The Keys of Marinus

“I don’t believe that man was made to be controlled by machines. Machines can make laws, but they can not preserve justice. Only human beings can do that.”

(The Sea of Death 11/4/64, The Velvet Web 18/4/64, The Screaming Jungle 25/4/64, The Snows Of Terror 2/5/64, Sentence of Death 9/5/64, The Keys of Marinus 16/5/64)

I’m worried about the long-term health prospects of this original TARDIS crew. In every story, they suffer immensely with Ian taking the brunt of it. Surely being hit over the head so many times puts him in real danger of developing dementia in later life. Mind you, he still seems pretty healthy in The Power of the Doctor in 2022 so he seems to have got away with it.

The Keys of Marinus is probably the weakest story so far. It sees the gang tasked with tracking down some keys on the planet Marinus. This means there are four separate adventures plus an introduction and conclusion. This doesn’t entirely work for several reasons. One is that there is no time for the stories to develop. It also means that this story requires five separate sets which pushes the budget and means Doctor Who feels especially cheap here.

This is the first story in which one of the leads goes on holiday- William Hartnell is absent for two episodes in the middle. It’s well handled here with the group splitting up and the focus remaining on Ian and Barbara whilst the Doctor is busy elsewhere. It also means he gets a great entrance when he does return and it feels like it did Hartnell a lot of good because he’s back with a lot of energy and an even bigger twinkle than before.

The Voord were intended to be an alien race as big as the Daleks but were never seen again on screen. The design is nowhere near as strong as the Daleks- other than decent creepy masks they are just men in wetsuits with Teletubby aerials. Even the story seems to suggest they are just men in wetsuits. They are also extremely clumsy with one very nearly falling over in the final episode if you look closely.

The biggest problem with the Voord though is that they only appear in the first and final episodes. One of the biggest problems with this story overall is that there is no primary antagonist which is odd when the Voord are right there. The Voord pursuing the travelers would have made the individual stories more interesting- why include silent, nameless soldiers in the mountains when you could have had the Voord playing much the same role?

I think it’s fair to say that in its early days Doctor Who was great at doing historical stories. Its sci-fi stories though were much more hit-and-miss.

My rating: 5/10

Next time: Aztecs!