Vengeance On Varos: Ranking - 56

 

Vengeance On Varos

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 19-26/1/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Phillip Martin, director: Ron Jones)

Rank: 56

   'Well, Arak, what's today's review like then?'

 'Oh Etta, I've given up reading them. Dr this, Dr that, too much violence, not enough violence, sardonic interplay of postmoderism principles underlying a multi-dimensional script, its the same every day. particularly this one. I think they get an alien in to write them some weeks' 

'Well, I like to marvel at the perspicacity of his wit' 

'Huh that writer lost his wits the second month when he tried to defend 'Time and The Rani!' 

'Only 56 reviews to go. What are we going to read when they're over?' 

'Dunno' 

(The screen shows static)

 

 

The 6th Doctor’s masterpiece now and one of Dr Who’s most original stories, which both delivers a critique of that very 1980s moral dilemma of video nasties and accidentally creates ‘Gogglebox’ twenty years early. ‘Varos’ has been misunderstood almost from the day it went out on air: it got complaints that it was too ‘violent’, even though it’s a story that critiques how violence has become too ingrained in modern society (with Varos very much a 1980s version of Britain). It’s a story that’s self-aware that it’s a piece of fiction, with an arch postmodernist humour that critiques Dr Who itself, but one with a lot of love for the series. It’s a tale of how Thatcherist Britain is doomed to end in misery if it continues on its current course and how it’s at odds with this very 1960s optimistic imaginative friendly series, even if it’s not the slam-dunk polemic of other stories around it. It’s the Dr Who equivalent of ‘Boys From The Blackstuff’, about the misery and depression of living in an exploited capitalist world that’s gone wrong (only the ‘boys’ are Varosians’ and the crystal is see-through). It’s a story that comes with its own Greek chorus commenting on the plot, two characters who experience the events of the story but uniquely never get to interact with anyone else in the story, a chance to see how ordinary Varosians are affected both by the restrictions of Varos society and the Doctor overturning it (because the revolution is very much televised this time around). Of all the dystopias in Dr Who Varos might well be the most horrible: you’re trapped on the planet, at risk of being tortured or executed for the slightest infraction, see all your hard work at your job be frittered away to rich slug businessmen and rather than having anything to aspire to even the highest job in the land is at risk of torture and death if the people hate you. And boy do the Varosians have reason to hate you.

Mostly though it’s a really good Dr Who story that has a lot of very real and gritty things to say, in an era when a lot of stories tended to be away with the fairies. No surprise, then, that it was written by the author of gritty Birmingham crime syndicate series ’Gangsters’ (starring Maurice Colbourne from ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’), a story that shares a lot of similarities with this one, including the arch humour and nods to camera as well as multiple characters who act like businessman Sil (even if they’re only slugs in character, not appearance). Martin was easily the biggest name to write for Who in the 1960s and many of his growing fanbase thought he’d gone a bit mad writing for a series that was suffering an image problem. Who producer John Nathan-Turner spent the entire commission breathing down his shoulder, asking for scene breakdowns (something that generally only happened with inexperienced writers) and demanding to see every draft of the script in case something ‘subversive’ dropped in (apparently the critique on violence in general and Thatcher in particular slipped past him). However there’s a simple explanation for it: Phillip wanted to write for a series his daughter Hillary, aged nine at the time of broadcast, could actually watch (and it sounds as if dad introduced her to the series partly to see what his old pal and RADA classmate Christopher H Bidmead was up to, now they were both writers). The sensible lass was a huge Whovian and had roped her dad into watching it with her too and ended each episode by suggesting he should have a go. What’s impressive though is that ‘Varos’ very much isn’t kiddies fare, even in an era of stories like ‘Timelash’ and ‘Mark Of The Rani’ that are pitched a bit younger than average: it’s a story about politics and violence and how controlling a population through fear is bringing it to its knees. It’s a story that sums up the survival of the fittest yuppie-loving money-grabbing 1980s and the sheer misery of the majority of people in Britain better than any other story (yes, even the all-round similar ‘Happiness Patrol’). And while Who stories about wicked regimes and evil tyrants are two a penny, this one is unique in that it shows how those caught at the top of the pyramid are every bit as trapped and powerless, unable to use their power to stop it. Even behind the scenes people went through hell making this story: Nicola Bryant was allergic to the feathers used in Peri’s ‘bird’ sequence, caught a chill filming the desert scene (with fans blowing in her face for hours), lost an abacus necklace she was fond of and which Peri wore when persons unknown broke into her dressing room (sharp-eyed viewers at the time wondered if it was a clue that it had gone missing by the next story!) and the ‘execution’ scene went wrong the first time, when the set with the nooses came apart (luckily without any actors being hurt!), while pity the poor policeman who pulled Nabil over on a day of shooting that had gone so late he still had his makeup on and tried to fine him for speeding – he’d been trying to get home quick because the marshminnows Sil eats – really dyed peaches – had given him the runs, which took some explaining!

Varos is one of Dr Who’s better thought out worlds, an ex-penal planet where the prisoners and prison guards have over time merged together to become one, each as lost as the other. It’s a tiny world with a population of just 160,000 (in a year where Britain’s stood at 56million for comparison) with the hint that the cruel capitalist punishments and the compulsory-viewed broadcast executions have caused the population to dwindle and that soon there’ll be nobody left to shout at. Certainly there’s not enough people to mine Varos’ only export, a mineral named Zeiton 7 that, little does everyone know it, is actually really valuable. In this democracy everyone born to the elite class has to serve out their term as governor and if the people at home don’t like their policies they can subject them to torture. The governor, then, is torn: to do the right thing by the poverty stricken Varosians longterm means short term misery and pain in the form of taxes and longer work hours, which will inevitably result in pain for him and possibly death (no governor has survived as many ‘votes’ as he has without dying). But to do the wrong thing means making things worse long-term and the suffering grow bigger, while the governor who comes after him will probably give in anyway. It’s thus is as close to a pro-Thatcher story as any Who ever made, with Martin Jarvis not so much an Iron Lady as a Cardboard gentlemen who’s always for turning, squirming this way and that because he knows that the next unpopular policy might be lethal. However they’re also pretty stupid and surrounded by the ‘wrong’ people: Sil is a businessman who’s obviously a slug, rubbing his fins with glee as the Governor sells off everything he can cheap – way cheaper than it ought to be. Martin, then, has his marsh minnows and eats them: yes Thatcher has a terrible problem, but by her own stupidity she actually made it worse.

It takes an outsider like The Doctor, not bound by the rigid rules of a stupid system, to see beyond it and put things right, turning this world upside down. But even he finds it heavier going than usual, with scenes where it really does look as if he’s dead – and not in a ‘gee the cliffhanger’s coming up’ way either. In this story he’s attacked, imprisoned and hanged at one stage (before it turns out to be a form of torture in the assumption that a man about to die will always tell the truth) as well as given a dose of a hallucinatory drug that really makes him think he’s dying in a desert and being attacked by a giant fly. What’s more this story makes it looks as if it hurts. Peri, too, has an awful time: the script’s oddest sub-plot is a ‘transmogrifier’ that takes a person’s inner demons and uses them against them, turning them into monsters, because on Varos any imagination is a dangerous thing. Remember the Doctor’s speech in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that a ‘peri’ was a fallen angel who needed to repent? What he missed out was that the literal translation of ‘Peri’ is ‘wing’; with any other writer of this most depressingly average of seasons I’d assume that to be a coincidence, but given how erudite his scripts are Phillip Martin he probably looked this stuff up.  She’s 90% of the way to being turned into a bird complete with feathers when The Doctor finally intervenes and unlike some ‘gee that was close’ sub-plots it takes a good while for her to recover. Poor Peri: while other people are turned into insects and worms she only wants to fly away and escape. And in that sense she is all of us, trapped on Varos/Britain in the 1980s longing to be somewhere else. And even the transmogrifier, an unlikely machine that even the locals don’t know exactly how it works, has been given a better backstory than usual: it’s a side effect from Zeiton 7 that caused the miners digging it to grow claws and turn into moles, in a world that’s forever demanding they be more than they actually are. It’s what happens to the incidental characters that shocks most though as even The Doctor gets in on the act: two guards are dropped into an acid bath (something The Doctor is often blamed for, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of being a scene recorded at the end of a long day, when a first take was let through that probably shouldn’t have been: in the script it’s an accident but Colin Baker was a little too ‘enthusiastic’ with his turning around), two more are vapourised as their weapons are turned on them (this is The Doctor’s fault, as he rescues a man from execution: as it happens he’s right but on another world he might have zapped two innocent hard working dads to rescue an evil mass murderer) and the end has The Doctor rig up some vine leaves to be ‘explosive’, killing off four of the baddies. Violence has become a way of life on this planet and everyone, even The Doctor, falls into the trap. It goes too far for some (and remember this was dad writing knowing his nine year old daughter would see it!) but it’s at least it’s relevant to the plot and happens because of the drama, better handled better than, say, ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ (where extra violence is half the drama).  

Phillip Martin’s script fair crackles with ideas that had never been seen in the series before and which indeed could never have been done before the mid-1980s: this is the era when ‘video nasties’ contained gory material you would never be allowed to broadcast on TV in case children were watching, so what better series to make your point in than Who, still ‘officially’ a children’s series but one increasingly watched by grown-ups with debate still raging about what should and shouldn’t be in the series. Mary Whitehouse has a whole new ally/enemy in this era too with the video classification board who work to different rules than on TV. At first when videos were released they had no one to monitor them and didn’t legally have to be careful about children watching, so there was a rush of cheap ‘video nasties’ made with extreme violence or pornography or both, often available in to rent shops (some of which were in newsagents where children bought their drinks and sweets on the way home from school).Videos eventually had a censorship board that met to discuss what programmes were most suitable for which ages, which in an era when thirty years’ worth of recorded material was up for release was causing something of a backlog and some hilarious mistakes that inevitably slipped through the net due to human error (this is the era when a few gory bloody films were passed for children and yet tame films with unfortunate names got banned or slapped with an 18 certificate). Martin knew that glorification of violence went back to ‘The Romans’ though (both the empire and the Dr Who story from 1965), ingrained as a part of television history that couldn’t simply be taken out with the flash of an age code (for a start most videos sold in these early days were illegal copies anyway – it’s thought the best selling ‘video’ from the first half of the 1980s was an illegal one featuring real life executions and murders that would never have been allowed anywhere near a TV screen). It might well be significant that the censorship board had a ‘Governor’ and that the first ‘model’ of videos to be banned wasn’t the VHS but ‘Betamax’, named like ‘Thoros-Beta’ where Sil and his Mentor friends are from (the censorship helped kill Betamax off as a format and made it obsolete within years. Which was a pain for me as that’s what the first Dr Whos I grew up on were on and it was years before most of them were out on DVD or blu-ray). The Varos execution ‘jingle’ is also remarkably like the theme tune to the earliest BBC home videos just to rub it in!

Another organisation that has a ‘governor’ though is the BBC itself. An organisation that often glorified violence in return for ratings (just think of all the people killed off in soaps at Christmas!) Is this Phillip Martin biting the hand that feeds him and commenting on how much violence is allowed on television? Nabil for one took this story to be a commentary on the gung-ho coverage of The Falklands War, glorifying soldiers in a way never seen on TV before (in return, so it’s often said, for the Conservatives backing down from removing the TV license as they once threatened). Note the subtle hints dotted across this story, too: the boxing and wrestling matches that are seen as ‘entertainment’ in between the stat hangings, while this story also resembles the famous BBC production of George Orwell’s ‘1984’, where the staff working on the show got their own back on their bosses (with the director general’s image used for the ‘Big Brother is watching you’ posters and hints at ‘BB’ needing a ‘C’ at the end. Spike Milligan picked up on this for one of the best Goon Shows ‘1985’ where the BBC very much are Big Brother and ‘Room 101’ is being stuck listening to inane BBC radio programmes! The Goons in TV form, of course, were on right before Dr Who in the early days).  

If somehow all that passed you by, though (and a surprising amount of people seemed to miss the theme of Varos on first watching, including JNT!) then ‘Varos’ is still one of the strongest stories in the era because it has some of the finest characters 1980s Who has to offer. Unlike a lot of stories in the JNT era it has some excellent actors and actresses perfectly cast to play them too. Alien, unlikeable, brown, slimy, disgusting and with an evil laugh, David Cameron would have approved of Sil’s underhanded tactics here, pretending to be the saviour of the planet Varos when really he’s undermining its resources and putting the ‘I,/Me’ into its ‘Mines’. He’s the sort of ugly vain capitalist who would sell his own grandmother to make money (and probably already has), one so vain he thinks he’s beautiful and Peri ugly. He’s the ultimate 1980s alien: a smug yuppie (in an era when they called themselves ‘the beautiful people’). This conniving alien slug could have been an annoying caricature, an alien concerned with nothing except profits, but Phillip Martin’s clever script gives him some softer edges that almost make him likeable and ‘human’ for lack of a better word. Though Sil is just another slimy businessman, someone common to a lot of Martin’s works, the writer was also a fan of the brilliant Isaac Asimov and took note of an essay he’d once written about writing believable science-fiction in that it had to be plausible: for instance from what we know about life from Earth chances are it needs water to survive and land-animals are overwhelmed by marine animals in number, so odds are if there is life out there on other planets it’s probably amphibious. The original plan was to have Sil in the tank, but this would have made things difficult for the poor actor and there was a worry children might copy it, so he sits on top of tanks instead. He’s more than just a big lot of flabby skin saying ‘moisturise me’ though. It was a clever move, for instance, to make him a character who thinks he looks dignified and brilliant, then saddle him with a faulty translator circuit that makes him look like an idiot without him knowing (that pronounces words like ‘goveryurnoeeer’ and has an unfortunate tendency to get stuck on lines like ‘You lying…liar!’) Nabil Shaban is perfect casting, adding little touches that make Sil come to life on top of the script, such as his wonderful laugh (based on a snake that a friend of his had and a discussion they’d once had about how snakes might laugh) and his habit of spaying his fins in anger whenever he’s frustrated.  His casting was fortuitous: BBC producer Alan Shawcross had done a documentary on disabled actors and sent a memo round to his colleagues suggesting they should hire more underprivilidged actors when the parts demanded it. At the same time Martin Jarvis had just been cast as the Governor and his wife Rosaylnd was also involved in TV and Radio and had just been in touch with a disabled theatre company named ‘Graeae’.  Nabil was one of their founders and one of the biggest Whovians to be in the series: he’d spent a lot of time as a child in and out of hospital because of his osteogenesis imperfecta and brittle bone diagnosis, that made his legs both unstable and short. His only entertainment had been the hospital television where he’d become hooked on Dr Who since ‘The Daleks’ in 1963. Indeed, by rights JNT should have been able to go straight to him as he’d written into the programme twice, suggesting himself as a replacement for Roger Delgado in 1976 when the pre-publicity for ‘The Deadly Assassin’ suggested The Master had been involved in a ‘nasty accident’ and again in 1981 when he heard JNT wanted a new Doctor who was a ‘contrast’ with the very tall Tom Baker. Sadly he didn’t get either but I remain in hope that one day Nabil might get the chance to be The Doctor yet, especially with Russell T doing so much to have disabled actors on the show again: he’s a natural, instinctive rounded actor who takes an already promising part and makes sure that you can never ever forget it, somehow making Sil both a believable bully and the hapless victim. The story goes that JNT proudly told Shawcross that he’d done what he’d said and cast a disabled villain; the producer was horrified and checked that Nabil was okay with it, but of course as a fully paid up fan he was more than happy (after all, Sil isn’t nasty because of his height or because he has to be wheeled around but because of who he is and what he thinks. Russell T somehow forgot that lesson when re-casting Davros in a controversial children in need sketch). 

Martin Jarvis, of course, had been seen by Dr Who fans before but is cast rather better here than he was in ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ (where he’s the most with-it gentile mad scientist in the series) and ‘The Web Planet’ (where he’s a butterfly prince!) Director Ron Jones had worked with him many times and thought of him immediately on reading the script: he wanted to move away from the Thatcher stereotype and have someone at least a little likeable, someone who wants to do the right thing but is perhaps a bit cowardly to do the right thing. It’s the sort of part he always plays, but in a situation pushed to extremes you never get to hear in radio 4 dramas The Governor is also part of a twelve-person ‘elite’ from which the next governor is elected so it needed to be someone a little posh. He’s superb in the role, giving The Governor a gravitas and dignity he doesn’t always deserve.  Torture overseer Arak is played with just the right menace by Stephen Yardley (he always seems to get these sorts of roles: believe it or not he’s the middle-aged axe-wielding maniac in the goriest Torchwood episode ‘Countrcyde’ where hapless comedy relief husband Rhys, of all people, finds cut up bodies in a story where the usual Torchwood team are all known to the baddies). Only the rebels are a bit wet, especially Jason Connery as Jondar hired purely to be beefcake and because of the publicity of having Sean Connery’s son in the show (he was unknown at the time but was cast in his breakthrough lead in the title role ‘Robin of Sherwood’ while filming this very story. Goodness knows how or why: rumour has long had it that after seeing how bad he was in rehearsals, but knowing that the Radio Times had already been told about his casting, half of Jondar’s lines were given to other characters to speak). 

Perhaps the most interesting characters are Arak and Etta, who are unique in the series. They are the viewers, sitting and watching the action unfold. They have to after all: it’s compulsory to watch and vote, so we see them commenting on the action as it unfolds, reacting as if they’re watching a Dr Who story along with the rest of us. That might seem an obvious idea now with so many reality TV shows around, never mind DVD commentaries where the people involved in the show do exactly that (and the Varos one is amongst the best, as most of the Colin Baker-Nicola Bryant ones tend to be if only for their friendship and teasing) but in 1985 this was a whole new concept. Along the way they moan when nothing seems to be happening, complain that the violence was much better and gorier the week before and how implausible things are. They never get to do anything that impacts any of the actual plot or talk to characters besides each other. Yet at the same time they’re our eyes and ears for what the unseen and forgotten working class think on Varos and have some very poignant scenes as living in such a violent, miserable world impacts their marriage: he tries to ‘nick’ her vote, she threatens to have him reported and at the end, when everything is changed, they ask what they’re supposed to do next without the vacuum of regular executions to keep them occupied (it’s very much a theme Russell T Davies ‘borrowed’ for the ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ finale, following on from the vacuum left by The Doctor in ‘The Long Game’, when reality TV is very much a thing). Their best line comes when casually discussing an execution that they’ve muddled up because there have been so many lately they’ve become de-sensitised to the violence: ‘You’re thinking of that other one. He wasn’t blind. Well, not in the beginning anyway!’ They’re also a postmodernist joke on ‘us’ – every time they lean forward to see more gore and you want to tick them off for being bloodthirsty you realise that you’re still watching too.

There are others dropped into the show too: The Doctor and Peri are rightly horrified that people are made to watch the horror that unfolds on this planet, broadcast live into people’s homes, a world that keeps people in place by making them afraid and having part of this world’s no-go areas make people hallucinate their fears. Only, of course, that’s exactly what the viewer is doing; those viewers we see on screen are really ‘us’ commenting that it’s not as violent as it used to be (in Varos’ pre-Mary Whitehouse days perhaps) and complaining that there isn’t as much blood and guts as in other weeks. The Doctor comments to actor Hugh Martin ‘do you always get the priest parts?’ as he’s led to his execution (he did too,in series like ‘Killer’ and ‘A Very British Coup’, though his other Who appearance is as a radio operator in ‘Terror Of The Zygons’). The playful script also plays up the cliffhangers of old, with the one and only one in this story (in the only 20th century series to use of 45minute episodes) ending with the Dr drowning on dry land watched by the governor in the control room who yells ‘Cut!’ right at the point we switch into the theme tune sting and end credits! Peri also gets to comment on how ‘these corridors all look the same’ (because they are!) and even JNT gets in on the act (that pun about how water is better bottled ‘Peri, eh?’ was the producer’s suggestion. No doubt with a tie-in advertisement in mind – Sil’s bathwater edition perhaps?!) Oddly though no one comments on perhaps the biggest joke of the whole story: they finally give up trying to make ventilation shafts seem like ventilation shafts and instead have them eight foot tall (even though people on Varos are average Human sized) so that even Colin Baker can walk through them!

Having two viewers is a neat idea that does something a bit different and – credit where it’s due – was script editor Eric Saward’s suggestion after seeing them as minor characters in the script which Martin eagerly agreed with. It’s easily the best alternation or addition he makes to any script in his six-ish years of working on the series. But then Saward was particularly close to Martin and for once was coming from the same place, rather than playing catch-up with a writer cast by his predecessor or asked for by his producer. The script had a long gestation period too, originally written for Peter Davison’s Doctor and re-written for both the new Doctor and the new companion, which helped (Saward was often playing catch-up with scripts that had needed working on quickly. Though it’s hard to imagine the 5^th Doctor and Nyssa in this world). It shows: ‘Varos’ has a unique feel different to all other Who stories (even sort-of sequel ‘Mindwarp’), different to other stories from this eras. There’s a gravitas and weight, helped by the fact that it’s all treated like a stage play (Martin had started his career in the theatre), not just with the ‘Greek Chorus’ but the longer-than-usual scenes and speeches and the relative lack of music (only a third of this story has an incidental score in an era when music was usually crammed to the rafters: there are actually scenes with, shock horror, pauses, just like the black-and-white days!) This is a world that comes with its own poignant language: people don’t eat food anymore for instance but ‘workfeed’ from the ‘food dole’, with all the implications that people live at the whim of society rather than having society run for them. What’s more, everyone in this story acts ‘normally’ for all the strange ideas: this isn’t a story where early Industrial Revolutionary era workers mill around discussing scarecrows or where H G Wells accepts everything about time travel at first glance: there’s a world-weary frustration on this planet, a sense of ‘now what?’ at every turn that rings true. You believe in this world and its people. If you were watching on first transmission in 1985 you were kind of living in it anyway.  

Colin Baker is in his element and his Doctor is never better on Tv as he gets to pontificate and harangue at length, delivering pompous emotional speeches that put him at the heart of the action in a way his two immediate predecessors never were (Ton Baker’s Doctor was distant and alien and Peter Davison’s did the mopping up job afterwards, but Dr 6 is prepared to risk all for his morals from the first. To his detriment, generally). Colin Baker his best platform for his permanently outraged Dr, shouting at a world that won’t listen to him and he’s met his match in Sil, his antithesis in a way The Master had stopped being in this era, a character ready to argue back at him but one driven by control rather than freedom and misery rather than joy. A lot of writers for the 6th Dr don’t really understand him (something script editor Eric Saward confessed later – and he pretty much created him!) but Phillip Martin gets him completely: he’s a timelord who has none of the sense of doubt the others (sometimes) have but unlike his close cousin the 4th Dr he doesn’t see the absurdism in the world either. For him, more than any other regeneration, his adventures a crusade and a moral wrong he just has to right. He’s a professor who sees the rest of the universe as his classroom of pupils and isn’t above lecturing them and punishing them when they get things wrong. He’s a more black-and-white Dr than the others, despite his multi-coloured costume, without as much mercy as the others. Which is a problem against more nuanced, pitiable characters like Davros or The Board, but perfect for a character as downright nasty as Sil and a planet so obviously ‘wrong’ as Varos. That, perhaps, is why this is the only DW story to have the word ‘vengeance’ in the title: he doesn’t so much save the day and put things right by removing the baddies as avenge the people who’ve suffered under this regime, every bit as much as the political system hurts people it disagrees with. Only, of course, the Dr is morally right and un-corruptable. Colin Baker is often the best thing in his era, but never more than here when he gets to be the Dr he was always meant to be, smarter and more learned than your average monster and not afraid to show it. Peri, too, gets a lovely lot to do compared to usual: she’s the moral compass when The Doctor isn’t there, plucky and brave in all the best ways, while her aborted change into a bird fills in a lot of details about her character, her need to rise above it all and fly away, to believe in better times (though being a botanist it’s a surprise she didn’t turn into a tree, growing tall to be above it all, like the ones in ‘Mark Of The Rani’. But better).  Peri is one of Dr Who’s great companions and Nicola Bryant one of its best actresses, even if she never gets the chance to show just what she can do; along with debut ‘Planet Of Fire’ though this is Peri at her best, sarcastic and sulky as the monsters try to have their way with her and with a put-down equal to everyone trying to put her six feet under.  It’s the moments when the pair are together that the story shines most though: now that the first two stories of ‘getting to know you’ have been recorded both actors know each other well and are having the greatest fun together. They’re a delight to watch. It’s a real shame that future writers go back to having them at each other’s throats for the rest of the season.  

It’s a shame too that Phillip Martin only ever got two Dr Who scripts on screen because he could write characters better than anybody still left writing for Who in this era; as we said in ‘Mindwarp’ his greatest strength is that he can take grotesque caricatures of people who seem hideous at first and then slowly fill in the gaps so that they have more depth than characters usually get in 90 minutes, turning a world that seems outlandish and cartoonish at first into one that becomes more subtle and real by degrees. Varos is a world that solves its problems with violence and where if you don’t like it there must be something wrong with you –a world that if you disagree with it can ‘devolve’ you by turning you into an animal, through acceleration of certain strands in your DNA. It’s a very different way of doing the things Dr Who always does, laughing at us for laughing at it, and it works so well it’s a surprise no one tried it again (there’s something similar going on in ‘Dragonfire’ what with literally dangling Sylvester McCoy over a cliff and naming characters after postmodernist theorists, but it doesn’t try anything quite as brave as this, an academic exercise rather than anything quite so ‘gutsy’). Martin is also clever at giving us exposition only when we need it, so we learn things at just the right time from multiple different characters from different points of view, rather than just having it dumped on us (perhaps the biggest reason why this script by an experienced writer stands out in a year with newbies like Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker and Glen McCoy who do that sort of thing a lot). The language too is magnificent for the most part, rich and rounded and different for every character, from the gum clipped sentences of the working classes to the Governor’s thoughtful prose to the Doctor’s impassioned speeches.

For all that though, Varos is far from perfect.  As so often happens in 6^th Doctor scripts he and Peri take an age to arrive on the scene and the opening scenes on board the Tardis as The Doctor sits round being depressed as they end up stuck in space are very out of character (I get what Martin and probably Saward were doing, by having even our hero feel the helplessness at being trapped in a situation beyond your control but the Tardis is always going wrong and the Doctor always has hope. Although as it happens this is the last time the Tardis goes wrong for the rest of the 20^th century!) Usually the joy in Who stories is watching the Doctor inspire people to do better but for once he ends up doing most of the work himself  and the Varosian rebels aren’t drawn with the same complexities and motivations of everyone else (it might be that, having been brought up on a penal colony, there simply isn’t a precedent for this sort of thing but that’s where The Doctor comes in, as an inspiration. A cut scene has The Doctor befriend Jondar after asking what got him into trouble and he says ‘curiosity’, very much a Doctory trait. We really could have done with that line back in, especially when this story under-ran with bits added at the last minute). It’s a shame Martin didn’t too more with Peri’s transformation and have the Doctor at least acknowledge it when he rescues her (although it’s just as well the intended closing line, where The Doctor offers to take Peri to a planet filled with millet, got cut!) There’s a lot to say about imagination being harmful to people who aren’t allowed to use it and who think they’re going to be trapped in the same drudgery life forever; it’s the one part of the script that feels stapled on rather than growing organically out of everything else. It would also have been interesting to see what animal he might have been too. There’s a truly woeful car chase that’s clearly under-par and under-budget and even a thought amongst fans that it’s a ‘parody’ of the Pertwee era doesn’rt excuse how poorly it’s executed. The ending is awfully sudden and violent and it’s sad to see The Doctor resorting to the sort of violence that everyone else on this planet uses. It comes out of nowhere and The Doctor and Peri go home in return for some Zeiton 7 even though the planet is still a mess and the people are still hurting. Even Sil has been shamed rather than banished (though on the plus side it leaves him free for a re-match, unlike say The Daleks and Cybermen, both destroyed in their original stories). While it fits the story, too, the amount of drab grey sets filled with drab grey people in drab grey costumes without any reprieve can get monotonous (for once the Doctor’s colourful coat and Peri’s 1980s neon leotard come in handy as a contrast!): it’s a real shame that ‘The Two Doctors’ ‘Revelation Of the Daleks’ and ‘Mark Of the Rani’ got all the location filming allocation between them for the year as the other three stories all suffer.

For all that, though, Varos is a still filled with many wonderful and memorable moments that lodge themselves in the brain. Though people talk about the violence going too far (and Martin gleefully posted a Radio Times letter about how the atrocities is the stories were ‘greater than anything in WWII on his bathroom wall) in this story it’s never gratuitous and always proving a point: you remember this story’s executions and acid baths long after similar threats in other stories have been forgotten. The Governor’s guilty conscience wondering if he’s doing the right thing leads to many a great monologue matched only by Sil’s subversive banking (Star Trek clearly borrowed him for their Ferengi as they’re much the same but Sil came first, by about twenty years) and The 6^th Doctor at his chest-beating best. The moment when the regime has been overthrown and everyone’s television screens turn blank, leaving with nothing but a vacuum in their lives, is one of the most thought-provoking ends in all of Who, as the camera turns to us at home and asks us what we’re going to do about it now that we’ve ‘seen’ through the hypocrisy of a Thatcher-type society. We can all learn a lot from Varos it seems; not least the fact that a DW script can be this daring and postmodern without it getting in the way of telling a good story, which rattles along at quite a pace and makes a lot of salient points in such an entertaining way this viewer sitting at home has no reason to complain. Michael Grade clearly hadn’t seen or – more likely – understood ‘Vengeance on Varos’ when he cancelled the show at the end of this season for being ‘too violent’ and ‘not very good’ (or maybe he thought that the dithering Governor trying to placate everyone rather than do the right thing was based on him?) This is, more than anything, an attack on the very violence he was complaining about, but done in better and subtler ways than a monster as one-dimensional as Grade could ever understand. The result is a brilliant inventive and creative story in an era when, more than any other in the 20th century, Dr Who had fallen into a rut and was recycling its own ideas. Proof that even in its darkest days Dr Who always had something worth saying and could comment on society’s failings in a way no other series ever could. There aren’t many classics in this era but ‘Varos’ is very much one, a near-perfect combination of writing and acting. Not everyone got it on first transmission, not everyone gets it now, but there’s food for thought in Varos beyond Sil’s marshminnows and a lot for fans to enjoy whatever level you want to watch this complex story on.

POSITIVES + The ‘Varos’ logo by set designer Tony Snoaden is pretty nifty, a double ‘V’ that looks like exactly the sort of thing an oppressive dystopian regime would come up with and also faintly resembles both the BBC ‘home video’ logo of the era and the most famous ‘Who’ logo, the ‘diamond one from the Pertwee era.  

NEGATIVES - The Doctor, Peri and two of the rebels (one of them played by Sean Connery’s son) are terrified because of a light distortion that’s made them afraid of…a fly. Even when huge, flies aren’t that threatening and the Doctor’s used enough to holovisions and giant ants and butterflies alike to recognise a mirage of a fly when he sees one. It’s a bit of anticlimax to say the least. It’s footage ordered specially from Oxford Scientific Films by the way, though the real sticking point was the desert scene: all of Who’s usual sources admitted they were after a decent desert film themselves and had none to spare (it eventually came from, of all places, music label EMI).  

BEST QUOTE: Peri: ‘Since we left Telos, you've caused three electrical fires, a total power failure, and a near collision with a storm of asteroids. Not only that, you twice managed to get yourself lost in the TARDIS corridors, wiped the memory of the flight computer and jettisoned three quarters of the storage hold. You even managed to burn dinner last night!’ Dr: ‘Well, I have never said I was perfect’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Varos’ was the very sensible choice for the 60^th anniversary ‘Tales From The Tardis’ (2023) series, given how relevant Phillip Martin’s tale of corruption on TV remains (‘The 21^st century’ sighs modern Peri at the end ‘It feels like Varos’. She’s not wrong there). As with the other stories in the nostalgia fest series it’s a brief top and tail to a re-showing of the episode with the 6^th Doctor and Peri bumping into each other inside a ‘memory Tardis’ and talking about old times. In some ways this is the least moving and nostalgic of the original six: Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are always doing something together, usually on Big Finish, so we’re used to seeing them together while their time in the Tardis was a mere forty years ago rather than sixty. In other ways it’s the best: the actors’ very real affection for each other shines through in a way it wasn’t allowed to when they were making Who for real and their warm embrace is a real highlight of the series (not least because it means that Peri definitely survived the end of ‘Mindwarp’: Peri looks surprisingly good for someone who spent so many years living with Brian Blessed’s Warrior King Yrcanos!) Peri comments he got older, to which The Doctor jokes (in what sounds like a Colin Baker ad lib) ‘and bigger…and beardier!’ In case you’re wondering he doesn’t have the old coat but he still seems to prefer clashes of colour in old age judging by his clashing waistcoat, shirt and trousers! The Doctor’s been keeping tabs on Peri, hearing songs about the ‘warrior Queen’ and talks – unusually for Who – directly about fate, of how Peri’s days were ‘intended for you from that day on Lanzarote’. While the other Doctors are a bit clueless as to what’s going on, trust the 6^th Doctor to have worked out first that this is a ‘Remember Tardis’ based on stories shared, ‘memories like ripples on a pond forever moving’. Peri in turn hasn’t forgotten the Doctor, saying she used to look up at the night sky ‘and wonder which star you were spinning around’ and wondering if she would ever see him again. A sweet finale has The Doctor telling Peri (and those of us at home) that injustice and suffering turns us into who we are and makes us fighters to be proud of, before agreeing to rush back to saving the universe from itself with lots of button mashing; a bit of a clumsy speech perhaps but heartfelt all the same in a year of turmoil around the world. Perhaps best of all is the way they approach each other: back in the very first scene in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ it was a ‘bit of business’ the actors developed between themselves to have Peri and The Doctor go one way then the other as she tried to escape from him, newly regenerated and unstable; now they do it to go towards each other for a hug. Phil Ford’s finally script gives us the closure we Sixie fans have been after, painting the pair as ‘two adventurers and friends’, the way their characters should always have been.

The ‘real’ sequel is of course Phillip Martin’s ‘Mission To Magnus’, written as part of the unproduced season twenty-three (and included with the other abandoned scripts listed under ‘The Mysterious Planet’). Followed by ‘Mindwarp’, a story that did make it to telly. Sil pops up on a whole load of other stories set after ‘Mindwarp’ too, all of which are listed in the column under that story.

Previous ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ next ‘The Mark Of Rani’

The Keys Of Marinus: Ranking - 57

 

The Keys Of Marinus

(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 11/4/1964-16/5/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Terry Nation, director: John Gorrie)

Rank: 57

   'My, Arbitan, what a big head you've suddenly got' 

'All the better for thinking about the fate of Marnius, dear child' 

'And what a big round circle you have growing out of your head' 

'All the better for playing ring toss my dear'

 'And what crazy flippers!' 

'I fancied a bit of snorkelling, OK?!?' 

'And my, how clumsy you suddenly are' 

'Well, I've been drinking, OK?!' 

'And oh Arbitan, what a big ray gun you've got!!!!'

  

 

In which the Doctor and friends help an old man retrieve his lost keys because he can’t remember where he put them. No I’m not making this up …

There was a trend on Twitter a while ago for people’s ‘comfort’ Dr Who story – not the best one, not the one you would show to newcomer fans to make them fall in love with the series, not even one that’s particularly good, just one that gives you joy. Honestly all Dr Who gives me joy, minus perhaps my bottom ten (which isn’t bad out of 327ish stories) - and even they give me joy in a curmudgeonly ‘what were they even playing at?!’ ranting kind of a way - but if I had to choose just one comfort Dr Who story then its ‘The Keys Of Marinus’. It’s not that clever, it’s not that deep, it’s not that well made, it has almost nothing in common with the rest of my top hundred and its arguably the first Dr Who story made to be a B-movie rather than ‘high art’, and yet like all Dr Who stories made in the show’s first year (this is just the fifth ever story) there’s something magical about it that warms the flippers. After all no other story in the show’s history ever had quite this much ambition to show this many different cultures and aliens and cities inside one story ever again – mostly because they learned making this story how hard that was to do; the fact that they even try to build a futuristic city surrounded by acid seas, a paradise filled with monstrous heads-in-jars, screaming jungles with sentient monster plants, an ice cave with scary defrosting soldiers, and a space-age courtroom in the tiniest studio in television (Lime Grove Studio D) and thought they could get away with it is such a wonderfully preposterous thing. The fact that they very nearly get away with it, with a story that’s clearly strung together with painted backdrops unfinished statues and sticking tape yet with no really obvious howlers like some 1980s and even some 2000s and 2010 stories I could mention, is extraordinary. 

You see ‘Keys Of Marinus’ isn’t just one six-part story but four one or two-part stories stuck together, each one set in a new location with new characters, every one featuring a different conundrum for the Dr and co to solve. Being so early the rules for the series haven’t set in just yet so rather than turn down ideas for being too expensive or daft the production team just went ‘yeah sure, it seemed to work with The Daleks, we’ll give that a go’ (well, not the director: legend has it that newly qualified John Gorrie took a first look at the script he’d agreed to work on to advance his career and spent the next hour with his head in his hands, groaning). After this Dr Who will become more streamlined and even the epics to come tend to feature one central storyline or world across multiple episodes and even if this story bites off more than it can chew every single time at least it’s a variety pack with a new idea to replace the old one along every few minutes (not for nothing does ‘Marinus’ sound like ‘marinade’; this is a story big on the seasoning and the taste it leaves in the mouth rather than the nutrients).True, the downside is a bitty story that’s really a series of memorable images strung together rather than a cohesive story. But then, this was a series which – so people tend to forget now – was meant to be continuous serial made up of episodes that ran from one story into the next and even the Radio Times didn’t mention when a new story was starting, so a fragmentary plot made a lot more sense then that it would now in our era of ‘series arcs’ (only this story’s close cousin. Terry Nations’ next story ‘The Chase’ is as fragmentary).

A last minute replacement for yet another fallen script (Malcolm Hulke’s intriguing sounding ‘Hidden Planet’ where time runs backwards: I’m amazed Steven Moffat hasn’t had a bash at that idea yet as its right up his street) it was written in a hurry following the success of ‘The Daleks’ when producer Verity Lambert and script editor David Whittaker phones Terry Nation up and pleaded with him for a second story, one where basically he could do anything he wanted, safe in the knowledge that he must know what he’s doing as last time it turned out pretty darn well.  In turn, Terry Nation was astonished at just how well his half-baked ideas turned out on screen and figured the BBC and especially designer Raymond Cusick know what they’re doing, so he writes any old thing he can think of without worrying about budget or how any of this will look on screen. So Terry recycles everything from his first Dalek script he can, without quote understanding how they worked as part of an overall story: the acid pools are back, the killer foliage with ideas above its station and the shiny city full of impossible technology.  Both sides have become convinced the other side can work miracles so it will all turn out fine in the end. Neither of those beliefs is strictly true: ‘The Daleks’ was a lucky show in so many ways, with all the right people working on it in just the right frame of mind, its success only every to be repeated in straight sequels, but they weren’t to know that this early on. By his own admission Terry wrote that story for some quick cash – by his own admission Cusick came up with the Dalek design because the script didn’t give him much to work on and he needed to come up with something. They got lucky, the perfect partnership at the perfect time: ‘The Keys Of Marinus’, by contrast, is unlucky multiple times over: everything in ‘Marinus’ has promise but just doesn’t quote pass ‘the acid test’, just like the poor Voord we see in episode one. 

Yes, acid: a word that plays a big part in this story, not least because it looks like everyone who made this story was on drugs. Marinus has every climate going and is a rare Dr Who planet that isn’t simply all one big land mass. The first we see of it is an island surrounded by acid pools (one causes Susan to lose her shoes) filled with rubber-suited creatures best described as ‘acidic’, bitter creatures who want to run the planet. Usually in this era there’s someone nice wanting help (usually someone ugly or very alien looking) but in this story the inhabitants are equally acidic judging by Arbitan who doesn’t enlist the Tardis team’s help so much as blackmail them. By and large all the people we meet in this story are acidic too: there’s the bitter trapper living in the wilderness isolated with his thoughts who takes quite a shine to Barbara in a near-rape scene they wouldn’t dare try to get away with now, or the city where everyone is so distrustful of everyone else that criminals are presumed guilty till proven innocent. In short everyone on Marinus is in a bad mood no matter whether they live in the wilderness, in a cushy city with a good job, out on an island being invaded or in a creaming jungle. The only people we meet who appear to be nice are in Morphoton – and they’re an illusion, a hypnotic trick designed to make you think people are sweet when really they’re the bitterest of the lot. ‘The Keys Of Marinus’, then, feels like Terry Nation really woke up on the wrong side of bed, resentful perhaps that his big career that once promised so much has reduced him to being stuck writing for a kiddies’ scifi programme. Like a lot of Nation’s writing, though, all it takes is someone to come along and right-some intrinsic wrong that’s got out of whack: Arbitan, for instance, is guarding the ‘conscience’ of the planet, which under threat of invasion he split up and scattered across the planet in the hope that different sets of people would keep them safe. Now, though, the end is near and he wants the keys to the conscience back, to give people their conscience again. The matter of whether blackmailing strangers into doing your dirty work for you is good for your conscience  never seems to have occurred to him.  

There are also, I think, two different inspirations for how this story turned out, with Nation and Whittaker deciding to make it a sort of glorified clips show for what Dr Who can do.  This is the first Dr Who ‘quest’ story – the only self-contained quest story till the cartoon ‘The Infinite Quest’ given that ‘The Key To Time’ season spent a whole year and six stories doing what this story does across six weeks – and it’s inevitable that Dr Who would try something like this early on, given that the most famous work in scifi/fantasy land was a certain Tolkien book about a quest for rings. More than one reviewer had referred to Dr Who building Tolkien-like imaginary worlds already by 1964 and Terry, who still wasn’t entirely sure what Dr Who was all about, seems to have read every news story he could get his hands on to try to find out (‘Marinus’ suggests he couldn’t quite work it out still: was Dr Who an action- adventure, a morality tale or out and out scifi?  Better give them all three!) Unlike that other famous quest story though instead of rings to rule them all there are time bracelets and keys to save a planet, instead of a New Zealand travelogue interrupted by interminable dialogue there are multiple planets to see (by my reckoning there are more different places in one planet visited here that isn’t Earth than in any other single Dr Who story, such a refreshing change when planets are usually made out to be all the same everywhere even though The Earth blatantly isn’t; this one has acid seas, a psychotic jungle, blocks of ice, and two cities, one lush-looking, one streamlined, not to mention an Aztec-like temple) and instead of annoying Hobbits there’s Yartek, Leader Of The Alien Voord, tripping over his own flippers. The reality of course is that the whole point of Dr Who in 1964 was that it was everything, with a space-time travel machine that could go anywhere and a format elastic enough that it could look like every other programme on TV. So what ‘Marinus’ also looks like, more than anything else, is channel-hopping, as if the Doctor and friends have landed in a scifi B movie, then a dark morality ‘Play For Today’, then an action series about lost worlds in jungles and ice and finally ended up in a courtroom drama (again ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, also by terry nation, have similarly fragmented themes and the sense of hopping TV stations between episodes). Which makes me wonder if Nation isn’t going all postmodern here and writing about what he knows, namely being a freelance TV writer in the 1960s, asked to write for Gerry Anderson puppets one minute and adult crime dramas the next. The story starts, after all, with the Doctor fiddling around with the canner as if watching television (and bemoaning the fact that the colour has stopped working, something they had in America in 1964 – indeed William Russell came to fame in ‘The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot’, the first TV series ever to be made in colour seven full years before he was in Dr Who - but not Britain!) After all, it was a good time to be writing about channel hopping: after decades with only two channels another had just arrived in the form of BBC2 which started the week of episode three of this story. I wouldn’t put it past him honestly (I’m convinced ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ is partly about trying to sell to different TV demographics, perhaps in America). Even the travel-dials, Nation’s first go at Blake’s 7’s ‘teleport bracelets’ look like TV remote controls (and yes, they had been around since 1950 though not all tellies had one by 1964). In other words Terry can’t work out which TV medium to write Dr Who for (and by his own admission he wasn’t too knowledgeable about scifi) so instead he writes for all of them.

‘Marinus’ also feels, like many a Nation story, as if the author is exploring all the things he feels is wrong with the then-modern world in a scifi setting: just as ‘The Daleks’ is his fear of impending nuclear war and what might have happened in an alternate universe where The Nazis took over Britain, so ‘Marinus’ is all his worries about the modern day. Notice how the story starts with the Doctor finding evidence of sand turned to glass, just as if an atomic bomb has gone off a few years ago – a mere nineteen years ago in the world watching ‘Keys Of Marinus’ the first time round.  The ‘Morphoton’ sequence feels like nation’s fear of consumer culture and how one day it will consume us all so that we stop thinking for ourselves, convince ourselves that we’re buying up luxuries that are really cheap tat. The last two episodes are his fear of justice gone wrong, when the ‘wrong’ crooked people are in charge and can get away with things they shouldn’t, with everything turned on its head (this is, after all, mere months after the assassination of JFK, with the sense of outrage that one man, with or without CIA or FBI or Russia or Cuban backing, could take down a man ‘trying to do good’). A lot of 1960s protests were about how the world was being run by senile old men who were sending children off to fight in battles that were not of their making: Arbitan standing in front of the glass case ‘conscience’ looks very much like news reports of LBJ standing in front of a lottery ball calling the names of those American teenagers who were about to be conscripted and sent into danger. Even the ‘screaming jungle’ isn’t that far removed from the imagery of The Vietnam War on the news every night in 1964 (although in a Dr Who twist it’s the jungle itself that’s the killer, not people hiding in it). Overall there’s the overall sense of a world gone wrong, everywhere, all at once: it’s a second sign of the chilling hopelessness and corruption at the heart of all his work like ‘The Survivors’ (when humanity is wiped out by covid) and ‘Blake’s 7’ (when our heroes are wiped out by the faceless establishment). While there’s no one central idea in this story as great as in ’The Daleks’ and none have the length to be explored anything like as well all are worthy themes to be explored, a sort of dystopian vision of the future born out of not pure imagination but building on the roots of everything that was wrong in the 1960s.

For all the fragmentary nature of ‘Marinus’ though there’s the very Dr Whoy theme of betrayal and faith that runs through all the episodes, with plots that have people pretending to be something they’re not: the alien pretending to be human, the brains pretending that you’re living in paradise, the trapper who pretends to be nice, the guards who frame Ian into looking like a robber and the aliens who pretend that their planet is paradise when the people are really enslaved in poverty. It feels, more than any other Dr Who story, like one of those ‘coming of age’ tales where you only truly know you’re grown up when you’ve overcome all the obstacles and shown discernment, observation, faith, courage, the ability to speak out against injustice and, erm, the chemical symbols needed to slow the movement of alien killer plants. Only then will you have passed the tests to be a fully functioning adult – and once you’ve worked that lot out you’ll also (spoilers) have seen through the people blackmailing you and giving you orders and know not to end the quest by simply doing what you’re told. They should show it in schools: these are life lessons far more valuable than, say, writing CVs for an overcrowded job market you have no hope of entering anyway or how to get on in a society that is collapsing around our ears.

Although that said everyone who didn’t see this story go out I 1964 – and even quite a lot of fans who saw it at the time – have been too busy laughing at the main baddy to give this story their full attention. It seems ridiculous now that everyone seriously thought the Voord were going to be the next big thing after The Daleks, giving them a blaze of publicity and putting them in annuals and spinoff sweet cigarette cards, just because Terry Nation thought them up. They’re clearly not as original or indeed ‘alien’ as a Dalek; they’re basically a frogman in a diving suit with a special mask containing circle or triangle balanced on top of their heads like an anorexic Teletubby, valuable for quick games of ring-toss but not very practical for world domination. They look like an extra in a suit, not a feasible enemy about to destroy the world and don’t even get a proper back story (the Voord aren’t much for talking and Arbitan, the only other character who meets them aside from the regulars, doesn’t know much about them either). But then nobody thought the Daleks would be a hit and, again, Terry Nation and the designers knew that they’d seriously underestimated each other in the past, so why not again? The scene where a Voord trips over his own flippers is one of the single most inept moments in 60 years of Dr Who (left in because episodes were only ‘allowed’ a single break of filming in 25 minutes in those days, unless something really catastrophic happened – that’s why William Hartnell fluffs his lines as much as he does). And yet the idea alone, of beings made out of rubber who can exist in acid seas, who have the power to take over worlds and who kill the last man standing just as the Tardis crew leave, is exactly the sort of high-stakes drama Dr Who did at its best. It’s a brave/silly move only having the Voord in two episodes though so we barely get to know them – and what we do know is mostly their ability to loom rather than do anything that exciting. Arbitan, too, is only sketched in: he’s a bit too much like the 1^st Doctor in that he’s a grumpy old man who seems to hate everyone and everything – you don’t feel any sense of loyalty or desire to see everyone put this planet back together again when he’s so unlikeable. The sets, too, are variable: beautiful acid seas with working full length submersibles (hurrah Shawcraft Models!) but some truly shoddy sets with the pyramids and their moving walls with the single most obvious painted backdrop in the series and an unfortunate moment when a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a Voord falls through a trapdoor (a last minute replacement when it was realised pushing the Voord down a hole and having it scream out of shot looked even sillier).

Far better is the morality tale of our second world Morphoton, where everyone is brainwashed into thinking everything is lush and beautiful and they have everything they need and can stay forever – only for the brainwashing to fail on Barbara (always the sharpest and most likely to think outside the box in these early days) and for her to see the truth: that everyone is living in rags and eating mouldy fruit. Such a simple idea but its oh so clever: and it’s a storyline that does the unthinkable, see our friends fall out – not just the division between the ‘unknowable them’ and ‘unknowing us’ either but between Ian and Barbara, the best of friends. We’ve seen divisions in the Tardis before but even Ian is on the side of the Dr and Susan this time and you really feel Barbara’s agonies at being dismissed when she knows she’s right and has made a reputation as being the Tardis’ sensible, reliable one (if this was the present day she’d be the one still taking covid precautions). The big scare of these early days is that our favourite schoolteachers are going to be stranded on an alien world forever so when the other three decide they want to stay and forget their quest for keys its heartbreaking and you really feel Barbara’s panic that she’s lost the others for good, the only sad person in a happy world (more like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ than people give it credit for).Cleverly we at home get to see this world from both points of view, with some seriously (for 1964) natty editing between the set dressed one way and then the other and having one of the regulars in close-up to cover certain shots so we can’t see their clothing. No show was doing anything like this in 1964, distorting our sense of belief in such a way and it may well be the most impressive shot in the series till the Tardis team start their ghostly wanderings through ‘The Space Museum’ the following year (I mean, it took two whole days – six hours! – to put together in the editing suite, double the usual amount). There’s also the story’s funniest scene, with William Hartnell gazing in rapture at what he think s is the most advanced technology he’s ever seen…a rather dirty coffee mug!

The idea of brains who have everything they need to they have even outgrown their bodies is a very telling one, something that a full four or six part story could have really made use out of and it’s almost a shame when Barbara stumbles on the solution so quickly. The writers miss another trick too: Nation writes Barbara as the first traveller to arrive in Morphoton which means she’s the one who has to sell the brainwashing to the others, with Ian oddly enough the cynical, untrusting one. Only later, when Barbara moves in her sleep and knocks off her ‘conditioning’ bracelet’, does she see through the scam for what it is – they should have had one of the others travel first and have Barbara be adamant about this world being too good to be true from the first and turned it into more of a morality play. Also that cliffhanger ‘tease’ of the dial being covered in Barbara’s blood is Dr Who’s first cliffhanger copout: apparently it was just a tiny scratch.  Finally Barbara goes berserk and smashes up the Morphoton aliens she finds, eerie glass heads in a jar, in a scene that’s extremely cathartic: it’s easy to think that our world leaders, in any era, are so cut off from us that they feed off our misery and live apart from us in glass cubes (while those ugly beasts with googly eyes are not unlike Boris Johnson). Terry Nation seems a less obvious candidate for our occasional ‘Dr Who in the 1960s as a counter-culture metaphor where the kids take over from the adults’ metaphors, being middle aged and with a pre-Who career writing jokes for comedians of the 1950s, but there’s a rebelliousness to all of Nation’s best work and so it is here, with Barbara effectively overthrowing consumerist society and freeing herself and her friends from the shackles of slavery (though, admittedly, the plot might have worked better if they’d given that angle to actual youth Susan, whose underused even by her standards this story – and far less likely to be listened to than Barbara, making the climax all the sweeter).

Next we move to Mellennius, another Nation favourite, a ‘screaming jungle’ where the plants are alive and more active than they were even on Skaro. This episode is sixty years ahead of its time, being in effect an escape room like The Crystal Maze full of puzzles our friends have to solve, as Ian and Barbara try to uncover the hiding place of the next key given to them by a dying man in a tiny medicine cupboard in the jungle before the planets eat them. Spoilers: all I’ll say its a good job the Tardis turned up in this story when they had a science teacher on board; had this been, say, Ryan and Graham they’d have been plantfood. It really does feel though, as if this segment was written for the Doctor and hastily rewritten when David Whitaker pointed out, quite reasonably, that the star had been working for six months now without a break and thought he could find a way of making the episode without him (it’s the start of a semi-regular run of our friends taking time off in Who’s relentless 40 week, six day schedule). Though the simplest and in many ways the silliest of all the plots (even on alien planets would plants really want to kill the beings that give it the carbon dioxide it needs to live? And how come there are so many trees compared to people?) it’s nicely tense and both William Russell and Jacqueline Hill act their socks off.  

Barbara is in even more trouble when the travel-dial next takes her to an ice cap and she’s rescued by Vasor, a man whose been starved of any feminine contact for far too long, while Ian is left to perish in the snow outside with a bag full of meat to encourage the surprisingly Earth-like Wolves of Marinus. He’s a nasty piece of work, Dalek-like in his refusal to even consider anyone’s needs but his own and he lies about having seen the others even when Barbara discovers a bunch of travel-dials in his possession. She’s torn: of all the companions except maybe Romana Barbara has been brought up respectably, to be nice to people and grateful for any help they can give. But Vasor is clearly lying and only kind to her face – you really feel her fighting her 1963 upbringing to stand up to this brute who nearly gets his way.  After that there’s one of the scariest sights in all of 1960s Dr Who, as the next key is hidden in a block of ice and guarded by giant mute suits of armour without faces (its hinted that they’re the first actual robots seen in Dr Who, although admittedly one screams when it falls off a cliff so perhaps not). Even with several minutes faffing round with a drawbridge and not much happening (poor Carole Ann Ford wasn’t acting when Susan is so scared walking across it – the rope broke in rehearsals and dropped her a few feet to the floor!) this episode is nicely gripping, our heroes scrabbling around looking for a key versus unstoppable foes they don’t understand well enough to fight and Vasor intent on revenge. The ice soldiers only appear on screen for a few minutes but they are, colloquially, one of the best remembered things about the series in its early days past The Daleks: I have lots of people of a certain age asking me which episode they’re in and given the tenseness of the part where they suddenly come to life, the key they’re guarding not yet defrosted, I can see why. Even so, these middle two episodes of the story are the weakest, the most ‘adventure’ style stories Dr Who ever did, without any real scifi trappings at all.     

Arriving on the next world a little ahead of the others Ian spots the key straight away in a museum case, but gets knocked out before he can get it and is framed for murder and robbery. Typical of their luck, this is an (un-named) city where everyone is guilty until proven innocent and things look grim indeed. Only the Doctor, having jumped ahead, can save him, with some last minute detection work and William Hartnell, fresh from a fortnight off, is rarely better than here as he owns the camera, gesticulating wildly and turning from empathy to outrage at the drop of a hat (I’m amazed he wasn’t called on to do any legal dramas in his long and distinguished career – he has the right gravitas for it and a barrister or a judge isn’t that far removed from his usual roles as an army sergeant). After two very action-based episodes it’s a relief to get back to an episode that’s talky again and the slow discovery of the real culprits is highly satisfying, even though there aren’t exactly many suspects. That’s Fiona Walker making her TV debut as Kala, the girlfriend with a guilty conscience by the way: she was fresh out of drama school and desperate for work so she left the director a note pleading with him to put her in his next show when he had a part free because ‘I’m too good to be out of work!’; admiring her cheek and having been unemployed himself Gorrie gave her this one. This plot doesn’t really have much to do with scifi or Dr Who either and a lot of fans find it dull but I really like how the plot does what in future will be a very Dr Whoy thing for mostly the first time: the drama is solved not by our heroes but by the Doctor making the people around him do better. He works his way into the head of the real criminal and pleads to his conscience to do the right thing – a neat mirror of Marinus’ conscience machine that needs to be fixed with the keys. Yet more reasons I think Nation might be writing about television and its capacity to inspired an audience to do the right thing!   

Finally things are put right, but for a while it looks as if it’s all been for nothing, as Yartek insists on pretending to be Arbitan even though he has a very different voice, a whacking great sticky out shape on his head under his hooded robe and big flipper feet. However the Doctor’s fooled smarter aliens than this and when he sends Ian with a fake key, knowing that the real Arbitan would see trough it, soon causes the conscience burns and collapse (which is a bit disappointing as a climax after all that but is at least a better ending than ‘I’ve switched the machine on and you can all go home again’ – they’ll try exactly the same trick with ‘The Key To Time’). In other words this is the first story where the Dr, arguably, ‘loses’ – the rescue party are recovered but there’s no Arbitan to rescue anymore and the keys might have been safer left scattered so no future aliens can get their hands on them. Nevertheless, the way the supporting characters have been rescued from their brainwashing and the close bonds they’ve made fighting a common enemy gives you a very satisfyingly Dr Who ending, of everyone being given their free will back so they can rebuild a better civilisation from now on.

The result is a story with a bit of everything, a bit too much of everything in many ways, so much so that its surprising that more doesn’t go wrong than it does. The Voord are the weakest part by far (they are to The Daleks what Beryl Reid’s Major Briggs is to Captain Kirk or what Mel’s computer programming skills are to Bill Gates’), unbelievable as a world-beating force, especially when dressed up, and yet they really do look alien and are less stupid than a lot of the dafter alien races we’ve had in Dr Who (like The Myrka or the Ergon); like a lot of this story you can at least see what they were trying to do. For the most part the first series of Dr Who looks surprisingly timeless but there are large parts of this story that looks like what it was: a children’s serial that nobody much cared for, on a super low budget, recorded in a cramped TV studio with 1964 production techniques. I’ve tried hard I these reviews to compare like for like, so that TV effects in the 1960s are judged by other TV shows from the 1960s, not Dr Who made in the 2020s, but even by the standards of the time a lot of this is really poor, like the ‘handy’ statue (all too obviously with a propman inside) which gropes Barbara a little too strongly before turning round (don’t know about you but her shrieks of surprise sound real to me, not acting). The story’s biggest problem though is the lack of urgency: unlike every other quest story around there’s no sense of time pressure in this story and the Tardis crew aren’t chased. For all that it matters to the plot they could have stayed for years in each location before moving on. It seems ridiculous that the Voord just sit around and wait for them to come back with the keys, in a really poor disguise and the threat isn’t really any different in part six than it was in part one (Terry Nation will take this on board for his next story which is one long Dalek chase) and to boot we already saw Arbitan snuff it at the end of episode one so we know there’s nothing to rush back for.

For all its faults, though, I still love ‘Marinus’ with my heart even when my head says I shouldn’t. It’s a story that really is a bit of everything, a pic and mix of so many assorted flavours – described by the Radio Times, for some reason, as ‘half a utopia, half an inferno!’ Sometimes it’s incredibly silly and some fans have tarred all the six episodes with the same brush as the Voord with the big feet and the idol with hands, but some of it is really quite scary, not just the obvious parts like the ice soldiers and the living killer plants but the scenes of Barbara trying to flee Francis De Wolff with no one around to save her, or the Voord with the hole in his rubber suit dissolved in the acid seas. Sometimes it’s inventing the rules that all future stories follow, such as the Doctor’s morals inspiring others or the Tardis actually seen materialising on screen (it’s another Shawcroft model) – until now we’ve always been inside the Tardis with our friends when the ship arrives somewhere (perhaps to make up for the fact that, for the first time, the Tardis gets beached and the regulars are given other means of travelling). It’s fascinating to see Terry writing for Dr Who without the Daleks (his only other Dalek-less script ‘The Android Invasion’ feels a bit too much like everyone else’s put through a blender) and his take on a world away from being a world war parable past present or future. Instead this is the WW2 idea of ‘keep calm and carry on’ exemplified (a phrase that was never actually used anywhere but was on a war poster that was never finished  and a phrase that is now so common and synonymous with British pluck that everyone assumes they said it all the time), our heroes always doing the right thing and staying in control even when faced with impossible odds, people to look up to. We’ve said a few times now that Terry Nation was only as good as his script editor – luckily in this era it’s still David Whittaker, so Nation’s usual big high concepts and dramatic set pieces are accompanied by some cracking dialogue and characterisation: you really get a feel for Ian and Barbara’s growing affection for each other in this story, as they save each other’s necks over and over again. Susan isn’t there yet (Carole Ann Ford actually complained to Verity, she hated her characterisation in this story so much) and The Doctor only really shines in the last two parts, but one of the great things about this early era is how the characters take it in turns to share the spotlight so that we get to know them in turn. Jacqueline Hill and William Russell are two of the finest actors to ever be in the series and they own every scene they’re in, adding layers that just aren’t there in the script – acting frightened underneath the courage they need, or outraged beneath their veneer of calm, or desperate underneath their very 1960s veneer of cool.

The production team, slightly embarrassed by this story (a B movie on a BBC budget) never tried anything like it again and Terry Nation, too busy writing Dalek stories for the foreseeable future, was happy never to be asked, while there’s more than one fan who would swap ‘Marinus’ for one of the missing episodes that are far more substantial and, well, coherent. The result is a story that’s easy to laugh at and poke fun at and yet ‘Marinus’ gets more things right than most: I love its morality, its heart, its comic lines, its heads in a jar (such a brilliant effect for 1964!), its action sequences, its sheer imagery and the powerful points it makes. I love it precisely because it is so sprawling and ambitious and quite unlike anything else ever done for the series, with a scope that other whole seasons never matched again. I love the fact that it feels as if we get to know a whole world – not just a tiny corner of a city but a whole planet with different cultures and different rules, filled with people who are just as deceitful but dress their lies up in very different ways. Most of all though I love Marinuses’  unique combination of being like the best of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Who, combining the old idea that stories were all about taking time to explore worlds and characters rather than plots, combined with the breathless rush of the modern era which moves on every 25-50 minutes regardless and which means that even when the story is in a slow patch you’re never bored because there’ll be another big thing along any moment. The ‘key’ to watching this story is to let it wash over you, to not try to worry too much about the plot or the overall arc or the fact that the monster can’t even stand up properly without tripping over – instead see it as TV straining at the leash to do everything, in one go, because this series might get taken off the air one day and everyone making it might never get the chance to say all these important things caged in such scifi terms or have this much fun creating a TV show ever again. In terms of ambition and imagination it’s a winner, even if the execution hadn’t got a hope of keeping up. So no, I’d never call this story peak Dr Who but ‘Marinus’ brings me joy every time I watch it (sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidentally) and you can’t ask for more from your favourite show than that.

POSITIVES +The model shot of the Voord space-boats arriving on Marinus Island are way ahead of their time and match up perfectly with the ’full size’ sequences. It’s not easy making a piece of plastic look as if it’s moving gracefully through acid-water without looking ridiculous – I mean ‘Stingray’ didn’t always manage that with a bigger budget and two extra years of learning how to make effects (Terry Nation wrote for Gerry Anderson too, but for the ‘Protectors’ series with actual people not puppets. It’s spookily close to what we get here).

NEGATIVES - George Colouris was only the second big name to ever appear in Dr Who, a person who  would be recognised by most of the TV audience rather than a specialist (besides the regulars anyway) but unlike Mark Eden (who goes above and beyond as Marco Polo in all senses of the word) Colouris is the first supporting actor clearly there for a quick buck and not a lot more. His portrayal of Arbitan is, well, arbitrary: when the Tardis regulars turn up out of thin air on an island surrounded by acid he sounds like he’s giving them his shopping list not processing his shock, then when Arbitan realises that he finally has some strangers to send after his own daughter whose disappeared he sounds as if he’s reading the shipping forecast, then finally when he dies it’s more of a ‘hey, you got me!’ than a colossal death scene. The director was obsessed with the actor, had seen him on stage and thought him electric and pleaded with him to do this show – he was amazed when Colouris said yes, although he never quite got this part or indeed this series. What’s frustrating is that I’ve seen Colouris in other borderline-silly scifi and he’s superb (his turn as the saboteur in Dr Who prototype ‘Voyage To Mars/Venus’ in 1960, by so many of the people who’ll run Dr Who in the Pertwee years, where King ‘Gerald Flood’ John from ‘The King’s Demons’, his girlfriend, some children and their pet hamster end up the first humans in space, no really – Michael Craze was in the first series, sadly wiped – is the best thing about the show and sold partly by his performance). Maybe he was just having an off day? Or maybe he was really struggling to keep a straight face when he saw the Voord trip over its own feet? 

BEST QUOTE:  ‘I don't believe that man was made to be controlled by machines. Machines can make laws but they cannot preserve justice. Only human beings can do that’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There’s a surprisingly large bunch of Voord-friendly spin-offs, perhaps because as the second monster from the pen of Terry Nation everyone was hopping for another runaway success like the Daleks, even though…well, just look at them! They were, for instance, the equal-first ever race from the TV series to appear in one of the Dr Who annuals long before the Daleks (and alongside the Zarbi for heaven’s sake!) ‘The Fishmen From Kandalinga’, thought to be written by an uncredited David Whittaker, is the final story in the 1966 annual and is a candidate for the maddest story in the edition. Spying a new race ‘so grotesque it was comical’ the Doctor jokes about it being ‘in need of beauty treatment’ – perhaps in revenge the Fishmen try and eat the Tardis! Te Tardis escapes by rolling to the bottom of an ocean where it gets stuck on the sea-bed and The Doctor decides to ‘jump-start’ it to a new place a few thousand miles away (a button he’s never seen to use again in any medium!) The Doctor discovers more of these fish-people stuck at the bottom of giant pits, trapped, when he hears a ‘conch-sound’ as mysterious black beings blow a horn and run in for the attack. It’s The Voord (a surprise rather given away by the illustrations!) who ‘have an odd thing protruding from their heads and two horns, almost like ears, at the side of their head to the back’. The Voord, arriving on a barge, take the Doctor prisoner and interrogate him – they remember him from ‘legends’ on their home world Marinus ‘millions’ of years ago. The Doctor plays dumb but tie the Doctor up and feed some weird fish-dish. After a lengthy paragraph on how it tastes they give up and tell the Doctor that he can ‘only eat plankton’ and basically tell him to lower his voice because he’s too darn noisy (!) Taken to an underground city we learn much about how the Voord live: they have fish-meat hanging from hooks on most walls and have phosphorescent lighting and live in concrete bunkers without furniture (it would be hard to sit down without tripping over each other’s flippers after all). Most of all it turns out that the Voord have been manufacturing land artificially on what used to be entirely a desert world and that the Fishmen down the pits were being kept as slaves to do the building work. Despite being in such grave danger The Doctor goes off on an angry rant about freedom and liberty, as only the 1^st Doctor can, and gets locked up again basically to shut him up. As he passes, though, the Doctor notices the two fake Keys of Marinus and wrist-dials that the Voord possessed during ‘Marinus’, now looking very old. The Voord demand the Doctor hand over his ship but he grabs one of the travel dials and heads to one of the pits he saw earlier. Surprising the Voord guard the Doctor seizes the protuberance on his head and he ‘whimpers with the sound of a kitten’. Inspired by his leas the Fishmen join in and overthrow the guards in what must surely be one of the first revolts in Dr Who (give or take ‘The Space Museum’)  and the story and indeed the first Who annual ends with the Doctor flying away in the Tardis wondering what secrets the universe have in store for him next.   

Despite the name The Voord were also half the stars for 1964 ‘Dr Who and The Daleks Sweet Cigarette Cards’, which told a story across fifty freebies given away with the corn-syrup confection by manufacturers Cadet (which was better for your lungs than the real thing but far worse for your teeth!) The 1st Doctor, alone like so many of these spin-offs when companies couldn’t afford to pay for a full set of likenesses, lands on Marinus and finds The Voord and Daleks in a fierce battle. The former discover the Doctor and capture him to discover his secret of space and time so they can keep up with their Skaro rivals and what they call ‘Ultkron Travel – beyond time which is above the speed of light’. The Doctor threatens to destroy the ship so the Voord eject him into space, where The Daleks pick him up instead. Panicked that the war is extending out to Earth’s solar system The Doctor (looking remarkably like unlike William  Hartnell and stuck inside a spacesuit for the vast majority of the story) gets a message to the people of Earth, which is picked up but ignored (typical!)  Picture 11 and 12 are the best of the set, showing an intense Dalek-Voord fight. The Daleks crash in a South American jungle and the Voord do the same with the Doctor on board, the Chief Voord befriending the timelord after he saves him from an alligator. The daleks, meanwhile, are off foraging for mushrooms to make their minds grow bigger (well, this was the 1960s!) and the Voord takes the Daleks to show hi where the best ones are. The Doctor is horrified (has he been betrayed?) but no, he showed them fungi deadly to Daleks and they’re destroyed, alas killing the Voord with them. There’s then a load of shenanigans with a Dalek council, a dogfight in space and a lot of the usual capturing and rescuing before the plot turns into the Daleks asking the Doctor for help because their ‘super brain’ computer has gone mad and started attacking them. How does the Doctor solve things? Erm, by simply pulling a lever, because they were built to keep Daleks away not ‘Humans’ (why did the Daleks build a computer with one if they have no hands?) And they say Russell T Davies cheats at endings! They’re a colourful collection of cards clearly written by a ‘fun guy’ but there’s not ‘mush room’ on the cards so the text isn’t a story as such just a description, with even less characterisation than a Chibnall or a Saward era story. Available in pdf format as a bonus extra on the ‘Keys Of Marinus’ DVD.   

‘Domain Of The Voord’ (2014) is the long-awaited Big Finish sequel to Marinus but a slightly disappointing one it has to be said. The opening story in the first ‘Early Adventures’ box set it was written by Andrew ‘Full Circle’ Smith and features William Russell and Carole Ann Ford doing all the voices for themselves and their missing colleagues rather well. The story seems at odd with ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ though, even though it’s a second ‘quest’ story, albeit one that’s a cross between the sailing ships of ‘Enlightenment’ and the race in ‘The Ghost Monument’. Being out in space and on the Voord’s conquered lush planet Hydra rather than in acidic seas robs the Voord of their aquatic selling points and turns them into the usual sort of boo-hiss villains. There are, at least, some good Voord in amongst the bad and the best scenes are the imprisoned Tardis travellers getting to know their foes properly as people rather than as a whole race, although none of it is as inspired as Smith’s usual high quality work.

The Voord also make a surprise appearance in the comic mini-series ‘Four Doctors’ (2015) set on Marinus during the time war and features The War Doctor alongside Drs 10,11 and 12, with the 9^th Doctor making a surprise cameo too. It’s a mad old story that borrows heavily from all sorts of past adventures including the time destructor (or something very like it) from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ that causes a Dalek flying saucer to crash in Marinus’ acid seas. The Dalek ship takes out the Voord’s protective shield and their leader (sadly not Yartek) and for reasons best known to the land of comics he’s engulfed by a liquid that then envelops a passing Human and turns him into a Voord (so are they all Human really?...)The Dalek masterplan was to take out the Voord who they see as a substantial rival (why???) and with the Daleks gone they can now rule happily without getting their flippers in a twist at the thought of the metal meanies steakling all their fun. Clara has a dream about Marinus and feels an urge to head to Paris in 1923 where she meets the 10^th Doctor and comic companion Gabby Gonzalez (who joined after Donna) as well as the 11^th Doctor and his comic companion Alice Obiefune (who joined in between Amy and Clara). Clara knows that these Doctors shouldn’t all be together and has a sense of foreboding, but they over-rule her and after some shenanigans involving ‘The Timelord Victorious’ (way, way waaaay too complicated to explain properly here) set off to explore a ‘pocket universe’ that turns out to be Marinus. Turns out it’s all a giant trap by the Voord, who are scared the Doctors will put time back on its set course and see the Daleks take over Marinus. The pot, such as it is, ends with two different 12^th Doctors fighting each other (each from different versions of the future) and between them all the Doctors take the decision to set time back on its right path, with the Voord slowly ‘regressing’. And you thought they were just a pretty pair of flippers!

A quick mention too for the comic strip ‘The World Shapers’ (1987) which ran in Dr Who Magazine issues 127-129 in which we see the genesis of the Cyberman where they evolve from…The Voord! No, I can’t see that either, but technically there’s nothing in any other story to contradict it.

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