Ketina here,
Final part of The Krotons, here we go.
First aired on 18 January 1969
H = Historian
K = Ketina
R = Ronelyn
Sp = Spoo
MS = Mini-Spoo
EG = ElfGrrl
P = Photobug
A = Altair
E = Ezio
Cz = Cz
—
EG: “Hey, I’ll use this thiny, to poke this thingy, so I can go through this thingy, to do this thingy, and then to do this other thingy.” For Jamie I don’t think just poking weird alien spots is a good idea.
E: Yeah, but when has that ever stopped him?
EG: He might get destroyed or blown up.
E: And when has that ever stopped him?
MS: Never.
Sp: <Kroton voice> We appear to be out of high brains. Perhaps we can take a bunch of medium brains and scoop them together.
R: I’m just glad that the Doctor didn’t die in the styrofall.
MS: Yeah, the revenge of the styrofoam.
H: And cardboard, I might add.
MS: Oh no! The Styrofoam and cardboard is going to fall on me. Nooo!!!
EG: “I’m going to lift this very fake and light rock” <moans and groans> “It seems so heavy.” <laughter
MS: Oh my god. It’s so hard to lift a styrofoam rock!
R: <Kroton voice> “Give us the Doctor or we will kill some random guy.”
<laughter>
R: “Give us the Doctor” Kazatch. “Why did you just kill that guy?” “Because he was over there.”
EG: And we also want to scare and threaten you. Even though we’re not so scary.
MS: “Yeah, Once you get to know us we actually make awesome cookies.”
H: I’m just going to say it, with the exception of the Jamie Beta scene, and some bits of business with the Doctor and Zoe, this was boring as heck. Is it me?
E: It tried, but it did not succeed. Alternately, gold star, you tried.
Sp: Rock fell on guys crotch! Oh, and more spinning Kroton heads. That’s worth the price of admission right there. And some of the inter-Gond power struggle stuff was vaguely necessary.
H: Necessary, yes. Interesting…
MS: Not so much.
Sp: The acting was the best out of the four episodes.
H: You think?
Sp: A low bar, to be sure, but I think we actually got some decent performances out of a whole bunch of people who don’t really deserve to go back and get named again.
R: AlphaGond, GammaGond.
Sp: WoebeGond…
H: There was at least one genuinely great actor in a so-so role. He did okay.
K: Scenery chewing guy or bland guy?
H: I was talking about Eelek.
K: Oh, big forehead guy.
R: Careful enunciation statement guy?
H: Sure. Philip Madoc.
K: I wanted scientist guy to actually cover his nose as well as his mouth to protect from the fumes.
H: None of them had tenth grade chemistry. Including the Doctor and Zoe. You don’t sniff, you waft. That was the first thing I got taught.
R: You’re dealing with an era when they used to give mercury and radium in kid’s chemistry sets.
Sp: Well, let’s run down the list. Chemist dude had never learned how to learn. The rest of the Gonds were too dumb. The Doctor’s an alien. Zoe’s got that tiny, tiny nose.
H: That tiny adorable nose.
Sp: Quite. Jamie has the lungs of a warrior. And, of course, the Kroton have no noses.
H: So how do they smell.
Sp: <Kroton voice> “Terrible”
<general laughter>
P: You know, dude, I passed on that joke. What does that tell you.
K: Wow. Anyway, good science, not so much.
P: You would have thought that before he left, he would have said there are things called atoms, and it’s what things are made of, go figure that out.
H: But the Greeks had to figure it out for themselves. The Gonds should have to figure it out for themselves.
P: Well, at least give them the scientific method.
K: It’s Doctor Who. He has to leave. It’s the rules.
Sp: So I’m going to take a wild stab and guess that this story’s final thoughts are going to be working backwards from “so, how could it have been worse.”
P: Deadly acid.
R: It’s in there.
Sp: I mean, like, it’s a four part story. And it really only needed two of them.
R: “Look stupid people!” <Kroton voice> “Yes, we bred stupid people.”
K: Yeah, so kill all the smart ones, and then hope someone will actually get smart? What the hell? That made no sense.
P: Should have had them bred first.
R: Maybe the reason that the Krotons never taught the Gonds about science is because the Krotons don’t know about science.
H: <Kroton voice> “We are medium brains at best.”
R: <Kroton voice> “We know how to drive the ship and fire the colander cannons. And that’s really about it.”
<the group somehow devolves into Colander jokes. Replace The Highlander with The Colander and go from there.>
P: Isn’t the fact that they want brains more zombie-esque than robot-esque?
H: Well, they don’t want the brains as such as they want the brain activity. The brain waves.
P: Also, how could you pilot an entire starship off of imagination.
E: Science.
P: Science my foot.
K: Gah! It’s crappy Doctor Who technobabble. It’s not imagination, or any of that. It’s mental psychic junk or whatever.
Sp: Wibbly wobbly story-wory.
H: I think it’s brain activity. Because the idea that the higher brains with more connections with brain power could do it.
P: I think the argument here is not it’s powering the ship, but instead it’s controlling it. Does that seem fair?
R: Oh.
H: I think it’s both. Because remember that the Krotons themselves were reactivated or resurrected based on the Doctor and Zoe’s mental activity. They tore something from their brains to do it. So it could be a power thing as well as a control thing. Does that make sense.
P: Still, laws of physics not obeyed.
H: Perfectly valid.
R: Hi, I’m Doctor Who. Have we met?
Sp: So, this story did help establish one important thing. That Jamie is such a trusted companion now that the Doctor can completely forget about him, and almost leave him, and just have faith that he’ll reappear when the moment is right. You know, like in a computer game, when you get too far from your NPC, and the game says “hang on” and boop, he’s right there.
R: “I can’t leave the story-line without my friend Superfly Johnson.” Cryptic reference to Daikatana, the worst video game in history. Look it up.
H: Anyway, are we at final thoughts for this episode and story?
P: I think you’re right that the story plot went from a casual stroll to warp 9 in 10 minutes. And that was boring. Because even our young member of the crew, Elfgrrl, could see that the episode turned into literally an algorithm of how to solve this problems without explaining where the algorithm came from. The complaint I have about this episode is that we go from a very simple cliff hanger that should have killed him…
H: It was a gyp. Rocks fell on him, and then when they found him there were no rocks on him. I’m calling shenanigans!
Sp: No no no Emergency Temporal Shift!
P: So the story cliff hanger is, oh no he’s been squished, and then “I’m fine” and then squished again, and then “I’m fine” again. And then the story suddenly turns into a sequence of unexplained events to solve the problem. So I found this episode to be unsatisfying.
Sp: It’s almost as if they should have thrown out the first and third episodes and expanded on what they did with the second and fourth episodes. Maybe there’s a little bit of pacing and timing of exposition that would have made some of this…oh, who am I kidding. This one can’t be saved, sorry.
H: Well, there are some really good ideas there. Like I said previously, it’s the execution.
P: Yeah, they failed to kill him.
Sp: <laughs>
H: The plot itself could be really interesting. The differently based life forms who could hybernated by turning themselves back into the elemental state, everything powered by mental energy, the idea of the trap to build up intelligent life. All of this could have been very interesting. But it wasn’t. Oh well.
K: Final thoughts…
A: It was awesome.
E: If only my chemistry classes were that interesting…
P: I have no further thoughts.
Sp: I think my previous final-ish thoughts still hold. Lots of good pieces to work with but they needed slightly bigger sets, slightly better director and to start from the 2nd and 4th episodes at their base. This would have come across a lot more strongly as a recon, strangely. But it gave us monsters with spinning heads and really, what else do you want from 60’s era Who?
—
And there you go.
-Ketina
NEXT TIME: THE SEEDS OF DEATH PART 1
