The Armageddon Factor Part Six

The one where the quest for the Key to Time finally comes to a climax...

Drax reduces first the Doctor, then himself, to miniature proportions in some bizarrely misguided attempt to escape the Shadow's Mute, but actually makes the whole situation much worse because before he was miniaturised, the Doctor left the TARDIS door open. This means that they are now powerless to stop the Shadow waltzing into the TARDIS and snatching the five segments of the Key to Time for his boss, the Black Guardian. Well done, Drax.

Except the Mute is not the sharpest knife in the box and gets distracted by looking for the Doctor rather than taking some initiative and grabbing the Key. This is perfectly in keeping with the rest of the plot at this point, which has ground to a halt somewhat. The Doctor can't do anything because he's roughly the size of an inch; Romana can't do anything because she is the Shadow's prisoner; and the Marshal can't do anything because he's still stuck in a time loop. The only character who can do anything to move the plot on is the Shadow, who is now free to obtain the Key to Time and ultimately destroy the Universe.

But oh no, that'd be too easy. First, the Shadow has to gloat prematurely about his victory ("The Key to Time is miiiiiine!" and all that), but when he actually gets round to going to the TARDIS to fetch it, he's incapacitated by the blindingly bright light of the TARDIS interior (it's never quite been this bright before, so maybe the TARDIS itself is trying to fight back?). Instead, the Shadow sends in one of his thicko Mutes (who, it should be noted, wear black brogues) to get the Key.

The stage is set for evil to triumph over good in the battle for power over the Key to Time. But what's this? Princess Astra is starting to get all esoteric by talking about destiny and transcendence. It's actually quite tragic that Astra suddenly realises her important part in the grand scheme of things, that she is herself the sixth segment of the Key. It's not what she knows, it's nothing about her person, it's nothing she wears or owns. It's simply all of her, her every atom and molecule. The sixth segment of the Key to Time is a human being, and Astra knows that to become part of the Key is her destiny. And she seems quite into it.

"This is the time of my becoming," she tells Romana. "My transcendence." And when Romana asks her what she means, Astra turns to her and says, pointedly: "Metamorphosis." It's quite spine-tingling when you consider that this episode is the handing over point between the two actresses to play Romana. It's Mary Tamm's last as Romana, and in the very next episode Lalla Ward will inherit the part. It's as if Ward is telling Tamm that her time is up, that regeneration is around the corner, just as Astra is telling Romana. Maybe it has something to do with why Romana chooses to take Astra's form?

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. The Shadow finally possesses the Key to Time, and all that remains is for him to join Astra's sixth piece with the existing five. But just as he's about to do so, everything goes shambolic. K-9 bursts through a polystyrene wall instead of using the main door, acting as a Trojan Horse to bring the miniature Doctor and Drax into the Shadow's lair. Drax then makes them both lifesize again, allowing the Doctor to snatch the Key from under the Shadow's muslined nose and scarper. All this while the Shadow and his mute cohorts look on ineffectually.

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor has all six segments, and just needs to put them together to make it whole. But Romana is not a happy woman, and has a bit of a ding-dong with the Doctor about the effects the Key is having on people's lives. "We're murderers. First Astra, now Merak," she says. "What happened to Astra was our fault. We're just pawns here to do the Guardian's dirty work. She was a living being, and now what is she? A component. And Merak thinks she's still alive. No power should have that right, not even the Guardians." It's one of Mary Tamm's finest moments in the whole season, and when the Doctor simply tells her to set the coordinates for Zeos, she continues to question why.

It's great moral stuff at precisely the right moment in the story. Let's consider the human cost of this ridiculous quest through time and space for six bits of crystal that make up some harmonious whole. The fact one of the pieces is a living being is cruel and heartless. It was pretty cruel and heartless making the second segment an entire planet too.

As the time loop expires, the Marshal finally gets his chance to fire those missiles at Zeos, something he's been waiting to do since midway through part 4. Poor John Woodvine has been thrown away by this story, as if writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin just got bored of him. The entire story seems to lurch from one idea to the next, such as having the Marshal, Merak and Astra such a big part of the first couple of episodes, then dropping the Marshal and Astra in favour of Merak and Shapp, then dropping them in favour of Drax and Astra. It's a bit of a mess in this regard.

The idea of making Drax a Time Lord is wasted too. There's no real reason for him to be a Time Lord in the story, and it would actually work much better if he wasn't. He should actually have been more like a Sabalom Glitz character, an intergalactic wheeler-dealer on the make and always on the move. The fact he's a Time Lord is pointlessly thrown away, and his previous friendship with the Doctor doesn't really amount to much either.

The Shadow is destroyed when his domain* is blown up by the Marshal's missiles (the Doctor set up a defence barrier around Zeos when nobody was looking, or something), and I love the effect of the Shadow's face melting away into the stars as the face of the Black Guardian emerges, in black and blue negative. And who better to play this icon of evil but Valentine Dyall, the Man in Black himself, who has a voice as dark as coal.

* I've been calling it his "domain" as opposed to planet, which is what everybody else seems to call it. But I don't understand why it's referred to as a planet when it quite clearly is not, it's more of a space station. It's also referred to as "the third planet", and by Romana alone in part 6 as the "planet of evil". Dunno where that comes from.

The Black Guardian thinks that dressing in white will fool the Doctor into thinking he is Cyril Luckham, but surely he doesn't think our hero is that much of a fool? The Guardian claims he can take on any form he wishes, which gives a good reason why he might look different, but why would the White Guardian decide to look different at this critical moment?

Thankfully, the Doctor has his wits about him and realises that the White Guardian would never have such callous disregard for the loss of Princess Astra's life. The White Guardian will already have put the powers of the Key to good use, and would never demand to hold it himself before using it. The Doctor disperses the Key's six segments once again, and Astra is returned to her mortal self, tending to Merak in his sick bed. But if Astra is back, then does that mean the other five segments are back as they were before too? Does that mean there's a 140ft giant squid on the loose again on the moon of Delta Magna, and that the shriveled planet Calufrax has returned to its orbit? It kind of negates the entire point of Season 16, reversing everything the Doctor and Romana achieved and making a mockery of all the people who lost their lives the first time around, such as Binro, Rohm-Dutt or Mr Fibuli.

The Key to Time would rear its hexa-crystalline head several more times in spin-off fiction, with the Fifth Doctor searching for it on two occasions, in the BBC Micro video game The First Adventure, and in a series of Big Finish audios, while the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny hunted it down in the 1993 comic strip Time and Time Again (amusingly, one of the segments took the form of a one-legged jelly baby dropped by the Fourth Doctor during Nightmare of Eden!). It even turns up in the alt-universe of Big Finish's Gallifrey audio series, in which the Season 16 quest was actually conducted by the Fourth Doctor with Leela and K-9 Mk I, with Romana having never left Gallifrey in the first place! ARGH, my head hurts!

And so it's all over. After 26 weeks of questing, searching and running, the series-spanning story arc is done with. It was a lovely linking theme, and a nice idea for the programme's 15th anniversary year, as well as something that would become quite normal in years to come when the show returned in 2005. Every series tends to have an overarching theme or meme these days, but back in 1978, such an idea was quite fresh. It'd be attempted again to greater and lesser degrees (Season 18's entropy theme, Season 20's "returning characters" theme, Season 23's trial theme) but the Key to Time was probably the most successful. It was simple, and added an epic quality to the six adventures. OK, so the adventures themselves weren't very epic, and the climax didn't really amount to very much, but the idea of it was perfectly sound, and fun!

The Doctor fits a randomiser to the TARDIS so that the Black Guardian cannot follow and seek vengeance on them, but surely the Black Guardian is powerful enough to find out where they are? Maybe the Guardian has better things to do with his time than get his own back on a daft bohemian madman in a box? Maybe...

Season 16 ended its run a little earlier in the year than its predecessors due to running uninterrupted through the Christmas break. It would return for the new Autumn season of 1979, and in the meantime its 6.20pm slot would be filled with the likes of Jim'll Fix It and Rolf on Saturday - OK? Not the most auspicious of replacements, to be honest...

First broadcast: February 24th, 1979

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The scene where Lalla Ward turns to look at Mary Tamm and says: "Metamorphosis." Spooky!
The Bad: Bob Baker and Dave Martin are remiss to write off characters such as the Marshal and Drax (the former doesn't even get a proper final scene).
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ (story average: 6.2 out of 10)

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 18

NEXT TIME: Destiny of the Daleks...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Four; Part Five

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-armageddon-factor.html

The Armageddon Factor is available on BBC DVD as part of the Key to Time box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Key-Time-Re-issue/dp/B002TOKFNM