Doctor Who A-Z #128: The King’s Demons (1983)

You could argue that The King’s Demons is the last ordinary story of the classic series. Over the course of the ’80s, as the show becomes a bizarrely early victim of the streaming-era curse of shortened seasons with no filler episodes, the middle ground of Doctor Who falls away; everything starts aiming to be epic or experimental or operatic, rather than solid. On paper, it sounds like a good thing – why would anyone want a solid filler episode instead of something that’s aiming for the stars? But those ambitious episodes have a habit of turning out either magnificent or embarrassing, whereas your standard base-under-siege, UNIT-vs-aliens or pseudo-historical stories are usually at least watchable. Once Doctor Who figured out what it was good at towards the end of the Hartnell years, it went on a remarkable tear of quality, and part of this is because each season had at least two of these stories which were all but guaranteed to work.

Unfortunately, The King’s Demons is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. It has a reputation as cheap and forgettable, at best an aperitif before the anniversary special of The Five Doctors, cruelly shunted into the season finale slot when Eric Saward’s Dalek script had to be postponed. I am not planning to overturn that consensus today. It’s one of those Doctor Who stories that just exists. There are a couple of cringeworthy elements, but mostly nothing too bad – just nothing good either. It was written to introduce a new companion, rather than tell a compelling story, and when the new companion turned out to be a dud its last remaining reason to exist was kicked away.

The new companion was Kamelion, the product of producer John Nathan-Turner’s belief that the show could one-up Star Wars by having a robot character played by an actual robot. The creepy, inexpressive, immobile quality of Kamelion has been blamed on its designer, Mike Power, dying in a boating accident before it could be properly completed, but with over four decades hindsight it’s probably worth acknowledging that Doctor Who absolutely could not pull off a fully automated robot companion in 1983. It was never going to happen. What is strange is that Terence Dudley’s script provides you with an easy get-out for this. Kamelion is, as his name implies, able to project holographic disguises of anyone he chooses. You don’t have to have the robot there if he doesn’t work – you could bring in a guest star as the Kamelion of the Week if the mood took you.

The fact that this didn’t happen – that Kamelion was stuffed in a TARDIS locker until he was killed off in Planet of Fire – is a symptom of something bigger in the Davison years. It’s not that things are going wrong – things were always going wrong in Doctor Who, as they do in every television show, or indeed any human endeavour. It’s that the will never seemed to be there to correct them. It was immediately apparent, for example, that the Master-focused season nineteen closer Time-Flight had been a disaster. Yet rather than build the Master back up as a formidable threat, we get The King’s Demons, where the Master does exactly the same things in a slightly toned-down register.

This time, the Master’s cunning disguise is as a man with a beard, but a different-coloured one than his own, and an accent which is allegedly French. As in Time-Flight, he is introduced halfway through the story, which when the story is two episodes long is an absolutely suicidal structuring decision. Once the Master is revealed, we learn he has replaced King John with Kamelion in order to… [drumroll] prevent the signing of the Magna Carta? Given that Season Twenty was all about bringing old villains back, it’s anyone’s guess why they didn’t create a new incarnation of the Meddling Monk for this, as even the Doctor is forced to admit this is minor-league villainy by the Master’s standards. It was, unfortunately, a sign of things to come.

Most Doctor Who historical stories, by now, are about genre rather than history, and The King’s Demons deserves some credit for bucking that trend. It’s just that here, the history gets in the way of the drama. We’re supposed to sense that there is something amiss from how belligerent and abrasive Gerald Flood’s King John is, but since John is generally depicted as a useless king who signed one good piece of legislation, this doesn’t ring through as much as it would if the Master had replaced, say, Elizabeth I, Henry V or some other monarch who maybe wasn’t as much of a historical fulcrum but is still generally considered “good”. Indeed, the first episode seems to be an attempt at misdirection: last season had a two-part pure historical penned by Terence Dudley, so this season we’ll make them think we’re doing the same thing. But Black Orchid was nowhere near memorable enough to make this gambit work, and even if it was, one episode of the “prithee, good sir” cod-medievalisms of The King’s Demons is enough to have even Mary Beard begging for some aliens to show up.

With the supposed wrongness of the replacement King John barely registering, it’s hard to know what we’re meant to invest in during the first episode. Right on the heels of his dramatic decision to reject the Black Guardian, Turlough spends most of this story imprisoned in a dungeon, and the Doctor and Tegan seem – rather rudely – barely minded to investigate. As in Black Orchid, Dudley is faithful to the Hartnell-era concept of the pure historical as a place where the Doctor can stretch his legs and explore without getting into an adventure straight away. Even if this wasn’t a key factor in the decline of these stories – and there are a thousand competing explanations for why they faded away – it sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of the increasingly action-focused direction the show was taking after Earthshock.

Even when the serial goes for ’80s spectacle, it’s still some way beneath the bar set by directors like Fiona Cumming and Peter Grimwade. The final mind duel between the Doctor and the Master is a pallid imitation of The Brain of Morbius, and Kamelion is, as noted above, a total failure. The one germ of promise in The King’s Demons, apart from its impressive set design and costuming, is that it represents a rare stab at a story about the Master getting a companion, one of the few obviously promising Doctor Who ideas that the show hasn’t touched. Obviously such an alliance would be short-lived, and so it proves here, with Kamelion defecting to the Doctor’s side. But there’s no sense that the Master sees Kamelion as anything other than a convenient tool to execute his dullest ever plan. The character’s Mephistopholean aspect is absent where it’s most needed: he should be able to tempt as well as threaten. Still, this inability to charm, enchant or seduce is a good match for the story around him.

Next: The Five Doctors (1983)

Graham’s Archive – The King’s Demons

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