So this should be the point where the show starts to hit its stride, right? I mean, we’ve had the set up and have seen the group bond. So surely it’s plain sailing from here? All we need is a couple of good stories…
But instead we get this.
The crew land on a planet manned by a sole survivor of some pretty half-hearted alien attacks. It appears this chap and his friends have been ruling this planet for thousands of years with a rather impressive level of mind control. A machine that simply makes people incapable of thinking naughty thoughts. The premise is one that would have a modern day Doctor foaming at the mouth but instead our chums seem fairly indifferent.
But it turns out the machine has been taken to pieces over the years and the bits hidden. The old boy trying to manage the thing rather randomly trusts a group of strangers to go and find the "Keys" that have been hidden all over "Marinus". Can you see what they did there?
The story is very disjointed and just seems to stop and then start again a bit down the road. The structure of the story is that each of the middle 4 episodes follows our heroes on a separate part of the quest to reclaim the 4 keys. This is a vaguely nice idea but is handled terribly.
The second episode shows our lot land in an area of the planet run by mind-controlling brains. This lasts a little while before Barabara smashes up the brains (yes, seriously, brains in jars. I suppose it wasn’t a cliché back then), happen across one of the keys and the group all bugger off again. It’s irritating that every time this story seems to find itself a nice little theme everything changes. And not in a good way.
Episode 3: Susan screams, Barbara gets herself captured. Susan screams again, Barbara gets herself captured again. Ian gets captured and takes a crowbar to his cell. Barbara tries to escape by screaming. It's all very Women's Lib..
By this stage it is obvious that the episodes are self contained stories in themselves. That seemed to work with Marco Polo. But it really doesn’t here. At all.
Interestingly, episodes 3 & 4 don’t feature the Doctor at all. Doesn’t really feel that way though as Ian still seems to be the driving force behind this story. He’s Bruce Willis and the Doctor is the background fat character there seems to be in most Bruce Willis films. When he’s there, you notice him (because he’s annoying you) when he’s not you basically forget about him.
Halfway through episode 5 I stop to watch the new pope being announced. This is an hour of my life I will never get back and yet I still feel vaguely disconsolate when I turn back to the DVD.
So The Doctor appears back in episode 5 as Ian somehow manages to get himself accused of murder. The Doctor somehow gets appointed as Ian’s defence and stages a re-enactment of the killing that would make CSI seem half decent. We then have a torturous court scene that includes possibly the most brazen Shakespeare rip-off imaginable (The play’s the thing, with which I’ll catch the conscience of the king: Only shit).
Then episode 6 sort of helps the whole thing dribble towards what you might loosely call a conclusion. The unconvincing court scene is capped off with an unconvincing capture of the real villains in an unconvincing plot twist. And before you know it we’re back where we started fighting unconvincing monsters and causing unconvincing explosions.
And then they all bugger off. Again.
What impressed me about this story is that it fails on almost every level. The story is far too ambitious and tries to do over 6 episodes what the show tried to do in the Key to Time season over about 26. The dialogue is stilted and trite throughout and the episodes don’t really link up properly.
When I started this blog I decided I wanted to talk about story rather than production values but on that front this fails too. You can see stagehands opening supposedly automatic doors and one of the Voords trips over his own absurd shoe entering one of the finals scenes and no-one thought to bother to edit it. It's this sort of crap that has given Doctor Who a bad name for 49 years and now, for basically the first time, I can see how it annoyed people. Maybe Doctor Who can get away with dodgy sets when the story is half good but when it's rubbish they somehow add insult to injury.
One line sums this story up:
‘No, impossible in this temperature, besides its too warm.’
Moving. Swiftly. On.
But instead we get this.
The crew land on a planet manned by a sole survivor of some pretty half-hearted alien attacks. It appears this chap and his friends have been ruling this planet for thousands of years with a rather impressive level of mind control. A machine that simply makes people incapable of thinking naughty thoughts. The premise is one that would have a modern day Doctor foaming at the mouth but instead our chums seem fairly indifferent.
But it turns out the machine has been taken to pieces over the years and the bits hidden. The old boy trying to manage the thing rather randomly trusts a group of strangers to go and find the "Keys" that have been hidden all over "Marinus". Can you see what they did there?
The story is very disjointed and just seems to stop and then start again a bit down the road. The structure of the story is that each of the middle 4 episodes follows our heroes on a separate part of the quest to reclaim the 4 keys. This is a vaguely nice idea but is handled terribly.
The second episode shows our lot land in an area of the planet run by mind-controlling brains. This lasts a little while before Barabara smashes up the brains (yes, seriously, brains in jars. I suppose it wasn’t a cliché back then), happen across one of the keys and the group all bugger off again. It’s irritating that every time this story seems to find itself a nice little theme everything changes. And not in a good way.
Episode 3: Susan screams, Barbara gets herself captured. Susan screams again, Barbara gets herself captured again. Ian gets captured and takes a crowbar to his cell. Barbara tries to escape by screaming. It's all very Women's Lib..
By this stage it is obvious that the episodes are self contained stories in themselves. That seemed to work with Marco Polo. But it really doesn’t here. At all.
Interestingly, episodes 3 & 4 don’t feature the Doctor at all. Doesn’t really feel that way though as Ian still seems to be the driving force behind this story. He’s Bruce Willis and the Doctor is the background fat character there seems to be in most Bruce Willis films. When he’s there, you notice him (because he’s annoying you) when he’s not you basically forget about him.
Halfway through episode 5 I stop to watch the new pope being announced. This is an hour of my life I will never get back and yet I still feel vaguely disconsolate when I turn back to the DVD.
So The Doctor appears back in episode 5 as Ian somehow manages to get himself accused of murder. The Doctor somehow gets appointed as Ian’s defence and stages a re-enactment of the killing that would make CSI seem half decent. We then have a torturous court scene that includes possibly the most brazen Shakespeare rip-off imaginable (The play’s the thing, with which I’ll catch the conscience of the king: Only shit).
Then episode 6 sort of helps the whole thing dribble towards what you might loosely call a conclusion. The unconvincing court scene is capped off with an unconvincing capture of the real villains in an unconvincing plot twist. And before you know it we’re back where we started fighting unconvincing monsters and causing unconvincing explosions.
And then they all bugger off. Again.
What impressed me about this story is that it fails on almost every level. The story is far too ambitious and tries to do over 6 episodes what the show tried to do in the Key to Time season over about 26. The dialogue is stilted and trite throughout and the episodes don’t really link up properly.
When I started this blog I decided I wanted to talk about story rather than production values but on that front this fails too. You can see stagehands opening supposedly automatic doors and one of the Voords trips over his own absurd shoe entering one of the finals scenes and no-one thought to bother to edit it. It's this sort of crap that has given Doctor Who a bad name for 49 years and now, for basically the first time, I can see how it annoyed people. Maybe Doctor Who can get away with dodgy sets when the story is half good but when it's rubbish they somehow add insult to injury.
One line sums this story up:
‘No, impossible in this temperature, besides its too warm.’
Moving. Swiftly. On.