August 29: The Ribos Operation Parts One & Two

This season marks something of a bold experiment for the series: long before the BBC Wales version started having overarching themes, season 16 attempted to have an entire season with a single goal in mind.  Each of these six stories deals with the Doctor's efforts to find a segment to the Key to Time, a powerful artifact that can stop everything.

This is all set up in the opening moments of the first story of the season, The Ribos Operation, and there are some great moments just in those first few minutes.  The White Guardian is portrayed as a Southern gentleman, dressed in white and sipping a colorful drink while seated in a large wicker chair.  He's the epitome of calm sophistication, as he describes the Key to the Doctor (who has a visible wound on his lip from an earlier off-screen encounter with a dog) and how he needs it to restore balance to the universe.  "Ah!" the Doctor exclaims.  "You want me to volunteer, isn't that it? ... And if I don't?" "Nothing," the White Guardian replies. "Nothing?  You mean nothing will happen to me?" the Doctor presses.  "Nothing at all.  Ever," the White Guardian says pleasantly.

And so the Doctor is saddled with a quest and a new companion: Romanadvoratrelundar¹⁰⁴, a recent graduate from the Time Lord Academy.  Mary Tamm plays her as naturally superior, and her initial back-and-forths with the Doctor are quite entertaining. "I may be inexperienced," she tells the Doctor, "but I did graduate from the Academy with a triple first."  "I suppose you think we should be impressed by that, too?" the Doctor scoffs.  "Well, it's better than scraping through with fifty-one percent at the second attempt," Romana replies haughtily.  "That information is confidential!" the Doctor cries defensively.

Once all this initial Key to Time business is set up, it's time for the main story to get going, and Robert Holmes chooses not to give us an important tale but instead one about con men and deposed rulers.  The main storyline of these two episodes is marvelously whimsical, being unconcerned with the usual threats of universal destruction/dominion.  Instead we get Garron and Unstoffe, two off-world con men trying to sell Ribos to the Graff Vynda-K, the deposed ruler of Levithia, in the manner of those selling, say, the Brooklyn Bridge to unwitting tourists.  Of course, the con men have attempted to sweeten the deal by making the Graff believe that the planet has an unusually high amount of jethryk, the rarest element in the universe.  It's into this attempted con that the Doctor and Romana enter as they're looking for the first segment of the Key to Time, and they end up being the catalyst when the con seems to go wrong, at the end of part two, even though they're trying to stay out of the way and just get on with grabbing that first segment.

It should also be noted how well the world of Ribos is realized on screen.  By choosing to make this an alien planet stuck in its own middle ages ("As yet, they haven't even discovered the telescope," Garron tells the Graff.  "Many of the natives believe that the planet is flat and if they walked far enough they would fall off the edge"), it gives the set designers the ability to create an imaginary world that is nonetheless rooted in history, which leads to an opulence and beauty often missing from more futuristic worlds -- no gleaming bare white walls here.  Someone (either Holmes or the designers -- or both) has also decided to give things a Russian flavor, which means that we also get some slightly unusual design elements that don't appear in more English medieval stories.  The whole thing looks amazing -- and even the fake snow looks convincing for once.

So far we've got a fun, well-written story (of course it's well-written; it's Robert Holmes, isn't it?) that's a joy to look at, and we've got a cast that are taking things seriously, yet clearly having fun while they do so.  These first two episodes are a joy that makes the viewer want to see more.







¹⁰⁴ Well, that's what we're always told it is, but Mary Tamm repeatedly pronounces it as "Romanadvoratnelundar".