Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 525: The Armageddon Factor, Episode Five
Dear diary,
This episode has been something of a string of surprises, coming thick and fast for twenty-five minutes! For a start, I’d completely forgotten the existence of Drax, and his sudden appearance left me baffled for a moment before I remembered. I can safely say now that I’ve never watched this far before - so on my initial viewing of the Key to Time season, by this point I’d switched off either the DVD or my brain! K9 says it best, I think: Drax is, frankly, silly. But that’s not a bad thing! In a story which has been fairly bleak so far (when you start off with a nuclear war, and things get worse from there, you know you’re in trouble!), it’s quite nice to have a new character turning up who provides some much welcome comic relief.
It’s nice to see that he’s actually a bit more than just a bit of comedy in the story, though. He’s there to try and tempt the Doctor off the rightful path, but of course our hero spots that right away. I can’t tell, in the closing moments, whether he’s shot his old school friend because he’s still planning to work alongside the shadow or because he’s just a bit of a bumbling fool. It’s nice to see the angle that this spins on the Doctor, too. He’s often been portrayed as the renegade, who runs away from Gallifrey and gets himself caught up in all manner of trouble. Here, though, he’s painted as a real grown up for the first time in ages - almost looking wearily down on Drax, who’s only going to get in the way of whatever plan the Doctor is forming for getting through all of this as unscathed as he possibly can.
No discussion of this episode would be complete without mentioning it - the Doctor has finally been named. It’s only taken them 15 years to do! It’s long been established that ‘Theta Sigma’ is simply the Doctor’s nickname from school, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s the intention of the scene! Certainly, when Drax first addresses him as ‘Thete’, that’s him using a nickname, but it then seems to go on for him to clarify the Doctor’s actual name. And, realistically, it does fit in with the world of Time Lord society! We’ve had Omega before now - another Time Lord figure named after a letter of the Greek Alphabet. I should clarify that I don’t really think that his name is Theta Sigma (though, I do believe that it’s perhaps his given name on Gallifrey?), but it’s interesting to see someone finally attempt to answer that ‘first’ question: Doctor who?
It’s also fitting that it should come in this story - the final one to be penned by the writing team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin. It seems somehow right that they should be bowing out of the series before the 1970s are out - I’ve come to associate them very much which this era of the programme. They’ve been responsible for quite a few additions to the Doctor Who mythos over the last eight years, and several of them make reappearances here, including the aforementioned Greek naming convention for Time Lords (it was Baker and Martin who created Omega, after all). Bob Baker will be back on his own next series, but we’re saying goodbye to Martin here, who aside from a few books throughout the 1980s, doesn’t make any more contributions to the world of Doctor Who. Still ,it’s not too bad going to be one of the men who created k( (told you I’d be back to loving the metal mutt today!)
Over the years, the Bristol Boys have fared quite well in my ratings. Taking into account my average ratings for each story, their lowest effort was The Sontaran Experiment, which scored just 5/10, followed then by The Mutants and Underworld which both averaged 6/10 from me. The Hand of Fear fared a little better at 6.5, with The Invisible Enemy scraping a little ahead with 6.75. The Three Doctors comes in with a solid 7/10, but it’s The Claws of Axos which has been my favourite Baker and Martin offering - it achieved an average score of 7.5/10! For those of you keeping track, The Armageddon Factor is currently sitting at 7/10, but there’s everything to play for in the final episode…
