The Power of Kroll

part 1

So I’ve never seen this one before, but evidently it involves a race of green folks called Swampies who are enslaved by some other folks. That’s all I get from the netflix packaging, so let’s just go directly to the video, shall we.

Written by Robert Holmes. We don’t start in the TARDIS this time, but in a military-type base, of the usual Doctor Who sort, with desks and control panels and no windows. There’s a lot of stainless steel and guns around. A man in a sort of uniform comes in, followed by a green-skinned and -haired fellow in a leprechaun-looking outfit. He’s even got a big shiny buckle on his belt. He’s carrying the other man’s things, until they’re snatched away and he’s dismissed. The other guys in the base welcome the newcomer, There’s four men in here and I’ll never be able to get their names straight, so “that guy” it is unless one of them becomes important. One of them is all upset because on the radar screen he was using to track the newcomer’s approach, there’s a second signal that approaches the base, then veers off into a nearby swamp. Radar wonders why anyone would want to go out to the swamp, and Newbie says he’s heard rumors about a group called the Sons of Earth trying to incite a rebellion among the Swampies, who I assume are the green blokes who live in the swamp. What I took to be a military base is actually some kind of refinery, and the company these guys work for is sort of concerned about the Swampie issues. More gossip, and Newbie grabs a gun and goes off down the corridor. Everyone gets back to work. Exposition scene? Kind of a fail.

Vworp vworp vworp. The TARDIS remats up to its eyebrows in swamp grass and reeds. There’s a sort of crunch, and reeds near the door start moving, then somebody must come out, and his progress can only be followed by the reeds parting a little and springing back. “Was it absolutely necessary,” Romana says somewhere in the tangle, “to land in a quagmire?” They struggle out of the mess and onto a little hill of dry ground, where Four seems to be doing a Hitler salute or something. I’d put this down to his usual inexplicable nature, but he drops his hat a few times and picks it up, explaining that he’s checking the gravity, which seems a little low. “This must be one of the moons of Delta Magna!” he says excitedly. He licks one finger and holds it up, thinks for a second. “I’d say … the third!”
“Doctor,” says Romana gently – she’s dressed much more reasonably this episode, in a rather cute orange vest over brown leggings, “Sometimes … I don’t think you’re quite right in the head.” She has definitely mellowed out since the first episode, too. She’s having issues getting the locator to work on this planet and goes off to find some higher ground.

The company chaps are looking for a gun runner named Rohm-Dutt (sounds more like a Star Wars bounty hunter to me), who they think was causing the signal on the radar. Supposedly he’s supplying guns to the Swampies. Two of them hop in a fan boat – the kind you always see on shows about the Everglades – and speed off.

We cut around to all the different groups of characters. Four is sitting on a hillock somewhere with a huge pile of reeds he’s cut down. He sorts them out carefully and picks one, strips off the leaves, and starts whittling it down into something. Two green Swampies paddle their canoe along the swamp, carrying a guy I presume is Rohm-Dutt. Romana is wandering around looking for a signal (how prescient – and this was long before cell phones) when two Swampies jump up and grab her. She drops the locator in the grass. Four, meanwhile, has finished his flute and is playing some Bach. Glad to see he’s making good use of his time. Eventually he gets up and goes looking for his wayward Companion just in time to get shot by the company men, who landed their boat nearby. Back at the canoe, the Swampies and Dutt hear the shot. Romana, as per usual, is just hanging out in the canoe – lounging, even – like this is exactly what she had been intending to do anyway today.

All the cutting! driving me crazy! Four is sprawled at the bottom of the hill and he’s totally wearing green wellies. Awww. Apparently the only description the guy with the gun had was that Dutt wears a hat, so he figured this must be him that’s been shot, because Four’s wearing a hat. Wow. That’s … a whole new kind of stupid I’m not familiar with. His coworker scolds him – and rightly so – for being a trigger-happy idiot.
“You shot the wrong man!”
“Not quite!” the Doctor pops up, as he tends to do, “you shot the wrong man’s hat! Fancy mistaking me for Rohm-Dutt.” Not a good idea to talk – about anything – in front of the Doctor. Especially when he’s apparently unconscious. The company guys decide to bring Four back to the base, since it’s dangerous out on the swamp and the Doctor looks a fairly shady character. Four grabs one of them urgently. “Will there be strawberry jam for tea?” He gets a jab in the stomach with a rifle and obligingly allows himself to be marched off, hands in the air.

The Swampies have made shore and tie Romana’s hands behind her and to a rock. She still manages to look around as though this is actually her swamp and they are all visitors she hasn’t decided whether to throw out yet. Is Romana part cat or something? Dutt threatens her by telling her about drill-flies, which lay their eggs in your feet and eat their way up to your brain. Auuuughhhhhhhhh. Romana just looks bored. Dutt says he won’t hesitate to kill her, since she’s a woman. Well, if you’d like to take a quick jaunt with us to Cardiff, Dutt, we could locate you a nice Captain who probably thinks drill flies are kind of kinky. Romana looks down her nose to where Dutt is sitting and chewing on a bit of grass. Hick.
“You know,” she says, “Emotional insulation is often indicative of psychofugal trauma.” I heart Romana. It’s her fourth episode, and she’s all ‘oh, the tying me up and marching along thing again? Really? This is so tiresome.’ She offers to cooperate, and Dutt interrogates her. She says she’s come with the Doctor and knows nothing about the refinery, but he doesn’t believe her.
“What were you doing in the swamp?”
“Catching butterflies.” She gives him her best sweet, innocent, ‘what, me? little ol me?’ smile. Second favorite Companion ever. Come on, Romana, you’re doing good but Donna Noble’s gonna be hard to pass.
“I like a joke,” says Dutt.
“I’ll try and think of one.”
“Come on, what were you doing in the swamp?”
“You’d be none the wiser, even if I did tell you.” He puts one hand on her shoulder and leans in threateningly. He asks her again. Romana is finally starting to look a tad nervous. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

At the refinery, which is apparently one of those ones on stilts over open water, Four is making his usual entrance, which is to say he’s just been chucked roughly through the door to the control room. He collapses fairly spectacularly in a blur of scarf, and opts to stay down when two guns are pointed immediately at his head. The workers say he was in the prohibited zone, ie within 100 yards of the classified project they’re working on.
“You really ought to put up a notice or something,” Four protests. Also, he is not impressed by their methane catalyzing refinery. They’re annoyed that he knows what it is, since this is the first that’s ever been built as far as they know. One guy asks him to prove he’s from another planet, and Four obligingly starts naming all the devices in the room and suggesting improvements. The workers are stunned and tell him he’s brilliant. Four grins like he’s just made a bunch of new friends and asks if he can leave. He heads for the door, saying he needs to find his friend, but they stop him, saying anyone on the swamp’ll be done for. A speaker on the wall interrupts.
“Attention. Orbit shot in ten minutes.”
They all troop off to watch this orbit shot thingie from the main control room, and bring the Doctor. Noo! The buttons! You fools!

In the swamp, Dutt is cheerfully arming the locals so they can drive the intrusive workers at the refinery from their shores. He wants a signature of some kind on the receipt, and the chief says that their only mark is the Mark of Kroll. We don’t find out what this is but apprently it can be written on paper. One of the Swampies advises the chief to sacrifice Romana to Kroll to bring them luck when they go to attack the refinery, and he thinks this is a spiffy idea.

A domesticated Swampie serves some kind of beverage in the main control room, where Newbie is explaining to the Doctor that the refinery produces proteins and shoots them into orbit to be picked up. Four accepts his cup and places it carefully in his coat pocket. “Just the six of you here?” he asks.
“Five,” replies Newbie, “Oh! You’re counting Mensch. He’s just a Swampie!” And a … good Jew? There is a momentary flurry of argument – apparently opinions differ among the staff about whether or not Swampies should be considered people. When the Delta Magna folks moved onto this moon to take its resources, the Swampies were already living there and really aren’t happy about the whole thing, apparently. Allegory much, Britain? Not that we’re any better, mind. Newbie says they’ll look after the Swampies as long as they behave.
“What, you’ll teach them to carry trays?” asks the Doctor. The workers all sit at their stations and put on headphones to monitor the orbit shot, and Four calmly turns and walks out the door. Ha. Not one for elaborate escape schemes, this Doctor. He’s more of an ‘oh, look. A door.’ kind of guy.

Back in the swamp, it’s night, and the local jolly little giants are doing a dance and chanting “Kroll! Kroll! Kroll!” Romana is brought forward. The chanting falters and stops as the orbit shot goes overhead with a WOOOOOSH. “Soon,” mutters Dutt, “We’ll put a stop to that.” The bottomless pit is opened up and the shaman starts exhorting Great Kroll.

Time Lord loose in the refinery! The Doctor is poking around and messing with things. He hears footsteps and darts behind a column, then darts right back out. “Hullo!” He acts as innocent as he can, and explains he got bored watching the orbit shoot. They can hear the chanting and drums outside, and Mensch says his people are sacrificing someone to Kroll, a giant squid. Apparently the squid was introduced by the new settlers. Four is concerned because he says Romana is really a rather difficult guest, and he wants to go relieve the Swampies of her. Newbie’s not having it and says the sacrifice means they’re planning an attack, so the refinery has to arm and counter-attack with first light in an hour. Four is pissed but is still on the Miss Marples section of his usual plan, so he meekly follows Newbie back into the main room.

Chanting continues apace. Inside, the Doctor watches Mensch creep out onto the balcony with a signaling lamp (the kind you can send Morse Code with), decides it’s not his problem, and sneaks out the door he opened earlier. Mensch starts flashing the light across the water, warning the Swampies so they’ll know the attack is coming. What they don’t know is that Four’s got ahold of a rather dodgy-looking kayak and is following the sound of the drums. I mean the chanting! Not the sound of drums. Oooog. Romana peers into the bottomless pit curiously and sighs in exasperation. Four beaches the kayak and creeps towards the clearing where the ceremony’s going on. Kroll is getting closer, apparently, because the chanters get all excited. The shaman falls to his knees and does the ‘I am not worthy’ bow, and some kind of pinchers rise into view. Romana starts screaming.

part 2

I forgot to mention in Part 1 that K9 may not be in this episode at all since he can’t maneuver in the swamp – he’d just sink, so he’s chilling in the TARDIS unless we need a deus ex machina and he learns how to fly like a new-series Dalek.

More chanting and stomping. These extras must be exhausted – I mean, they paint you green, take all your clothes, stick you out in a swamp in the middle of the night and make you chant things. Clearly the way to make a living. Romana is screeching again. She is not a good screamer. A sort of mushroom-headed thing with pincers is threatening her. Four runs up and yanks off its head to reveal a Swampie in a monster suit. Jinkies! Four actually slugs him in the stomach, which is rather violent for this incarnation, and the Swampie keels over. I really am not sure what the Swampies’ plan was here, since Romana and the monster-suit guy were in an enclosure where the other Swampies can’t see her. What were they planning on doing? Why the suit, if the Swampies can’t see her? So confused. Four says that the pole she’s tied to has marks from suckers of an actual giant squid, probably the Kroll that the refinery men brought to the planet a long time ago. Four says the actual Kroll must be dead by now, so this masquerade is to prevent the locals from losing faith. The Swampie Four punched gets up and runs off for help. I see armed guards in the Doctor’s future.

Up in the refinery, Radar is perplexed because his instruments show something enormous moving around in the deep water. His superiors don’t seem concerned and tell him to ignore it.

The Swampies are apparently under the impression that the sacrifice went as usual, and are discussing what to do about the attack Mensch warned them about. Dutt wants them to run and hide in the swamps, but they say that now they have weapons they’ll stand and fight. They tell Dunn he needs to fight alongside them and not slip off to Delta Magna like he wants to. Dutt looks pissed and tries to figure out how to wriggle out of this. In the enclosure, Romana guiltily admits to Four that she dropped the tracer earlier.
“What?” he says, horrified. He reaches in his pocket and says, just as guiltily, “Well, I … picked it up!” Romana says they need to escape, then, and find the fifth segment. Wait, fifth? Am I watching these out of order? I am! Crap! I skipped Androids of Tara! Oh well.

The Doctor says they can just hang out for awhile, since the Swampies will be more concerned with the coming attack than with finding them. He tells Romana about the factory and says Delta Magna is populated by Earth colonists, and that they displaced the Swampies from DM and put them on this moon, figuring it was useless, but now that they’ve found a use for the moon they want to push the Swampies out again. Romana in turn tells him about the Swampies and Rohm-Dutt and Kroll. They’re both confused about how such a primitive methane refinery can produce the vast quantities of protein that the DM guys are shooting into orbit every day. Romana says she doesn’t care and doesn’t want to get involved, just get the segment and leave and let these guys shoot each other all they want. But that’s not the Doctor’s style. He’s examining the bottomless pit Romana was hanging over, and starts climbing down. Romana is exasperated. You should be used to this by now, dear. Show him a button and don’t tell him what it does, he’s going to push it. Show him a pit and say it’s bottomless, he’s going to jump down it and find out if it really is. This is prior precedent for the Impossible Planet, here.

Radar has finally gotten someone to look at his weird readings. They say it looks like 2 square miles of seabed was flung up at once and is drifting back down again. Cthulu ftagn! Never trust a god with tentacles, I always say. Another guy comes in to say the Doctor’s vanished. They’re unconcerned, but he thinks the Doctor may have something to do with the lake-bed disturbance. Radar snorts.
“I doubt our mysterious friend could manage anything of that scale on his own.” HAAAAAAAAhahahahah. Oh you are so wrong. The cranky bastard I’m going to call Frank to keep with my MASH theme still thinks it’s suspicious that the Doctor coincidentally showed up and then things got destroyed. He says that Four seems harmless and was with them the whole time anyway, but that the Doctor mentioned having friends they haven’t seen yet. After a moment or two of debate, they’re all fully convinced that the Doctor is their enemy and spying on them for the Swampies. They think he took off to warn them of the coming attack.
“I had an instinct about him from the very beginning,” says Newbie, who is totally lying, “He was altogether too glib by half.” Newbie takes Mensch and a motorboat to go take out the Doctor.

Back in the swamp, Four has crawled back up out of the hole with a bunch of stuff, namely a huge book that he says is the history of the tribe. He reads Romana a section about Kroll smashing out of the aquarium where the DM guys kept him and killing everyone present, then escaping into the sea.
“Ooooo,” says Romana, “I like a book with a happy ending!” I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic. I don’t think so. Four says that he thinks Kroll’s still alive, just dormant, and that the book says he wakes up every few hundred years. Four figures he’s about due to return soon. He chucks the book back down the well and heads off.

It’s light out and the Swampies are setting their ambush. The monster-suit guy is telling the chief about the failed sacrifice, and the chief tells him that if Romana ran off they can just tell everyone that Kroll ate her and be done with the whole thing. The motorboat with Mensch and Newbie pulls up. They’ve brought someone else but I can’t tell who. One of the Swampies fires on them but the rifle backfires and he’s killed. A huge tentacle suddenly comes up out of nowhere and snatches Mensch up. Mmmm, Kosher! The DM guys take off, and suddenly a HUGE monster head appears over the horizon. Cool! Kroll is really freaky-looking. He’s not really a squid at all. The Swampies run out to prostrate themselves and beg for mercy. Kroll sinks slowly back into the water and the Swampies say it’s a good omen and that Kroll will help them defeat the DM guys, but first they have to go after Dutt, who has taken off. I’m not really sure why they’re pissed at him – I think the rifles he brought were faulty and that’s why they backfired. In any case, Dutt’s kind of a douche so it’s fine by me.

Teatime at the refinery. The DM folks are freaking out because the Swampies were warned (they think by the Doctor) and had guns (from Dutt, they know). Also, there was a big giant squid thing. Frank is having a fit about the Swampies being armed now. A guy with curly hair wants to call the police unit, but Newbie refuses and says they’ll take care of this his way. He says they need to “get rid of this problem once and for all.” Even Frank, who is a jerk and has said nasty things about Swampies in previous scenes, thinks this is going too far. In any case, he wants to nuke Kroll first to get that out of the way. They sit down to start looking for it on the scanners, but can’t make head or tail of them so they call Radar back in. He’s pissed at being interrupted at … whatever he was doing, but comes in, buckling his belt. Not much recreating going on in this place, eh? Radar gripes at them for messing with his stuff and hits some switches. On the screens appear … Cthulu! Newbie is horrified.

Romana and Four are puzzling out what’s going on. Four says the vast amount of protein being produced is due to Kroll’s presence in the lake, and because the refinery is operating there now, the temperature of the lake has changed, and that and the noise they’re making underwater must’ve woken Kroll up.
“Doctor,” says Romana stiffly, “We’ve got company.” They’ve inadvertently wandered into the Swampie village. Several green guys are approaching. Are there no Swampie women?
“Well, you’d better introduce me,” says the Doctor, “As some wise and wonderful person who wants to help – don’t exaggerate.”
Romana clears her throat and the Swampies grab them.
“I told you not to exaggerate!” More Swampies drag Rohm-Dutt by. Romana identifies him to the Doctor as “someone very popular around these parts about an hour ago.” The chief tells the other Swampies to guard the Doctor and Romana but not to hurt them. He says he needs to go speak with Kroll and then they’re going to do this sacrifice thing properly, dammit!

The DMs are trying to figure out how to kill Kroll, even though some of them aren’t really convinced it’s hostile. They’re tracking Kroll as it crawls along the lake bottom, and Radar suggests maybe it’s just a bottom-feeder.
“I am not interested in its feeding habits,” snaps Newbie, “Unless they happen to include us!”
They debate whether bombs would kill it or just piss it off enough to smash the refinery up, and Newbie says he doesn’t care, he’s getting some depth charges. Radar and Frank are not pleased.

Romana is wondering what the seven rituals of death are that the chief mentioned, and which one they’re going to get.
“Oh, the usual,” says Four, “Fire, water … hanging upside-down over a pit of vipers…”

“That’s only three!”

They are so weird.

Curly is checking on some pipes leading through the refinery, when he hears echoes of some creature coming in through the pipes.

Dutt is trying to sweet-talk his guard, but the Swampies are pissed at him for bringing them faulty weapons and trying to take off before the fight so he wouldn’t get caught. The guard says they never should’ve trusted a human, since they’re all liars. He seems to think it was a deliberate plot to sabotage the Swampies, but I think Dutt was actually just trying to make some money with worthless junk and didn’t care about the fight at all. Four starts chastising him, calling him a rogue, and saying he doesn’t want to die in the same batch as scum like him. Romana would prefer not dying at all.

Radar and Frank are staring absently at the screens, bored stiff because Kroll’s just hanging out and not moving. Suddenly there’s a boom. A tentacle has come in through one of the pipes and is after Curly. The other two grab guns and run down to help.

The chief arrives and tells the prisoners they will die according to the seventh of the seven holy rituals.
“Seven!” hisses Four, “That’s my lucky number!” Romana wants to know what they did, and the chief says they screwed up the sacrifice ritual earlier and mocked their god. Four is annoyed and says it doesn’t count since it wasn’t a real Kroll and therefore not a real sacrifice. The chief says that it does too count, so there, and the real Kroll appeared this morning, so nyah nyah to you. Romana and Four are both like, damn, we missed it?

Back at the refinery, alarms are going crazy. Radar and Frank bust in just in time to see Curly get yanked down the pipe by the giant tentacle.