The Armageddon Factor

This thing makes me feel in such a way I'd be very worried if I felt like that that about somebody else feeling like this about that, do you understand?

If you listen to fans about Season 16, you will usually get a debate on whether The Power of Kroll or The Armageddon Factor is the worst story of the season. Given that I rather liked The Power of Kroll, I'm betting this one will win my vote unless it pulls something miraculous out of a hat and The Pirate Planet ends up in last place. I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt especially since it brings in Lalla Ward for the first time.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Romana follow the Key detector to the planet Atrios which is currently in the midst of a nuclear war with it's neighbor Zeos. The military leader is known as the Marshal and he runs the war while the planet is ruled by Princess Astra. Astra is having a liaison with the chief surgeon Merak and the two are working together to try and contact Zeos about bringing an end to the war. The Marshal is having none of it and aware of their attempts, traps Astra in an abandoned part of the base flooded with radiation.

The Doctor and Romana arrive in the base, having just avoided being vaporized by nuclear missile, just outside the section where Astra has been trapped. They find a dead guard but fearing a trap from the Black Guardian have K-9 cut a small hole in the door. The use of the weapon alerts the Marshal and he and detachment of guards arrest them, shortly after Astra makes a plea for help through the hole. K-9 drops into the shadows and is not seen by the guards.

The Marshal takes advantage and has Merak brought up as well, accusing all three of them of being Zeon spies. The Doctor tricks the Marshal's second-in-command, Shapp, into summoning K-9 with his dog whistle. K-9 enters and shoots the lights, allowing all three to run back into the tunnel towards the TARDIS. Meanwhile, a cloaked figure has materialized into the room and taken Princess Astra out, transmatting them to some other location.

The three fugitives run back to the TARDIS to find it blocked by debris from the last attack. K-9 returns and informs them that the guards ran down the other passage. Merak figures that Astra was behind the door and the Doctor has K-9 cut through the door. They find it empty except for Astra's tiara. With no alternatives, the Doctor and company return to the control room although he tells K-9 to keep watch on the wall of the radioactive room.

When the Doctor, Romana and Merak reenter the control room, they find the Marshal staring into a mirror "meditating". He welcomes them and decides the Doctor is to be the new strategist to fight the Zeons. He activates the viewscreen to see the space battle, although he is forced to recall their forces when they are beaten badly by the Zeon fleet. Realizing the Marshal is probably mad, the Doctor proposes a psychological force field and asks to speak to a Zeon prisoner to create one. The Marshal replies that they have no prisoners.

Back in the room, K-9 follows a signal into a duct where he becomes trapped in a chute heading towards the incinerator. The Doctor requests K-9 to help him and Shapp informs him of K-9's plight. The Doctor goes in after him and the Marshal begins freaking out that the Doctor might die. As he does, he pulls at his collar and Romana notices a chip on his neck. When the Doctor emerges, she tells him of this and they figure he is being controlled by another source.

The Doctor proposes to head to Zeos to capture a prisoner for the shield and the Marshal informs him of a transmat near the radioactive room. Meanwhile, Romana and Merak sneak around and find a hidden room that looks onto the control room through the Marshal's mirror. They see him being controlled through a skull that transmits through the mirror and rush to warn the Doctor. They arrive too late as the Doctor is grabbed by two masked men and transmatted off planet.

The masked men take the Doctor to a room where the leader, called the Shadow, interrogates the Doctor about the five found segments of the Key to Time. He also produces the TARDIS and demands that the Doctor go in and give them to him. The Doctor insists they are in a state of limbo and points out that if he enters the TARDIS, he could escape at will. The Shadow agrees that it is a stand off and is willing to wait him out. He and the men who grabbed him disappear.

Back on Atrios, Romana has K-9 reconfigure the lock to allow access to the transmat. Merak however grabs the key detector and transmats himself first, locking her out again. She once again has K-9 force the door, this time breaking the mechanism which keeps the door open. She and K-9 also transmat over. The open door is seen by Shapp while investigating the alarms and he too is transmatted to Zeos.

Romana catches up with Merak and takes back the detector although not before discovering a bracelet that belongs to Princess Astra. The Doctor runs into Shapp and figuring that Romana and K-9 have also come, summons K-9 with the dog whistle thus uniting the entire party.

K-9 informs the Doctor that he's been in contact with the Zeon commandant who is also a computer. The Doctor has K-9 take him to it and K-9 gets access to the core room where he introduces the war computer Mentalis. While examining the computer, they also learn that the Marshal is personally flying towards the planet with a load of weapons, intending to destroy Zeos for good.

The Doctor sends Shapp and Merak back to the transmat to try and stop the Marshal. Shapp is shot by a minion of the Shadow but falls into the transmat and makes it back to Atrios. He radios the Marshal to stop but the Marshal ignores him. Merak sees a projection of Astra summoning him but falls into one of the Shadow's traps and is knocked out.

The Doctor and Romana try to deactivate Mentalis' shut down state to allow it to defend itself from the Marshal's attack but it destroys the control mechanism to prevent them. They head back to the TARDIS and assemble the five segments of the key to time. When nothing happens, the Doctor crafts a facsimile of the sixth piece which allows him to create a small time loop around the Marshal's ship as it is firing it's missiles. However, as the key is not complete, the time loop begins to degenerate, meaning that the Marshal's missiles will eventually destroy Zeos and Atrios in the blast.

A mind controlled Astra finds Merak and tricks him into believing they need to find the Doctor and Romana. They do and the Doctor tells them to transmat back to Atrios with K-9. As they walk, they are attacked by the Shadow's guards. K-9 drives them off but is tricked into a transmat which sends him to the Shadow's planet. Astra ditches Merak and he is sent back to Atrios.

Astra finds the Doctor and Romana and tells them that she was separated when K-9 drove off the Shadow's guards. With the time loop deteriorating, the Doctor decides to go to the Shadow's planet to stop him. The three take the TARDIS there and Astra and Romana head off to find the Shadow. The Doctor waits and heads in a different direction.

The Shadow captures Romana with the help of the mind controlled Astra and uses a projection of Romana to confuse the Doctor. The Doctor catches on but is caught in a cell shortly afterward. In the cell, he runs into a fellow Time Lord named Drax who was threatened by the Shadow to build Mentalis and help him get the Key to Time. The Doctor convinces Drax to help him and repair some of the equipment from his TARDIS, which is on Zeos.

While Drax is busy, the Doctor investigates a tunnel outside of which he finds a mind controlled K-9. K-9 offers a deal from the Shadow to the Doctor to spare Romana's life but the Doctor grabs K-9 and throws him down the tunnel where Drax removes the mind control chip. The two then work together to repair the equipment.

The Doctor tries to get back to the TARDIS but is captured by the Shadow's guards who take him to Romana. The Shadow also removes Astra's mind control chip to return her to normal and tells the Doctor he is working for the Black Guardian. Knowing that the Doctor would gather the other five segments, he found the sixth and has sat in wait for the Doctor. The Doctor agrees to bring the Key segments out of the TARDIS. He and a guard make their way to the TARDIS but Drax is waiting for them with the repaired equipment. However, he fires at the Doctor, shrinking him. He then turns the gun on himself and shrinks himself as well.

The Doctor runs across the floor and he and Drax hide in a crack in the wall while the guard searches for them. The Shadow, watching from his screen, sees the door of the TARDIS unlocked and leaves to take the Key. The Doctor and Drax then run through the crack and into K-9, whom the Doctor orders to return to the Shaddow, pretending he is still under his control.

On Atrios, Shapp and Merak see the time loop holding the Marshal deteriorating. Merak, suspecting that the sixth segment of the Key to Time is connected with Astra, pulls up her medical file and notes a genetic anomaly that has passed through her family. Suspecting that she is the key, Merak attacks one of the Shadow's guards guarding the transmat entrance and forces him to take him to the third planet. He steals the guard's robes and follows the Shadow back into his lair.

The Shadow retrieves the Key to Time and brings it back to where Astra and Romana are held. Astra, realizing what she is, is drawn to the key and is transformed into the sixth segment when she touches the detector. The Shadow picks it up but before he can remove the fake segment, K-9 bursts through the wall and points out Merak. This distracts the Shadow long enough for the Doctor and Drax to exit K-9 and be returned to normal size. The Doctor grabs both the key and the sixth segment and runs with Romana, Drax and Merak down the tunnels.

Merak, in a state of confusion, wanders to find Astra. Drax also stays behind, promising to transmat himself and Merak while acting as rearguard. With only one second left in the time loop, the Doctor doesn't have enough time to replace the segment so he and Romana take the TARDIS back to Zeos. There, with Drax assisting him, the Doctor fully disables Mentalis, allowing him to put up a gravitational deflection field around Zeos.

As the time loop fails, the missiles from the Marshal's ship deflect away from Zeos and destroy the Dark planet. As it explodes, the Shadow begs forgiveness from the Black Guardian, who vows to finish the job and take the Key for himself.

Drax bids farewell to the Doctor, deciding to go into business with the Marshal to rebuild both Atrios and Zeos. The Doctor then places the sixth segment, completing the Key. As he does so, the Doctor becomes worried about the extreme amount of power that the wielder has and knows that he must get it to the White Guardian as quick as possible. The White Guardian appears on screen and asks for the Key so that he might restore balance to the universe. The Doctor asks him about Astra and the Guardian notes that while regrettable, the Key must remain in his possession.

The Doctor realizes that the Guardian is actually the Black Guardian masquerading as the White. He activates the TARDIS defenses. He also orders Romana to dematerialize the TARDIS as he pulls out the Key detector. Pulling the detector out redisperses the segments through time and space, freeing Princess Astra, who reunites with Merak as he recovers in a hospital bed. The Doctor and Romana decide to continue their travels but with a randomizer that will make it unpredictable to know where they are going and thus keep the Black Guardian on his heels about how to catch up to them.

Analysis

While not the worst thing in the world, this story had a lot of problems and easily takes the crown of the worst story of Season 16. This is even more unfortunate as it feels bad to end a pretty good season on such a sour note.

This story has a myriad of problems. To begin, it is six parts and you can feel the bloat. In fact, I ran through it in my mind and I think that if you skipped directly from Episode One to Episode Three, you would pick up the plot almost where you left off and missed nearly nothing, the bloat is that bad. Even in the episodes where there is a critical bit of information given out or a key change of scene, so much of what is said and done could be pared down from the full twenty minutes it's given to a span of five to ten; the bloat is just that bad.

There are other problems with the bloat as well in that there are at least a couple of scenes where we've come out of long stretches of people running around or doing other things to kill time and then get a massive info dump. The worst of these is at the start of Episode Four where the Doctor is bringing Merak and Shapp up to speed on everything that has happened. We saw some of those scenes but instead of exploring all of this in those scenes, we're only given little glimpses and then a large expositional piece. It is some of the worst way to convey information, especially since we had been given at least a little insight into what actually happened.

Tone is another problem in this story. The whole thing has an underlying tone of wanting to be serious and a dire situation to get out of. Yet we are flooded with characters who are clearly comedy elements. Shapp is a pratfalling type straight out of Monty Python. I actually thought he even looked like John Cleese. Drax is a British geographical stereotype (Brixton is where I think he was supposed to have picked up the accent) and is an odd left turn after the first four parts of the story. Even the Shadow is played so over the top (as opposed to the Marshal) that he is impossible to be taken too seriously. By the time you get into Episodes Five and Six, you feel as though you're in a pantomime show and nothing is to be taken seriously.

This story also suffers from a lack of compelling characters. I've already noted the comedic ones but both Astra and Merak are just so devoid of personality that they are just boring. When writing up the recap, I had to go back and correct myself because I accidently wrote "Romana" when I meant "Astra", mostly because Lalla Ward is given so little to play with that you only remember her as Lalla Ward i.e. Romana II. If she hadn't become Romana II, I'm not sure anyone would remember her, she has that little personality. You basically get that in Merak as he is also a completely forgettable milquetoast who's only defining feature seems to be his hunt for Astra. It's even worse when you think that there was a set up for some interesting political drama between them and the Marshal but that just fizzled out and we're left with dirty dishwater.

The one character apart from the Time Team that is actually interesting and compelling is the Marshal. He has a very odd personality shift starting in Episode Two but once it's exposed that he is being mind controlled by the Shadow, that makes a bit more sense. But even with the twists, his personality and range of acting is such that you want to wee what happens to him and interact with him. So of course he gets put in the time loop and is essentially removed from the story for the last three episodes.

Another character who is completely underused is Romana. She does almost literally nothing except summon K-9, ask the Doctor what is going on and get captured. She shows almost no initiative except in a couple of scenes while on Atrios and does nothing to help out. I think her lack of action on both Zeos and the Dark planet are especially annoying because there is no reason why she can't be of use. She knows computers just as well as the Doctor and there were no guards around at one point so there was no reason why she and Astra couldn't have made a run for it. It's just a waste of a good character.

The Doctor is enjoyable as always and he at least gets to keep the central focus. He alone of everyone is probably the only one who navigates the waters between drama and comedy but even he goes over the edge here and there. His "evil" moment after they've completed the Key is downright disturbing to look at it and not for anything to do with the portrayal of evil. Still, he is one of the few reasons to get invested in this story.

Perhaps one of the oddest things is that this story seems compelled to make K-9 be the hero. It's like the writers decided that although it was the Doctor who would save the day, K-9 would be the most dutiful sidekick who would get all the proper action scenes and directly solve all the major issues. K-9 rescues the Doctor from the Marshal; he allows Romana to access the transmat; he gives the Doctor access to Mentalis; he smuggles the Doctor and Drax into the central chamber to retrieve the Key from the Shadow; etc. I don't mind K-9 but any story where he is the one providing the solution to all the problems (similar to the sonic screwdriver) and it just becomes boring. It's like Batman going to his utility belt for some magic gadget every time. At some point, I want to see the regular hero actually think his way out of the problem, not produce a "get-out-jail-free" card.

Even the ending is a let down. There might have been some interest in it if the Black Guardian had first shown up on the TARDIS view screen as the audience would have to figure things out as much as the Doctor did. But instead we had that silly overlay with the Shadow talking as he dies and we are given a very clear shot of the Black Guardian. So we know instantly that it's the Black Guardian who is appearing. There is also the unsatisfactory point of the Doctor dispersing the Key nearly instantaneously. We are given no evidence that the White Guardian accomplished what he wanted to do with it so the whole quest ends up having been for naught. It was just such a sloppy end to what seemed to be a good premise.

One of the reasons that I think this story was so tonally off is that Douglas Adams came in as script editor at this time. So you went from the more serious minded Anthony Read to the comedic Adams. My suspicion is that Adams ended up pushing any unresolved threads in the script to the silly side and that's why the tone seems to start in a serious direction and then crater into absurdism.

I will say that I thought the direction was alright. There were a few moments where it was pretty obvious that they were trying to maximize what was a small filming space by taking obvious circular routes around the set but most were fairly well hidden. The lighting also helped give the story a darker mood, although that also contributed to the odd disconnect between what the focus of the story should be.

Overall, this is a pretty bad way to end the story arc. If it were more entertaining, I think it could be redeemed a bit, but it steady goes downhill and it gets boring. Even worse, you don't even get a proper climax at the end as you would think the White Guardian would have come in to give a little coda. The ending was done much better in Enlightenment where at least you had a direct confrontation between the two. Outside of a rewatch of the whole Key to Time season, I can't think of any particular reason to pull this one out and watch it again.

Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5