One curiosity of the Tom Baker years is its reluctance to use old villains. After the understandable caution of his first, continuity-packed season, the show settles into a groove of one previously established threat per season – sometimes, in Season Thirteen and Season Sixteen, even fewer than that. This sparing approach clearly didn’t hurt the show’s popularity – Doctor Who recorded its highest-ever ratings during this period. It does, however, raise the question of who these old monster stories are for. Bear in mind that, as The Keeper of Traken airs, the show is nearly three years away from its first VHS release, and repeats are extremely rare. A villain who hasn’t appeared in years might plausibly be a villain the audience has forgotten about.
The show deals with this in a variety of ways. Destiny of the Daleks is working with unforgettable, pop-icon monsters, and it knows it. The Invasion of Time, by contrast, is aware it could use a scene where Tom Baker hisses the word “Sontarans!”. The Deadly Assassin reinvents the Master so thoroughly that it doesn’t matter whether you remember his appearances alongside Jon Pertwee or not, which leads us to The Keeper of Traken, where the solution is… er, dunno?
You could argue that this is irrelevant at this point, that if you’re exploring old Who you’ve probably read some sort of series guide, most of which will tell you that this is a Master story. It doesn’t feel like one, though. There isn’t a hint of the Master’s appearance until the penultimate episode, where we see the story’s apparent villain – a living statue called the Melkur – being piloted by a brown, slimy hand emerging from a ragged black sleeve. This tracks pretty well with how the Master was depicted in The Deadly Assassin; it also resembles roughly eight thousand other Doctor Who villains. The confirmation that we’re dealing with one of the show’s key baddies comes about halfway through the final episode. Before then, the threat is that the apparent villain is being controlled by a different villain. This has the feel of a plot twist, but since we have no reason to suspect this second villain is more powerful or more interesting than the first – or, indeed, much idea who he is – it becomes a sort of cargo-cult drama, arranging events in a more-or-less dramatic shape then being perplexed when they don’t form a compelling story.
It has the feeling of a story that’s just happening, rather than being told.
And unfortunately this is just how The Keeper of Traken rolls. It has the feeling of a story that’s just happening, rather than being told. Writer Johnny Byrne was so irked with script editor Christopher H Bidmead’s changes to his work that he actually tried to get his original draft made as a Colin Baker story, as if it was Go Set a Watchman or something. The fact that he was rejected, along with the not-exactly-classic calibre of his later scripts for the show, might be seen as a vindication of Bidmead. But I’m not sure Bidmead has improved the quality of a standard Byrne script here – he’s just made it bad in a different way. For all the innumerable flaws of something like Warriors of the Deep, it is at least written by someone who understands he’s writing an adventure story. The Keeper of Traken, by contrast, begins with another entry in Bidmead’s long, inexplicable quest to rob the TARDIS of its mystique as the titular Keeper teleports into it, spends ten gruelling minutes info-dumping about the Melkur and Traken’s society, then buggers off and leaves the Doctor and Adric to decide whether or not they want to land there or not. Perhaps it would be cliched and overfamiliar to have the Doctor and Adric land on the planet, get into trouble and work things out from there. It would also be entertaining.
We are told that Traken is a perfect, balanced, harmonious society, but since we never see or even hear about anything beyond one small elite clique, it’s anyone’s guess what that might mean. Is it a utopia? A dystopia? We never learn – that would mean engaging with life on the ground. Instead, we get a lot of chatter about consulates and diplomatic immunity, a Phantom Menace-level misapprehension about what a young audience might be interested in. Director John Black films it in the style of the contemporaneous BBC-TimeLife Shakespeare project, which means nearly every scene is just four people milling around an admittedly very impressive city square set talking to each other. He seems of a mind with Bidmead when it comes to jettisoning the standard pleasures of adventure SF, and if we’re being generous we could read his failure to correctly line up an effects shot as a form of genre critique. (The final scene alone has two egregious examples of this)
This is normally the point in a negative Doctor Who review where we get to praise the regulars for maintaining some level of quality. Sadly, this time we can’t. The two recurring cast members who are introduced this episode – Sarah Sutton and Anthony Ainley – are fine, particularly Ainley. Our way into the story, though, is provided by Tom Baker and Matthew Waterhouse. Dispensing with the duty of analysing Matthew Waterhouse’s performance, because he’s Matthew Waterhouse, we’re left with Tom Baker. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him as completely checked-out as this. He would be visibly weary throughout his final season; in Logopolis that’s obviously the point, while Full Circle proved he could still be roused to a strong performance if the script was good enough. That’s not the case in The Keeper of Traken. By now Doctor Who has spent a long time taking tonal cues from its mercurial star, which has helped it survive some rough patches. When Baker is feeling moody, the show becomes darker. When he’s feeling larky, it becomes funnier. Here, the series is having to confront what happens when he’s just bored.
The answer, unfortunately, is that it becomes boring. The Keeper of Traken at least has a strong aesthetic; the sets are, as mentioned previously, gorgeous, and the Melkur is a unique-looking monster. Rather than the series’ usual Gothic or space-age sensibilities, it’s based on Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, whose roots in the war-obsessed Italian Futurist chapter means this is yet another Doctor Who monster rooted, albeit distantly, in the aftershock of fascism. All this means, though, is that The Keeper of Traken is the Doctor Who equivalent of a musical where you leave humming the sets.
Next: Logopolis (1981)
