If swallowing The Trial of a Time Lord all in one go taught me anything, it's that swallowing an entire seasonal arc all in one go is a terrible thing to do. So I'm going to split up my Key to Time reviews over the next few months, and then do a review of the season as a whole around Christmas.
I'm starting with The Androids of Tara, which is the 4th of 6 stories this season, for two reasons. One, it's the one story from this season that fulfils that magical double criteria of not being written by the same author as one of my top five stories, and also actually being pretty good.* Two, it's the one story from that season that I actually have with me here at college as opposed to back at home.
*Blah blah David Fischer, blah blah "The Gamble With Time" blah blah. If Fischer actually wrote a considerable portion of City of Death, it would have his name on it. (Amusingly, the other contribution that Ben Aaronovitch, author of Remembrance of the Daleks, made to the show was Battlefield, the serial that killed Classic Who stone dead.)
And actually I should bring up a bit of backstory here. Not about the Key to Time season as a whole, because then I'd have to start griping about that a good three months before I intend to, but rather about this story. Seems another script fell through, and David Fischer was asked to bash something together, presumably because he happened to be handing in his scripts for The Stones of Blood right around then and was the only writer within the producer's line of sight. (This sounds harsh, but wait until I get to something else Fischer wrote.) Ironically, the serial that Fischer bashed together at the last minute (and, yes, plundered the plot from The Prisoner of Zenda outright) is a whole lot better than The Stones of Blood, the one he supposedly spent some time working on.
Now for those of you who have seen The Prisoner of Zenda, you can all sing along as I summarize the plot for the rest of us: Count Grendel has designs on the throne of Tara. To that end, he's kidnapped the Princess Strella, second in line to the throne, and the Prince Reynhardt, first in line. The plan is to crown the Prince, have him marry the Princess, kill the Prince, marry the Princess, kill the Princess, and then become King. Strella refuses to cooperate, so Grendel kidnaps Romana, who looks just like her, and when she refuses to cooperate, he has an android duplicate of Strella built instead. We the audience don't know about the duplicate (though we know that androids exist, since the Doctor's rigged one up to look like the Prince), so the cliffhanger to episode 2 is hereby the second-best* cliffhanger of the season: at the (fake) Prince's coronation, Strella shows up and pledges her loyalty. Suddenly the Doctor brains her with a sceptre. The audience gets a week to wonder whether he killed Romana or Strella, only to come back the next week and find out that it was actually an android duplicate.
*I actually did type "best" and then remembered The Pirate Planet, episode 3.
Then Grendel tries it again by mocking up a fake Romana to ambush the Doctor. The real Romana briefly escapes, only to be recaptured (filler, more than anything else), the Doctor and Grendel have a swordfight that's fairly limp until they move out of the videotaped studio footage and into the filmed location footage... and then it becomes the greatest sci-fi swordfight until The Empire Strikes Back. The Doctor trounces Grendel, who leaps from his own battlement and swims away. The Prince and the Princess presumably marry and live happily ever after; all we get is a bit of comedy as we realize that K-9 got stuck on a boat.
Oh, and Romana found the Key segment in the first five minutes of the adventure (while the Doctor was out fishing), because the author realized what a stupid plot device the Key was.
The best line of the serial is, of course, "Would you mind not standing on my chest? My hat's on fire." Watch it yourself to see how well that line makes sense.
Frankly, as the swordfight and the laser "bolts" demonstrate, this is the first time Doctor Who tries to do Star Wars. Yeah, they'll keep doing it for forever, but as I implied earlier, the swordfight here beats the one in that movie. No, really. The planet Tara is another vaguely medieval world, so the BBC costume department gets to strut its stuff while the Alien Makeup department/person/thing doesn't get a check this month. ...aside from that pathetic monster that menaces Romana right after she finds the Key segment, but that's probably an android made so Grendel can impress damsels in distress. At least, that's the story I'm going with.
Final score: 8/10. The requisite Graham Williams Comedy Moments don't really detract from the story too much. Grendel is of course the best villain of the season... in fact, behind Count Scarlioni, he's the best villain of the entire Graham Williams run. And then there's that swordfight, in which (apparently) Tom Baker actually does all his own stunts (please remember that the man was 45 at the time and started his run on the show by breaking his collarbone). Frankly, if you can't see this story's awesomeness past the horribly fake monster who only gets about a minute of screentime, then this isn't the show for you anyway.
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