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The Doctor, Romana and K9 are on the trail of the sixth and most important of the segments of the Key to Time... but has it already been found? Who is one step ahead of the Doctor?
What do you think of The Armageddon Factor?
Men, young men, are out there, dying for it.
It's no classic, but I still enjoy it tremendously. There's a mix of brilliant ideas and naff ideas, good fx and rubbish ones. It's hopelessly over-ambitious and at the same time there are lingering shots of K-9 ambling down corridors to fill the run-time.
Similar to The Stones of Blood, it starts off going in one direction then veers off in a completely different one. The Marshall of Atrios is one of my favourite characters of the season and it's such a shame that he's sidelined (timelooped) for the second half of the story. He's far more entertaining than the Shadow, who's a bit too 'Nyahhahahah!' - although he himself is trumped by the all-time King of Nyahahahhah, Mr Valentine Dyall.
And whatever happened to Drax?
I actually like The Armageddon Factor. It's a great epic and a good end to a wonderful season. The confrontation with the Black Guardian is a magnificent scene, someone who'd return later on to menace the Fifth Doctor. 9/10
(I didn't know this until a few months ago but the story was supposed to be shown on UK Gold the day Princess Diana was killed but due to it featuring a princess in great peril, they pulled it and instead showed Planet of the Spiders.)
There's a wonderful grim doominess to the first couple of episodes, where the war feels very real and nasty somehow. I like those bits, and all the speeches and the rhetoric of war- great stuff, but somehow this all gets lost with silly scenes with Shapp and Drax and what was a promising story gets a bit lost towards the end. I do rather like the reveal that the whole war is being fought against a computer and that there are no people left on Zeos at all.
As Steve mentioned, The Marshall is wonderful, but I do like The Shadow too. I think the skull-like mask he wears is a great image and the fact that he can make K9 go bad is chillingly horrible.
I can never work out of the actual wrap up of the season is good or not. I'd struggle to think of a better way to end it if it didn't end like this...
On paper Armageddon is great .There are enough ideas thrown in here to make half a dozen stories - interplantary war, a puppet Marshall, Mentalis, shrinking Time Lords, Time Loops, Evil K9, a villain who's been plotting for thousands of years, and a showdown with the source of all Darkness.
Add to that actors of the calibre of John Woodvine and William Squire and you would think this was a guarenteed hit. Its the execution that really lets it down. Lack of time / money seems to make too much of it look very cheap, and there are some scenes where the acting is embarrisngly cringeworthy. We get padding worthy of a Saturday Morning Serial, yet other important bits of information are leaped over or bypassed (this is definitely one where the Target version is better than the TV one).
A good, if not potentially great season finale that just sort of slides into a damp squib for me.
I like the conclusion to the Key to Time business, with the final scene - certainly as a kid I didn't see that coming, which I rather liked!
I agree with Jon - this is a story which has so much which suggests that it could and should have worked, but it doesn't. It's too long, the acting veers from great to atrocious - whose idea was it to make Drax a watered-down Glitz? - and the best things in it are the Shadow and "Young men are out there dying for it!" (If you find any, let me know...;))
3/10