Doctor Who Season 16: It's time for a quest...

While the early seasons of Doctor Who presented the stories as a continuous adventure, the various storylines weren’t connected together. One adventure would end, they’d retreat to the Tardis and then the next one would start. After a while, even that slight tissue was dropped.

For his second season, Graham Williams decided to craft the first fully connected season in the show’s history. He actually wanted to do the The Key to Time storyline in his first season, but there wasn’t time to assemble it in time. Season two, however, would bring the concept to life.

It ends up being an uneven season, with some terrific adventures along the way (including Douglas Adams’ first contribution to the show) and the likes of The Power of Kroll, which doesn’t have much going for it except for a giant-mega-squid-thing (coming this fall on the Syfy channel).

The Ribos Operation

We start with an adventure from an old friend, as Robert Holmes returns with a typical script, loaded with scoundrels and grifters. First off, we need to make some introductions. Solo Tom Baker is taken to meet the White Guardian, who gives him a task conveniently broken into six parts. He needs to the find the fabled Key to Time, which can return balance to the universe. He also gets a new companion, Romana, played in the first season by Mary Tamm.

In what is going to be a familiar sight during the season, Ribos is a mixture of a technologically advanced society with lots of touches of the Middle Ages tossed in. The story features low-life grifters (in other words, perfect Holmes characters) and a certain jewel that may just be… the first segment to the Key to Time.

The Pirate Planet

Or, “that episode Douglas Adams wrote.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was still bubbling up through BBC Radio when Adams got the commission, and you can see the various influences throughout in this script. There’s a touch of the Vogan’s, as the planet in question is actually a shell that travels the universe and destroying the worlds beneath it. There are ineffectual revolutionaries, even more ineffectual bad guys and plenty of jokes along the way. Tom Baker really seems to be thrilled by the material, and has an absolutely brilliant scene when the planet-killing scheme is revealed. His abject horror at the situation feels and sounds absolutely real. The special effects don’t always do the series any favors, but it certainly is one of the most ambitious series of the season – and still a lot of fun watch (even with the bad mecha-parrot flying around).

The Stones of Blood

Episodes during the Graham Williams’ years set on contemporary earth are rare (just one per season), and I tend to get this one confused with the superior Image of the Fendahl from the previous season. This does have some striking and startling bits of horror – well, as much as you can get with mobile stones (of blood, I imagine). The series takes a strange left turn at the end as we end up in a trans-dimensional prison ship officiated by a couple of overbearing and by-the-book flashing lights/police officers.

The Androids of Tara

Hey, it’s the Prisoner of Zenda – in space! Well, not exactly space, just another planet with a mix of advanced and primitive technology. There’s a bit of daring do and the cast looks like they are having plenty of fun, but the acting and effects are pretty uneven and the whole show is a bit flat.

The Power of Kroll

It’s been a few weeks since I watched this particular episode. The only things that have stuck with me through that time is: just how impressively and unbelievably massive the Kroll squid thing (also a segment, of course) is; and all the green-skinned natives chanting “Kroll! Kroll! Kroll!” over and over again. The plot is kind of like the Jon Pertwee episode The Mutants, just without the poorly deployed moral message.

The Armageddon Factor

Budgets always got squeezed at the end of classic Who seasons, and – as was typical through the later 1970s – the final serial was a six parter. The low budget hurts this space adventure, though it isn’t without its delights. The main one is Lalla Ward, who plays a princess here before taking on the role of Romana in the following season. The plot involves warring planets and supercomputers – a bit like the original Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon” – that finally gets us to the final segment. The Black Guardian, hinted at before, makes an appearance, but the Doctor susses him out and all is saved, though the Key to the Time is dispersed, making the past 26 episodes a bit pointless. Still, there was some fun along the way.

Fun is not a word often used when discussing season 17, as we will find out next time.

Doctor Who Season 15: Enter the tin dog

A new season marked a new era, as producer Graham Williams took over. His initial plan – a season-long series of interconnected stories – would have to wait until his second season. In the meantime, we get a mix of good and bad – sometimes in the same series – as the tight budget continues to constrain the show. It didn’t help that Star Wars premiered a few months before the season started in September 1977, meaning that the visual rules for science fiction had just been broken wide open.

The Horror of Fang Rock

Philip Hinchcliffe may be gone, but season 15 opens with a series that is very much in tune with his era. This is straight-up horror, involving an alien presence and an isolated light house. Through the four episodes (in one of Terrance Dicks’ best scripts for the show) they actually kill off two different groups of people: the light keepers and the survivors of a shipwreck. Still, the alien invasion is prevented and an explosion at the end changes Leela’s eye color. (Louise Jamison had to wear colored contact lenses in her first season; one of the deals she made to come back was to ditch them.)

The Invisible Enemy

And here comes K-9. There is a lot going on in these four parts, but the story still feels padded out. Once the Invisible Enemy of the title becomes, well, visible, the story loses its way, leading to a meandering fourth episode. The earlier episodes, however, are plenty of fun. We get some bona-fide scares early on, as a relief crew is infected by some kind of super-intelligent space virus. Later on, contact gets made with the Doctor. To get the main virus out of his head, he and Leela are cloned and sent into the brain. Along with this Fantastic Voyage-style adventure with get K-9, the robot dog that quickly became a fan favorite – and who cause multiple headaches in the future in recording. Also, once the virus gets big for episode four, the series loses all momentum. Dodgy monsters would be a hallmark of the upcoming seasons.

Image of the Fendahl

Like here. If you hadn’t seen the opening credits, you might think you had arrived at the wrong program for the first 10 minutes here. We have an isolated group of scientists working on time experiments. They have also awakened an ancient evil, as like in The Daemons or Quatermass and the Pit. The Doctor gets in the way, but not before a death cult (yes!) threatens all of humanity. The interplay between the scientists is good, as are the performances from Tom Baker and Louise Jamison. The trouble comes near the end when the Fendhahl makes an appearance. It is absolute rubbish. It’s hard not to laugh every time it is on screen, and that robs the end of the story of any of its major payoff.

The Sun Makers

The satire at the heart of this Robert Holmes’ serial (his first after his term as script editor) isn’t particularly deft. It’s a spoof on taxation, where the repressed minions of humanity’s last outpost on Pluto are squeezed worse than poor George Harrison in “Taxman.” Actually, it is a bit more complex than that, as these are actually corporate taxes charged to the people by a ruling corporation.

Beyond that, there are some playful moments scattered throughout, especially for Leela (this is Louise Jameson’s favorite episode) and some epically bad sets and special effects. This includes a futuristic car that travels about as quick as the “Enforcers” from the MST3K classic, Space Mutiny.

Underworld

My recollection – and I probably hadn’t seen this in 25 years at least – of Underworld was a lot of running around on unconvincing CSO. The reality? Pretty much that, though now I can see the interesting parallels drawn between this story and Jason and the Argonauts. (Yay! Studying the classics can be helpful.) Here, the Doctor teams up with a group of explorers with names quite close to Jason and crew, who are looking for a legendary lost ship that contains their race’s biological code. With that, they hope to end a quest that has gone on for 100,000 years and start a new world.

They find the ship, but it has been buried beneath a layer of space matter. They also find an oppressed people to free and plenty of time to wander the BBC corridors, rendered both in a couple of white panels and the aforementioned green-screen sequences that didn’t fool me as a youngster and come off even worse today.

The Invasion of Time

And we end the season with a six-parter that is really a four-parter with a two-parter stuck on the end. We also go back to Gallifrey for no good reason. No, scratch that, there was a good reason but it had nothing to do with the story. Another script fell through, leaving the crew in the familiar lurch. A new story was improvised by script editor Anthony Read and producer Williams, and a low, low budget was paramount. The costumes from The Deadly Invasion were still in storage, as were the Gallifrey designs from before. Voila, instant story.

There are a few moments of interest – The Doctor acts nasty for a bit; the invaders turn out to be the Sontarans – and plenty of padding. The final two episodes feature long, long stretches of exploration through the Tardis (which appears to have a power station in it) that stretch usual corridor jaunts to the breaking point. It also provides a rather unsatisfying end for Leela, as the warrior woman goes out not in a blaze of glory but in the arms of a Citadel guard that she has shared no romantic times with at all. (The producers were unsure if Jameson would go ahead with her plans to leave; she did.)

Up next, we get a whole season dedicated to the search of the six parts of the Key to Time, complete with a new companion and a bad guy with a crow on his head.