Trivia / Doctor Who S16 E6 "The Armageddon Factor"

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• Blooper: One that didn’t make it into the episode, but is still infamous amongst the fandom. Frustrated beyond measure at the script, Tom Baker blew up during the filming of this episode:
  Tom: ....Clicking towards oblivion.... How long, K9?
  K-9: Insufficient data.
  Tom: Yeah, you never fucking know the answer when it's important!
• Follow the Leader: Essentially, the story is Doctor Who does Star Wars. Only with a typical BBC budget.
• Recast as a Regular: Lalla Ward plays Princess Astra. In the next season, she took over as Romana, with Romana having intentionally regenerated into a form resembling her.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Drax was originally envisioned as a strange old man. Instead, the idea of a shady, Cockney Time Lord was recycled from elements discarded from a previous script.
  • In the original storyline, the Doctor and Romana visited two planets, Atrios and Zeos. Both were preparing for war as they both blamed each other for their planets’ sudden change in orbit. Astra (at that point called “Reina”, a name later changed to avoid confusion with Prince Reynart from "The Androids of Tara") was an astrophysicist who had discovered a mysterious being known as the Shadow, who lived on his own planet encouraging the two worlds to fight. The Doctor had to use the makeshift Key To Time to temporally freeze both planets' armies. The Shadow's own shadow was in fact the sixth piece of the Key To Time. His scheme was to use the Key to pit one half of the universe in war against the other half (something that was retained for the finished storyline, though indicated to be primarily the Black Guardian's plan). The Doctor stopped the Shadow by unfreezing the Atrian and Zeon armies and misdirecting them to fight at the Shadow's “Castle of Evil”.
  • The Black Guardian originally didn't appear in the climax. Originally, the Doctor simply decided that he did not trust the White Guardian with the Key, and consequently scattered the six segments again to prevent anyone from controlling it. This was changed when the actor couldn't reprise his role.
• Working Title: Armageddon.

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