 This is the fifth of six linked stories that comprise the whole of Season Sixteen, known collectively as The Key to Time.
"The Power of Kroll" was a last-minute replacement for a cancelled story and features what would be known at the time as ‘the biggest monster ever’ in Doctor Who’s history.
The request to include the largest monster in the show's history came from Script Editor Anthony Read. Anthony Read also requested that writer Robert Holmes minimised the humour that many scripts from this era were renowned for. This second requirement originated from higher up at the BBC.
As reported by Doctor Who Magazine, this story was a replacement for one entitled "The Lords of Misrule" by distinguished screen writer Ted Willis. However, it has been reported that Ted Willis never worked on Doctor Who but thriller writer Ted Lewis, best known for the seminal "Get Carter", did work on an unused story for this season.
One of the working titles for this story was "The Shield of Time". This was based on a short lived idea that all stories in Season Sixteen were going to be entitled "The (Something) of Time".
Given the story’s marshy setting, writer Robert Holmes had avoided using K9. Therefore to compensate for the fact that K9 was stuck inside the TARDIS and did not appear, John Leeson, who voices K9, was given the role of Dugeen in this story after Martin Jarvis, who had originally been approached to play Dugeen, dropped out before recording commenced. This is John Leeson’s only on-screen appearance in Doctor Who.
Neil McCarthy, who played Thawn. and Philip Madoc, who played Fenner, were also both replacements for actors who had to drop out before recording commenced. Neil McCarthy had previously played Barnham in the 1971 Third Doctor story "The Mind of Evil" while Philip Madoc, had previously played several villainous lead roles in Doctor Who over the years ("The Krotons", "The War Games" and "The Brain of Morbius"). Philip Madoc had thought he had been offered the more substantial part of Thawn and so therefore was very disappointed to find himself consigned to a more minor role. This story proved to be his last involvement with Doctor Who.
John Abineri, who played Ranquin, had previously played Van Lutyens in the 1968 Second Doctor story "Fury From the Deep", General Carrington in the 1970 Third Doctor story "The Ambassadors of Death" and Richard Railton in the 1974 Third Doctor story "Death to the Daleks".
The Director allocated to "The Power of Kroll" was Norman Stewart, who had helmed the previous season’s "Underworld" which is another story with intense effects requirements.
"The Power of Kroll" suffered from a number of mishaps during location work that took place in Suffolk. Visual Effects Designer Tony Harding intended to achieve the Kroll using a model which would be inserted into the filmed material via split-screen (with the model on the top of the frame and the location footage on the bottom). However, film cameraman Martin Patmore, acting on poor advice, elected not to expose the upper portion of the film. This meant that a hard line would appear in the completed effect, making the join between the model work and the location footage obvious.
Effects problems continued to plague the story as Tony Harding also discovered that his model for the refinery could not be photographed from the correct angle due to problems with the tank facilities.
Also during location work the green make-up (made with a special water-resistant dye) that was used on the actors playing the Swampies proved particularly difficult to remove from the actors as the solvent required to remove it had been forgotten, causing the cast to retire to a nearby American air base to remove it with industrial solvents.
Producer Graham Williams was taken badly ill during the recording of this story and so for several weeks, Script Editor Anthony Read and Production Unit Manager John Nathan-Turner assumed many of Graham Williams’ duties. They were aided by Blake’s 7 producer David Maloney, who had directed a number of Doctor Who stories – the most recently being "The Talons of Weng-Chiang".
The BBC’s Head of Serials, Graeme McDonald was so unimpressed by the set designs in this story that he ordered that Designer Don Giles was never to work on the show again. By coincidence, in the third episode The Doctor is heard criticizing the decor of the Swampies’ execution chamber and recommending that its architect be fired.
The episodes of this story are noticeably shorter than average. While it was normal at the time for individual episodes to fluctuate between 23 and 25 minutes in length, the last two episodes of this story clocked in at only just under 22 minutes. In addition these episodes began with longer-than-usual reprises of the events leading up to the preceding cliff-hangers, both clocking in at close to 90 seconds each.
It is revealed that the atmosphere of the third moon of Delta Magna is thin, and the gravity tiny. However, during this story we see evidence of neither.
According to the Swampies the fifth segment of The Key to Time allows one to see the future. As the Symbol of Power, it was brought by the Swampies to third moon of Delta Magna, where it was swallowed by a giant squid, causing it to mutate and grow.
In the second episode a Swampie is heard referring to the altar, where Romana was to be sacrificed, as the Stone of Blood. "The Stones of Blood" was the title of the third story in The Key to Time season.
At one point The Doctor makes a reed-flute and starts playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s "Badinerie" from his Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B Minor. The Doctor’s reed flute playing though does not match the music.
The Doctor is heard talking to himself, before his final encounter with Kroll, in which he states that he is 760 years old. This suggests he is either rounding up (as his age was given as 759 in "The Ribos Operation") or he has had a birthday since the beginning of the quest for The Key to Time. The latter may actually be the case, as a birthday scene was originally planned for "The Stones of Blood" but this idea had been dropped as Producer Graham Williams had felt this scene would have been too self-congratulatory.
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(Position = 145 out of 159)
(Position = 174 out of 200)
