The Armageddon Factor Part Two

The one where K-9 almost gets melted down for scrap...

This episode must have had the younger viewers anxiously biting their nails in fear that sweet little K-9 would be melted down as scrap metal in the Marshal's furnace. It is, admittedly, quite a nervous time for those with a fondness for the canine computer, watching him roll inexorably toward a fiery furnace (although we never see a single flame!). As he approaches the end of the line, K-9 sorrowfully has to close down and face his combustible demise. Luckily, the Doctor manages to rescue him in the nick of time, leaving K-9 barely singed (but a bit smoky!). He's a very hot dog.

All this jeopardy comes well over a year before the world saw C-3PO broken down for scrap and headed for the furnace in The Empire Strikes Back. As a child, I always found the dismemberment of C-3PO intensely upsetting, so I can only imagine how Doctor Who viewers felt about the prospect of losing their favourite comedy robot.

This episode consists of an awful lot of talking, but there's not much which moves the story forward (and we're only on part 2). Tom Baker has clearly been mucking about with his lines, and the light-hearted interplay between he and John Woodvine as the Marshal is nice enough to watch, but ultimately quite hollow. The moment where the Marshal begins to misquote Shakespeare's King Richard II, and the Doctor insists "I prefer the original", smacks of Baker and Woodvine chumming up together in a corner during rehearsals to make high-handed "improvements". In actual fact, it's just self-indulgent time-wasting.

And all the wonderful Mary Tamm can do is look on from the wings, arms crossed with a look of understandable frustration. Poor Mary. She really hasn't had very much to do of any importance since The Androids of Tara. It's as if the script writers just forgot about Romana, particularly the strength of her character, and resorted to writing a cut-out-and-keep Doctor Who companion who asks lots of questions and screams a lot. Such a shame. No wonder Mary left. Romana really was going nowhere at this rate.

The Marshal has had a complete u-turn about the Doctor and now welcomes him with open arms, claiming him to be the "new architect of our victory" against Zeos. This all comes after he's had a mysterious chat with whatever's behind the mirror in the corner, which appears to have some kind of hold over him via the less-than-discreet plastic chip on his throat. But we know not to trust him, especially when Romana overhears him say: "The Doctor must not die. Not yet!"

It's very typical of Doctor Who to depict an epic space battle using little dots of light on a display screen! It works - just - but the obvious influence of the Alliance's X-Wing attack on the Death Star at the end of Star Wars demonstrates once again that writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin had so much more ambition than Doctor Who could ever meet. They never learnt this, they never let the show's budgetary limitations stop them from imagining amazing things. Sometimes their chutzpah was rewarded by the bravery and talent of the production team (the modelwork in The Invisible Enemy and Underworld, the CSO weirdness of The Claws of Axos, a robot dog!) but sometimes their vision wasn't met, and writing a space battle between the forces of Atrios and Zeos is one such time.

Suddenly, up pops Princess Astra (in her only scene in this episode) to ask her people to surrender to Zeos and hand over the Marshal, the only way that peace will be achieved. It's hard to know whether this is the real Princess Astra, or whether she is under some kind of Zeon influence, but either way the Marshal's having none of it, and angrily pulls the plug on the telly!

Talking of TV screens, look out for the camera pan across the technicians at around 10min 54sec and you'll see one of them has a close-up of the Doctor's face on his monitor, which is obviously the next camera shot of Tom Baker!

Romana and Merak manage to get behind the Marshal's mirror and find a glowing skull sitting there listening to him. Is it the Fendahl? Doubt it. But this espionage means Romana discovers that the Marshal (and whoever he's colluding with) knows the Doctor is a Time Lord, so maybe the skull is something to do with the Black Guardian? This would make sense, seeing as the Marshal seems very interested in the Doctor being able to provide a weapon to wipe out Zeos (ie, the Key to Time). Curiouser and curiouser...

The Doctor is then whisked away to Zeos by two hooded skeletons, and we get a wonderfully melodramatic close-up of Mary Tamm looking terribly anxious, but also incandescently beautiful. She was never anything less, to be honest.

First broadcast: January 27th, 1979

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The threat of seeing K-9 melted down for scrap adds some much-needed tension.
The Bad: This is part 2, and it isn't really going anywhere. Let's hope the Doctor zapping to Zeos will step things up a bit.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

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

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