September 10: The Armageddon Factor Parts Five & Six

Apparently I had lowered expectations going into these last two parts: I had a memory that the Drax bits were too jokey and that the very end wasn't very good.  It was therefore nice to be pleasantly surprised.  These two episodes hold up quite well.

But yes, if the first two episodes were primarily on Atrios, and the second pair on Zeos, then these final two are set on the Shadow's world (what the Doctor calls the planet of evil but which looks more like a space station, at least from the model shots).  There's a sense of trying to disorient the Doctor (and therefore the viewer) by providing fake voices and multiple visions of Romana, but it doesn't quite come off.  And as it turns out, it doesn't last too long either, as the Doctor counters fellow Time Lord Drax, who refers to the Doctor as "Theta Sigma".  As About Time mentions, it really does feel, given Bob Baker & Dave Martin's history of naming Time Lord characters after Greek letters (Omega), that they're revealing the Doctor's real name after all these years.  (Fortunately (since Theta Sigma is a dumb name) The Happiness Patrol will retcon this as a nickname.)  The Drax bits are quite entertaining, and I like how the Doctor rumbles his game almost immediately -- which means we don't have to worry about Drax betraying the Doctor at a crucial moment.  Mind, part five's cliffhanger makes it look that way...

All the shrunken stuff in part six is okay, but this episode is really about trying to obtain the complete Key and stop the Shadow from handing it over to the Black Guardian, and doing so before time runs out on the time loop and Atrios and Zeos annihilate each other.  This does give things some welcome tension, and while the events themselves aren't the most exciting (it's basically about the Shadow getting the first five segments, turning Princess Astra into the sixth, and having the Doctor and Drax infiltrate the Shadow's main chamber via K-9), that time pressure makes you wonder if they're going to achieve everything in time.

The Doctor commands the completed Key to Time while Romana
looks on. (The Armageddon Factor Part Six) ©BBC

The very end of the episode is a bit problematic.  The bit where the Doctor pretends to have gone mad with absolute power doesn't really work (although one wonders if it would have been more successful if Dudley Simpson had put some dramatic music over the scene), and there's a bit of a sense of "that's it?" at the end.  Yes, the Key to Time was completed, but the Doctor is never seen to hand it over to the White Guardian, choosing instead to rescatter the pieces across the universe (which brings Princess Astra back, who tenderly looks at an injured Merak -- except I'm so heartily sick of Merak by this point that the scene doesn't have the impact I suspect they were going for).  It's a bit anticlimactic for a season-long arc, and while there are theories to account for this (one is that the Guardian in The Ribos Operation was in fact the Black Guardian in disguise, and that the Universe wasn't actually in grave danger; this appears to have been the view that the production team took -- at least according to interviews with Bob Baker), the problem is that none of those theories show up on screen, which does leave an unfinished feeling at the end.  (Oh, and speaking of unfinished business... what actually happened to all the Zeons?  Did they die early on?  Are they all in hiding on another part of Zeos?  We never find out.)

Still, this only happens at the end, and before that The Armageddon Factor is a surprisingly entertaining story.  There's a feel of an epic here in Bob Baker & Dave Martin's final story for the series (and as it turns out, the last six-parter as well¹⁰⁷), and even if what we get on screen doesn't quite match the effort, there's still plenty here to engage with.  It's also nice to have a story that's actually largely about the Key to Time, as opposed to the other five stories this season, which treat the Key as an incident along the way.  Making the Key the focus helps with that epic feeling.  It's not perfect, but The Armageddon Factor is a damn sight better than its reputation would have you believe.

Season 16 was, of course, the first season of Doctor Who to have a linking theme for all the stories.  As an experiment I would say it was a qualified success.  Certainly having a specific season-long goal gives the stories an impetus that contributes to the feeling of something monumental going on.  Of course, the fact that these six stories often only have a passing familiarity with the Key to Time as they go on to tell their own tales (The Androids of Tara in particular) does lessen the impact somewhat, but I found I didn't mind.  It's only at the very end that things disappoint, and as that's something that could have been solved with an extra line or two of dialogue it's not that frustrating an ending.  The production issues behind the scenes (essentially, linking six stories means you can't switch the running order around any, which causes problems when one of the stories is having troubles) meant that they were unlikely to try this again, but in general the Key to Time season works more often than it doesn't.

Of course, the other thing to note about this season is how uninterested it is in being scary.  The one story that half-attempts this (The Stones of Blood, if you've forgotten) seems incredibly uncommitted to making things terrifying.  This is a season far more interested in space stories and in romping about and having a good time.  This obviously suits Tom Baker just fine, as he seems far happier being invincible and having fun than in being dark and brooding.  But the issue this causes is that the focus of the show is now squarely on the lead actor's shoulders.  Doctor Who, at this point in time, is no longer interested in exploring strange environments and presenting striking, often scary, imagery; now it's all about watching the Doctor and Romana romp through the action and being generally invincible -- content to make jokes at the baddies rather than look worried (which, to be fair, isn't the worst lesson in the world).  It works as well as it does because, frankly, Tom Baker is incredibly entertaining to watch, but there's a sense that there's only so much more of this the programme can take and still remain viable.  Doctor Who has essentially become a light entertainment show, something safe and comfortable; we're a long way away from its beginnings.







¹⁰⁷ Allowing for the fact that The Two Doctors (and, sort of, "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords") is essentially a six-part story masquerading as a three-parter.