For a serial where the pitch was basically, as Shannon Sullivan makes clear (3), <biggest monster ever>, it seems sensible to start with how Dicks translates that to the page. Essentially, he describes the awakenings of Kroll as akin to a natural disaster: it was ‘dormant’ like a volcano (4), appears massive as ‘an underwater mountain’ (5), exerts such great force that ‘it could leave its mark on stone (6). That last one conjures the effect of water or wind over geological time, and that sense of mythic age is also significant: it hibernates ‘for hundreds of years’, its last appearance is recalled only through an old book found in a ‘secret room, full of religious relics’ (7), its existence, before it’s disturbed, more like a long-lived ‘enormous tree’ (8) than animal life. Once awake, it’s little more than a massive ‘ravenous’ (9) mouth that views ‘all life [as] food’ (10) and nothing more. Throw in the description that it’s ‘so terrifying that […] the mind could scarcely take it in’ (11) and Kroll doesn’t sound especially unlike the Fendahl or even Sutekh – an ultimate predator antithetical to the continued existence of anything else.

    Alongside this is, in the words of Wood and Miles, ‘a fable about imperialism and native culture’(12).  Their phrasing makes it clear how shallow a fable it’ll be, as does El Sandifer’s observation that the moral amounts to little more than ‘homicidal savages with funny skin probably shouldn’t be subject to genocide’ (13), but let’s hold back on that for a bit and focus on how the anti-colonial commentary sort of does almost work, especially in Dicks’s adaptation.

    When ‘colonising Earthmen’, swarming across the cosmos like a voracious plague, arrive on Delta Magna, they ‘over-run’ it (14), their population exploding until it’s ‘very crowded’ (15), making it not just developed but ‘over-developed’ (16). The suggestion that they’re demanding of the planet more than it can give is reinforced by the detail that they’re ‘running out of both space and food’; that this has happened staggeringly quickly by the detail that Delta Magna is not just heading for collapse but is ‘already in danger’ (17); and that this is a result of human rapaciousness rather than the planet having particularly limited resources by the detail that they have made Delta Magna ‘like Earth itself’. They have destroyed Delta Magna by transforming it into ‘a bustling, heavily industrialised planet’ (18), just as they destroyed Earth and, presumably, every other planet they’ve touched.

    Against them, there are the Swampies, stated to be ‘the native inhabitants of Delta Magna’ (19), who barely make a mark on their environment – their settlement composes of just ‘a rough wooden fence’, ‘muddy ground’ and some ‘reed huts’ (20); their boats glide ‘silently’ across the waters, disappear into their surroundings (21) and are actively contrasted with the humans’ hovercraft (22). Seen as ‘obstacles in the way of progress’ (23), the Swampies were effectively made ‘homeless’ (24), dismissively ‘shipped off’ (25), or more aggressively ‘deported’ (26) from, Delta Magna (much like, just in case you didn’t get the analogy, ‘the Red Indians of Earth [were] sent off to reservations in America’).

    Now that the Earthmen’s hunger for resources has turned its attention to Delta Three, they to try to feed off Kroll (27), who the Swampies themselves worship, and in the process reawaken a (28) leviathan with an appetite greater than and opposite to their own, one which, without the presence of the Doctor, would wipe the refinery and all life off the face of the planetoid. The endpoint of unchecked industrial imperialism is oblivion.

    If you also read Kroll as a manifestation of the Key to Time, an object that restores ‘the balance of the cosmos’ (29), the anti-imperial message becomes even stronger – colonialism represents an imbalance against which the universe itself fights. It makes sense that Dicks alters the Doctor’s line to Rohm Dutt that ‘The weight of history’s’ against his mission (30) to simply ‘History’ (31); the former suggests the evidence of past empires suggests he’ll fail, the latter that some elemental force determines that empires must always be overthrown.

    This also feeds into the environmental aspect of the story, something that is articulated more thoroughly in the book than on TV. Here, the view of the Sons of Earth is stated to be ‘that man, having hopelessly polluted his native Earth, was going on to repeat the same process on a variety of other worlds’ (32), making a moral of the contrast between the refinery and their hovercraft with the Swampie settlement and their slender boats. Kroll represents nature itself spewing forth a beast to stop the Earthmen’s spread, fulfilling the same objective envisioned by the Sons of Earth (33). Nature can only be pushed so far.

    Obviously, considering the reputation of this story (34), there are a few problems with all this. Firstly, the story makes it strangely ambiguous whether the Swampies are indeed aboriginal. Though the Swampies have been described as ‘the native inhabitants of Delta Magna itself’, they are also said to be ‘the planetoid’s native inhabitants’ (35). The latter statement can probably be dismissed as a mistake, what with their having been ‘shipped off’ to Delta Three by the Earthmen. Less easily dismissed is the Doctor and Romana’s discussion of ‘Early Samoan influences’ in Swampie culture (36). On TV, if you really try, this can just about be made to read as some earlier contact between Samoans and Swampies, with ‘traces’ of that ‘influence’ persisting (37). In the book, it’s a little more complicated: ‘influences’ is harder to twist into a reference to a meeting between communities than ‘influence’; and ‘old Earth cultures surviv[ing] in their colonies’ suggests a more direct line between the Earth and the Swampies than ‘old cultures surviv[ing]’ beyond their populations. Are the Swampies descendants of humanity? Is this a cargo culture thing? It’s unlikely to be the latter now that Delta Magna’s civilisation is ‘older than’ Earth’s (38) rather than just ‘as old’ (39), but maybe the ‘civilisation’ being discussed is that of the colonists on Delta Magna rather than that of humanity? Maybe Delta Magna was first colonised by a small group of early (?) Samoans who turned green (??) and then were evicted by a larger group of colonists, much as was being attempted in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon? Would that make the Swampies ‘native’? I guess it would if they’d been there long enough to turn green…

    Less confusing is the second problem. For all the Earthmen of the refinery mistreat the Swampies, not even registering them as people (40), the Swampies don’t come out of the story well. As Wood and Miles state, it’s ‘surprisingly ready to portray the Swampies as murderous, superstitious, octopus-worshipping savages’ (41). This could be read as a parallel ‘attack on organised religion’ (42), as Rob Shearman does, with the novelisation’s slight beefing up of Varlik, ‘less religiously minded and more practical’ (43) than many of the other Swampies, going some way to supporting him: in the novelisation, it’s made clear that does not ‘join in the chant’ praising Kroll (44) and that he both knows ‘more about technology’ and has ‘less fear of it’ (45) than others before clearly becoming their new leader for the post-Kroll era (46). What’s more, Dicks also has the Doctor specify that the worship of Kroll is something it would be best for the Swampies to learn to move beyond (47), and the ease with which even Varlik, as everything crumbles around him, can’t help but ‘cling to’ the old comfort of ‘belief’ (48) illustrates that it’ll take more than the events of this story to let them do that.

    Fine… except that one of the key issues with the villain of the piece, Thawn, is his lack of belief or investment in anything beyond himself. His motivation for constructing his refineries and evicting the Swampies once more isn’t even his desire to help the population of Delta Magna, but simply to become ‘the most respected and honoured scientist’ amongst them (49), with his willingness to commit genocide fuelled by the fact that ‘his career as a scientist depended’ on the success of his scheme (50). It appears that those who believe in something are idiots willing to kill in the name of their faith and those who don’t are monsters willing to kill in the name of ambition.

    Reinforcing this bleak picture, the Sons of Earth, who clearly follow some form of ideology whilst not being an organised religion, have to defend themselves from accusations of fanaticism (51) rather than mistakenness (52) and are seeking to frustrate a ‘Government’ (53) rather than a more-easily-assumed-to-be-nefarious ‘Company’ (54). All of this makes them less immediately sympathetic – they may stand for the right things, but the fact that they might be motivated by belief rather than reason and that they stand opposed to the actual representatives of the people guard against their rising above the murk with which everyone else is tainted. Dugeen is even explicitly made a member of their ranks, defending them with a ‘We’ rather than a ‘They’re’, perhaps so that the pointlessness of his death, pressing an abort button which doesn’t work in the hope of preventing something the Doctor stops moments later anyway (55), should reflect the organisation’s ineffectiveness. 

    In Tardis Eruditorum, El Sandifer raises the possibility of ‘an uncomfortable nihilism’ at the heart of the story (56), something of which she’s previously accused Robert Holmes, for ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’ for example, but which she here levels at the whole series. Whether the novelisation’s leaning into this or the script was slightly pulled back from the brink before recording, ‘The Power of Kroll’ and especially Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll certainly seem to point to such a problem. They might address interesting issues, but their response is basically that everything’s shit and nothing matters. There’s certainly precious little other explanation I can come up with for an anti-colonial story describing one of its natives’ movement at ‘scuttl[ing]’ (57) and not thinking it might be best to give at least that one word another go before submission.