The Keys of Marinus

The Sea of Death [Episode 1]

We begin with an impressive landscape shot of an island...

Hannah: Oooooh!

...dominated by a huge pyramid...

Hannah: I like pyramids.

...and the episode title.

Hannah: I like death. And I like water.

The TARDIS materializes, in what might possibly be the most transparent piece of model work in the entire history of the programme. Hannah's reaction isn't quite what I was expecting.

Hannah: Aww, it's so dinky! The diorama was beautiful and I love the tiny little TARDIS. It's really well done. I mean, you can tell that it's a scale model, but it's really cute! It reminds me of when we were in Norway and we saw that diorama of Flåm with all the drunk people and the man pissing on the tree.

Ian is still wearing his silk Chinese garment from the previous story, so presumably this adventure takes place immediately afterwards.

Hannah: So they've just had this long and arduous three-month adventure and they still want to go out places? Don't they want to go home?
Me: They can't get home.
Hannah: In the first story the Doctor said he can do it if he's got the right calculations.
Me: Yeah, but it's obvious by now that he just can't steer it.

Barbara asks if the water is frozen; the Doctor replies "No, impossible in this temperature. Besides, it's too warm."

Hannah: What?! What?! What?! And nobody thought there was a problem with that script?
Me: It wasn't in the script, Hartnell just fluffed his line.
Hannah: So he ad-libbed. Badly.
Me: He just got a bit muddled. Happens to the best of us.

Mistakes aside, there's a nice family atmosphere between the four travellers. After the tension of the early days, this is something of a relief.

Hannah: Everything seems really friendly and natural. The acting feels a lot more comfortable and everyone generally gets on with each other now.

The island is surrounded by an acid sea, which explains why this week's villains, the Voord, are men in wetsuits. Or, as Hannah proclaims, "half frog and half Teletubby." She's less flippant when the Doctor, Ian and Barbara discover an empty wetsuit with a small tear and conclude that the poor sod has been dissolved inside his suit. She's also clearly frustrated that nobody is learning from their past mistakes; Susan has gone exploring on her own again ("Has she not learned anything from wandering off into the Gobi Desert?"), prompting the others to split up and search the city ("That was a great idea with the Daleks").

At the centre of the pyramid, a man named Arbitan introduces them to the Conscience of Marinus, a machine that has brought peace to the entire planet... by affecting everyone's mind to stop them from commiting any act of evil. Eventually the machine was somehow deactivated by Yartek, leader of the Voord, and now they're all on a violent crime spree. The only way to restore the machine is by recovering the four missing keys scattered around the planet.

Hannah: Why should we trust the bloke in the robe? He built a machine that manipulated people's minds. And if it made everybody really peaceful and lasted for ages, how did Yartek turn it off?

Arbitan, of course, wants to recruit the Doctor and company to find the keys.

Hannah: If they didn't see that coming, they're stupid.

Hannah is fully expecting our heroes to co-operate, so it comes as a surprise when they decline and Arbitan has to resort to blackmail. He equips them each with a travel dial, pre-programmed to teleport them to each destination in turn; Barbara leaves first, with the others following her a few seconds later. Then a Voord kills Arbitan from behind.

Hannah: That was a bit shit.

The Velvet Web [Episode 2]

By the time the Doctor, Ian and Susan arrive at their first location, Barbara has already found time to have a nasty accident, recover, meet their new hosts, change her clothes and get shown to a decadent chamber where we find her lying on a chaise lounge and being pampered by servants.

Hannah: She was only a few seconds ahead of them. Why has she already changed clothes and been waited upon?

The servants introduce the travellers to their new life of luxury, but there's something missing.

Hannah: Nobody's showed them the bathroom.
Me: Does it matter?
Hannah: It would in real life.

There's also a rather disturbing carving on the wall. After everyone's gone to bed, the eyes light up.

Hannah: Oh! Oh, that's disturbing!

The camera seems to linger on it for a while.

Hannah: That's horrible!

Almost a full ten seconds, in fact.

Hannah: That's not nice! That's not nice at all!

When we discover that the city and its inhabitants are actually under the thrall of some well-spoken brains in glass jars, Hannah is strangely excited.

Hannah: Yay, alien overlords! Cool eyestalks. I like how posh the brains are.

One of the servants, Altos, was a member of Arbitan's last expedition and evidently didn't get very far. His tunic is also a little too short for Hannah's tastes.

Hannah: Why is he not wearing any trousers?

In the end, Barbara manages to defeat the brains by breaking free and smashing the place up a bit.

Hannah: That was pathetic. She just hit a jug against table for a bit, and only one of the jars actually broke. And also some equipment, which somehow immediately stopped the telepathic control.

Having collected the key, our heroes are ready to continue their quest, now joined by Altos as well as Arbitan's missing daughter Sabetha.

Hannah: I thought this would go on longer.
Me: Do you not see how this story works yet?
Hannah: Yeah, they've got to find each key. But I thought that was such a complex little set-up that for some reason I thought it would be longer.
Me: They've still got three more to find yet.
Hannah: Yes, but there's no harm in having two episodes for one key if there was a particularly interesting problem. I could see this episode as a whole story in its own right.
Me: Did you ever watch T-Bag?
Hannah: No, what's that?
Me: It was a children's TV show in the 80s that followed pretty much the same pattern as this story. T-Bag was an evil witch, and in each series there would be a collection of magical objects that she wanted but they end up scattered across time and space, and the young girl protagonist has to go on a quest to collect them all before T-Bag gets her hands on them. Each episode was a self-contained adventure set in a different location, and in the last episode when the girl had finally collected all the items, T-Bag would usually find a way to steal them back and come within striking distance of victory before she was eventually defeated. And there was usually a character like Arbitan who appeared in the first and last episodes to send the girl on her quest.
Hannah: Sounds good.
Me: I don't know how well it would hold up by today's standards, but it used to be one of my favourites and it's possibly the reason I like these quest stories so much. But in this case we know the villains have already taken over the base and are ready for when the heroes return, so you get a nice sense of foreboding hanging over the quest.
Hannah: Yeah, it's good. Still don't understand why that guy had no trousers on.

One key down, three to go. The Doctor decides to jump ahead to look for the final key while everyone else searches for the next two.

Hannah: He's the weakest and he wants to go alone? Splitting up is never the right idea unless you're severely pressed for time...
Me: Well, they are pressed for time--
Hannah: ...and each person is capable of achieving the goal by themselves. Which he's not.
Me: The Voord have already taken over the--
Hannah: They don't know that. They just know it's imminent.
Me: Exactly, that's why they're severely pressed for time.
Hannah: Yes, but you also need to split your forces evenly. Don't send the Doctor off by himself, he's a weak old man, that's already been well established.
Me: He can hit people with his stick.
Hannah: Wow. Impressive.
Me: He almost killed a caveman!
Hannah: One that was lying on the floor! Doesn't mean he can stop someone running at him with a gun or a sword.
Me: I don't think any of them could do that.
Hannah: Ian disarmed one of those wetsuit men with a knife.
Me: It's a bit different from someone running at you with a gun.

The two parties arrange a time to reconvene, and decide that a week should be just about long enough.

Hannah: "See you in seven days." Oh yeah, they're really rushing.

The Screaming Jungle [Episode 3]

The episode opens with Susan screaming.

Hannah: Ah yes. Susan getting to do her Susan thing.

She's swiftly followed by the rest of the group.

Hannah: Oh, he's still got no trousers on.
Me: He's wearing a tunic.
Hannah: A tunic is supposed to cover your parts.

Time for more creepy architecture. This time it's a statue made entirely of stone except for the moving arms, which clearly belong to a member of the production team standing behind it.

Hannah: Ohhhh, little arms! It's so horrible! That was one of the worst bits of Thunderbirds, when they zoom in and there's real human hands doing things. Almost as bad as the mechanical mouths.

Other than the feisty plants that try to kill everyone ("Naughty fronds"), Hannah finds the screaming jungle a bit underwhelming.

Hannah: There wasn't a lot of screaming and it didn't seem that scary. And they were in a guy's room for ages trying to find something in a pot; it felt like a Crystal Maze room, where they're just in there to find one thing and then they find it and leave. And is there even an element E?
Me: Not on Earth, but apparently there is on Marinus.
Hannah: Fair enough.

Still, she appreciates the chance to explore such a diverse planet for a change.

Hannah: That's the problem with most sci-fi stories: they go to another world and you only see a small part of it, so you assume the culture is the same across the whole planet instead of having different regions.
Me: The drawback is that they'd usually have a whole story's worth of money to create one alien world, but now they have to create a new world every episode on the same budget.

Once again, Hannah notices someone missing out on the action.

Hannah: Another one without the Doctor. Was he on holiday again?

The Snows of Terror [Episode 4]

Ian and Barbara are rescued from a snowy wasteland by a big hairy trapper, Vasar, who gives them furs in exchange for their travel dials.

Hannah: What happened to the one who isn't wearing any trousers? His legs should have snapped off.

When Ian goes out into the snow to find the others, Vasar is more than happy to keep Barbara company (if you know what I mean), but thankfully Barbara manages to fend off his advances. Ian finds Altos ("Aw, he's got tiny knees!") and returns to the hut where Vasar reveals that he abandoned Susan and Sabetha in the caves and kept their travel dials in a drawer. Hannah is very uncomfortable; not to put too fine a point on it, she's not keen on the inclusion of a big hairy rapist in a children's programme.

Hannah: The presence of a possible rapist is a bit dark for what's supposed to be a family show. That's a direction I didn't think they were going to take; I don't know if it really adds to it, but at least he doesn't appear to have tried to molest the girls, he just abandoned them in a cave. Unless he did do something to them and they never mention it again.
Me: Now who's being dark?
Hannah: Well, I think it's unnecessary. There's enough terror in the idea of him killing people without having to include that.

Also located in the caves is the next key, frozen in a block of ice and protected by four armoured knights who come to life when the ice is melted.

Hannah: Wow. I want to know what company they use for their security system. "You shall have these slow groggy men, waking up to attack intruders with old weapons and coming after them really slowly." You know what would be better? Iron bars to stop you from getting there in the first place. I bet they didn't bring the handful of wrist devices out of the drawer with them. If they left them in his hut, they're idiots.

The knights look familiar, too.

Hannah: Ni! Ni! Ni! Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!

Of course it goes without saying that the travel dials are indeed back at the hut, otherwise there'd be no need to bother dealing with the knights at all.

Hannah: It would have made so much more sense if they'd brought all their stuff from the hut in the first place! Surely once Ian had brought Altos back in from the snow and overpowered the man, they would have gathered up their stuff and taken it with them? You wouldn't leave it there so that you'd have to go back. But no, the only way to have some kind of peril is for them to leave their travel dials behind in the cottage so that they need to deal with the knights, when they could have taken them and escaped by just jumping to their next destination from the cave instead. The only way they've managed to have a bit of excitement is by making the characters do a stupid thing.

When they finally manage to jump to their final destination, Ian arrives solo and is immediately knocked unconscious.

Hannah: Yes, I often faint when someone waves a large object near me.
Me: What about when someone smashes you round the back of the head?
Hannah: It was nowhere near him!

Sentence of Death [Episode 5]

It's time to get the final key, and we know what that means...

Hannah: Welcome back, Doctor. It's been a long time. In your titular show, without you. Again.
Me: Missed him?
Hannah: Well it's not Doctor Who without the Doctor, is it?
Me: What about "Blink"?
Hannah: He was in it!
Me: A bit. Anyway, it's still an ensemble cast at this stage, isn't it?
Hannah: Okay, it is a good story, these episodes are good. It's just not the same without him.
Me: You miss Hartnell when he's not there, don't you?
Hannah: I miss the Doctor.
Me: You like him now?
Hannah: I'm still on the fence. He's getting there.

She's pleased to see Altos again, too.

Hannah: Put your legs away, mate.

When Ian is put on trial, Hannah is delighted to see another familiar sci-fi motif.

Hannah: Every sci-fi show always has a courtroom episode, either set on their own planet or on another planet where they've done something that they didn't realise was against the law. Usually it's when they've run out of money and need a filler episode that gives them an excuse to have everybody sit round and talk. It's happened on Stargate a lot, and Stargate: Atlantis, Red Dwarf, I'm pretty sure Star Trek: The Next Generation did it a few times... I'm very happy Doctor Who has one already, it makes it feel like part of the sci-fi family. You can't go gallivanting around the universe without getting caught up in other people's politics, it's a sci-fi rule.

During the trial, the Doctor extracts a confession from the murderer by using the oldest trick in the book: talking him into exposing himself.

Hannah: (laughing) He's such a dummy! No one ever actually gets caught out by that.

But his accomplices are still out there, and at the end of the episode Barbara takes a phone call from a kidnapper who has taken Susan hostage. I decide it's time to have some fun.

Me: Oh, that's right, this is the one where Susan dies.
Hannah: Good.
Me: And then we start the next story with a new companion.
Hannah: Oh, let it be pants-less man!

The Keys of Marinus [Episode 6]

The people of Marinus evidently have a rather abstract approach to measuring time, and Ian's execution is set to take place "when the pointer reaches the star."

Hannah: Do they not have clocks? He's taking this very well. He's not raging, he's not upset...
Me: He's still wearing his ancient China stuff.
Hannah: I like it. At least he's wearing trousers.
Me: Not a fan of Altos, then?
Hannah: I really like him, despite his trouser lapse. He's kind of camp and fun.

When the villain's identity is revealed, Hannah is surprised; she was convinced Ian's interrogator was responsible.

Hannah: I thought he was going to be a bad guy, all the way through. He was so adamant that Ian was guilty and didn't even consider anyone else, so I thought he was clearly the one that did it; I didn't realise it was just because that's their legal system and that's the way everybody thinks in their society.

Altos and Sabetha go on ahead to meet Arbitan and let him know they were successful.

Hannah: He's dead. He's been dead for a week.

What we find instead is Yartek, barely managing to wear Arbitan's robe over his enormous head. Ian spots the ruse when Yartek slips up by not recognising Altos; Hannah is annoyed that she didn't pick up on it herself.

Hannah: I like to be able to spot things. I can't do it in a Poirot but I can do it in a sci-fi.

And the TARDIS departs in a reversal of the exact same model shot we saw at the beginning of the story. It gets more or less the same reaction.

Hannah: (giggling) Ah, little diorama TARDIS.

The Score

Hannah: I like the fact that it was a quest story, and I loved seeing all the elements I've seen in other sci-fi shows like brainwashing, man-eating plants and a courtroom episode. They've done them really well and I don't think they spent too long in any one place, although I feel like the screaming jungle was underused. I think that was the least exciting episode. All the rest were pretty fun. And I like the characters, there's a few that only appear for one episode but they're well-written. I don't know what to score it. At this rate everything's going to be scoring really high...
Me: I wouldn't bet on it.
Hannah: I've liked everything apart from that two-parter.
Me: Yes, but there's a long way to go yet.
Hannah: Well, I really enjoyed it; I've pushed to see more episodes this time and I don't think I've really cared about doing that for the other stories. Each little adventure was really good and I like seeing all those sci-fi tropes. I think this is...

9/10

Me: So would you welcome the Voord as returning villains?
Hannah: I'd like to know more about them. Are they humans in a suit, or are they actual aliens with weird-shaped heads or what? We know almost nothing, so I'm curious about them. I'd be very happy to see them again, I like it when people write back stories to fill in the details.
Me: Maybe they'll come back in the new series.
Hannah: That would be a bit random.
Me: So were the Macra in "Gridlock".
Hannah: I've just realised one episode is called "The Sea of Death" and another one's called "The Sentence of Death". Now if they just changed that, it would be perfect.