Doctor Who A-Z #47: The Krotons (1968-9)

The Krotons is something like the base material of Doctor Who. The Doctor and his friends roll up on a nameless planet where a group of people in an isolated community are being ruled by stubby robot monsters. Some of the oppressed community want to rebel, others want to submit, and the Doctor provides them with enough focus and enough of a plan to rally behind.  If you wanted to call it generic, you’d get no argument from me. Some people, though, hate it. I’ve seen it cited as one of the worst Patrick Troughton stories, which is a remarkable over-reaction. It’s not even the worst story of Season Six. It’s not even the worst Robert Holmes story of Season Six.

Holmes, by common consensus Doctor Who‘s greatest ever writer, racks up his first writing credit here. Perhaps this is why some fans recoil from The Krotons: the first Robert Holmes story should, by rights, be a dazzling announcement of a major talent. It should be the first jewel in the crown. It should, at least, be something other than a serviceable remix of things the show has spent the last two years doing over and over again. Let’s look at that from a different perspective, though. This isn’t a masterpiece Holmes sweated blood over, it’s a script that incoming script editor Terrance Dicks suggested Holmes do a few more drafts of in case they needed an emergency replacement for Dick Sharples’s planet-of-the-feminists comedy story Prison in Space. And when the production team realised that, yes, Prison in Space was as bad as it sounded, they scrapped it and put this into production instead.

Given all this, is it not at least a little impressive that Holmes’s audition piece for Doctor Who sees him nail the show’s formula so perfectly – not least because the show had only really settled on this as a formula within the last year or so? Certainly there are things in The Krotons that are as bad as the serial’s reputation. The titular monsters were obviously designed to be the new Daleks, a cynical motivation that never ends well. They’re bulky and hard to manoeuvre, a problem which director David Maloney does a creditable job minimising the impact of. They also inexplicably talk with Birmingham accents, a detail which made me laugh almost as much as the Kroton probe that menaces the Doctor at the end of the first episode. Absent of any other context, it looks as if Troughton is fighting off a giant metal penis.

None of this, though, is Holmes’s fault. His script has the odd cop-out, like the hitherto-unmentioned TARDIS defence mechanism which kicks in when a Kroton tries to blow it up. (This was reintroduced as, essentially, an anniversary-year in-joke in Wild Blue Yonder, but most later stories would just present the ship as near-indestructible, which is a much simpler way around the problem) The Doctor keeps mentioning the chemicals he finds on this nameless planet, suggesting the solution to the Kroton menace will involve some piece of scientific ingenuity. In the end, though, he just does them in with sulphuric acid, a chemical which disagrees with most things.

In other areas, the vagueness of the world-building seems to be hiding interesting, subversive ideas. The aliens the Doctor is protecting from the Krotons are the Gonds, who initially appear to be an absolutely generic group of wimpy space pacifists in the vein of the Dulcians or the early Thals. Holmes makes some weird, telling choices in sketching in their society, though. Despite slavishly obeying Kroton law the Gonds haven’t actually seen a Kroton for thousands of years, causing some of the more rebellious Gonds to question whether the Krotons even exist. Nevertheless, the Gond leaders continue to offer human sacrifices to the Krotons, an act of obedience which makes it fairly clear what the Krotons are meant to represent. The Gonds might be one letter away from being gods, but their society is a theocracy dedicated to the worship of the Krotons.

Admittedly, an attempt to read this story as an attack on religion falters on the grounds that the Krotons are unambiguously shown to exist. But what qualifies them to be gods? The Gonds assume that their city, with its amazing, inexplicable gadgets – like a big robot willy – must be controlled by the Krotons. Yet the Krotons seem to have little understanding of the city’s artificial intelligence themselves. They’re pinning their hopes on educating the Gonds using the city’s Learning Hall so the most intelligent Gonds can run it instead. The problem for the Krotons is that educating a slave population rarely works out well for the slave-masters, and as a result the information offered by the Learning Hall is so heavily censored as to doom the plan to failure.

Doctor Who would occasionally return to this kind of territory – Holmes’s own scripts for Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng-Chiang also have aliens and time-travellers being mistaken for gods. Sutekh and Magnus Greel, though, were mistaken for gods of the underworld, who tend to have fewer people standing up for them. Underneath its generic surface The Krotons is a story which says gods are stupid, and people can easily beat them. Perhaps its vagueness comes not from bad scripting, but from a fear of how the audience might react if Holmes makes the satire as overt as he later would in The Sun Makers or The Two Doctors. It must be said, too, that even if all this subtext came through clearly it would still hit the problem that we never really believe in the Krotons as being omniscient or powerful, let alone gods.

Either way, there is more of the later, subversive Holmes here than I was led to expect, and he relishes the ironies it throws up: for once, the angry mob smashing scientific equipment are against religion and for progress. The characterisation of the regulars is spot-on as well, with Jamie formidable and brave in the face of some nasty-looking Kroton torture, and the Second Doctor’s chaotic humour and love of subterfuge tempered by a certain maturing gravitas in Troughton’s performance. Best of all is Zoe, whose intelligence is now so central to the plot that even the Doctor worries aloud that she’s outshining him. She’s not, not quite, but this is still an unusually well-balanced TARDIS team, everyone filling a different role in the story. If The Krotons is the Troughton years on autopilot, it only shows what a well-run ship the show is at this point.

Next: The Seeds of Death (1969)

Graham’s Archive – The Krotons

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