The Key To Time quest draws to a surprisingly drab close...

The Armageddon Factor. Hmmphh. Sounds a bit like a cross between Gladiators and The X Factor in which Simon Cowell, Many Faces Of Louis Walsh, a Minogue Sister and People’s Pop Princess Cheryl Cole decide which bicep-bulging goons go head to head in mortal combat. In fact, it turns out to be both an orchestrated war between the planets of Zeos and Atrios.

Oh, and more crucially, it’s the last instalment in the Key To Time saga.

The past 26 weeks have boasted some of the best examples of late 1970s Who - witty snowbound Hustle prototype The Ribos Operation, explosion in imagination factory The Pirate Planet and summery Zenda update The Androids Of Tara. One of the good things about the season is that the linking theme isn’t always crowbarred in at inopportune moments. That’s the great thing about the quest motif - you simply start and end with the Key link, and then get on with telling the story in between.

As for the whole season arc, and whether it’s steered to an appropriate conclusion or not, that’s another matter.

But let’s backtrack a bit and rate The Armageddon Factor itself. It’s not a story that readily springs to mind when discussing great Who stories, which is unusual since it’s the all-important season finale. Most season finales have acquired some sort of legendary status, but oddly, The Armageddon Factor is more of the forgettable B-side, more of a You Know My Name Look Up The Number than a Let It Be.

Maybe this is because in a season full of bright colours and innovative designs and concepts, The Armageddon Factor is just - grey. Everywhere you look, there’s grey. Grey walls. Grey blocks. Grey doors. Even the characters are a bit grey. The most obvious examples of this are Princess Astra, Atrios’ very own people’s princess and her useless boyfriend Merak. Astra doesn’t do much apart from get captured, chained up and hypnotised by a black toy brick. And then in the final part, she goes all zoned out as she starts prattling on about her destiny, thereby in no way giving away the fact that she’s the sixth segment of the Key. Lalla Ward (Friend Of Douglas Adams) is quite good though - she can do the eerie baddie bit quite well, and she’s also a much better screamer than Mary Tamm. So it’s no surprise that she would be asked back to the series to play the second Romana.

"If you were to devise a Merak Says Astra Drinking Game, you’d need to implement a stark health warning, since he seems to say it every six minutes"

Ian Saynor’s Merak on the other hand is a different proposition. Merak isn’t so much a bloke, more a lost little boy who’s misplaced his cuddly toy. Saynor evidently got the long straw when he received the part, since remembering his lines wouldn’t prove too taxing. All Merak gets to say is “Astra!” on a loop throughout the six parts. If you were to devise a Merak Says Astra Drinking Game, you’d need to implement a stark health warning, since he seems to say it every six minutes. He walks down a corridor: “Astra!” He discovers Astra’s bracelet: “Astra!” Oh yeah, how can Astra suddenly become a bracelet? He wakes up in a hospital bed: “Astra!” It’s appropriate that this is his last line. Outside of all this Astra projection, Merak doesn’t really get to do a lot, except follow other people around like a forlorn puppy. Given that there have been plenty of useless incidental characters in Who, Merak is surely the King.

Mind you, for a Bob Baker and Dave Martin script, the lack of good characters and character development isn’t a surprise. They either tend to portray characters as goonish imbeciles or waste them altogether. On the comedy imbecile front, we have two of the blighters: Shapp, who starts off as a fairly dull but still sane number two, but yet manages to mutate into a bumbling fool who’s a cross between Terry Scott and Mr Lucas from Are You Being Served? That cry of “MERRAAAA-AAAA-AAA-KKKK-KKK!!!” as he stumbles into the lift is cringe-inducing.

Although not as cringe-inducing as Drax and his gorbloymey Cock-er-neee accent. Now this is nothing new, since the tenth Doctor inexplicably decides to adopt a similar faux-Mockney accent, although at least David Tennant manages to carry this off well. Drax, on the other hand, is just an irritating midget who looks a bit like Francis Rossi from Status Quo auditioning for Blake’s 7. Barry Jackson, AKA the Ubiquitous Dr Bullard in murder japery Midsomer Murders, does his best, but sadly, he fails to make Drax into a half believable character. Which actually isn’t his fault, since Baker and Martin pour rubbish Cockney cliché after rubbish Cockney cliché into his mouth. “You’re banjaxed my son! End of the road! Finito!” It’s the sort of lingo that Del from Only Fools And Horses might get to say.

"John Woodvine gives an excellent performance, full of nervy, shifty tics, that suggests he’s not quite the man in charge as he claims to be"

And then there’s the poor old Marshal, a character who starts off really well, and then ends up as the human equivalent of a badly scratched record in a poxy little spaceship. Shame, this - John Woodvine gives an excellent performance, full of nervy, shifty tics, that suggests he’s not quite the man in charge as he claims to be. So what happens? He goes off to blow a planet to kingdom come and gets himself trapped in The Doctor’s Time Loop. Which is a waste of a decent human villain.

As some sort of compensation, we do at least get two great baddies. There’s a pecking order to the Armageddon Factor baddies. The Marshal is at the bottom of the pile - hence his exile in a futuristic broom cupboard. Then we have The Shadow, a shuffling old git in a skeleton mask, who’s the accomplice of the eagerly awaited Black Guardian. I like The Shadow actually - or rather his voice which is as doomy as you can get in Who. It sounds like it’s being spoken from the depths of hell itself, a deep, distorted mumble that sounds like a slowed-down Gordon Brown. William Squire steals the show in The Armageddon Factor, even if The Shadow’s a bit of a lazy bastard. He gets everyone else in earshot to do his dirty work, including The Doctor’s faithful companion K9. Most of the time, The Shadow does nothing but apart from sit on his boulder throne and cackling. Yup, it’s another bwa-hah-ha-ing baddie, although sometimes, it sounds like The Shadow’s crying.

At least, The Black Guardian’s a decent baddie this time around. He doesn’t resort to the nyer-hah-ha-ing of his three 80s stories, and neither does he stomp around in a hessian sack and a dead bird hat. The white bald cap is by no means as offensive. And Valentine Dyall’s performance is much better here - the benevolent being rapidly giving way to a growling negative beast. Originally, Cyril Luckham was to have portrayed the Guardian again, suggesting that the White and Black Guardians were one and the same. At least the 80s Guardian tales dispelled any ambiguity as to this dilemma, but the original concept’s still quite intriguing.

Or more intriguing at least than The Armageddon Factor itself. It’s enjoyable, but it hardly ploughs new dramatic territory, and worse still, doesn’t manage to fill the six parts adequately. Put it this way, you could abandon parts three and four, and it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. The story is broken down into three acts. parts one and two establish the mystery of the Marshal who’s gimbling away at himself in a mirror, and the problem of the war between Atrios and Zeos. These are successful and set out the intrigue well. Unfortunately, all that mystery is dispelled in parts three and four, which is basically wall-to-wall padding and walking around corridors. The whole corridor thing has been touted by Who sceptics. It’s a hoary old cliché, but sadly in this case, the sceptics are right. The Doctor, Romana, and practically all the other characters walk around the Zeos corridors, apparently on a loop. Oh, and K9 gets to whisper sweet nothings with a computerised pyramid called Mentalis. Never mind the conversation about the war between planets, the two computers are probably experiencing the equivalent of a first date. Sadly, Mentalis blows itself up, so bang goes K9’s chances of robotic romance.

Unfortunately, nothing’s really accomplished in these middle parts. It’s just relentless talky scenes that don’t add anything to the story, including an inexplicable rant about bees (During which point, Big Tom finally seems to lose his rag with wet fish Merak). The time loop concept is neat, but even this is padded out more than it should be.

At least things do start to pick up in the last two parts, as The Doctor and Romana travel to the planet of The Shadow. That said, the bizarre “amusement arcade rubbish” is ridiculous, with The Doctor oddly spinning off into what looks like a crystal ball made out of toilet roll at high speed. The shrinking scenes are quite fun, and at least, this allows The Doctor and Drax to save the day. And even if you can tell that Astra’s the last segment a mile off, it’s still an effective plot point.

Well at least until she’s restored to full health in a totally underwhelming conclusion. Even back in the 1970s, season arc resolutions were tricky beasts. Nowadays, this is common practice, since season arcs either turn out to be a damp squib (The Darkness turns out to be the Daleks, who then become comedy dodgem cars) or not even resolved at all (We still don’t know what’s up with all this Silence Will Fall stuff). Even other programmes manage to turn a potentially interesting season arc into a complete fiasco. Take Buffy spin-off Angel, and in particular, season 2, with its potentially gripping arc of the monotone gel-head going bad and his old flame Darla being resurrected from the dead. In the end, this wasn’t resolved properly. Angel went good again, Darla buggered off, and the Angel Investigations found themselves in some shitty fantasy land called Pylea which resembled a horribly gaudy fairy tale as imagined by Graham Norton.

"Because of the botched conclusion, the Key concept doesn’t quite stand up, but overall, the season rewards time and again"

But I digress. The Armageddon Factor’s conclusion is lame. Basically all that happens is that The Doctor gets all the segments, and then…!

Scatters them through time and space again.

Stupid, huh? And a real let-down after six months of great adventures. It makes the whole quest idea seem a bit pointless - why send The Doctor on a quest in the first place? Presumably, the balance was restored during those all-important few minutes that the Key was assembled, but this is never dwelt on.

Evidently, Graham Williams decided that another story arc wouldn’t work either, especially given season 17’s free and easy style of storytelling. As a whole, The Key To Time works because of its (mostly) great stories, innovative ideas and concepts, and some surprisingly high production values - not to mention a first-class performance from the main man throughout the season. Because of the botched conclusion, the Key concept doesn’t quite stand up, but overall, the season rewards time and again.

As for The Armageddon Factor itself, it’s swings and roundabouts. Padding, silly characters, lack of depth do threaten to drag the story down, but overall, it’s good fun, has some notably good villains, and brings the season to a satisfying conclusion.

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, The Power Of Kroll

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