Day Eight — January 8th 2021
The Singing Sands and Five Hundred Eyes
The Singing Sands (Marco Polo — Episode Two)
Because Marco Polo is always singled out as being so good, there’s a part of me that always wants to be contrary and say ‘oh, no, it’s fine but it’s nothing special’. And yet I’m listening to this episode and I’m realising that it really is very good.
Terry Nation may get the credit for creating the Daleks and therefore ensuring the programme’s longevity (although I’d argue that almost everything that made the Daleks successful — the look, the voice — came from people other than Nation), but John Lucarotti is certainly the better writer of the pair.
The characters here are so richly drawn. Our regulars are better served than in any of the episodes we’ve had so far — and better than they will be in pretty much any of their future ones too. There’s a gorgeous scene between Barbara and Susan at the start of this episode, where they discuss Doctor Who, and the TARDIS, and their travels together. Susan gets a properly beautiful line, which I’m surprised isn’t quoted more often;
“One day we’ll know all the mysteries of the skies, and we’ll stop our wandering.”
That should be her default quote! The one they stick next to her picture in the calendar! I proper love that.
Susan also gets a slightly unusual line in this one, which I know I should just ignore but it’s hard to do… she tells Ping-Cho that she’s ‘never seen a moonlit night.’ I mean… eh? I know Doctor Who locked her inside the TARDIS pretty much as soon as she got home in An Unearthly Child, but that can’t be right, surely? Are you telling me she’s never taken a longer route home and caught sight of the moon in the sky?
The tele-snaps for this one show that we see the mini TARDIS model again — raised up on the back of a cart outside Marco Polo’s camp. I’d not noticed this particular shot before listening through this time, so it’s nice to see there’s still new things to discover when doing another marathon! There’s something oddly beautiful about seeing the ship stood there — it feels a little bit magical. A huge thank you again to brilliant Clayton Hickman for cleaning up the image a bit so you can actually make out the box, ‘Pull to Open’ panel and all!
8/10
Five Hundred Eyes (Marco Polo — Episode Three)
The sequence where Ping-Cho tells us the story of Aladdin is a bit strange, isn’t it? I’ve heard this story maybe three or four times including this listen-through, and every time it feels like everything grinds to a halt for it. I can’t tell if I like it. Part of me thinks it’s a really interesting thing to have happen, and it’s never repeated, but the other half of me sort of switches off.
Marco Polo feels like the only Doctor Who story which really embraces the original idea for the series to be educational as well as entertaining, and they’re really making the most of having Ian and Barbara as teachers. We’re getting plenty of nice little historical bits from Barbara (I really like her forgetting that China was once called Cathay in The Roof of the World), and it’s surprising how much they find to have Ian relate throughout the story, too.
All these years later, it seems odd for the TARDIS to be producing condensation on the inside, although with all the power still out, perhaps it’s not all that unusual as an idea. I’d love to be able to see these sequences to see how the water droplets look on the TARDIS walls — we know they erected a pair of them in the studio, but the tele-snaps for the episode show only the Doctor in extreme close up and darkness during this sequence.
I also love how it’s used to further prove Tegana’s theory that these travellers are evil spirits. There’s something fun about the idea of taking a fairly common scientific event and presenting it as magical to minds which do’t understand it just yet.
It’s perhaps no surprise that the historical information in this one is so strong, because Lucarotti had previously written an 18-week radio drama based on the travels of Marco Polo, for which he’d researched his topic thoroughly. I had a bit of a dig around today to see if I could find said radio drama, which was broadcast in Canada in the mid-1950s, but it seems no one is sure if it still exists or not. I’m crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t be impossible to find out and include as an intriguing bonus feature when they get around to the blu-ray of Season One.
I did find, however, this rather brilliant article that delves deep into the story of said radio drama, and I came out the other end feeling that I knew a lot more about it than the vague ‘I think he wrote a radio play’ notion I woke up with!
7/10
