Classic Doctor Who: The Key to Time
Mark Harrison | On 30, Apr 2023
Offering more than 600 Classic Doctor Who episodes broadcast between 1963 and 1996, BritBox and BBC iPlayer’s The Whoniverse are bigger on the inside. If you’ve watched all of the new series already, then why not join us as we turn on the TARDIS randomiser for a monthly primer on the adventures of the first eight Doctors…
As the longest-serving Doctor during the show’s original run, Tom Baker is the star of numerous different versions of Doctor Who. His Fourth Doctor is a funny, eccentric and righteous figure and is understandably regarded as the quintessential Time Lord. And, tempting as it is to choose highlights from his seven seasons in the role for this Fourth Doctor column, it’s the most atypical season that might best sum up his eclectic era.
In Season 16, all six serials are interconnected by the Doctor’s quest to assemble the six segments of the Key to Time, Doctor Who’s answer to Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet. This powerful McGuffin is being contested by manifestations of good and evil – the White Guardian enlists the Doctor to retrieve the disguised segments and keep them from his counterpart, the Black Guardian, who seeks absolute power to corrupt the universe.
Baker’s fifth season also marks the introduction of a new companion, the show’s first major female Time Lord, Romana (Mary Tamm), a recent graduate from Gallifrey who’s considerably more academically accomplished than the Doctor but far less experienced in travelling through time and space. Based on producer Graham Williams’ concept, the scripts come from Doctor Who greats Robert Holmes, Douglas Adams, and Bob Baker and Dave Martin, as well as newcomer David Fisher.
While modern fans are well versed in recurring themes such as Bad Wolf, Trenzalore, and the Timeless Child, classic Doctor Who seasons weren’t connected beyond individual serials until this one, originally broadcast in the show’s 15th-anniversary year – but before you binge it all, here’s what you need to know about The Key To Time:
Previously on Doctor Who…
A bit of context first – the Fourth Doctor goes adventuring off-Earth almost immediately after regenerating, and noticeably drifts away from picking up contemporary Earth companions for most of his life. At the start of this season, he’s already lost two best friends as a result of trips home to Gallifrey – Sarah Jane Smith and Sevateem warrior Leela – and now travels with K9 Mark II.
Despite moral panics over the show’s violence and horror content from Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association in the early years of Tom Baker’s run, the show remained hugely popular. But after the BBC conceded that Doctor Who was too scary, Williams was tasked with revamping the tone of the show.
Not coincidentally, Season 16 is the first to be produced after Star Wars turned up in UK cinemas, bringing with it a revival of space-opera storytelling and a huge leap forward in special effects. Doctor Who has rarely had enough of a budget for the latter, and so, this season’s scripts trade heavily in galactic royalty, quirky robots, and yes, the odd star war.
The Ribos Operation
“Have you ever looked up at the sky at night and seen those little lights?”
The Doctor and K9 are rudely interrupted by the White Guardian foisting a quest and a new companion on them. Along with Romana, they go hunting for the first disguised segment of the Key to Time on the medieval planet Ribos and come between two con men and their mark, a deposed tyrant called the Graff Vynda-K (Paul Seed).
Scripted by Robert Holmes, The Ribos Operation is a nice little four-part caper, packed with the writer’s signature supporting characters. Planet hustlers Garron (Iain Cuthbertson) and Unstoffe (Nigel Plaskitt) are a classic Holmesian double-act, and the Graff is a hateful and histrionic villain, but the poignant, understated highlight is Binro the Heretic (Timothy Bateson), an outcast for his belief in life on other worlds.
The Pirate Planet
“Destroy everything!”
The great Douglas Adams makes his first contribution to Doctor Who with The Pirate Planet and, despite a suitably troubled writing process, it turns out to be an absolute banger. Bound for the planet Calufrax, the Doctor and Romana are surprised to arrive on the prosperous planet Zanak, where the furious Pirate Captain (Bruce Purchase) raves on high and the telepathic Mentiads rove around the surface.
Steven Moffat once said Adams “brought the revelation of what Doctor Who would look like if it was written by a genius” and while some judicious script editing was required to bring the big ideas and surreal comedy in, The Pirate Planet bears that almost as well as the following season’s City of Death. In the spirit of Season 16, this is more of a big, colourful sci-fi runaround than that, but it’s also the strongest standalone serial of the run.
The Stones of Blood
“The Cailleach demands blood.”
Like the previous season’s Image of the Fendahl, The Stones of Blood is a folk-horror story set on contemporary Earth, and the only Earthbound story in the Key to Time arc. David Fisher’s debut story finds archaeologists researching a set of standing stones in Cornwall and uncovering a mystery that connects a Druidic sect with the third segment of the Key.
Boasting a pair of cracking guest performances by Beatrix Lehmann and Susan Engel as archaeologists, the serial proves one of the most creatively eclectic stories of the season. Despite its grounded setting, it gives us aliens ranging from the titular Stones – large blood-drinking rocks called the Ogri – to the show’s first entirely VFX-based creatures: advanced justice machines called the Megara. What’s more, it’s the 100th serial in the original run and it was broadcast in the weeks leading up to Doctor Who’s 15th anniversary on 23rd November 1978.
The Androids of Tara
“Ten thousand gold pieces to the man who shoots the Doctor!”
David Fisher also writes the next story, which nowadays would be called a romp. The Androids of Tara is a rollicking reinterpretation of The Prisoner of Zenda, in which the wicked Count Grendel tries to prevent the coronation of Taran Prince Reynart, and the fate of the planet depends on the Doctor convincingly operating a faulty robot duplicate of the heir in his absence.
In any season that didn’t also have The Pirate Planet, this would be the comedy outing, piling sci-fi farce and swashbuckling action high on top of Zenda’s tried-and-tested plot structure. Baker is on superb form, too, clumsily manoeuvring through the royal intrigue and convoluted stakes until, brilliantly, it’s time for a big sword fight at the end. Silly as it is, the romantic and literary allusions here are a better working model of a post-horror Doctor Who than most of the stories that followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Power of Kroll
“Kroll! Kroll! Kroll! Kroll! Kroll! Kroll!”
In contrast to The Ribos Operation, Robert Holmes’ second Season 16 serial came with a couple of stipulations – first, the BBC wanted the humour to be scaled back, and second, script editor Anthony Read wanted the serial to feature the series’ biggest monster ever. And so, The Power of Kroll is a more typical base-under-siege story, involving the crew of an off-world methane refinery on the third moon of Delta Magna, and the native “Swampies”, who worship the titular giant squid.
Notably, the refinery is crewed by serial guest stars Phillip Madoc and John Abineri, both on their fourth appearances, and K9 guest actor John Leeson, appearing on camera for once. As to the story, Holmes would later call it his least favourite of all his serials – it’s solid fare, but it turns out that as Key To Time adventures go, the combination of “less funny” and “more effects-driven” doesn’t make for many highlights.
The Armageddon Factor
“As from this moment, there’s no such thing as free will in the entire universe. There’s only my will because I possess the Key to Time!”
The quest for the Key to Time culminates in a long-running war between neighbouring planets Atrios and Zeos, where an agent of the Black Guardian is waiting to thwart the Doctor and Romana and steal the other segments. As a conclusion, The Armageddon Factor feels most like a space opera in the Star Wars vein, but it winds up an oddly scatter-brained proposition – perhaps because Bob Baker and Dave Martin dissolved their partnership midway through writing.
What’s more, while the other serials are four episodes each, this six-part finale sprawls from Atrios to Zeos and beyond. Weirdest of all, it also marks the one and only appearance of Drax (Barry Jackson), another old classmate of the Doctor’s. But finally, an unusually serialised season ends in the most Doctor Who way imaginable – the finale of this season-long arc is inevitably anti-climactic, but it also creates a new status quo that immediately gets you excited for the next adventure.
Further viewing
The Armageddon Factor features uncredited contributions from outgoing script editor Anthony Read and his replacement, Douglas Adams, who went on to have a difficult time wrangling Season 17. As mentioned, City of Death is the most successful outing of that more comedic run of stories, but Adams departed after his planned finale, Shada, was cancelled by BBC strikes.
Mary Tamm left Doctor Who after one season and The Armageddon Factor guest-star Lalla Ward was cast as her second incarnation in the serial after. Adams’ off-kilter regeneration sequence at the start of Destiny of the Daleks has the Fourth Doctor argue that she can’t borrow Princess Astra’s appearance but allow it after she seemingly tries on a few other ill-fitting appearances – there was a mixed response from fandom on that one, even back in the late 1970s…
Directly after this season, the Doctor and Romana put the TARDIS on shuffle for a while with a randomiser device that stops from the Black Guardian tracking them. Nevertheless, the villain lures the Fifth Doctor into a trap in Season 20’s Black Guardian trilogy of serials, comprising Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, and Enlightenment.
Classic Doctor Who would return to the season-long story format eight years later with The Trial of a Time Lord, but we’ll get to that…