The Armageddon Factor

"The Key to Time : The Final Story", “Wish You Were Zeos”, “Doctor Who and Susan Skipper”, “Armageddon Outta Here”

“The One with the Elastic Time Thingy” (USA), “Eternal Sticky War Never Ending Battle Conflict Factor” (China)

Doctor Who wanders into the middle of another war and claims he works for a travel agency.

*** - People that don't like the ending forget that if the White Guardian had used the Key to fix the universe then the next ten seasons would've seen the Doctor wandering round with nothing to do. 

Tom “I haven’t seen you since Terror of the Zygons”

John Woodvine “ARGHHHH - I AM NOT JOHN WOODNUT”

"How can we have pants until we have the ultimate detergent that will ensure lasting pants?"

Mentalis was originally called Mintalis until a secret sponsorship deal between Bob Baker and Trebor was uncovered.

Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward had a catfight in the canteen during shooting as Tamm called Ward a ‘stuttering tart’ while Ward retorted with ‘at least my hair is my own’. A recording of this brawl was sold on eBay for fifty pounds but it turned out to be a computer-generated hoax.

It during the making of this serial that both Mary and Lalla submitted application forms to be Tom Baker’s next wife. Although Mary gave the better interview (and listed two more hobbies than Lalla) Tom ultimately sent her a polite letter of rejection.

John Leeson, having been covered in oil for much of his time as K9, had begun to carry a towel around with him. This gave incoming script editor Douglas Adams an idea that would make him richer than Sir Nigel Havers himself.

Sadly, the good bit of this story wasn’t recorded due to industrial action.

The fake segment of the key to time was made of polystyrene stained with urine. BBC documentation lists “person or persons unknown” as the source of the urine while the polystyrene was donated by the Blue Peter team.

...is that you shouldn't assume that a magical object craved by the supreme evil of the universe is necessarily a good thing.

Si Hunt

"I've never had any luck in my dealings with Tamm. Some years prior to the photography "shoot" incident outlined earlier in this panel I conducted a one-on-one interview with her for the 'Glamour Edition' of Mucky Devastation. Ian Devine wanted it to be a 'swim suit' issue but I rightly told him no one would go swimming wearing a suit and he would run the risk of publishing twelve blank pages. I asked Tamm a few basic questions - correcting her on a few minor details about her childhood, her school record, her early acting career, how she got the part in "Doctor Who", what happened during her one-year contract which wasn't renewed, what she did after "Doctor Who" and what she was doing at that time. I then reached my p-e-n-e-t-r-a-t-i-n-g question.

"Do you ever wish you could regenerate into Lalla Ward?" I asked.

"Well, she's ever such a nice person..." began Tamm with that sickening sincerity for which meat puppets are duly despised.

"I ask because she has aged so much better than you have. If you could have her face instead of your own you would undoubtedly be better off than you are now. Not to mention her superior intelligence and I've heard rumours that she is much more charming than you. Though personally I've always found charm to be overrated."

She considered her reply but, recognising the truth of what I had said, merely tied me to my chair using masking tape, gagged me and held me prisoner in her hotel room until starvation left me so disorientated that I signed a letter of apology and affixed one of my own second class stamps to the envelope. She posted it to herself, cut my bonds and dumped my weakened and naked body in a laundry basket. I must've touched a nerve or something <shrug>. That's the price one pays for being a serious journalist."

Ralph "Malph" Gandalph, writing in "The Key to Time and Relative Dimensions in Space Pirates", dismissed the conclusion to the Armageddon Factor and listed 49 films which he felt had better endings. In the process he gave away so many spoilers that he actually drowned in the volume of correspondence generated and was never seen again. Elsewhere, viewers thought it was "my Nth favourite story of the season", "a climax like none I have ever experienced before", "more of a punch line than a resolution", "it really puts the 'exit' into 'exciting'", "I'm glad I bought it from Canada because if I'd walked to the shops for it I would've been seething" and "I don't know enough words to describe how I feel so I will devote the rest of my life to learning more."