverberate to how people live today. ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ however is not true. Not one line of it. We have multiple eye-witnesses who gave interviews and left diary entries that have no mention of a Professor Bracewell inventing ‘Ironside’ soldiers that helped win the war before turning out to be part-Dalek himself. There’s nothing in the history books about the fact that ‘The Battle of Britain’ was actually ‘The Battle Of Britain and Skaro’. We’ve moved a long weay from the early days when the 1^st Doctor implored Barbara not to alter history ‘not one line!’ – never before has a Dr Who historical, set on a verified fact-checked era of British history, messed around with time as much as this one does. And that cheapens everything. Suddenly the war hero is no longer the lone British bulldog with the weight of the world on his shoulders – he’s a man who gets advice from a travelling alien timelord. Suddenly our spitfire pilots are fighting not just for King and country and freedom but because there’s an alien spaceship in the sky. Suddenly the plucky Brits in their finest hour are no longer battling an unknowable war against an implacable merciless foe but extras in a Dr Who story that we know is all going to work out fine in the end (because, let’s face it, they weren’t going to be brave enough to let the Daleks or the Germans win were they?) Everything that’s so powerful when you walk into that cabinet room and see the history is cheapened because it didn’t happen like that. (Ah you cry, but this year’s mystery the crack in the wall wiped everyone’s minds. But can it change diary entries? And how come it’s so selective with what it wipes? Honestly it’s more a way round the fact that everyone in the Davies era knows about aliens and Moffat wants to go back to basics while being a plot point in the season finale and nothing more).

To be fair to Gatiss, it was a terrible commission and he uncharacteristically struggled with it at first, before figuring he would simply make a ‘war movie’. But what war movie to make? At first he returned to a story he’d come up with for season 3 but which Russell had rejected, in which an alien artefact makes items in The British Museum come to life (probably rejected on grounds of both cost and the fact it resembled the film ‘A Night At The Museum’, a big hit in cinemas the year before). But how to get The Daleks in? There’s a really good Dr Who story to be had in WWII, where The Doctor supports rather than takes over, where you really feel the despair and hopelessness if this war is ever going to be over, especially in late 1940-early 1941 when this story is set, when the Germans (who had been preparing for a war far longer than Britain or France) have a headstart and The Americans are late to the party. Hitler only began losing when he became over-confident, deciding to fight the Allies on one side of Germany and the Russians on the other at the same time (the turning point of the war and surely the most obvious way to do a WWII story, with an equally over-confident alien whispering in his ear). You could have had an alien whispering in Churchill’s ear, increasing his depression and doubt and making think he’d lose, especially if they were the reason he lost the election, to the surprise of everyone (including Atlee, who took over from him after a campaign run more in hope than certainty). However putting Daleks in the story can only make it go one of two ways: either they hep the enemy or they pretend to be helping ‘us’.

 Mercifully Gatiss chose the latter, less obvious version but even then he’s backed himself into a corner. We know, as well as The Doctor, that The Daleks are evil and have to be stopped. We also know that everyone else won’t believe him. That’s the story right there and watching people gradually learn something we already know does not make for good drama. So Gatiss switches gears halfway through and throws in the idea of a ‘humanised’ Dalek being a bomb, which is better – it gives us a chance to go back to basics where The Daleks are the opposite of humanity, breeding out all feelings except hate (even if that’s more of a Cyber-thing really). This must be the only time in Dr Who where a walking Human bomb ends up making a story better rather than being obvious padding. But it’s still never quite enough. Because how could it be? Dambusters and Dalek Thrusters don’t mix. The Daleks don’t belong in a WWII story, not directly. Which is weird when you think about it. After all Terry Nation based them on Nazis. He became a writer purely because, as a child, he had nothing to do in his Welsh family bunker than make up stories to himself (his dad being at the front and his mum being an RP Warden).’The Dalek Invasion Of earth’ is clearly based on what The Nazis never got to do (complete with Heil Hitler salutes with their plungers). But they’re a metaphor. They’re not meant to be in a story featuring real Nazis any more than ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ should have been set in ‘our’ cold war or The Slitheen should have been using the ‘real’ weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq War. Mixing fact and fiction like this just feels wrong. This ends up les the battle of the Somme than just some battle and all the poignancy and heartbreak  of a real situation gets lost in the need to tell a Dr Who story.

Churchill doesn’t feel quite right either. While Matt happily talked to journalists about how it made sense that he was old friends with The Doctor, given they were both intelligent peaceniks, that’s not true. Churchill was happiest at war: it’s partly why he got booted out of office when peace was declared (The Doctor, of course, famously runs away rather than fight unless he has to). Though he was rightly hailed as a hero who got Britain through their darkest hour he shared more similarities with Hitler’s racism and prejudice than a lot of historians were happy to admit at the time, though a lot have written about them since his death (in 1965 during the broadcast of ‘The Romans’). His published letters and diaries reveal a man very of his time, a generation or so older than even William Hartnell, who believed in the superiority of Britain and her empire above all else, while the deaths of non-Europeans/American immigrant Europeans were inconsequential (even his Russian allies, which might help explain a lot of the cold war metaphors in this book). He’s the sort of person that The Doctor would normally take down from power, with very different values. But of course The Doctor has to be on Churchill’s side (he can’t very well be on Hitler’s can he?) so Gatiss gives us the clichés from the school textbooks: a plucky even-tempered battler always with a wry smile and a decent bloke doing the right thing that bears no resemblance to the real, very complex, often depressed anxious and very ‘Human’ man at the heart of the war. It’s a waste: the best Dr Who historicals take something from history that you thought you knew and goes the extra mile to show why an outcome that seems certain now was once in flux and why the people we know from our textbooks as all ‘good’ or all bad’ were really somewhere in the middle, as all Humans are. The classic example is ‘Marco Polo’, with a title character who is mostly good but understandably suspicious of The Doctor and confiscates his ‘flying caravan’ leaving him a prisoner while the mighty Kublai Khan turns out to be a nice old man who likes playing backgammon. While that sort of characterisation is much harder to pull off in 45 minute plots than the olden days (‘Marco Polo’ runs to nearly three hours!) nevertheless a scene or two of Churchill confessing his inner doubts, or appalling Amy with a racist comment (when she thought he was better than that) would have done wonders to make this story ‘real’. Instead this version of Churchill feels flimsy and has about as much in common with Winston Churchill as Churchill the canine mascot from the car insurance ads (the one Amy is aping when she goes ‘oi, Churchill, oh yes!’) 

It would have helped too if The Daleks were worthy foes in this story, but they’re not. There were two moments during the run-up to the comeback series when fans breathed a collective sigh of relief that maybe it would turn out to be alright after all. One was when it was confirmed that the Tardis would stay a blue police telephone box, the other when The Daleks were only going to be given cursory re-touches rather than redesigned (one of the reasons the 1990s comebacks never happened between ‘Survival’ and ‘The TV Movie’ were the leaked ‘alien spidery Dalek’ designs that were openly ridiculed in fandom). However the ‘iron’ Daleks have been introduced for a while now and Moffat wanted to put his stamp on the series so they were an obvious thing to change. Even though there’s no obvious reason why The Daleks ever should change (it’s in character for the Cybermen to keep upgrading themselves but The Daleks always think their God’s gift to the universe and perfect already. It feels at one point as if the plot is going to equate them with the Nazi ideal of ‘supermen’ but then Gatiss realised they’d already done that with Cybermen in ‘Silver Nemesis’ and audiences mostly thought that was stupid too). He really liked the Peter Cushing film Daleks that came in a variety of bright colours (back when they were only black-and-white on TV of course) and asked for a similar design for his new ‘paradigm’, in multiple colours that were big and bold. Moffat and Gatiss then spent all the time they should have been working on the script together emailing each other ideas in the middle of the night what jobs the different coloured Daleks could do (the full list: orange Daleks are ‘scientists’, blue Daleks are ‘strategists’, red Daleks are ‘drones’ even though it’s a fact in an annual written by Terry Nation himself that Daleks can’t see the colour red – so did they stumble on the colour by accident and they think they’re invisible? -  white Daleks are ‘supremes’ (even though they don’t look much like Diana Ross their new singe ‘Halt In The name Of Love Or You Will Be exterminated’ is out soon on Skaro Records) and most confusingly of all the blue Daleks are ‘eternals. A Moffat suggestion as ‘it’s a cool sounding name, though I don’t know what they’d actually do,I bet it’s something really important’. Quite. Nobody seemed to work out what the Yellow Daleks were and while there were plans for Green Daleks they were thought to look ‘silly’. All this was meant to be explained in a sequence where The Daleks come down the ramp and are ‘introduced’ by the supreme white Dalek to The Doctor, but this was dropped when people couldn’t stop laughing at the readthrough and it was considered to be more like a ‘Miss Universe’ contest).

While they were at it The Daleks were made bigger: the ones in ‘Dalek’ were designed to be Billie Piper’s height as she looked at one in the eyestalk so these ones were re-designed to fit Karen Gillan’s taller height (even though it’s a weird quirk of both this script and ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ that Amy never meets The Daleks face to face so this ended up being entirely unnecessary). Unfortunately that also meant they had to be wider and chunkier with a planned for explanation that this would be where the Daleks stored ‘weapons’, like Thunderbirds craft, had they had another episode but for now makes them look as if they need to check into interplanetary weightwatchers. Moffat also went back to an original unused design that had an eyeball visible at the end of an eyestalk. Model versions of these Daleks were given a real publicity push with half an eye on being that year’s big Christmas toy (after the Cyber head changer toy, released to almost no fanfare whatsoever, became the surprise seller of 2007) and even got their own Radio Times cover (only thing being election week they only printed the ‘red’ ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ ones for Labour, Conservatives and the Lid Dems, the three biggest parties in 2010. In a betrayal that mirrors the story and surprised absolutely no one the truce between the blue and yellow ones resulted in the extermination of the red ones and then a further betrayal saw all of the yellow policies exterminated in favour of austerity measures even Davros would have considered too rightwing). However the Daleks were a huge flop. Fans thought they were stupid (especially the bigger size which led to many jokes about Daleks going on diets) and while Whoivians are generally happy to buy stuff that features examples of Dr Who at their most imaginative and bold, crass commercialism for the sake of it is the sort of thing lesser franchises do. The toys filled up bargain bins for years to come and to date they’ve only been seen sparingly since, by popular demand (there’s a beaten up yellow one in ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ and a patriotic hybrid red white and blue one in the crowd scene in ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’). Although I’m mostly annoyed that they passed up the chance to use the joke that they were mistaken for ‘Shearman tanks’ (see ‘Dalek’ for the writer who brought them back).

It doesn’t help either that the plot is a combination of multiple other Dr Who plots stuck together. The obvious one is ‘Power Of The Daleks’ from 1966, Gatiss’ favourite story according to some interviews, where The Daleks were being sneaky and pretending to be good, helping out a Human colony with the cry ‘I am your servant’. Given that it’s the story where The Doctor changes his appearance for the first time it’s a clever means by original script editor of making the viewer doubt everything and then root for The Doctor when they turn evil and prove he really was right all along. So Gatiss has them do the same here, chanting ‘I am your soldier’ rather than servant in a twist that every fan would have seen coming a quadzillion rels away even if they hadn’t seen ‘Power’ or read about it in guide books. The Daleks are only  pretending to be on the British side, just as they were only pretending to be on the Vulcan settlers’ side, even though they are really after…well what are they after exactly? They are trying to revive the Dalek army, we know that much and laying a trap for The Doctor so I suppose it makes sense he would pop in to see Churchill at some stage, but why here? Surely they’d be better off invading The Powell estate and hurting The Doctor that way? And why pretend to be good nd work for Churchill, when they could just be bad and work for Hitler and help destroy the Earth into the bargain? Gatiss thankfully knows he can’t keep up that subterfuge forever so changes it midway through, but the idea of The Daleks being able to create Human doubles has been around even longer: ‘The Chase’ in 1965 in fact. Planting a bomb inside a character has been around since ‘The Ark’ the same year. And the Doctor’s attempts to keep Bracewell alive by making him think of the pain and suffering of being Human? That’s almost verbatim from ‘Earthshock’ where it was the 5^th Doctor lecturing The Cybermen (though it makes no sense here: the bomb is a physical part of him. Thinking shouldn’t be able to change a thing if the timer countdown has been set off. And why does he even have a timer? Surely they could have triggered it the minute Bracewell saw the Tardis arrive?) For all the extra budget and grander effects there isn’t one thing ‘Victory Of the Daleks’ does better than any of these stories and most of it is far worse.

There’s nothing new or imaginative here, nothing radically different to anything that’s been done before. Even Amy’s reaction to being back in time and meeting celebrities is just a poor re-write of the similar scenes in Gatiss’ own ‘The Unquiet Dead’ where Rose ends up meeting Charles Dickens in Victorian Cardiff (though Amy never does anything as interesting as Rose, hanging around with the big guys rather than talking to the little ones at the bottom of the payroll). That story worked because Gatiss had done his research and knew exactly how to use it, making a trip to the past feel real, having Dickens become a fully three-dimensional complex human being good and bad and had a monster that made perfect sense given the setting of gaslights and hot air. Here it all feels false and fake, re-creation rather than the real thing, Churchill is a cardboard cut out hero who’s only vice is his cigar (actually a prop as you weren’t allowed to smoke on location!) and The Daleks are here because they’re a known ratings winner. Putting the spitfires into this story, an emblem of British pluck, and having them fight a Dalek spaceship also seems tailored for the ‘next time’ publicity trailers and not much else: it doesn’t fit the story, the Daleks would destroy them in seconds if this was ‘real’ and it’s really there as a way of Gatiss giving himself a cameo (to date he’s still the only person acting out words he wrote himself and was credited for in a Who story. Although there is actually a Dr Who link: they were designed by Bill Dunn, who was the father-in-law of Who director Douglas Camfield and who’s daughter played Petra in ‘Inferno’ amongst other smaller roles). It’s all very cynical: Dr Who has the most elastic series format in series history and can do anything. True fans mostly want to see the series doing new things, or at least old things in new ways,  even if it leads to more risk. But there’s no risk here: WWII is popular, The Daleks are popular, bung them together and see what happens. Oh and get some brightly coloured toys into the shops before Christmas too. You wouldn’t know it from some of the reviews of the Disney era I’ve seen online (with some people clearly not understanding the first thing about any of the stories) but Dr Who fans tend to be smarter than your average scifi fan, people who’ve read every textbook going and twice if it’s to do with history. They know this stuff isn’t real. They know when they’re being treated as purchasers rather than viewers.

So does ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ get anything right? Well, yes. Given that this is a Dalek plan we’re talking about here it’s nicely simple and plausible for the most part (no digging through the Earth’s crust and replacing the core with a motor engine in this story!) Given how hard the rest of season five can be to follow at times (albeit easier than any of the Moffat seasons to follow) it’s good to have a story that doesn’t keep whizzing about across time or having The Doctor subvert his own timelines by doing something clever and nonsensical. There are some nice lines dotted along the way, such as Amy realising (surprisingly late given what happens in the previous two stories) that time travelling won’t always be fun and that The Doctor being the good guy means bad guys hate his guts. No one else reacts to the developments in the wear normally at all, but Amy reacts just as a young woman whisked across time and space by her imaginary friend would react. Her interception when The Doctor is trying to get Bracewell to think about being human, by making him focus on love rather than pain, is a very Amy moment and gives her the chance to look doe-eyed at The Doctor when she asks if he ‘ever loved someone he wasn’t meant to love’ making her love triangle arc far more subtly than other stories this year (although her acknowledging this makes the ‘linking’ scene between ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Blood’ and ‘Vampires Of Venice’ even weirder in retrospect and Murray Gold’s latest pompous angel choir takes what should have been a tiny sweet moment and beats you over the head with a spitfire). Churchill equating The Daleks with how he talked about The Russians in real life (that any enemy of his enemy is his friend) at least makes him seem less gullible and stupid than he might have done. The ‘ironsides’ name for the Russell T Daleks is cute and exactly the sort of nickname they would get in a war. There’s a particular fine scene, sadly dropped in the final edit, where she worries that The Doctor won’t make it out and that she’ll be trapped in WWII (‘I was getting married in the morning. I’ll be 91 years old on my wedding day. And I hate spam!’)  The ending, too, is actually pretty brave: this must be the only WWII re-creation where the ‘bad guys’ win! For the ‘Victory’ in the title is true; The Daleks know that The Doctor will rush off to save Earth rather than stopping them and they get away (though goodness only knows what these weirdly coloured Daleks get up to off screen as it’s a whole different bunch in ‘Asylum’). Their gloating, while The Doctor runs away to save a life, is a gorgeous juxtaposition and easily the best scene in the story (not least because this unpredictable Doctor’s next move is to punch Bracewell, as the first thing he can think of to save him). 

It also looks fabulous and any sense of reality you get from this episode comes from how it looks not how people act or what they say. While the production team tried and failed to get permission to film in the actual war-cabinet that inspired the original story (which would have been too cramped for even a modern film crew in any case) there was another almost as god right around the corner. It’s a measure of how much Wales had taken Dr Who to it’s heart in this era that a camera crew were allowed into the bunker of the ‘Joint Resilience Unit’ in Swansea, a secondary unit created in case London was ever over-run in the cold war, and a new headquarters had to be established at speed. Though strictly speaking it was created in the 1950s and had an anachronistic war table (way too big to fit in the London model!) the addition of a few extra props and the safe removal of a few others means you would never know the difference (mostly it was being used in 2009 when this story was filmed as a training centre for medical teams in case of a mass invasion/accident). Other scenes were shot in Brackla Bunker. The costumes, the set dressing, even the hairdoes are all accurate in a way that only BBC costume dramas can be. The re-creation of the night sky over London lit up before a Luftwaffe invasion with a Dalek spaceship hanging in the sky is a triumph for the FX department, even more so than the similar scene in 'The Empty Child' (although there are way too many barrage balloons). Seeing a model Dalek being moved around a war table also feels ‘right’ too, the one time the Skaro scaries feel like they ‘fit’ here. The acting too makes up for a lot of the shortfalls. Ian McNeice doesn’t act that much like Churchill really, but he gives his all and looks the part (he was hired after playing Winston in a 2008 play about Harold MacMillan ‘Never Had It So Good’ and had already been in a Dr Who audio for Big Finish, ‘Immortal beloved’, in which he played the God Zeus. Yep, it’s one of those audios…Churchill must have felt like a slight demotion after that). Bill Patterson, one of the bigger names to be cast in Who in this era, gives his all as Bracewell too, although it’s not a part anyone could have played that well (basically it’s mad inventor turned guilty becoming romantic lead. We really needed a tag scene of him and Dorabella too).   

Even so, it’s a poor episode in most respects. Far from being back to the scheming manipulative hard to defeat monsters of ‘Power Of The Daleks’ these are a bunch of simpletons sniggering at the back, waiting for teacher to turn up when they’ve played a practical joke. There’s no gravitas, no weight, no sense that the Earth is in deadly danger if The Doctor doesn’t sort it all. It doesn’t help that Gatiss has very little about the new Doctor to go on: he watched as many series starring Matt Smith as he could, but none of them had characters much like The Doctor and by his own admission Gatiss went for ‘generic’, in his first draft, writing for The Doctor as if he was a straightforward dashing hero like Pertwee. Dr 11 does things in this story he never does anywhere else, including shushing Amy the way Dr 3 once did to Jo. This one isn’t a dashing authority figure though of course: the whole ‘joke’ of the era is that Matt Smith is an old man in a young person’s body, a young pinup that happens to have the eccentricities of an OAP. He’s not the sort of Doctor to out-yell a Dalek platoon and physically attack them with a wrench (not least because anger is the one thing Matt’s a bit shakey on, while Matt is notoriously clumsy and accidentally used a real wrench in the scene where he attacks the Dalek rather than a lightweight prop, giving the Dalek operator a ringing head!) They only needed an extra re-write and they could have really used that sense of who this old-young Doctor that no one takes seriously at first but who has clearly been through so much here, in an era when children were growing up fast and facing mortality at too young an age. But then this is a story by someone born more than twenty years after VE Day, when the war never seemed in doubt and when the good guys were always going to win. It’s a trip round a war room exhibit, not a real attempt to actually make history come alive, the way Dr Who was designed to do in its early days. There’s no way David Whittaker would have let a story this clumsy and in many ways patronising through quality control. After all, having The Doctor save the day takes away from the people who really did. Amazingly as ‘photostrip’ version of this story was released, purely for schools, to help children get an interest in history despite this being the least accurate Dr Who historical of them all (needless to say, it wasn’t very popular and they never did another). As a WWII story it fails because it’s inaccurate. As a Dr Who story it fails because we’ve seen it all before. As a war film it’s sort of passable, mostly thanks to the scenery and the acting, but it’s also one of those dumb B-movie ones that’s spent longer working on the effects than the dialogue or story. This isn’t a victory then, it’s a lost battle that should never have been fought, the sort of recycled history-changing (both human and Dr who) that fans all feared might happen when Dr Who came back and which a lot of the abandoned revivals in the 1990s were panned for doing. To give them both credit, though, Moffat and Gatiss will both learn from this and never do anything quite as careless, clumsy or cynically commercial again. They still get to win the war.Daleks? With Churchill? Oh no no no no no no no…

POSITIVES + At least there’s one bit of recycling that comes off: Just like ‘The Face Of Evil’ The Doctor threatens to blow The Daleks sky high with his ‘deadly weapon’. It’s a Jammy Dodger, which The Doctor happily munches when his enemies see through his ruse (in the original, of course, it’s a ‘deadly jelly baby’).

NEGATIVES – They make Bracewell come from Paisley (Steven Moffat’s home town) just so that Amy can give the line ‘you’ve done well, for a humble Paisley boy’. Lillian, meanwhile, gets the surname Breen, which happens to be Mark Gatiss’ mother’s maiden name. At least when David Whittaker, Dennis Spooner and Russell T Davies used to do this sort of in-joke it was subtle.

BEST QUOTE: Dalek: ‘I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Doctor and Churchill are quite chummy aren’t they? Controversially so given that some of the war leader’s comments about race and gender aren’t, erm, as broadminded as say The Doctor’s (Steven Moffat explains this away once by telling Dr Who magazine that the 11^th Doctor, particularly, would have been struck by how a man capable of great things could get so much wrong). You get to hear more of their relationship down the years – and down the regenerations – with Big Finish’s series ‘The Churchill Years’. Ian MacNeice reprises his very excellent Churchill impression for, to date, eight stories across two box sets (released in 2016 and 2018) featuring Doctors 9, 10 and 11 (sound-alikes sadly, rather than the real thing, though the Matt Smith particularly is a great impression). I still find it a bit odd having Churchill be the ‘hero’ though, worrying about how WWII will turn out when the audience all know that it’s all alright at the end, sort of. Most of the stories are set around real events in WW2 that feel a bit ‘look at how much research we did, ma!’ rather than stories in their own right and it’s sometimes a struggle to tailor them to fit the Dr Who scifi mould. There are a couple of really good ones amongst the dross, though: ‘Hounded’ skips the war to look at Churchill’s  ‘black dog’ of depression, a ‘Vincent and The Doctor’ style story about never giving up whatever dark place you’re in because one day you might live to do great things, while ‘Young Winston’ goes back to Winnie’s days as a soldier in 1899 when he makes for a most unexpected team-up with Madame Vastra, Neve McIntosh making for a great double-act with Churchill that you probably never knew you wanted till now but do. 

One of the adventures that isn’t mentioned is their first meeting in ‘Players’ (1999), a 6^th Doctor ‘Past Doctor Adventures’ novel by Terrance Dicks in which he and Peri bump into a young Winston Churchill back in his days as a reporter in The Boer War. All is not as it seems, though, in a ‘War Games’ style story where soldiers are playing a much bigger war in a game of intergalactic chess manipulated by the alien ‘players’.  One of Terrance’s better books that recycles from one of his better TV stories and throws in a great amount of loving period detail (Terrance really knows this period from his childhood inside out). Considering this is the first time he’d written for Colin Baker’s Doctor full length he really captures his strident tones well too, better than most prose writers (though he struggles a bit more with Peri, who’s rather wet in this book).

‘Their Finest Hour (2018), part of the 8^th Doctor box set ‘Ravenous’, sees McNeice star alongside Paul McGann as Churchill calls in a favour from an old friend. There are reports of luminescent red triangles in the sky. A fiendish new Nazi device?  Or aliens? It’s the latter: a war race known as the Helyion have come to Earth, but rather than get involved in the fighting they’re really inveterate gambles who have bet on the Germans to win the war and are doing everything they can to sabotage the other side! That’s just not cricket old bean. What starts out as a fun story turns sad somewhere round the middle, with lots of death and destruction in a decent outing for the 8^th Doctor and Liv.

McNeice as Churchill turned up again in the 7^th Doctor story ‘Subterfuge’ (2020), number #262 in Big Finish’s main range, a story which covers one of the saddest times in Winston’s life. Though the man who won the war, a fierce campaign by his labour rivals meant Churchill wasn’t trusted with keeping the peace and to everyone’s shock he finds himself out of office after the 1945 election, bizarre as that seems now. The Dr Who version says that’s because of The Meddling Monk who ran a campaign that’s based on fake news and untruths: they don’t quite paint their lies on the back of a bus like the ‘Brexit’ campaign did but it’s pretty close! Other excitements include an unexploded bomb, an assassination attempt on King Edward VIII’s life and a stem crystal. The story ends with The Doctor unable to change the timelines back again completely, leaving an utterly miserable Churchill out of office claiming that his friend has let him down and they are bitter enemies from now on. A thoughtful story. 

Finally, ‘Operation Hellfire’(2020) is a Big Finish story from volume six of ‘The Third Doctor Adventures’, with Tim Treloar a decent Pertwee alongside Katy Manning’s Jo. Jonathan Barnes’ story nicely captures the feel of a mid-Unit caper, what with devils being raised from the dead in crypts and two superpowers colliding with each other head on. The difference between this and a more nuanced complex story like, say, ‘Frontier In Space’ though is that there’s clearly a wrong and right and The Nazis, so often treated as a joke in other Dr Who stories (especially ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’) are at their most threatening and evil here, soldiers happy to commit genocide if it brings them the respect of their leader. Of course because it’s a Pertwee story there has to be a maguffin too and the story goes a bit downhill when the ‘amulet of the wastelands’ turns up, an alien artefact that enables its finder to mass hypnotise entire populations. Of course Hitler is the one who finds it. Churchill doesn’t get much to do in this one, McNeice only turning up at the end of episode two, pleading with The Doctor to take the amulet away to another planet – which he does. Eventually. A bit of a muddle to be honest that’s more of a cut-and-paste job than usual (sweet and kind-hearted Jo is totally the wrong character to use with the most corrupt regime in Earth’s history, for instance).

Previous ‘The Beast Below’ next ‘The Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’

 

The Armageddon Factor: Ranking - 252

  The Armageddon Factor

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

Rank: 252

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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