Day 496: The Power of Kroll Part 1

There's a seriousness at the heart of this story. Instead of us being greeted with a swashbuckling adventure or a Hammer Horror style story about vampiric stones, this story instead appears to concern itself with a refinery where the staff are enslaving the native people as well as setting up refineries all over their land. This is something that they object to, but they don't respond to this in the normal way that we'd expect for a Doctor Who story, that is wait for the Doctor to come along and then have some form of revolution. Instead, we see them ordering guns and ammunition from a gun-runner, planning to take back their land by force. Granted, this isn't an idea that is new to Doctor Who, but I feel that it gains an extra seriousness because of the fact that they are using real guns. These aren't laser pistols or the like, these are real machine guns, thus driving home the point that these guns will be used to outright kill people. This seriousness is something that we haven't really seen in Doctor Who for a while, and it's something that we'll see a bit more of as the series continues. But for now, let's just see where The Power of Kroll will take us as the serial continues...