The Armageddon Factor

I seem to recall that JNT once compared "Trial" favourably with "The Key to Time" season as a less-complex proposition, perhaps because the latter encompassed a whole year of Doctor Who, whilst his own effort spanned a single story. Nevertheless this completely overlooks the hoops "Trial" had to leap through in the name of its linked theme, and the escape clause involved in each Season 16 story which enabled a writer to all but ignore the linking theme if he chose; in "The Androids of Tara" for example the Key is found in the first episode and then simply lost to be picked up again in the last. And aside from the dodgy 'invisible Doctor' cliffhanger, it's all but irrelevant to "The Stones of Blood". But forgetting about the main concept is something "The Armageddon Factor" just couldn't get away with.

We won't go round the houses. I'm going to talk about the ending of the story, because it's by far the most interesting bit. The story ultimately ends up offering more questions than it answers, which is better for the series as whole (and the possibility for future stories, as was ultimately realised in Season 20) than it is for this adventure. The climax to the season begins with the White Guardian disguised as Black, and the Doctor subsequently recognising this because the White Guardian would never have such a callous attitude towards human life with regard to Princess Astra. The moment of recognition comes when the careless Black Guardian dismisses Astra, but this rather skirts around the issue. It was the White Guardian who first sent the Doctor off on his quest, one which he knew would ultimately lead to the manipulation of Astra. In short, what the Doctor is acknowledging here is that either the White Guardian was Black all along, or that both share the attitude that

the life of one person is insignificant. Since the Black Guardian WANTS chaos to reign, we must assume that the Key was hidden by the White Guardian in the first place, and that he didn't think twice about manipulating the House of Atrios; in short, having the very same disregard that makes the Doctor see through Black's disguise.

It wouldn't be a bad thing for the Black/White scenario given in "The Ribos Operation" to turn out not quite as it first seemed; the very existence of the Guardians is contrary to the rest of the series; they are essentially God and the Devil. There is no science behind them in the way the Time Lords, the previously revealed 'higher beings' in the series can die, build ships and can be corrupt, and there is no demystification story for them either; they never get a "Deadly Assassin". The Guardians appear and disappear at will, can hijack and invade a TARDIS, and can magic up Homebase patio furniture as they please; they are obviously magic. Interestingly, the Key to Time itself is their only weakness, the Doctor dispersing it because it is "too powerful for any one being to possess", which suggests they lack total power and even (given the Key's obedience to the Doctors voice) that the Key itself is alive.

This is good, because there is no place in Doctor Who for Gods; if the Guardian's can do anything by magic, it becomes unrealistic for the Doctor to be able to defeat them, and unlikely that they'd be chasing after the Key in the first place. The Black Guardian's comment later on that he "cannot be seen to be involved" is an odd one, and a slight cop-out. Just who is he afraid of? And anyway, how is bribing Turlough to kill the Doctor "uninvolved" in a way that destroying him outright isn't? We should assume, given this fear of some higher authority and inability to even track the Doctor down after "The Armageddon Factor" that the Guardian's aren't as powerful as is initially made out. If they are, it makes nonsense of them being thwarted by such mortal concerns as the power drain in "Enlightenment" or the Randomiser. How can a being able to stop time itself be defeated by a power drain?

Just as the Time Lords were introduced as practically indestructible and capable of killing by sheer will, but were then brought down to the fallible plane that the rest of the Doctor Who Universe exists on, so the Guardian's must be too. "The Armageddon Factor" points in this direction, and if the Season 20 trilogy had never happened we might even assume that there WAS only a Black Guardian, and that it had all been just another plan by an evil black-suited maniac. But the Guardians are still an interesting concept, and it would have been a shame to waste it. We can only hope that they're developed further in the future, perhaps by the series clearly defining where they exist in relation to the Time Lords, just whose wrath will be incurred by the Black Guardian influencing Universal Events, and just what the Key to Time is and where it came from. We must be thankful that the "Key to Time" season gave us an interesting new concept, but really it's one about which we still know almost nothing.