Doctor Who
The Keys of
Marinus
Most of the
criticisms levelled at The Keys of
Marinus over the past 50 years have been fair play, and yet it’s a story I return
to as one of the more effortlessly watchable of the Hartnell era. Consequently,
the one complaint I can’t really countenance
is that it’s boring. While many a foray during this fledgling period drags its
heels, even ones of undeniable quality in other areas, Marinus’ shifting soils and weekly adventures-in-miniature sustain
interest, however inelegant the actual construction of those narratives may be.
The quest premise also makes it a winner; it’s a format I have little
resistance to, even when manifested, as here, in an often overtly budget-stricken
manner.
Doctor Who has dabbled with the search structure
elsewhere, most notably across The Key to Time season, and ultimately Marinus’ mission is even more of a MacGuffin
than in that sextology, a means to string together what would otherwise be vignettes
to little overall coherence or consequence (The
Chase and the makeshift epic The Daleks’
Master Plan would be even more flagrant with this a year or so later,
although there it was in the name of pursuit of our protagonists).
But the
loosely episodic format is such an evergreen staple of storytelling, from The Odyssey to The Hobbit and beyond, that it would be churlish to slight its potency,
particularly when offering such shamelessly pulpy content. One of my favourite
series as a youngster – too soon curtailed, alas – was The Fantastic Journey, a similarly variable weekly trek through
strange (or rather familiar-looking, Californian) locations in an unknown land
(the Californian countryside), with the promise of unknown and infinitely
variable vistas (however recognisable and ultimately humdrum; yes, California) being
key to the appeal. And to Marinus’ appeal.
Admittedly,
you have to be willing to move beyond some precipitous pitfalls of plotting to
fully embrace the story. Terry Nation’s narrative proficiencies, or
limitations, tend to cop a lot of flak, and rightly so. His other non-Dalek
story, The Android Invasion, has a pretty
good scene-setting first episode, but otherwise amounts to a compendium of
hilariously ham-fisted bun vending (the peak, or low point, being an eyepatch-raising
twist to make Nick Courtney proud. If only he’d been there; at least his best
was yet to come, exhumed as a rotting Cyber-Brigadier). Having Daleks in a
story seemed to shift attention just enough that the prevailing Nation-esque shortcomings
were granted a free pass, most of the time (even, for some, like Mark Gatiss,
with that most inspiration-bereft of encounters, The Planet of the Daleks). Unfortunately, Marinus has problems making sense of its convoluted mission
statement from the ground up.
I can just
about buy into the premise, at a huge pinch; Arbitan the Keeper (we presume,
since there’s evidently a degree of longevity to these assorted Marinians, what
with Yartek learning to resist the effects of the Conscience Machine a mere 1,300
years before) and his cronies developed the Conscience Machine as a computerised
Judge Dredd, its own judge and jury, but we’re told it was modified such that
it controlled the minds of men, so eliminating evil throughout the world.
It was only
when Arbitan’s crew learned of the Voord’s (I don’t care if Voords is possibly-maybe
correct, Voord is much better, almost as if someone has thought about it.
Besides which, they need as much credibility as they can scrape with those
flippers) savvy that fourth-fifths of the Machine’s keys were ferreted away,
while Arbitan attempted to whip up version 2.0, and so restore law and order. The
machine as intended invites the spectre of the classic AI gone berserk, as per
Colossus, Skynet or the Matrix, suggesting less sophisticated thinking, while a
technology that eradicates evil is Nation coming from the opposite angle to the
Daleks.
You can see
why Arbitan (George Coulouris) thinks a machine acting as a conscience for all
is necessary, as he doesn’t appear to have much of one himself (living for
millennia evidently doesn’t imbue much in the way of wisdom), blackmailing the
TARDIS crew into popping off for the keys, and sending his dearly beloved
daughter into harm’s way. He ought to have at least warned them of the threats
they faced. Even being charitable, and suggesting most of the perils weren’t in
place hundreds of years before, when the keys were first distributed, it’s
difficult to believe the ice soldiers weren’t bedded in by Arbitan himself,
since their very nature is as guardians of some sort.
Arbitan: They no
longer decided what was wrong or right. The machine decided it for them.
One wonders
if Williams, Douglas Adams, and the Bristol Boys didn’t watch Marinus in prepping the finale of the
Key to Time season, since The Armageddon
Factor similarly fluffs the big, dramatic raison d’être. Both
stories have a fake component, used for varyingly constructive/destructive purposes,
and both fail to fully deliver on the promise of ultimate assembly. To be fair
to Marinus, destroying the Conscience
Machine is the only ethical outcome that could
be satisfactory; it’s just lucky it takes out the Voord as well. Except that,
since the Voord’s whole motivation derived from disagreeing with the Machine’s
purpose, they may really be the good guys; okay, they don’t look like the good
guys, more Silent Hill via Play School, and they’re alarmingly
knife-happy, but Arbitan does seem tyrannically
intent on forcing them into slavery of the will, so can you blame Yartek for
wanting to adapt that to his own ends?
The main
problem with all this is that the ending is such a rush-job. We’re dropped into
the moral qualms over the use of the machine rather suddenly, almost as an
afterthought. It’s fair enough that the Doctor collects the keys, forced into a
mission against his will in order to get the TARDIS back, but for his stance to
carry any weight, he really needed to broach it earlier.
One of the
complaints about the story, as expressed by the ever-rickety-in-logic The Discontinuity Guide, is that “There’s not enough room to develop the
individual stories, most of which are very dull”. Which begs the question,
why are you complaining about them being undeveloped, then? About Time comes to a similar
conclusion, for different reasons (“the
epic scale means that it never stands a chance of being interesting”; Wood
and Miles also assert, bafflingly, “Why
should we care if the TARDIS crew get the keys, when the reason they’re
searching is to get back to the TARDIS, which is in a death-trap anyway?” –
er, because otherwise they’ll never get the TARDIS back?)
As intimated in the
opening paragraph, I can’t say I find the story dull at any stage, nor is the railed-upon
lack of urgency a factor; for me, the ticking clock of something nasty (the
Voord) lying in wait when the crew return is sufficient to sustain any
longueurs (of which there aren’t any, not really, except maybe a wee bit across
the 1.5 episodes of the Millennius sequence, but they have the consolation of
Billy being back from his hols, in full effect). I wonder if those berating the
story on this level binged it, as it paces itself rather perfectly seen over
six consecutive nights.
But there’s
definitely a negative side to all this hopping about the place. Not so much in
set-up as resolution. The mysteries of Morphoton, revealed in The Velvet Web (if only Mel Tormé had been up for that cameo, it could have retained its original title),
easily the best sequence, could have done with a longer sustained illusion (so The Discontinuity Guide is partly right).
It kicks off like a trial-run for The
Romans, with the crew on recliners scoffing grapes, and the Doctor’s
summary (“Oh, er, sensuous and decadent,
but rather pleasant”) could be right out of that story.
Hartnell is
fluffing like a jackanapes in the first episode (most famously, “No, impossible at this temperature. Besides,
it’s too warm” and “And if you’d had
your shoes on my boy, you could have lent her hers”) and he’s not alone
with the fluffs throughout, but that just makes him more cherishable. That, and
his enthusiasm for truffles. Ian’s on good form too, (rightly) doubting anything
is for free (“Here comes the bill”;
the idea that capitalism is an illusion is itself an illusion, or is it?). He
then delivers the second possessed performance of the main crew (I think,
following Susan’s attempt to cut off his Johnson in The Edge of Destruction).
Barbara,
who like many in this story, not least the Voord, discovers that hiding in
plain sight is rather effective, finds it all too easy to destroy the brain
creatures (surprisingly, given her pitiful aim), which are a simple but
effective piece of bug-eyed ‘50s B-movie design.
And, for
all that John Gorrie seems to cop flack, there’s directorial inventiveness running
through Morphoton. It may be easy to mock, and there are gaffes in abundance,
but he does a vastly superior job to, say, Richard Martin. Which might not be
saying much, but there’s a more-than-sufficient
variety in form and atmosphere each episode. Here, he’s note-perfect in
capturing the slip between perception and reality, with both point-of-view
shots and Ian and the Doctor acting out their illusionary world in his “lab”
while under the influence. I mentioned The
Fantastic Journey, and its best episode Fun
House is very reminiscent of The
Velvet Web; an apparently luxuriant location masking decay and filth.
Is this
Terry Nation’s condensed Brave New World,
a trenchant treatise on the illusory nature of materialism as embodied by a populace
who allow themselves to be duped and conditioned in exchange for superficial comforts,
rather than nourishment of the soul, which stagnates? Westerners, like the
people of Morphoton, “are perhaps the
most contented in the universe”?
There’s the
criticism that Babs only arrives moments before Ian and the others, yet has
been in Morphoton for a good while, enough to get rather louche, but I don’t
really see the issue. The leaping timeframe lags work because there’s a
narrative break, even if not a temporal one (and who knows the vagaries of the
in-transit aether). Babs is quite kill-happy in Morphoton, and kill-happy in
the subsequent The Screaming Jungle
too, getting jolly baity with a poor tendril.. Susan should just be grateful she
hadn’t made friends with a Sand Beast.
Barbara: This is
a dead place.
Ian: Yes,
it’s a bit quiet, isn’t it?
Barbara: That
isn’t quite what I meant.
This
sequence is rudimentary by any standards, what with makeshift killer creepers
(more effectively rendered in the later The
Seeds of Doom), rum ruins, and dialogue such as “This whole place is one big booby trap”. Darrius, a beardy mad
scientist as played by Trevor and Simon, is given to portentous warnings about
his creation (“It’s coming again. The
jungle is coming” and “When the
whispering starts, it’s death, I tell you. It’s death”) before expiring
with a risibly cryptic clue (he keeps his key in a jar with a chemical formula
written on the side).
The real
downer here is Susan, screaming and wailing at the slightest thing like she’s
six years old (which is probably unfair to six-year-olds). Really shockingly
useless. Babs should have been attacking
her, rather than the creeper (Susan’s at it again in the following episode,
making this something of a cut-off point for the character being halfway
palatable). You have to wonder a bit about Darrius too; sitting about for
hundreds of years, twiddling his thumbs waiting for Arbitan to get in touch, he
comes up with a growth accelerator that changes nature’s tempo of destruction
entirely. The feckin ijit.
Vasor: Last
year, I broke the back of a wolf with both my hands.
Snows of Terror is the one with the rapey trapper, and
sinister ethereal choirs out of The Goodies
and the Beanstalk. For all that the later ice caves business is a
sub-Thal-journey attempt to fashion an epic adventure on a shoestring and
failing (more notable for being the episode fans ponder if it wasn’t the one
that frightened the once slender Davo as a lad, rather than its actual content),
and throws in entirely unanswerable, and thus best not dwelt upon elements
(what are these soldiers exactly? Other than suggesting Grail guardians from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), Gorrie’s
still doing his level best with limited resources, and enough of this works to
be engrossing.
The Trapper,
Vasor (Francis de Woolf, also Agamemnon, he of the quivering buttocks, in The Myth Makers), is a sinister sort,
John Goodman from 10 Cloverfield Lane
at teatime. Particularly unnerving as he tenderly rubs Babs’ hands. Why he
didn’t dump Ian in a crevasse outright is highly questionable (you might ask
the same about Goodman and John Gallagher, Jr), but I quite like his cunning
plan of sending Chatterton out into the wolf-ridden slopes, his pockets stuffed
full of raw meat. Quite creative. I don’t think much of his furs, though, and I
don’t know how Ian expected to last five minutes with a few bits of fox thrown
over his shoulders, let alone equipped with several yards of liver.
Altos (Robin
Phillips) and Sabetha (Katherine Schofield) are reasonably effective as
companies for a story (they’ve got to count for more than Adam). They’re certainly
a lot less tiresome than Susan. Sabetha has a nice snooty thing going on, and
Altos is predicting early Bowie by a decade, with his short shorts and
androgynous crop top. But with a touch of Rik Mayall.
Ian: The laws in this country are a mockery.
The Doctor: I quite agree with you, my boy…
Ian: I need a man to defend me.
The Doctor: I am that man.
When
Hartnell reappears in Sentence of Death,
it’s enough to wish the show was filmed before a live studio audience; the
crowd would have gone wild when he appears, as if by magic, promising to go all
Perry Mason in aid of the capital crime-charged Ian. Is this a signature hero
moment for the one-time caveman-skull-stoving TARDIS captain?
The City of
Millennius legal system bears up, I suspect, to negligible scrutiny, although
one might argue it’s a highly effective deterrent to anyone doing much of
anything at all, such as leaving the house, let alone a remotely dodgy act,
since they’re instantly rewarded with a guilty verdict unless they can prove
otherwise.
Ian: Thank
heaven you remembered reading Pyrrho, Doctor.
The Doctor: Reading?
What are you talking about? I met the man!
It might
explain, to be charitable, why the place is littered with do-badders putting
their feet in it in the most obvious manner (“But you couldn’t know where it is, I…” and “But she can’t have found it, I…”).
However, against
the notion that Terry wasn’t making the effort are some interesting asides. There’s
the use of psychometry to reveal the characteristics of those who have been at
the scene of the crime. Also, the suggestion of domestic violence, hot on the
heels of Babs being harassed (and an attempted strangulation from Ian), gives
way to reveal that Kala (Fiona Walker; let’s not mention Silver Nemesis) is a criminal mastermind herself, and no slouch in
the acting stakes (“They’re like all the
rest of them – stupid, stupid”), even if she falls prey to the same tootsies-in-mouth
incrimination that does for her hubby (“Well,
how did she know she spoke to Susan?”).
While it’s
fun to have the Doctor as the counsel for the defence, and the doggedness with
which Ian remains charged has a certain bureaucratic cachet (first as the
accomplice to Aydan – Martin Cort, also of The
Seeds of Death – then accused by Kala)
the increased span of time spent on Millennius doesn’t actually service the
plot any better than in the other locations; it just gives Terry more time to
fashion unlikely developments. Donald Pickering (Beyus) is fine as the villain,
but less effective than he is in the later The
Faceless Ones (let’s not mention Time
and the Rani).
The Doctor: You’re
all running around like a lot of scared chickens.
The big
climax with Yartek, taking up the backend of The Keys of Marinus (the episode, not the story), is on the
perfunctory side, but as throughout – and this is perhaps my consistent and weak
defence, but it is my defence – it
remains engaging.
Sometimes this is in the patently ridiculous sense, with
Yartek impersonating Arbitan by pimping it up in his robe (Gerry Davis would soon
be likewise inspired, giving the proto-Cybermen parkas to hide their Cyber-ness
in The Tenth Planet; perhaps this
tenuous connection led to Grant Morrison offering a link between Voord and
Cybermen in The World Shapers). At
others it’s in the quite sly; Sabetha attempting to suggest Altos is a useless
servant doesn’t really wash, but Ian’s ruse with the fake key is rather clever,
and an effective and seamlessly integrated piece of plotting, utilising as it
does an element from the third episode.
It’s also
fun to see the Doctor laughing when he’s clobbering Voord on the noggin. What
with this and the shovel incident in The Reign
of Terror, the suggestion that he put away braining people in the Cave of
Skulls is a little pre-emptive. The Doctor isn’t very helpful, though, when,
having stressed the importance of man not being made to be ruled by machines,
he instructs Sabetha to carry on her father’s good work. How precisely will
proceed “only not quite in the same way”?
Give her a bit of a steer, or you’ll just make things worse.
The Keys of Marinus tends to be criticised for reducing the series
to a lowest-common-denominator adventure romp, on a budget so slim it shines a
harsh light on failings of performance, plotting and overall execution. No
doubt some of this is true, although I’ve usually found cheapness the most
forgivable of aspects in derided stories (as the observation goes, the casual
viewer would perceive every Doctor Who story
as as cheap and shoddy as every other story, classic status be damned).
It certainly
isn’t the most though-provoking Hartnell, the phantasmagoria of the second
episode aside, and it frequently trips over itself, both in terms of
Nation-isms and onscreen flipper antics (of which, footwear aside, the Voord
are a strangely effective piece of design, fashionably zippered but striking,
particularly as it’s left to the viewer to decide if they’re hiding humans
underneath or really look like that). But the adventuring format is a winner, and
makes The Keys of Marinus as important a part of
testing the show’s boundaries as the more celebrated stories preceding it. As
for the notional tedium, it’s clearly in the eye of the beholder.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.