Bob Holmes' Least Favorite Script Is a Swampy Mess
Kroll rises, K-9 vanishes, and everyone's covered in green paint. We dive into the Key to Time's soggiest, squiddiest story.
Plot Summary
On a swamp-covered moon, the Doctor must contend with a gargantuan squid to prevent the ethnic cleansing of a primitive tribe.
Notable for:
Fifth story in The Key to Time season arc.
Tony Harding, who designed K-9, also designed Kroll.
Seven is the Doctor’s lucky number? It changes considerably once we get to The Creature From the Pit.
Location shooting meant K-9 couldn’t participate.
Pete commentary:
Doctor Who’s kaiju episode! The Power of Kroll is great fun, ostensibly doing something big and dumb right before the final wrap-up to The Key to Time. To be nicer, it’s big and simple—big monster threatens everyone in the story while telling a relatively straightforward story about the evils of colonization and racism. It’s all very what-you-see-is-what-you-get, and everybody shows up (except maybe Glyn Owen as Rohm-Dutt).
There’s something very cool about the TARDIS materializing in reeds. They should do it again sometime.
Thawn at one point asks if the Doctor is from “outside this constellation”—an interesting prediction from the 1970s how the future would measure regions in the future.
The guest cast is a who’s who of Doctor Who veterans:
Philip Madoc (also the War Lord in The War Games and Solon in The Brain of Morbius) gives some nice texture to Fenner. He wants what he calls “progress,” but he has a moral code, disapproving of Thawn’s extremist streak that leads him to murder.
John Leeson as Dugeen is a bit further along the continuum of extremes. He clearly has sympathies with the Swampies and the “Sons of Earth,” though he’s not fully on board until he’s forced to choose whether he wants to participate in the genocide.
Neil McCarthy had appeared in the Mind of Evil, but he gets more to work with here with Thwan. He twists his mustache (almost literally) plenty, and you understand from the get-go where this guy’s coming from when he decisively dismisses the Doctor’s assumption that Mensch, the swampie, should be counted as an equal.
The three of them elevate otherwise ho-hum dialogue: I like it when Thawn and Fenner argue about what to do, and the technical feasibility of any particular solution.
Romana screaming at the end of episode 1 feels a little out of character. It’s not great to see her reduced to a regular screaming Doctor Who companion when she’s not supposed to be cut of the same cloth. It can work if that’s the point—that the terror of the situation is so great that even someone as sophisticated as Romana loses her cool (which I’d argue Destiny of the Daleks does well)—but that’s not the case here. That said, Mary Tamm can scream with the best of them.
“Swampie” is such a smart term. It’s clearly a racial epithet, one tossed around so casually that you never actually hear their proper species name.
The base doesn’t employ women, ostensibly as a matter of policy (that’s certainly the implication from Rohm-Dutt), so they’re sexist, too!
The music in the Kroll ritual is bare-bones, even by Doctor Who standards. The whispered hymn of the sisterhood of Karn is like Bohemian Rhapsody compared to, “KROLL! dum-dum-dum-dum-dum KROLL! Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum KROLL!”
Can’t hate the swampies: They went all the way with the green paint and the braids. It works, even if there’s a little too much shine on the faces at times.
Kroll, the special effect, is very dated now, though I remember as a kid really being into the idea of a gargantuan monster. I hadn’t seen any Godzilla movies before this, so this might have been one of my first encounters with a kaiju-like monster in fiction. Seeing it rise against the horizon is really neat—you want to believe it, though there isn’t nearly enough supporting elements, in either effects, performances, or story, to really sell it.
Kroll’s first appearance is underused. When it rises, only Thawn, Rohm-Dutt, and the swampies see it. There’s no close-up of anyone’s face looking shocked. And how did the Doctor and Romana miss it? Also, it’s incomprehensible that it’s not the cliffhanger. There was a huge opportunity here, and they missed it.
When Kroll rises for the episode 3 cliffhanger, the Doctor and Romana are strangely calm.
They also haven’t thought through what a beast the size of Kroll would mean, physically. Where are the vast waves that would be displaced? How could Kroll have any problems destroying the refinery almost instantly? How could it get this close to shore at all (does the lake get instantly deep once you get a few feet in)? Etc.
The tentacles aren’t as bad as they could have been, but they do underscore the problem with scale: why are they so small compared to the creature? I guess these are some kind of secondary tentacles? Used for hunting? Why is it hunting? Surely eating a couple of humanoids wouldn’t sate it. And it hunts through “surface vibrations?” Did it watch Tremors?
Romana speculates the tentacles would feed the creature while it’s dormant for hundreds of years. I guess it wants a real meal when it gets up, but wouldn’t it want to hunt something much larger, and in the water?
Robert Holmes elevates the script beyond the seemingly dumb premise by giving the swampies some depth. Ranquin is far from a noble primitive: he’s manipulative, deceitful, violent, and clearly blinded by his faith—all the qualities of a fundamentalist society. Whether the swampies were always like this or pushed by the Delta Magna colonists is up for debate.
I also like how Ranquin talking about the many on Delta Magna who support the swampies’ cause in a way that suggests he thinks they’re suckers. A prototype of the “useful idiots” argument.
The swampies’ torture chamber is creative. Obviously based on the the rack. The tightening of the vines is kind of silly, but it doesn’t take too much headcanon/suspension of disbelief (these are alien plants, after all) to buy in. And the way the Doctor gets out is quite good.
However, if the whole point is that shattering the glass of the skylight lets in the rain, they seem to have forgotten that in the very next shot as the Doctor frees Romana and Rohm-Dutt: there’s no rain pouring down from the opening.
I like the Doctor’s line that one can make “progress” mean anything. I don’t know how much that idea may have been used to justify colonization, but it’s a good way of bending the argument back: what are you even doing here?
I really enjoyed this exchange—Bob Holmes, you’ve still got it:
DOCTOR: I think it’s an illustrated history of the tribe. A sort of Bayeux tapestry with footnotes.
ROMANA: Oh, a sort of Holy Writ.
DOCTOR: I think it’s atrociously writ, but the pictures aren’t bad.
A bit strange that Thawn feels he needs to shoot Dugeen. Why not grab him and push him back since he’s clearly struggling to even stand?
Thawn’s death is shocking, partly because it’s one of the extremely rare times Doctor Who shows blood. It’s quite grim, but it’s a pretty smart choice. You hate this guy? You’re bloodthirsty for justice? Here’s some blood.
Tom Baker is his usual banterous self: It’s super fun when he tries to blame his sabotage on the cleaning lady. Suggesting Kroll is saving Thawn (and the others) for pudding is excellent, too. “Kroll is…” “...all baloney!” So good. THIS is why we tune in every week—seening him have fun while being the smartest person in the room and saving the day.
Convenient that the segment just inserts itself on the tracer in this one. Put the scuba gear on ice, Romana!
Can’t imagine Fenner is going to be OK. The swampies menacingly surround him at the end, and they’ve just lost their god and many of their people.
Which makes you wonder: The Doctor just “killed” their god. How are they not pissed?
What did Pete’s family think?
Grace was amused at the swampies’ chanting, saying it looked like a fun “workout class.”
Four Questions to Doomsday - Pete
Why did the Randomizer take us here? I asked it to bring the heat, and it delivered: According to the Doctor, the base’s “heat exchangers” have raised the temperature of the lake, contributing to Kroll’s awakening. In the beat of the Kroll chant, you can ALMOST hear Vanilla Ice.
What if the evil plot had succeeded? Say Thawn kills Dugeen earlier and destroys Kroll, plus the swampies. Somehow the refinery survives. The Doctor then needs to see that Thawn is indicted for his crimes while also somehow recovering the fifth segment, which would now be in somewhere in the lakebed.
Where’s the Clara splinter? She’s the designer of the Doctor’s boots, which morph into pants whenever the wearer wills it. Handy!
Dalek, Ogron, Professor Hayter, Viscount Banger, Fixed Point in Time, Lady Cassandra, or Zarbi? This is a fun one, with just enough under the surface to surprise you (see what I did there?). A Dalek-Zarbi hybrid.