Six episodes
Aired between 20th January 1979 and 24th February 1979
Written by Bob Baker and David Martin
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Michael Hayes
Synopsis
The Doctor and Romana follow the tracer to the last segment of the key to time, which lands them in the middle of a war between two planets - Atrios and Zeos. They are curiously led to the location of Atrios' princess - Astra, who has been trapped. The Marshall of Atrios believes they trapped her and intend to kill her.
This leads to a lot of cat and mouse antics until the Doctor ferrets out evidence of a shadowy figure manipulating the war from behind the scenes.
This shadowy figure kidnaps the Princess and Romana ends up teaming up with Astra's love interest, Merak to try and find her. They eventually find their way to a hidden transmat which goes to the base of this shadow figure (who's coincidentally called "the Shadow").
The Shadow tries to make the Doctor hand over the segments as he works for the Black Guardian, but the Doctor bluffs his way into the TARDIS and gets away.
The group eventually end up on Zeos and discover that everyone on the planet is dead, but a great supercomputer is running everything. As the Doctor tries to dismantle it, he gets word that the Marshall is on his way in a warship to blow Zeos up.
The computer goes into self destruct mode and the Doctor is forced to jury-rig a fake sixth segment and use the key to place Zeos and the Marshall in a time loop so the solar system isn't destroyed.
Once the threat is stalled, they all go back to the Shadow's base to find the sixth segment. K9 gets separated and is brainwashed, and Romana is captured. The Doctor looks around and finds another Time Lord, Drax, who was forced to install the Zeon computer. He agrees to help the Doctor and constructs a shrinking machine.
The evil K9 is sent to capture the Doctor, and the Shadow finally gains access to the key to time. He prepares to use it for evil purposes, but the Doctor (having escaped again) and Drax, manage to interfere and steal back to the key. They discover in the process that Princess Astra herself is the real sixth segment of the key, and they use her to restore order.
The Doctor disarms the Zeon self destruct mechanism in time and the Marshall's weapons are deflected to the Shadows ship, blowing it up.
Drax is taken back to Atrios and K9, Romana and the Doctor all go away. All that's left is the full key. The Black Guardian turns up, disguised as the White Guardian and asks for the key, but the Doctor realises the ruse as he has no regard for Astra being trapped in it, therefore, the Doctor snaps the tracer and scatters the key away.
Astra re-appears on Atrios and is reunited with Merak, and the Doctor and Romana escape in the TARDIS thanks to the Doctor's installation of a randomiser switch.
Trivia
- During the filming of this serial, Tom Baker became more and more vocal about his anger towards the production of the show, and the fact that his ideas weren't being taken seriously. This may have been a contributing factor to Graham Williams beginning to decide that he'd had enough. Nevertheless, he met with Tom to hear out his opinions but they were outlandish and impractical so he had very little impetus to help Tom out.
- The Randomiser wasn't a random decision at all. Graham Williams realised that a lot of the tension of the show and the mystery would be cut out if the Doctor could travel anywhere and anywhen. To get around this, he put in the randomiser to make sure that the mystery remained
- This was Mary Tamm's last Doctor Who story. As mentioned before, her decision to leave was due to the fact that she felt the character had become quite generic and the format required her to dumb down Romana to help the audience understand what was happening which wasn't the character she had been sold.
The Review
The Armageddon Factor shares a significant point of a lot of successful Doctor Who stories; it begins with a setup of a mystery. The war torn world in civil war with a trapped woman behind an immovable obstacle is just as successful as being dropped onto a sand hopper, locating a local village that has strange people, or finding a deserted London that's actually infested with Daleks.
Indeed, the setup, whilst quite camp in places, is a distinct reminder of the Kaled / Thaal war from Genesis of the Daleks and promises a good analogy about the horrors of nuclear war.
Further from that, the second episode begins to develop an interesting plot twist by indicating that the Marshall is being dominated by an evil force. This is as insidious as the War Games, and offer much promise. From here though, alas, things begin to go downhill rapidly. There's a strong strain of farce that runs through the story including the first two episodes in places, and the middle very quickly sags into a "run around corridors" block of filler.
The Shadow is a wonderful acolyte to a primal evil force at first, but quickly proves to be just another inept bond villain and he's got stiff competition for the most annoying character with Cockney Drax and Shapp (and the less said about his portrayal of getting shot, the better!). At least John Woodvine is competent, but the set and script aren't great.
And the ending, the ending just doesn't make sense. The Doctor determines that the White Guardian isn't the White Guardian because he doesn't care about Astra, but have you ever thought about the greater good? And he breaks the tracker and scatters thew key, but there's no indication that the actual White Guardian has used it.
The Armageddon Factor has much potential but I'm sorry to say that it never really gets used and provides a boring slog of six drawn out episodes until it collapses exhausted at the end of the series, not giving anyone much satisfaction.
Rating
3 out of 10
Rewatchability Factor
2 out of 10
Watch this if you liked...
- The Myth Makers
- The War Games
- Frontier in Space
- Genesis of the Daleks
- Warriors of the Deep
- Battlefield
No comments:
Post a Comment