Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 526: The Armageddon Factor, Episode Six
Dear diary,
I worried - correctly, it seems - that the whole business with the shrinking ray (another thing from earlier Bob Baker and Dave Martin scripts to make a return!), was simply going to be used as padding for this final episode, until the story was ready to tie up the loose strands of the key to Time arc in the final scenes. The Doctor’s problem, if I’ve understood it correctly, is thus: He’s opened the door to the TARDIS, where the Key to Time is being held. He’s been shrunk, so he can’t close the door! Oh no! The Shadow could, therefore, wander into the TARDIS at any time he likes and simply pick up the Key (he later has a lackey do it).
My problem with this is that although they’re shrunk, the Doctor and Drax also possess the machine they need to make them large again! Not only that, they’re able to get hold of K9 if they need to. What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t simply dart out from the crack in the wall, make themselves larger again, use the confusion to knock out the guard, and then hotfoot it into the TARDIS? It’s painted as some big crisis for them, but there never actually seems to be any danger involved (beyond getting trodden on).
Oh, but that’s a minor quibble, and I’ve found myself enjoying everything else about this episode. I love all the moral dilemma around Astra being the Sixth Segment to the Key (and I love even more that it’s key to the resolution, too!), and I’m surprised but keen to find that she’s restored to human form at the end! I had no idea of that - I genuinely thought that becoming the segment killed her, and always thought that it was quite a dark way to end a season.
There’s plenty of spectacle on show in this one, too, with explosions, and more shrinking effects, K9 blasting his way through a wall (albeit somewhat clumsily), and the Key being dispersed back out through the universe… yes, I think this has probably been a fitting capstone to the whole Key to Time season, and even though the White Guardian doesn’t get to use the Key (or does he? The Doctor comments that the Black Guardian could use it while it’s assembled in the TARDIS, so has the White Guardian somehow managed to do that, too?), it doesn’t feel like a let down after 25 weeks of build up!
We say goodbye to Mary Tamm with this episode, although you’d not know it by watching the story. It’s a real shame that she was never invited back to film a regeneration sequence (Tamm even says in the special features to an earlier story in this set that she was waiting for the call!), and I’m actually going to miss having her around. Romana as a character has grown on me across the season, and I’ve really enjoyed watching her relationship with the Doctor develop, while still retaining a few key things that are uniquely ‘them’. Here’s hoping that I continue to enjoy the character as much in her second incarnation!
Another thing that we’re saying goodbye to today is the six-episode format of Doctor Who… well… sort of. The Armageddon Factor is the last Doctor Who story to be broadcast in six twenty-something minute chunks - a format that the show has been using to varying degrees since right back in Season One with The Keys of Marinus. Over the last couple of seasons, it feels as though they’ve settled into a nice format for five 4-part stories topped off with a single 6-parter to round out the season. It’s certainly worked better for me than those middle Pertwee seasons, when we had 6-part tale after 6-part tale!
I say ‘sort of’, because it’s not strictly the case. I’ll be watching the animated version of the never-broadcast Shada when I reach the end of Season Seventeen in about a month’s time, and that was made (and has been completed) in six parts. Then you’ve got The Two Doctors coming up in the mid-1980’s, where there’s only three episodes… but they’re almost twice as long! There’s also David Tennant’s swan-song, The End of Time, way out there in my future, and that clocks in somewhere around the length of a 6-parter, too.
Officially, though, this is the end of the road for stories like this. I can’t really claim to be sorry at their departure - I’ve often found six-parters to be something of a struggle, both when watching through, and when trying to write about them! Unless the story continues to give you lots of new things to talk about (this story has been a great example - spending broadly two episodes apiece on Atrios, Zios, and the Third Planet), you very quickly find yourself running out of things to say! It feels like another evolution for the programme to be dropping them from its style, and I always love a bit of evolution in the series. Now… what will Season Seventeen bring?
