The Power of Kroll Part Three

The one where the Doctor saves his life with perfect pitch...

Harg is gone, but I doubt anybody will notice, and he certainly won't be missed, because right from the start he was a one-dimensional character who had "Dead By Part Three" written all over him. And, like the other three technicians, he has about as much personality as a grape. It's really difficult to believe that the great Robert Holmes - the man who gave us Spearhead from Space, The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Caves of Androzani - is responsible for this tedious dirge. There's no colour in the writing at all, it's all dialogue and no expression. Maybe he was having an off-day (we're all entitled to them) but this really is his worst work since Season 6 (but even lows like The Space Pirates have something to enjoy).

Reflecting the lifeless scripts they're given, the actors playing the refinery staff are equally as morose, especially Philip Madoc, who looks like he's struggling to stay awake through proceedings, even propping himself up against the scenery at one point, and often looking to the floor in despair. Madoc is in such a mood, and you can tell! John Leeson achieves nothing more than mastering the art of twiddling knobs, while Neil McCarthy struggles to convince even himself that this is a good part for him. He has flashes of steel which work (he was always a good bad guy), but there's no escaping the fact the role of Thawn would have been much better in Madoc's hands (or even George Baker's, who pulled out).

The Doctor, Romana and Rohm-Dutt - a character now in search of a reason to exist - spend 15 of this episode's 22-minute duration tied up with creepers passing glib comments about the nature of their imminent deaths. And it's incredibly boring, although I suspect Tom Baker felt he was having a field day with his stampede of supposedly witty lines. The only mildly amusing bit of it all is when Romana, who's had an itchy nose throughout her incarceration, is finally released and is annoyed that her nose has stopped itching: "A textbook example of displacement anxiety."

The method by which the Doctor rescues the trio from having their spines snapped by creeping vines is one of the most ludicrous escapes in the history of anything, never mind just Doctor Who. The Doctor holds a high note at just the right pitch to break the glass of the architecturally disagreeable window above them, thus letting in the pouring rain and loosening the creepers' grip on their limbs. It's something he learnt from Dame Nellie Melba, apparently, but by this point I just want to swear at the TV and switch the whole thing off. It's like something out of a Laurel and Hardy film (where it would be genuinely funny), or a sketch by the Goons (where it might not). I actually dislike this scene intensely; it's perhaps more offensive to me than some of the childish pranks of Season 17.

The last thing you need when your cast is naked and painted green is for it to start raining, but the Delta Magnan equivalent of Mother Nature cares little for the aesthetics of Swampie haute couture, and summons up a doozy of a storm, complete with repetitive thunderclaps and lightning straight out of a Hammer film.

This is also riling the resident giant squid, also known as Kroll (or, much more amusingly, Jemima if you're Fenner the grouch). Kroll is proving difficult for Dugeen to measure, but it's roughly a mile across and 140ft high, with at least 30 tentacles!

After director Norman Stewart pulls an old Underworld-shaped trick out of the hat by re-using the same footage twice (Swampies running), Rohm-Dutt finally gets something to do, which is to be killed by one of Kroll's wandering tentacles. He's pretty much been a dead man walking since part 1, serving only to bring the arms to the Swampies, after which he wasn't needed at all. In fact, he is so underwritten that he could quite easily be edited out altogether and just have Ranquin admiring the guns they've been given off-screen. I care about Rohm-Dutt's demise about as much as the Doctor and Romana do, which is to say, barely at all. It's a shame that the Doctor reduces Rohm-Dutt's nasty death to a mere "I told you so", but no one's looking for emotional depth in The Power of Kroll. It's hard enough to find any depth at all.

The cliffhanger sees a second emergence of Jemima - sorry, Kroll - from the marshy deep, which means we get more Swampies dragged kicking and screaming into the water by rubber tentacles, and a repeat of that awful split-screen effect. Urgh.

First broadcast: January 6th, 1979

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Nothing really stands out.
The Bad: Dame Nellie Melba's party trick, huh? Get outta here...
Overall score for episode: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

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

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-power-of-kroll.html

The Power of Kroll 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