Day 501: The Armageddon Factor Part 2

Edit: So whilst watching some special features on The Armageddon Factor DVD, I noticed that they were mentioning the fact that Part 1 of this story was the 500th broadcast episode of Doctor Who. This perplexed me, mainly because I had this down as the 500th episode. I then consulted my backlog and discovered that I had made a mistake when noting down episode numbers around the time of The Deadly Assassin. So whilst I fix the episode numbers so that this won't happen again, I'll leave this entry standing as is except with the relevant numbers changed. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

501 episodes. On this blog we've covered 501 individual episodes of Doctor Who. We've visited junkyards, ancient Egypt, oil refineries, small English villages and distant alien worlds. And through all of that time the series still produces some truly great moments.

Take, for instance, this episode. The Armageddon Factor concerns two warring planets: Atrios and Zeos. For the first section of the story we are stranded on Atrios, and we see the destruction and damage that the war has brought. But then we reach the point that the episode has been building up to: the battle between the two planets' respective fleets of spaceships. We view this battle from afar, looking only at a monitor screen revealing the ships and their movements. We wait and see the battle to take place, only to see Atrios' fleet be utterly demolished by their enemies.

Looking at the scene from a production point of view, it's incredibly low budget. We're confined strictly to one set, which is used to have the main characters commentating on the events. There's also not enough money to afford spaceship models either, meaning that our only representation of the warring fleets is by a series of dots on a screen, which flash brightly and then disappear when they get hit. But despite the lack of production values, it still comes across well. This is mainly due to the performances of the people watching the events, in particular that of John Woodvine as the Marshal, a man who desperately hopes that his fleet will survive. He pleasingly remarks on every hit with a quiet glee, only to be continually reminded of how the ships being hit are his own, and that he is losing badly. It helps the situation come across as a desperate one, and makes us empathise with their hopeless cause.

And this scene is just another great scene that we've covered over the past 501 days. It makes up for a lack in budget with strong acting, some excellent direction and some very well made sets, thus making for some incredibly good television. But there are still 300 or so episodes left, which can only mean that We've Got Work to Do!