If you’re of a certain age you maybe remember
the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” series of repeats. There was a particularly long
gap between Tom Baker’s last series, and Peter Davison’s first, and not only
that, the series was being moved from its hallowed Saturday teatime slot to a
twice weekly evening slot. In order to give the new series the best chance of
success, the BBC sanctioned what I believe may well have been the first ever
repeats of stories starring previous Doctors. The stories selected were “An Unearthly
Child/100000BC”, “The Carnival of Monsters”, “The Three Doctors”, “Logopolis”
and “The Krotons”. Now, choosing the first ever story to represent the Hartnell
era was an obvious choice to make, albeit that, after the first episode it
really isn’t a very good story. Likewise, “The Three Doctors” had to be chosen,
as did “Logopolis”, being Tom Baker’s last, and the story in which we were
given a few seconds’ look at Davison. But “The Krotons”? It was a story about
which I knew nothing at the time, and it’s probably fair to say that it didn’t
have much of a reputation among the fans. I think that a lot of us were
disappointed with it, especially bearing in mind that this was the first story
written by Robert Holmes. I’ll make a small digression about him in a moment. To
be fair, John Nathan Turner wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice for a
representative Troughton story. One of the requirements for The Five Faces
series was that each story had to be a 4 parter. At that time in 1981, “The
Krotons” was the only complete four parter in the Archives.
I cannot in all honesty remember much about
watching “The Krotons” in 1981. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I probably lost
interest in the story as I can just about remember watching the first episode,
but not any of the others. So you might well be thinking that I’m currently
expecting the worst. Yet there are a couple of reasons for hope. For one thing
there’s the presence of Philip Madoc among the cast. As I’ve mentioned before,
he was a terrific actor, and actually tailor made for guest appearences in
Doctor Who. He almost invariably made any story he appeared in better for his
presence. Then there is the fact that it was written by Robert Holmes.
Robert
Holmes
I make no apologies for making a digression
about the late, great Robert Holmes. I don’t necessarily expect everyone to
agree with me – by all means feel free to disagree – but Robert Holmes was my
favourite Doctor Who writer, and in my opinion the greatest of all the classic
Doctor Who scriptwriters and script editors. (although Terrance Dicks must be
discussed in the script editor category as well). He made his debut in Doctor
Who with this story, and would script the next but one story, The Space
Pirates. Neither of these is generally reckoned to be his best work. But look
at the stories he scripted for Jon Pertwee : -
Spearhead from Space
Terror of the Autons
Carnival of Monsters
The Time Warrior
By the time The Time Warrior was broadcast,
Robert Holmes had taken over as script editor, and when Philip Hinchcliffe took
over as Producer, and Tom Baker as Doctor, they went on to make what many
people think were the most consistently successful and excellent seasons in the
classic series’ History. During this time Robert Holmes either wrote, or
rewrote pretty much from scratch
The Ark in Space (in my list of all-time
favourites)
Pyramids of Mars (one of my all-time top 10)
Brain of Morbius (another long term favourite)
The Deadly Assassin ( my honest – to - God – all – time – favourite – classic - Doctor – Who – story – of – all – time)
The Talons of Weng Chiang (in my all-time top
10)
Whichever way you look at it, this is an
incredible output of quality. He wasn’t finished when he gave up being script
editor either, and went on to write
The Sunmakers (a satire which has stood the
test of time)
The Ribos Operation (consistently enjoyable
opener to the Key to Time)
The Power of Kroll (rather lacklustre segment
of the Key to Time)
After John Nathan Turner took over as Producer
he implemented a deliberate policy of turning to new writers and ignoring the
old guard, and so Robert Holmes, although originally approached to write the
script for “The Five Doctors” 20th anniversary special, didn’t write
for the series again until Peter Davison’s final story. Mind you, this was
The Caves of Androzani (voted the number 1 on
the Mighty 200 poll)
Having read a fine biography of Robert Holmes I
got the impression that although he would be asked to write for the sixth
Doctor, it was an uneasy working relationship with John Nathan Turner, and
this, and illness probably explains why his last work for the show, “The Two
Doctors” and “The Mysterious Planet” weren’t representative of his best work.
Well, all of those stories lay in our future.
For the present, though, let’s see if we can draw anything at all positive from
“The Krotons”.
After
Watching
Well, I’m very sorry, but that wasn’t bad at
all. Maybe not a classic – well, definitely not a classic – but a perfectly
watchable slice of late-Troughton classic Who. And yes – I did watch all 4
episodes in one sitting, and not to get the whole thing over with, either. I’m
not just saying this because it was written by my boy Holmes – the fact is that
I was rather enjoying it, and wanted to see more.
Watching the show, I couldn’t help drawing some
similarities between this story, and two earlier stories, “The Savages” from
the 3rd season, and “The Dominators” from the start of this 6th
season. I’ll explain the similarities as we go along.
The TARDIS lands on an unnamed planet,
inhabited by a humanoid species called the Gonds. Hmm – is it just me, or do
you see the word Gond and immediately start adding an –a – before the last
letter? Oh, it is just me. Ok then, moving swiftly on. The planet looks very
similar to Dulcis, but then on a BBC budget, in a black and white show I’m
afraid that it is always going to look like that.
The Gonds, then, live in a city of rather
primitive stone dwellings – although thankfully their costumes are nowhere near
as ridiculous as the Dulcians’. In the middle of this city they all seem to be
gathered round a futuristic looking polygonal metal door. Their two most
promising students have been selected to go through the magic doors, to become
companions of the Krotons. The Krotons are an alien race of crystalline form
who crash landed on the planet many hundreds of years earlier. Still in the
first episode, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe watch as the male Gond student is
ejected from the back doors, and then liquidated, or ‘dispersed’ in Kroton –
speak by a pair of guns which are similar to those used by the War
Machines. It transpires that the Krotons
have developed the ability to convert mental energy into pure energy, and they
extract this from the brightest Gonds, before kicking them out of the ship, and
killing them before they go running back to the rest to tell them what is
happening.
At the start of the story, the Gonds look on
the Krotons as their benefactors, since the Krotons have been steadily doling
out carefully chosen Scientific knowledge to them, and accelerating their
development. The Krotons, being crystalline entities mostly made of tellurium,
are in a state of being slurry in tanks. They need a lot of mental energy to
reconstitute them.
Phew – okay, now I said that this reminded me a
little of “The Savages”, and the way that the Gonds are drained of their mental
energy is another take on vampirism essentially, in the same way that the
Savages’ vitality is drained off to be
used by the city dwellers. Now, the fact is that the combined intellects of
both Zoe and the Doctor, in episode 2, proves enough to reconstitute two of the
Gonds. I did say that “The Krotons” also reminded me of “The Dominators”. The
Dominators need radiation to provide energy to enable their spacecraft to take
off – while the Krotons need mental energy to enable their spacecraft to take
off. The Dominators assess their Dulcian slaves, discarding those who lack the
intelligence to be useful to them – ditto the Krotons. There is a conflict of philosophies
between the pacifists and those who want to resist the oppressors, although it
is made slightly more interesting in “The Krotons” with Philip Madoc’s
character who starts as a loyal servant of the Krotons, becomes a hard and fast
resistance leader who uses this hardline stance to take over as the leader of
the Gonds, and then, when the Krotons say that they will leave the planet if
the Gonds hand over the High Brains – Zoe and the Doctor – then he becomes a de
facto collaborator. It would not be believable in many other actors – to Philip
Madoc it’s a piece of cake.
Well, so far so good – and judged on the
aspects of the story we’ve looked at so far the story was fine by me. Now let’s
get to the Krotons themselves. There’s two aspects to the Krotons we need to
discuss – their appearance and their voices. Starting with their appearance,
the Krotons are supposed to be crystalline entities. To be fair, their ‘heads’
do resemble giant crystals. It is possible that the design of their bodies was
inspired by the appearance of a snowflake under a microscope, or another type
of crustal. The trouble is the rubber skirt at the bottom of the costume which
is there to hide their legs. The director takes care to try to show this as
little as possible, but whenever it is visible your eye is just drawn to it,
and you can’t help thinking about its pure wrongness. On the whole the design
looks a bit like the designers were approached with the brief – look lads,
here’s a fiver, that’s all we can afford, do the best that you can -. As for
their voices, well, they are a little bit of a Roy Skelton Off-the-Peg
selection, but do have the advantage over the distinctive voices of the Quarks
that you can, at least understand what they say.
One final connection with “The Dominators” is
that the Doctor has no compunctions about blowing them to kingdom come with
their own bomb. In the same way he has no qualms about dispersing the two
Krotons using sulphuric acid. The idea of it is rather horrific, although the
execution is less so.
I rather think that “The Krotons” is seen to
best advantage when looked at as one component in a developing season. This
relatively undemanding 4 parter comes immediately after “The Invasion”, and is
as different from that story, as “The Invasion” was from “The Mind Robber”. So,
as I said, no, it’s not a classic, but it’s perfectly watchable and quite
enjoyable – even if I didn’t in 1981.
What
Have We Learned?
“The
Krotons” doesn’t deserve the opprobrium heaped upon it after “The Five Faces of
Doctor Who”. It is certainly watchable, even if it isn’t Robert Holmes’ best
work.
Zoe
is clearly better at intelligence tests than the Doctor
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