Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 519: The Power of Kroll, Episode Three
Dear diary,
It’s only really in the last few minutes of this episode that I actually started enjoying it. For the most part, this episode has simply felt like going through the motions, but during those closing minutes of the story, with the Doctor, Romana, and Rohm-Dutt making their escape and Kroll looming large on the horizon, I suddenly found myself interested again. My biggest issue is that this should have been the first big reveal of Kroll in all his glory. There’s a lot of tension to these scenes, as tentacles grab people, and Swampies are pulled underwater, and it’s a shame that the climax to this - the reveal of Kroll himself - is undermined by the brief appearance he made in the last episode.
The biggest shame about that is that Norman Stewart’s direction in the rest of the story is, on the whole, a better example than most of talent in the series. He’s got a real flair for choosing some interesting shots, such as the camera movements to give scale to the torture chamber in which our heroes spend lots of this episode, and he’s actually doing a good job of filling the story with tension on occasion. He’s managed to make the location work look fairly decent, too, and it’s certainly a better showcase for his skills than Underworld was last season!
Certainly, I think that the direction is one of the things saving this story from being completely tedious. It feels as though everyone is simply putting the effort in to get the story on the screen and nothing more. Everyone involved, from the writer to the actors, seems to realise that this is never going to be fondly remembered as some kind of stand out, and thus they’re not really trying. I think it’s fair to say that over the years, The Power of Kroll has rarely been regarded as a bad story, but simply as one of those mediocre tales, that everyone sort of overlooks (that said, the results of the recent Doctor Who Magazine poll place it story number 212 of 241, meaning that it had dropped 38 places since ratings were collected in 2009, although it’s score had moved up slightly over 2% since that time, too).
It’s a shame, really, because it should be really grabbing me. Lovely location, a great big monster with an effect which continues to work far better than I was expecting it to, and it’s quite a pivotal story behind the scenes, because it’s the first tale, in a manner of speaking, to be ‘produced’ by John Nathan Turner, who’ll soon become very important to the programme. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that the final episode will be able to swing round my mood on this one, so I’m eagerly awaiting The Armageddon Factor and the big season finale to turn things around for me…
