Day 231: The Krotons Episode 4

There's honestly not too much to say about this serial. I mean, there probably are some interesting points to be made, but my two themes that I can draw upon are either the fact that there's some people involved with this who are going to become incredibly influential in the future of Doctor Who, and that this will officially be the last Doctor Who story that I see as a teenager. And the teenage idea will mostly be full of me talking about how much influence Doctor Who has had on my life, which can fit into any story, so I might just leave that for the future and focus on the future careers of the writer, director and script editor of this story.

Robert Holmes wrote this piece. He will, in future, become a stalwart writer for Doctor Who, writing some honest classics that really show how amazing this series is, one of which contains what is probably my favourite Doctor Who moment of all time (we'll deal with that when we come to it). Watching this, his first story for Doctor Who, it is difficult to see what we will see in him in the future. It's nothing particularly special, but it has some interesting ideas. Creatures who use mental power to travel, for instance, and they subjugate lesser beings not by force, but by education. It's stuff like this that shows that there might be something in this writer.

Also of note is David Maloney, the director. This is his second impression on the series, after handling The Mind Robber. This doesn't give him a lot to work with, but he's still able to make it watchable. Take for instance, his scene where the Krotons are destroyed. This is symbolised by having them fall on their backs, helpless. A lesser director would have just shown them flailing about, and yet Maloney is able to instead take a shot from their perspective, showing them helpless and lessening the inadvertent comedic value that would have been created by shooting them from another angle.

And finally, we come to the script editor, Terrance Dicks. He's technically the assistant script editor, yet this story is basically his baby. He's the person who brought this story to the production office as a good idea, and he is also willing to take good ideas and make them work. One of the problems that apparently persisted with the current production team is that they would often nurture one idea, then realise that it wasn't working for them and chuck it out, leaving them with no ideas. Dicks is able to take ideas and help them along, making them work in the process. He is able to take ideas and make them into functional pieces of fiction, meaning that under his guidance, Doctor Who will go from having a more variable quality, to being more stable and more productive in the future.