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The Kraals |
Reviews
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The Kraals |
"The Voord? Never heard of 'em!" by Stephen Maslin 24/11/14
The Daleks remain as central to Doctor Who as they have been for half a century. So instead of wandering off down that well-trodden path, let's remind ourselves of the other two headlining alien foes that Terry Nation created.
1) The Voord.
They appeared only once, in The Keys of Marinus back in 1964, and probably didn't get a second outing because said story was a bit rubbish (and, one suspects, because those rubber suits were even more uncomfortable than sitting in a Dalek). File under 'Unremarkable Enemy of the Week' and move on.
2) The Kraals.
"Kraals? Never heard of 'em!" Which is odd as the Kraals are surely the most thriftless and wasteful beings in the known universe. Their plans for world domination go something like this:
a) building a complete facsimile of a substantial part of the world they wish to dominate, correct in every detail;
b) using it as a kind of training ground for some androids of their own manufacture;
c) blowing that training ground to bits and proceeding with the invasion proper, secure in the knowledge that they've had a practice run at it, albeit an expensive and pointless one.
All very impressive I'm sure, but if they are capable of creating such true-to-life simulacra - wood, trees, Sarahs - then why don't they just skip all the invading nonsense and concentrate their energies on terraforming? If one wanted to buy a house that were not for sale, you would not build a perfect replica of it, then knock it down and then 'invade' the original. You would save yourself oodles of trouble by not knocking the replica down but living in it.
The Kraals are equally improvident with their androids. For example, chief scientist Styggron creates "one special unit, an android programmed to attack Kraals" (with hostility circuits and everything!) and then destroys it just to prove that he can. "Science" he says "will make the Kraals invincible" but one might also point out that a complete lack of self-restraint or common sense will leave them as poor as church mice. (Would you take the trouble to design and build something for a highly specialized purpose, only to smash it to smithereens with a hammer in front of your neighbors? Do you think they'd be impressed by that? The Electrolux Trilobite 2.0 currently retails at $1799 and that's only a robot vacuum cleaner. Just think how much a multi-functional android would cost and how many of them you'd need for a full scale invasion.)
With such bizarre behavior, you would expect the Kraals to be renowned throughout the cosmos for being immoderate and perverse, hell-bent on gobbling up vast resources on fiendishly extravagant schemes. You would be flat wrong. Nobody has ever heard of the them, not even Colonel Faraday (and he's a member of UNIT).
Or rather, nobody claims to have heard of them. Universal silence on 'The Madness of Kraals' is more a matter of collective embarrassment over how these rhino-faced idiots were allowed to get as far as they did. Nobody thought that the wanton profligacy they indulged in would have the slightest hope of producing success and so they were left alone. Once their funds started to dwindle, we all thought, they would surely come to their senses. But they didn't. Thus it was that against all the odds, the Kraals came within a hair's breadth of conquering the Earth, about which we should all feel deeply humiliated.
AFTERTHOUGHT
Seriously, I love The Android Invasion, Kraals and all, but in the way that one loves the most ungainly of one's six children; the one who's not very bright, the one who can't tie his own shoelaces, bless 'im. ("Morbius! Go and help your brother cross the street and make sure he doesn't try and head-butt the cars as they go by.") The problem is that in Terry Nation's attempts to outline the plans of any alien race, you can feel him tying himself up in his own knots, either without noticing or without seeming to care that he is doing so. It is worth noting that The Android Invasion is at its best at the start - a succession of eerie set pieces - before the Kraals take centre stage (and before the writer has to make sense of everything).