I enjoy
this serial a lot. It’s a great
reflection of how ambitious Who was
right from the start – the stories in the show’s first season go in so many
different directions, perhaps none more so than this one. In later years, the show plays with the
concept of threading the different stories of one season together in a unifying
arc (“The Key to Time,” “The Trial of a Time Lord,”) but this is an early foray
into that idea within the confines of a single serial.
The First
Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara are pulled into an adventure they didn’t
anticipate when they arrive on Marinus.
The five keys needed to operate the Conscience of Marinus, a
super-computer capable of stopping a hostile group bent on taking over, have
been hidden across space, and the computer’s keeper enlists our heroes to
retrieve them for him. With the aid of
pre-programmed “travel dial” bracelets, they jump from planet to planet,
encountering an assortment of adventures in their search for the keys.
I don’t know
what it is; I just enjoy classic Who
serials that take place in multiple locales (I feel the same way about “The
Chase,” although I like this one quite a bit more.) While there’s something to be said for the
ability to stretch a story out over, say, four or six episodes, there can also
be a lot of filler in there – some of Three’s early stories really drag, and some Two stories seem
to compete with one another over how many times different combinations of the
Doctor, Jamie, and/or Zoe can get captured and need rescue within a single
story. Providing multiple settings is a
way to shake things up, offering different backdrops as well as different
challenges to overcome.
And “The
Keys of Marinus” has some cool mini-stories inside the larger narrative of
finding the keys. I especially love the
creepy goings-on in the first city our heroes visit, and the “screaming jungle”
is pretty nifty, too. Such a wide
variety of obstacles gives all the members of team TARDIS a chance to do
something cool. The Doctor gets to shine
in a courtroom, Barbara lays the smackdown on some hypnotic parasites, Ian
shows some clever thinking with chemistry, and even Susan gets a bit of derring
do in a frozen cave. While they meet a
few folks along the way who recur throughout the story, there are also new
people to engage with in every episode, and just in general, the story moves
along at a really nice pace for classic Who.
Okay, so
I know I just griped a little about some of the old stories feeling slow, but
that truly is a mixed bag. There are
times when it’s so great that a serial has the time to spend on a little
detour, particularly when these moments focus on the Doctor and his companions
gelling as a unit. This story has a good
example of that as well – I really enjoy the tendency these first-season
stories have of starting their serials slowly, spending a good chunk of the
first episode with our heroes simply exploring and having a little fun. Marinus, with its acid sea (and accompanying
glass submarines,) has plenty of intrigue, and I just love the interplay of our
heroes as they work out the particulars of where they’ve landed. While the new-series episodes rarely drag,
they can in turn feel very go-go-go at times, and it would be nice if,
occasionally, they could take a page from the One-era book and spend at least a
couple minutes on good old-fashioned discovery before the main action starts.
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