The other great scene is the introduction of Kublai Khan. The first Dalek adventure showed us that the more epic you make the story, the greater the risk of it falling flat when the climax can’t be as grand as you want it to be. For six weeks’ viewing (and several months’ adventuring!), all the travellers in Marco Polo have done is set out to meet the great Khan. The danger, surely, is that the reveal of this warlord Mongol could only be disappointing – and Lucarotti brilliantly faces that head on, and trounces it, by playing it as comedy, by showing the Khan as a frail old man who finds a common bond with the Doctor by bemoaning the agonies of old age. It’s the dramatic power of finding out the Wizard of Oz is just a little man pulling strings, or Deep Thought announcing the answer to everything is 42, or revealing after all the press hoopla that the eleventh Doctor is Matt Smith. And yet, what’s terrific is that the tension doesn’t lessen – the scene might smack a little of The Mikado, but it’s impressed upon us that this apparently doddery arthritic has the supreme power of life and death. And that carries so much more awe than had he been simply another Tegana with better robes.
Incidentally, Toby, you’re an actor – what do you make of all the different accents? For a while I was thrown that there was no consistency to them at all. Some were putting on cod Chinese, some speaking in BBC English. I’ve rather grown to like it, though, I think it lends rich variety to the setting. Does it make that classically trained noggin of yours seethe?
T: Actually, I don’t mind the accents; complaints about such things are, frankly, the first weapon employed by lazy critics. Quite often, I’ve seen actors getting stick for using an accent that is actually their native one, which just goes to show how little weight such objections can have. In the case of this story, once you’ve accepted a Czechoslovakian Kublai Khan, such things cease to matter.
I’m likewise struck by our meeting with the Mighty Kublai Khan. Hartnell’s overt comedy refusal to kowtow to him seems initially like a misstep, but it’s worth it for the reveal of the aching, moaning warlord. The Doctor needs to rail against his condition (even if it does make him seem a little daft, seeing as he’s facing a man with the power of life and death over everyone present), so that the two old codgers can bond over gout! The Doctor and Khan hobbling out, groaning far longer than you expect, their exit protracted with comedy grunts, is nuts but great fun!
By this point in the story, the loss of the TARDIS – which is stolen while en route to the Khan – cannot be taken too lightly. When the Ship, say, falls into the chasm in The Impossible Planet, we know it’ll somehow come back because we’re on an alien planet surrounded by strange, SF goings-on. But the sheer length of this tale, combined with the travellers having no technology at their disposal in this time period, and this being a point in the series’ history where seemingly anything can happen, makes searching for the missing Ship become like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Special mention should be made that there’s yet-another riveting cliffhanger: Ian, who finally gets proof after six episodes that Tegana is a ne’er do well, is denied a triumphant denouement when the Mongol – expert swordsman that he is – calmly beckons Ian towards him.
Assassin At Peking (Marco Polo episode seven)
R: And, after nearly three hours of screen time, the story ends – and not through any logical plot development, not because any characters’ plans have come to fruition – but because of random chance, and the whims of a tyrannical old man. Now, that’s brave. It’d even look a bit clumsy, but Lucarotti knows precisely what he’s doing; the backgammon scene between the Doctor and the Khan is certainly very funny (Hartnell’s polite regret to his opponent that he has now won a year’s income from Burma made me laugh out loud), but it also sets up in miniature the way that the outcome of this entire adventure will depend upon the vagaries of fate and luck. Nothing comes to pass the way the characters expect – Ping-Cho’s husband dies the night before his wedding, Marco’s bid to curry favour with the Khan only achieves the opposite. The only person in the drama who is in charge of his destiny – and, indeed, of everybody else’s – is someone introduced only in the previous episode as something very like comic relief. Now, that’s the power of a monarch. Once again, the Khan is like the Wizard of Oz, with the power to send everybody home – but he’s much more capricious than his outward appearance as a genial old man might suggest, and is just as likely to sentence death as to grant freedom.
Once again, we’re watching a historical adventure where the big fight at the end is between the two guest stars, and none of the regular cast get a look in. (The format of the programme has yet to properly establish itself.) And we’re left in no doubt that although the day is saved because Marco Polo happens to beat Tegana in their bout of swordfighting, it could so easily have been the other way around – one different thrust of a blade would have meant the entire adventure was concluded differently. Again, this could so easily be seen as a fault – after seven weeks of build-up, the ending is shockingly abrupt. There are no time for proper goodbyes, no chance to take a breath as the Doctor and his friends escape quickly in the confusion of Tegana’s suicide. But I think that’s the entire point – even up to the last drop of the story, Lucarotti never allows the characters to relax, never lets us think that the situation is now safe and cosy. In their very first adventure, the TARDIS crew escape by the skin of their teeth from a bunch of cavemen. In this story, they’ve been exposed to art, and history, and a culture bursting with riches – and it makes no difference; when the chips are down, they still have to seize the chance to scamper away. In the (very dull, frankly) Target novelisation, Lucarotti tries to correct the plotting of this last episode. Tegana is defeated as a result of the Doctor’s guile, and we get that conventional ending in which everyone departs as friends, with the Khan even gratefully offering the Doctor a position in his court as personal secretary! It’s smoother, yes, and it’s more what we expect from Doctor Who – but it also entirely changes what the story is about. At this stage, the Doctor and his friends haven’t the power to influence events. They’ve barely the power to keep their lives. And it’s fascinating.
I did love this story. It’s been such a joy these last few days, looking forward to the next episode. I honestly don’t want it to end... what do you say, can we just forget the next story, and move on to The Aztecs? Because I know we’re being upbeat and only looking for the good in these episodes... but isn’t The Keys of Marinus a bit pants?
T: John Lucarotti has already proven to be smart, elegant and poetic, but the scenes with the Khan allow the writer to flex his not-unimpressive comedy muscles. To that end, Clare Davenport is perfect casting for the Empress, lumbering in and bossing Kublai about so much, he wishes he was more like Genghis. It’s a sweet and very funny cameo, with Kublai genuinely scared of the wrath of Mrs Khan.
But this frivolity just helps to disguise the numerous reversals of fortune throughout this final episode. Just as it looks like the Doctor’s skill at backgammon will win the TARDIS back, Lucarotti throws a final spanner into the works by having the Doctor lose – he emerges from his game against the Khan with only a bit of paper currency (the start of the show’s mischievous stance regarding the pointlessness of money) and starts giggling like a lunatic. Again. Then, when it seems as though Ping-Cho’s story will end unhappily, it turns out that her aged finance drank “a potion of quicksilver and sulphur to prolong life... and expired”, which means her marriage contract is terminated and she’s now free.
Other characters have darker endings: there’s a bit of black comedy when the kowtow insistent Vizier is killed before what sounds like a hell of a fight, and while Tegana’s suicide lets him to die with a certain dignity, it is, concurrently, a very brutal moment. Even the death of Kuiju – who is killed by the Khan’s men while trying to escape – shows the different moral compass of this time period. It’s shocking because he was, as you said, something of a comedy turn. (Incidentally, the actor playing Kuiju – poor old Tutte L
emkow – seems cursed in that none of the episodes he appeared in survived the BBC’s purge. Despite Lemkow being in three stories – Marco Polo, episode four of The Crusade and three episodes of The Myth Makers – we can’t see any of his performances. Judging by their, ahem, eccentricity, this is something of a shame.)
Marco, at least, weighs in on the story’s resolution by besting Tegana in a duel, and then by allowing the travellers to reclaim the TARDIS and escape – and yet there’s no time here for reflection, goodbyes, or even a post-adventure bon mot followed by a group giggle. With the travellers back on the run, we’re left with Polo rounding off back home – whilst handily explaining why none of these exploits will make it into his journals. Phew!
My goodness, this was a beautiful adventure. I’m sad to see these people go, and I’m even sadder that I’m tidying away telesnaps of Marco Polo while dusting off the shiny disc of The Keys of Marinus, rather than the other way round. Still, if the stories to come even match in quality the adventure we’ve just experienced, we’re in for several treats.
January 11th
The Sea of Death (The Keys of Marinus episode one)
R: Do you know, I think the most interesting thing about this episode is what isn’t there. The story opens without a reprise, without any real link to the previous story – save for the fact, I suppose, that Ian is still wearing that fetching Oriental garb. The past 20 weeks have run into each other consecutively, giving the sense this programme is one long serial with one common goal – which is to get these interfering schoolteachers safely back to sixties England, thank you. But now, that element has been dropped. There’s a break in the show’s overriding imperative for the first time, and this must have been deliberately done. But if so, why?
I think it comes out of a new understanding of what Doctor Who is all about. For a start, against the odds, it’s now a hit show, with viewing figures regularly reaching over nine million. It’s not on borrowed time any more, and it doesn’t need, therefore, to be looking towards a conclusion. As a result, it has to start taking the attitude that these travellers are enjoying their adventures, that all of this time-and-space lark is as exhilarating for them as it is for the audience.
With all of that in mind, it’s interesting that The Sea of Death seems to echo The Dead Planet – although since they’re both first episodes by Terry Nation, and since he’ll become renowned for using the same structure again and again, I wouldn’t count on it being all that calculated of a decision. The TARDIS arrives somewhere strange, the crew wonder over the peculiar landscape (here it’s a poison sea; in The Daleks it was a petrified jungle). They see a mysterious city in the distance, go to explore it, get separated in the process for a bit. But whereas no-one save the Doctor was too keen on exploring last time, here everyone’s behaving like jolly tourists. On Skaro, it took the Doctor sabotaging the Ship to get his companions to venture into the mysterious city they’ve seen; on Marinus, the Doctor need only suggest that they look around as an afternoon excursion, and Ian nods cheerfully. Even when Susan goes missing, Ian and Barbara are relaxed enough to coo over the architectural use of building blocks, with all the fervour that suggests they’ve just read about it in a local guide book.
All of this had to happen. This is what Doctor Who needs to be – a collection of adventures in which the regular characters want to participate. This about-face admittedly feels rather glib after the previous 20 episodes that we’ve watched (and especially when contrasted against our heroes’ desperate efforts to leave in Marco Polo), but this is going to be the template for now on, and that’s not in itself a terrible thing.
The shame of The Sea of Death, though, is that it doesn’t really offer much for this new holiday-making TARDIS crew to be impressed about, in spite of their most affable efforts. A petrified forest on Skaro looked sinister, but the sea of death on Marinus... is somewhere off-camera. I’d love to pretend there’s something very clever about the Voord – creatures who at first glance merely seem like men dressed in rubber suits, but who then turn out to genuinely be men dressed in rubber suits – but I think I’d be reaching a bit. They’re not very interesting because they never say a word, and they’re not very threatening because all they seem to do is stumble into all of Arbitan’s traps. And though the Doctor pays some lip-service to being blackmailed into a quest to retrieve the missing keys to the Conscience of Marinus, the rest of the TARDIS crew are in holiday spirits, and so don’t mind too much. They have the resigned look on their faces of tourists who’ve been told their flight home has been delayed for a couple of hours. Oh well, nothing for it. Back to browse round the Duty Free shop for a few more episodes then.
There’s one delightful line that I must draw attention to. It could well be one of Billy’s fluffs, but it’s actually so absurd, it has a wit to it that suggests it really must have been scripted, surely? Asked whether the sea is frozen, the Doctor replies, “No, impossible at this temperature. Besides, the sea is too warm.” Which has the same sort of skewed logic as a Douglas Adams joke. Almost.
T: Memo to Arbitan: if you want to keep the Voord (or “Voords”, as they’re credited) out, you might want to stop making walls that give way when you lean on them, thus granting access to your abode. Oh, and that forcefield of yours might come in handy as a Voord barrier: surround your dwelling with it, and no one will be able to get in and stab you. Oops, too late.
I know I’m being cheeky here, but it’s because my pleasure in watching The Sea of Death is mainly due to my having discovered a different way to enjoy Doctor Who. For years, when I collected videos of Doctor Who stories, I was often disappointed that the actual images didn’t live up to the pictures my wild imagination had conjured upon reading the Target books. Also, I watched the vids in a climate in which Doctor Who was a joke, an unloved relic, and so I resented these old tales if they didn’t satisfy modern standards. I watched them with half an eye on what the cherished “casual viewer” would make of them, and got angry if I didn’t think they’d appeal to my cocksure teenage mates. But why the hell should they? It took me a long time to realise that I could enjoy Doctor Who when it wasn’t necessarily at its best and not get hung up about it. With time, I could still admire the show’s scope, ambition and imagination while having fun with its imperfections and shortcomings.
Such a mindset has served me well at times, because with the best of goodwill and charity regarding imperfections and shortcomings, this episode is bloody full of them! The technical faults (crew-members can be glimpsed behind revolving walls at least twice) aren’t as intrusive as one might think, because I had to have these slip-ups pointed out to me, and even then had to remain eagle-eyed to spot them. However, the bit you mention about Ian and Barbara commenting on the walls demonstrates the huge gulf between the quality of writing in the script for Marco Polo and this one. John Lucarotti’s asides grew organically from his story, whereas in The Sea of Death, knowledge is shoehorned into a bit of perfunctory chit-chat. It sounds tacked on, and the actors involved can’t muster much interest in it. Even George Coulouris – in his one-episode cameo as Arbitan – seems quite befuddled and as unsure of his lines as William Hartnell.
And rewatching this story has only reminded me that the core of this adventure entails the Doctor and his friends being sent on a mission to rearm a machine that, er, takes away free will. After the sophisticated morality chess game of Marco Polo, we’re suddenly in the realm of such trite definitions as “evil” – from which the Conscience of Marinus can apparently free people. Even the machine’s name is a bit presumptive, as if nobody on Marinus has a “conscience”, and requires science to provide one for them. Somehow, I had self-edited the whole raison d’etre of the story from my subconscious, but it now seems very un-Doctor Who to me, and stands out more starkly because the rest of the script is just Doctor Who by numbers.
I know we’re supposed to stay positive in this undertaking, so I apologize if I’ve skewed too negative here. Despite my misgivings, I do fin
d it hard to call The Sea of Death a disaster, and can find bits to enjoy. I like the little TARDIS that appears on the beach (surely the first such model ever made – I wonder what happened to it?), and Norman Kay’s music is evocative and seems to trot along. Coulouris was quite a name to get in his day, so we should give the production team some casting kudos. But I do find that my chief comfort in rewatching this story, warts and all, is that it gives me a feeling of familiarity and warmth. It falls short in the details, but at least Doctor Who is still taking us to places that no other series can go.
The Velvet Web (The Keys of Marinus episode two)
R: The best way this episode could have been improved is if it hadn’t survived the BBC’s purge. No, honestly... this would be so good if we were unable to see the thing! Think about it – if we only had an audio soundtrack and a few gloomy telesnaps at our disposal, our imaginations would have filled in the gaps, and led us to believe that the utopia of Morphoton had the same opulence of set we were given just a couple of weeks ago in Marco Polo.
What we get instead, unfortunately, is a really good premise that’s compromised by cheap design and awkward direction. This won’t be the last Doctor Who adventure to have suffered from that – but because The Velvet Web is all about contrast of perspective, in that we’re invited to see beauty and decadence through the Doctor’s eyes and grime and filth through Barbara’s, it’s especially galling that there isn’t the budget to achieve the former or the imagination to achieve the latter. We’re meant to be shocked when we see that Morphoton as previously viewed through Barbara’s eyes has been reduced to just a shabby BBC set, but instead we’re presented with just a different sort of shab.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 8