I do feel a bit sorry, though, for Henley Thomas, who is here playing Tarron. He doesn’t appear to have done much before or since his appearance in this story, and yet he was considered important enough to get guest-star billing in the Radio Times. Oh, how proud he must have been, showing this to his Mum, thinking this was the beginning of something good for him, and then... nothing. He had a couple of other telly bits, and then obscurity. Donald Pickering and Fiona Walker, at least, went on to much more successful fare – especially the former, whose cool underplaying here is an early entry in a career filled with such glacial, watchable performances. And if we’re playing “Where Are they Now?”, I should point out that Michael Allaby has become a leading writer on climate change. Perhaps he got into the zone by watching The Screaming Jungle a couple of weeks ago, was gripped by the idea of nature destroying man and thought “half a mo’, there’s something in that!”
Oh, and what with the production team having spent money on three Voords in The Sea of Death when just one would have been enough (as only one Voord is visible at any given time), we here get two actors credited as “First Judge” and “Second Judge” despite the fact that they aren’t allowed to deliver a line, and are forced to rhubarb with Raf de la Torre (the “Senior Judge”). At one moment, Torre’s judge-posse laboriously nod far longer than any human being has ever nodded before or since, as if to make up for their being robbed of dialogue. In particular, quite why the judge on the left bobs his head up and down like the Duracell Bunny when a simple “yes” would have sufficed is anyone’s guess.
The Keys of Marinus (episode six)
R: Yartek – the leader of the Voord – isn’t a very intelligent villain. He attempts to deceive Ian by wearing Arbitan’s hood over his head and keeping his distance – but he hasn’t even taken off his wetsuit helmet, suggesting even to the most gullible of people that Arbitan’s head has grown corners since they last spoke. It was established in episode one, after all, that the Voord wear their costumes as protection against the acid sea; it’s not their actual skin. Or maybe Yartek isn’t wearing a helmet at all – maybe he isn’t even humanoid – and he has the misfortune to be an alien who happens to look like he’s in a wetsuit, and lead a group of people who always happen to wear wetsuits. It’s enough to make anyone a little power-crazy and unbalanced.
This isn’t the only time that Doctor Who will create a monster, and then casually forget the details of that monster on its return – a warrior found encased in ice will, in future serials, refer to its own race as Ice Warriors; the third eye that a Silurian uses to open doors becomes something which flashes during speech; and the Daleks, after their first serial, no longer need to drive around on metal like bumper cars. Those sort of changes are inevitable – from story to story, monsters can only carry the characteristics that the viewers at home remember, no matter how inaccurate. But in the case of the Voord, it’s possibly the only time that the production team throws away what the monsters are all about mid-story. And it’s telling, because it’s been so long since we’ve seen last them, and we’ve watched so many mini-adventures in the interim, that it does actually feel that the Voord are a returning villain from the past.
One could argue that any story which is about the collection of vital keys, which only ends with them being destroyed before they can be put to any practical benefit, is going to come across as a massive anticlimax. Peculiarly enough, in its truncated six-episode form, The Keys of Marinus predicts the disappointment many will feel 15 years later at the end of The Key to Time season, which has much the same let-down after 26 weeks of adventuring. But rather than making the quest here feel like a waste of time, the destruction of the Conscience feels like a positive conclusion to the serial. Although this story has hardly had the greatest depth to offer, its support of free will in all its forms is very winning. It’s especially appropriate too, coming as it does at the end of a story which, however clumsy some of the little adventures it has given us, has tried its level-best to celebrate so much variety of locations and characters. The idea that the inhabitants of Morphoton or Millennius should be controlled by Arbitan’s machine seems as daft as suggesting that the Thals or the Mongols should be as well.
Two especially nice moments here: I love the way, after losing the trial to the point that Ian gets a death sentence, we see the Doctor sitting quiet, staring into space. We’ve seen him bluster before, or face crises with pride or anger or even a fit of giggling, but we’ve never seen him so still and composed. It’s very powerful, as is the dignified way he accepts the commiserations of the prosecutor. And in a lighter vein, the little romance between Altos and Sabetha may feel as contrived and unmoving as any romance between two sheets of cardboard – but as they depart, it’s interesting to see the interplay between Ian and Barbara as they stand in the TARDIS doorway. Ian puts his hand on Barbara’s shoulder, grins, beckons her into the Ship – and she smiles in return. That’s the real romance of the series, right there, subtly developing under our noses with barely a word of dialogue to mention it – and Russell and Hill are playing it beautifully.
A final reason to take note of The Keys of Marinus: the novelisation. It’s not that it’s an especially good book, because it isn’t – but it is written, of all people, by Philip Hinchcliffe. And the idea that the man responsible for turning Doctor Who into something so horrific – a man that was the bane of Mary Whitehouse and BBC censorship – had to watch The Screaming Jungle over and over again does something funny to my head.
T: Whilst Terry Nation cannily wrote episodes requiring more physical action during Hartnell’s absence, he’s rightly put him centre stage here – and he’s rewarded by an actor in commanding form. The Doctor makes up for buggering up Ian’s defence last week by cunningly unmasking the murderer, and reveals he actually knew where the missing key was the whole time. Oh, he’s a clever manipulator, this one. Who knows what he might have been up to in the weeks before Ian and Barbara stumbled into the TARDIS: burying an ancient Time Lord power source, perhaps? In light of this, it’s plausible!
Otherwise, though, we’re now back in slapdash territory. Barbara asks Tarron if the “psychosymetric” test is back on the murder weapon, and he says it isn’t. No matter, she replies, it will say that Kala (Fiona Walker’s character) killed her husband. Hang on – you’re telling me that Ian’s trial has finished, and the clock is ticking down to his execution before the forensic reports are back on a related murder? It’s rough justice on Millennius methinks. Have these people no Conscience? (Oh, wait a minute...)
Then our heroes return to Arbitan’s island, and I’m reminded that I rather like the design of the Voords – despite, as you say, confusion as to what exactly they are. Personally, I see no reason why they can’t actually look like rubber outercasing, meaning they’re monsters, not men. Or perhaps they are men who happen to look like rubber monsters. Or perhaps they’re wearing rubber suits, but underneath they’re still just as rubbery, only slightly thinner. Oh God, I don’t know. If the script is confused, you can’t blame me for so being.
And so, finally, after six long weeks of adventuring to retrieve the keys so the Conscience can re-exert control over the populace of Marinus, the Doctor takes the position that, “I don’t believe man was made to be controlled by machines.” What? So, what was the bloody point of the quest, then? It seems rather a glib payoff, doesn’t it? Yes, the assertion that free will is important is laudable, but it hasn’t really grown organically from what we’ve seen in the last five episodes. It’s bunged on at the end, like a naff joke at Spock’s expense at the end of a Star Trek episode.
To look over the entire story, I don’t think much of The Keys of Marinus was good, necessarily, but I did wind up enjoying it. None of the storylines outstayed their welcome, and each episode had plenty of incident to keep us occupied. There were some neat ideas at work, and a heck of a lot of labour for that inventive designer Ray Cusick. Was this adventure childish in parts? Yes. Was much of it far fetched
? Yes. And we’re wrong to expect that from a family programme about a time-travelling police box for what reason, precisely?
January 14th
The Temple of Evil (The Aztecs episode one)
R: Up to now, the TARDIS crew have essentially been spectators of the times they’ve visited, unwilling to do more than observe, and only breaking out of that because they’ve been forced to win back their freedom. The Keys of Marinus followed that basic idea, but really only paid lip service to it – our heroes never seemed that threatened by the loss of the TARDIS, and the forcefield put around it was treated so glibly, the story never even felt the need to take it down again. Instead, the Doctor and his pals blew up the Conscience and defeated the Voord – and, like it or not, put themselves at the very centre of change upon the planet.
The Temple of Evil is a reaction to that. It’s all very well for the Doctor to take an active involvement in the affairs of fictitious planets – but what about in these history stories he keeps popping into every other adventure or so? Barbara’s decision to take advantage of her new guise as the goddess Yetaxa and save the Aztecs from themselves is only arrogant and wrong because she’s doing it in the wrong type of Doctor Who adventure – the Doctor happily encouraged Ian to rewrite the culture of the Thals, so Barbara trying to get rid of human sacrifice here in Mexico seems only a logical extension of that. The resultant argument between her and the Doctor is fascinating, firstly because by doing so, John Lucarotti has immediately dived into the essential inconsistency of the show’s premise (and one that is still being teased at in 2008, like a nagging itch – why is it acceptable for Donna save the Ood, but not the victims of Vesuvius?). And what’s terrific about the debate is that the Doctor loses – because his only real argument can be that Doctor Who Stories Don’t Work That Way, and all the moral rightness lies with Barbara. The climax to the episode, in which the sacrifice is prepared, is just terrific – the expression on Ian’s face speaks volumes, that of a liberal twentieth century man unsure just how far he can go along with this, knowing full well he’s promised the Doctor not to interfere, but for all that becoming an accessory to a man’s death.
The brilliance of it is, of course, that Lucarotti refuses to patronise the Aztecs. Barbara technically saves a man’s life by calling a halt to the sacrifice, but all that the intended victim shows in response is shame and embarrassment. The last look he throws her, just before he jumps to his death, is the petulant defiance of an angry child who is sulking because his mother’s taken away his favourite toy. Up to that point, we might have sided with Barbara entirely, thought the Aztecs would want to be rescued from their savagery – but this character who gets only one line, and whom we might have assumed was only an extra, throws Barbara’s mercy right back at her.
The opening scene is very also clever – Barbara emerges from the TARDIS, clearly delighted to find herself at her hobbyhorse period of history, and proudly proclaims herself to Susan an expert on this era. Susan’s face is a picture; she’s rather less enchanted by what she sees about her, focusing on the horror rather than the beauty Barbara enthuses about. And while Susan claims that she knows little of the period, she knows it well enough that she can reference the Spanish, date Cortes’ arrival exactly to the year and give an account of the horrors of human sacrifice, which isn’t bad going. By contrast, the best that Barbara can do is pick up a bracelet. The suggestion Lucarotti makes from the outset is that Barbara may not be the voice of experience after all. It’s probably not deliberate, but the way that the other members of the TARDIS later discover her – all dolled up and lounging in luxury – is essentially a repeat of the opening of The Velvet Web. And just look how Barbara’s assessment of Morphoton society was back to front as well. The Velvet Web was all about skewed perception, how the beauty presented to us might just be rags. And now we have the whole of the Aztec culture to wonder at in the same way – truly, what is barbaric here, and what is not?
T: Yes... it’s often stated that the main job of the companions is to stand about and ask questions, but that’s not the case here, as both Susan and Barbara impart necessary contextualisation in an informative and interesting way. We then learn about the cleverness of Aztec engineering at the same time that it becomes a vital plot point – these people have built complex structures, and one of these impressive architectural feats instantly becomes the barrier between the travellers and the TARDIS.
What strikes me the most about The Temple of Evil, though, is how it’s all very theatrical – and I don’t at all mean that as a slight. One of the reasons I like Doctor Who is because I get characters and dialogue I’d never see in any number of programmes about vaguely grumpy detectives, or tough times in grotty housing estates. I’ve read critiques that dismiss the dialogue in stories such as this one as “cod-Shakespearean”, but I have to strongly disagree – Lucarotti’s lines are rich and elegant, and it’s a perfectly reasonable conceit to convey a sense of place and time through hyper-real, “grander” language. It would jar if Tlotoxl – the High Priest of Sacrifice – and his contemporaries talked with twentieth century colloquialisms, and we’d gain nothing by losing such fine language as Cameca’s comment, “Better to go hungry than to starve for beauty.” As part of this approach, John Ringham’s cruel, lizardlike performance as Tlotoxl is perfectly apt – he’s a truly memorable villain. Just watch the way Tlotoxl makes his first entrance by shambling into the corner of the picture; it’s a subtle and effective trick.
But despite the lofty position afforded to the travellers, the Doctor expertly enunciates the undercurrent of danger: it’s all very well that Barbara is regarded as a god, but if these people discover she’s not one, it won’t be pretty. It’s interesting, then, that Ian acts with such confidence when he’s chucked into the soldiers’ barracks – he’s understandably wary regarding his rival for command, Ixta, but never displays a fear of him. A middle-class science teacher from our time might seem rather out of place in such a setting (“I will fight you Ixta, but first we need to assess your social, emotional and interpersonal development and ensure we give you enough positive integrational encouragement so as not to curb your self-esteem levels”), but Ian comes from a generation who grew up as the most devastating war the world had ever seen was being fought. He just gets on with the business at hand, hoping that words will suffice, but seemingly ready to use action if it comes down to it.
As an aside, Rob, let me say that so far, we’ve largely agreed on the plusses and minuses of the episodes we’ve seen. I can’t wait till we vehemently disagree. I can see it now... “I tell you again, Hadoke, if you don’t accept that the High Priest Lolem in The Underwater Menace is the greatest villain of the series so far, I will never give you Bruno Langley’s phone number,” followed by, “Damn you, Shearman, for vomiting on the legacy of the Morok Commander!”
The Warriors of Death (The Aztecs episode two)
R: Oh, you can tell that John Lucarotti wrote this, can’t you? Everybody’s manipulating everybody else – Ixta is using the Doctor to win a fight, the Doctor is using Cameca to find a way of opening the tomb, and Tlotoxl and Barbara are using absolutely everybody for political reasons. It’s plotted so tightly, and has all the various little bits of subterfuge converge splendidly in the episode’s closing moments: Ian is poisoned as a result of the Doctor trying to buy information about the tomb, and Tlotoxl at last dares Barbara to make a public demonstration of her divinity. This has the perfect structure of a theatre play, with all the disparate subplots affecting the other in the most calamitous way just before the curtain falls for the halfway mark.
It’s told with greater pace and efficiency than Marco Polo, and maybe a little of the charm is sacrificed as a result. But the scenes between the Doctor and Cameca in the gardens are delightful – however calculating the Doctor’s reasons may be for flirting with the old girl, there’s more than a sense he’s genuinely smitten with her. Hartnell clearly enjoys playing this new Doctor as someone who can be sentimenta
l and fond. The awkwardness he displays upon realising that there are always a group of extras staring at him from behind as he begins his courtship of Cameca is a subtle piece of comedy, and especially lovely.
T: The biggest similarity I can see between this and Lucarotti’s previous story, Marco Polo, is the way that everyone puts their cards on the table, but just stops short of showing them. Tlotoxl is cagey and patient – he’ll make his move in his own good time – while Barbara tries to use her composure and unflappability as a weapon against him. So the cliffhanger boils down to Barbara playing her “I’m a god, do as I say” ace, and Tlotoxl responding with his “If you’re a god, prove it” joker. This Aztec priest is such an adaptable, shifty character; he’s far more palpable a threat than any clodhopping rubbermen who fall through walls and fail to disguise their triangular heads.
But I also enjoy the interplay between the Doctor and Barbara – William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill work really well together, don’t they? Their reconciliation was one of the highlights of The Brink of Disaster, and their confrontation here – as the Doctor tells Barbara how her ignoring his advice has made everything worse – is just as impressive. He chides her, yes, but only in the sense that he’s commanding and pragmatic, not that he’s unkind or unfair. Her response – to cry – is, for once, a genuinely understandable outburst. She’s not upset because he’s being a git; it’s because he’s right and her plan didn’t work – and she’s now feeling pressured and vulnerable. And then the Doctor melts, and becomes understanding and tender. It’s such a lovely dynamic, coming as it does in a flawlessly written and acted scene.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 10
