April 25: "The Krotons" Episodes One & Two

The Krotons is the first story from Doctor Who's most prolific 20th-century writer, Robert Holmes, who'll go on to write some of the most highly acclaimed episodes of the series.  But his first script is an inauspicious one, being as it is a spare script that new script editor Terrance Dicks had set aside in case another script fell through.  Well, another script did fall through (and from just about all accounts -- including the positive ones -- we were spared a horrifyingly sexist "comedy" called Prison in Space, by Dick Sharples), and so this script was promoted to full production.

It's not a bad couple of episodes, and there's certainly some imagination going on, but there's also a sense of unreality.  To be fair, much of this has more to do with the actors than the script itself: the students in particular tend to be rather unconvincing.  The first fight with Jamie is actually rather good for a studio fight, but you get the sense that Jamie should be mopping the floor with him, rather than barely holding his own.  And the mini-"revolution" staged by the students in episode one is also rather stagey (and it doesn't help that some of the bits on the teaching machines are clearly just taped on).  But there's also the way in which the script gets all of its exposition about the planet of the Gonds and their relationship with their Kroton masters out of the way fairly early -- it's pretty blatant, and Holmes will soon be much better at this sort of thing.

So episode one is all about set-up, and episode two is about complications.  It's not actually clear why the Krotons decide the Doctor is the leader of the rebels, but there is the nice touch of announcing he's dead after their killer camera root thing has killed someone else -- the Doctor's thought that since it killed someone it figures it killed the one it was meant to kill being accurate.  If you know what I mean.  But episode two is quite entertaining, particularly the part where the Doctor works with the teaching machine to get a high enough score to be accepted into the Krotons' machine -- his antics with Zoe are very entertaining.  And then we get a look at the Krotons themselves, who are apparently brought into being thanks to the Doctor's and Zoe's high mental energy.  Their design is quite striking -- the problem is that they look unfinished from the waist down, with just a thick rubber skirt for legs.  And unfortunately, one of our first sights of a Kroton is of this skirt.  But then we get other looks at the Krotons, especially after Jamie is let into the machine under the assumption he's also got a lot of mental energy to drain.  And so drain Jamie they do -- except he might not survive the process...