Not all Doctor Who infuriates me. Sometimes, even when a story is riddled with plot holes, there’s still something about it that keeps my mind happy enough to overlook the issues and dream up new ideas about the story. Usually, rather than the characters or the story, it’s the mechanics of the world we’re visiting that piques my interest and the first example of such a story (in terms of the marathon at least) is “The Keys of Marinus”. So many stories (in Doctor Who and science fiction in general) have their stories set in one small region and seem to suggest that the entire planet is identical to that region. Often the whole planet will be named after that one small region. Thank goodness that doesn’t apply in real life otherwise, based on where I currently live, the whole planet would be called Tedius or Suburbius. What’s even wilder is when the characters turn up on a planet and they actually assume that it’s identical all over. The first Doctor is exceptionally good at this one, he did it in “The Dead Planet” and will do it again, to the same level of accuracy, in more than one story. In “The Keys of Marinus” though, the show attempts something rarely seen since. It attempts to show the audience a planet with a variety of climates, societies and landscapes and, as such, it’s a planet that I genuinely end up caring about as it feels far more real than usual. Okay, the plot’s a load of bunkum as we’ll eventually discuss, but along with what we see on screen, there’s bits that can be read into the story that presents us with a complex set of information that builds up into a world full of potential stories that mean Marinus is a world very worthy of further investigation.
For the sake of convenience (for now anyway), we’ll assume that the TARDIS is helpfully translating things for us and so centuries are the same as Earth centuries and so on. Though not important for the geography of the world, it’s going to make for an interesting plot hole when we get that far. However, when the Doctor decides to jump ahead to the final key, they agree to meet up in about seven days or so (it’s all too easy to forget that lots of the first Doctor stories take place over quite significant amounts of time). Given that all the Doctor has to do is locate one of the circuits, it seems to be reasonable to assume that a day on Marinus isn’t too different in length to that on Earth. It’s interesting to think that the Doctor assumes he’s going to be able to find somewhere to say during that time and won’t be living on the streets but that’s definitely something for the plot holes section, Gravity, as is seemingly the case for pretty much every planet in science fiction, is very similar to Earth gravity so Marinus does seem to be an Earth like planet over all. Plus we know it has at least one moon (the pool that Susan’s shoe falls into is a tidal pool suggesting the presence of a moon) and it has jungle regions as well as snow covered mountainous regions. Nothing overly unique so far. The pyramid type building that houses the conscience also suggests that there’s some sort of region (hopefully not too far from the island) where huge lumps of rock could be excavated from the ground and shaped as needed. There are small towns as well as various cities and the population is seemingly spread over a wide enough area that riots in one part aren’t talked about in other parts. We know enough about Arbitan’s island to start to be able to make quite a few educated guesses about the local geography. In particular, it’s surrounded by a defensive sea of acid and has glass on the edges of the beach. Now, call me cynical, but I can’t see the rest of the planet being too happy about all their seas being highly acidic so the most logical arrangement is that the sea surrounding the island is an inland sea that’s entirely surrounded by land and, for security reasons, there’s probably not too much happening along the coastline. Certainly it’s unlikely to be high on the list of places to relax, no paddling allowed for one thing. It’s not unreasonable to think that the entire arrangement is man made, if not entirely then certainly they did a lot of modification to an existing area (if the sea is that acidic that it can totally dissolve living tissue with no residue left behind then I’m guessing the rocks that make up the coastline had to be carefully chosen as well).
There would appear to be at least 5 population groups on the planet, if not more. Arbitan doesn’t seem to come from any of the societies that we see on screen so we’ll assume that he comes from some sort of scientific elite ruling class type society. The fact that people don’t use his name in hushed tones suggests that it’s not an overly secret society and given that Arbitan has been on his own on the island for a year or so suggests that they do have a way of sending him food parcels so he doesn’t starve BUT don’t have the means of physically getting to the island any more. So it looks likely they have the ability to teleport things to him (using the same technology as the travel dials) but not a person to keep him company. Presumably the island has some sort of defence to stop people flying to it (otherwise that would seem a far safer way of getting there than under the acid sea) so perhaps the pyramid has to be so large as that’s where the defences are housed. Either that or the conscience takes up the whole of the ground floor and everything else is storage space for tinned foods and in a few thousand years of technological perfection, no one has invented the aeroplane. This also suggests that no one on Marinus has invented the departure lounge either, hence it’s a relatively pleasant place to be on average.
Next up are the Voord. The implication is that they’re native to Marinus (sorry to those of you who love the phrase “Yartek, leader of the alien Voord”, there’s nothing in the story to even remotely suggest they come from anywhere other than Marinus), are humanoid, and it just so happens we don’t see them take off their rubber suits. The fact they don’t even take off their head gear seems a little weird until you remember that they’ve found a way to stop the conscience removing their free will. Could it be that the weird tellytubby-like headgear we see them in is the method they use to block the signals? That could certainly explain why it looks as though they have a TV aerial on their heads, it’s absorbing rays rather than them going into the brain? It’s also very likely that the Voord have been around on Marinus for a very long time or, if not the Voord, then there were definitely trouble makers on the planet when they were building the pyramid. Why else would you build a pyramid with revolving side panels and acid traps if you weren’t expecting trouble? It should also be noticed that in the week that our heroes are circuit collecting, more Voord arrive on the island to replace the ones killed in episode one. We see four mini subs arrive at the start of episode one. One of them contains the remains of the dissolved Voord, one Voord gets stabbed and one drops into the acid sea. That just leaves one Voord from the original batch but, in episode 6, there are at least two of them on the island. At this rate, along with remnants of shoes, there are going to be a lot of one person subs littering up that beach! Oh and whatever that acid is, it’s mindblowingly strong stuff. There’s a tiny crack in the sub, a tiny tear in the suit and the occupant of the suit is 100% dissolved, no obvious remnants but errrrr the suit itself remains safe. Moving swiftly on…
The real mystery of Marinus comes in episode 2 and will forever torment us until someone (Big Finish?) do a proper sequel to the tale. Given that all the other characters we we see in the story are humanoid, just exactly where the brains of Morphotron come from is anyone’s guess. Or, for that matter, what they’re actually doing other than just turn people into slaves with their VERY powerful sensory control. Oh if only this could have been a two part section of the story, we might have had a few clue dropped or even a scene where the Doctor and Ian can’t work out why they’re seeing different readings on the non-existent cyclotron. There’s just so many questions in the 25 minutes and not a single answer (one question being how Barabara recognises people in her sleep, but as that’s a definite plot goof, I’m not going to make a fuss about it yet). The best guess is that these brains (Braintek, leader of the alien brains) is turning the locals into slaves to dig out the magnetic core of Mar…. sorry, brain drifted there, that would just be ludicrous. The architecture seen here is pleasingly different to that later on and whereas you can fault the plot for not giving us all of the information we should get, we can’t complain about the amount of effort that’s gone into this production.
Well, maybe just a little bit of criticism then. Thanks to the in universe length of “Marco Polo”, it is admittedly about three or four months since Ian and Barbara were on Skaro and about half that time since the viewers were there… but sorry, when it comes to chasm jumping, we already know Ian and Barbara are pretty good at it, so the chasm scene in the ice caves should have been child’s play to them. And it also raises the same question as we had in the previous episode with the magic jungle (over the years I’ve seen criticism that why would speeding up growth cause the plants to turn anti-humanoid, but my argument against that is that we don’t know what these plants would have been without the magic formula and might be Marinus Fly Traps out of control). Just exactly who built all the traps? Are we supposed to believe that one old man carved the swivelling statue, designed the dropping ceiling and the sword swinging statue? And in the ice caves, who installed the probably quite challenging pipe work that enabled the key to be defrosted AND built the robot guards that seem to have a very high level of intelligence (or were they actual people who were in suspended animation? I’ve never quite understood that bit). An awful lot of effort has gone into protecting these keys but it’s never really explained who put it all in. And oh, okay, one other piece of plot criticism (yes yes, I should have criticised Barbara’s sleep vision but I think that’s such a fun episode I couldn’t bring myself to do it). In the final location, before returning to the island, we get a very slightly tedious legal case, albeit one with some damn fun headgear. Yet, back in episode one (I’m never sure how far back viewers were assumed to remember fine plot details) we learned that everything involving the circuits had been done during Arbitan’s life time and, before that, the Conscience of Marinus was some sort of super mind controlling justice machine that stopped people doing bad things. So how come there’s such a detailed court system in place that feels as though it’s got all kinds of records going back hundreds of years? Oh, apparently Arbitan is a couple of thousand years old according to episode one so that’s alright then. Let’s face it, this is a Terry Nation script that was written fast (even by his standards) so we need to cut it some slack.
Our regulars throw a few new curveballs into the mix of things which, to me, suggest that we need to rethink a few things that have become “fact” over the years, starting with Ian. I’m never entirely sure why, but the usual view is that he’s a science teacher that focuses on physics. Now, in this story, once Barbara has reminded everyone that she’s a history buff, Ian gets to comment on the pyramid and its construction. However, rather than state definitively that he knows about the physics of the construction of pyramids, he actually seems to get Barbara to double check / confirm his knowledge. To me, this seems a little out of character for a physics teacher so I’m going to suggest that actually his main subject is chemistry. That would certainly tie in with all the glassware he’s got on the go in episode one of “An Unearthly Child” and there’ll be a few bits and pieces ahead which seem to confirm this. As for the “only three dimensions” sequence in that first episode, well I know of a few physics and chemistry crossover topics that could quite easily loan themselves to analysis in three dimensions so it’s very possible he’s talking chemistry for that bit too. As for the Doctor, there’s the start of one of Hartnell’s stock phrases when he says “In all my travels I’ve never come across anything like this before”. To me, this suggests that he sees himself as a seasoned explorer these days and definitely not fresh off of Gallifrey. Certainly this ties in with bits and pieces from the previous 4 stories and will be expanded on greatly over the next season or so (before becoming ridiculously routine after that). He’s met Pyrrho, so that could conceivably be the time that the TARDIS was an ionic column, we can’t definitely put that as a new “pre-London” trip. Susan, on the other hand, is regressing back into screaming territory but, I suspect more by chance than anything else, the reason for at least some of the screaming will be vaguely explained in a couple of stories time and, when it happens, it’ll actually give us more hints about Marinus than we realise.
I absolutely love Marinus as a world. In the following 60 years or so I don’t think we ever really get another story where there’s a fully formed planet. With current episodes getting about 42 minutes to tell their story, something tells me it’s going to be a while until we get another place like it on screen. But we really should go back there one day. The story ends in such a strange way that it almost feels as though there should have been a way for us to find out how Marinus developed after we left it. At the start we should have had more of a stand off between the Doctor and Arbitan about the morals of thought control, instead it’s dealt with in an almost throwaway line in episode 6. This really is that rarest of things for the first Doctor’s era, a story that I wish had been a lot longer! The Doctor’s never really been one for going back though, so our chances of seeing the dawn of the conscience on Marinus are slim to nil. Therefore it’s onwards to the next adventure. And the next one has the one thing the Doctor’s seemingly afraid of… romance!