The Keys of Marinus

Chapter The 97th, you know what it's like when you just can't find your keys...

Plot: 
Once upon a time, the planet Marinus had a machine that controlled the planet's population to make them honest and just, and they lived in peace and hypnotised harmony having had all their difficult choices and responsibilities outsourced; but, some wet-suit fetishists called the Voord somehow managed to evade the machine's power. The machine's custodian Arbitan turned it off, to stop people being exploited by the Voord. So, next step, destroy the machine, you'd think, right? It was ethically dubious, anyway. But no - instead, Arbitan hides himself and the machine away in a fortress surrounded by a sea of acid, and hides the five keys to the machine at various locations around the planet, then works on making the machine foolproof again. Once he's done this, he sends each one of his friends and family off to find the keys, but none of them return.

Luckily, he ropes in the Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian who've landed on Marinus in their ongoing peripatetic adventure in time and space. Still, all this justice imposed by machine stuff will be an interesting underling theme ... oh, no they've just decided to use it as an excuse for some fun romping about; fair enough. The TARDIS travellers go through what amounts to various themed escape rooms to find the keys; they then return to find Arbitan dead, killed by Yartek leader of the Voord, or Voords (depending on your protocol). They destroy the machine; if they'd done that right at the start, it would have meant six episodes of everybody's life back, that's all I'm saying. The Doctor gives a little speech denouncing all this justice imposed by machine stuff but it's too little too late, really.

Context:

Watched the DVD over what seemed like ages, with long gaps between the episodes, accompanied by the Better Half, and sometimes one or two of the children (mainly boy of 9 and girl of 6) coming into the living room to watch bits. I don't know why it was such a struggle - it's not as if it has a dense layered plot involving complex, mentally challenging scenarios. The trouble might be that the family are all Who-ed out, having been happily watching the Tom Baker blu-ray boxset separately throughout the long school holiday. As such, a bitty, even more episodic than usual serial, which we could pick up and drop without any problems, should have been just what the Doctor ordered. [Side note: Peter Davison's first series is going to be the next Blu-ray box set released later this year; my first ever season as a regular watcher, and I'm super excited; come November, though, it's going to be the same deal: working through a whole season while watching random episodes on the side. I predict another slowing down of my blog publishing rate around then.]

First-time round:

I don't remember reading the novelisation of The Keys of Marinus when I was a youngster, but I remember seeing it often in shops or school libraries. It was an intriguing one as the book cover - a painting of a very not-blue TARDIS floating in orbit round a planet - gave away nothing about the story, not even which Doctor or monsters featured in it. I was probably quite unaware of the plot when I finally came to see it in early 1999, when the VHS crawled out during the latter years of the range. It must have been one of the last I bought from Volume One in Worthing, who'd been my main supplier for most of the 90s, as I moved to Brighton not long afterwards and starting getting my regular DVD and video fix from MVC instead. 

Reaction

The Keys of Marinus is the fifth story in Doctor Who's first ever season, and the show is still thrillingly testing out the types of tales it can tell. After a survival narrative, a Wellsian political fable, a chamber psychodrama, and a historical travelogue, the show presents us this time with the first ever Doctor Who quest. Writer Terry Nation produces his first stab at the second of his two main 1960s Doctor Who story templates: type A - a competent, slightly serious Dalek tale, or B - a frothy runaround through different locations. The problem with the latter is that it does put a strain on resources, particularly in the 1960s, when even a story with only a couple of sets that could be reused week on week could end up looking cheap. Having to create a wholly new environment for every studio session, including all the costumes and effects, was a definite challenge. The approach was improved upon (at least in terms of production value) the next time Nation tried it in The Chase, and eventually perfected in The Daleks' Master Plan, which fuses story types A and B in that it's a frothy Dalek runaround through different locations which stops every so often to be competent and slightly serious.

None of those retries was so boldly and baldly a quest with a capital Q as is The Keys of Marinus, though. Just for fun, I compared the unfolding action to the twelve stages of Christopher Vogler's Hero's Journey, a structure for quest narratives based on the work of Joseph Campbell; Marinus indeed progressed through each stage in its small way. It starts with our heroes in their "Ordinary World" of arriving at places with glass beaches and acid seas; there is then a "Call to Adventure", well, more of a long-winded polite ask to adventure, but it nonetheless ticks the box. The next stage is "Refusal of the Call" and this is where I suspected it could even be deliberate. It almost never happens that the TARDIS team refuse to help someone, even in this early adventure-phobic era, but here they flat out refuse to go on the quest, and it's only Arbitan's force field tricks that make them grudgingly accept their mission. Arbitan would be the candidate for the title role in the next stage "Meeting the Mentor"; he also has the nous to get killed later, as mentors inevitably do - actually or symbolically - in this kind of narrative; see Obi Wan in the first Star Wars, for example (George Lucas was influenced by Campbell's works too).

Using the travel dials, our heroes then progress to "Crossing The Threshold", and in every place they go they repeat the next few stages "Tests, Allies, Enemies", "Approach to the Innermost Cave" and "Ordeal". There's a literal cave in one of these mini-stories within the main narrative - perhaps this is more than coincidence? Can we really see Terry Nation taking the time to study Joseph Campbell as a jobbing writer in the 1960s? Maybe. The trouble is that his playing these stages out multiple times on a small scale doesn't leave time or space for things to be deep or difficult enough. Barbara's final ordeal in The Velvet Web episode involves knocking over some glass jars; the audience, it's fair to say, go through worse ordeals during The Keys of Marinus than that, and it's hard to credit the brain creatures' evil empire lasting so long if that was all it would have taken to bring it down.

Anyway, each time, the "Reward" is achieved as another key is collected. After a brief detour into courtroom drama, the TARDIS team and their allies take "The Road Back" to the TARDIS, in possession of all the keys. All is set for the hardest stage of all: "Resurrection", which should be a battle to the very limit of the hero's powers where he or she snatches victory, so tough it is like being killed and born again. This is represented somewhat disappointingly by the Doctor and his friends  hoodwinking a man in a novelty wet-suit. The final stage, "Return with the Elixir", should see our heroes changed by their experience; events on Marinus, though, have not made a dent on the Doctor, Ian, Barbara or Susan. Perhaps their travelling dial companions, Altos and Sabetha, are the more changed, having fallen in love.

It's a lucky dip story: one episode you're going to get a shiny toy, the next episode - perhaps even the next scene - you'll come away with a handful of straw. But it is by no means all a dead loss. No other Doctor Who story to my knowledge can boast sharing a cast member with Citizen Kane (George Coulouris). Some of the sections are very much fun - the Doctor as lawyer in the courtroom bit, for example, or the bravura scenes in The Velvet Web where Barbara's perception of the environment is different from what everyone else sees. This is even more commendable given the technical limitations those scenes were made within - whatever designer Raymond Cusick thinks. Cusick is interviewed in a special feature on the DVD talking Eeyore-like about how none of his work on The Keys of Marinus is anything to be proud of, but he's being much too hard on himself and the story. It's not that bad. 

Connectivity: 

In most parts this story is hard to connect to Sleep No More, but one stop on the Marinus mystery tour calls back to the Morpheus process; it takes place in a place called Morphoton, which has brainy creatures in it called Morpho, and whose plan involves sending people into a sleep during which they are altered. I also would have said that both stories feature sand, but in Sleep No More it's not really sand, so I guess that doesn't count.

Deeper Thoughts:
You can't remake history - not one line!  During the many planning documents and series bibles put together when the US version of Doctor Who was being planned (the one for which the Paul McGann TV Movie was intended to be the launchpad), one idea they had was to remake some of the clunky stories from Doctor Who's past, buffing them up to a shine with their hoped for big dollar budgets. Sacrilege? Maybe. But a couple of stories from early on were so ambitious, for any BBC budget let alone the tuppence ha' penny they had in the 1960s, that it might be interesting to see what could be done with them, given modern technology and the opportunity for more time and money to be spent. The Keys of Marinus would be one of those for me, and another William Hartnell story The Web Planet too. But what about remaking stories that were well made and relatively richly resourced to begin with? What about remaking 1977 Tom Baker classic The Talons of Weng-Chiang?

The Talons of Weng-Chiang, unlike The Keys of Marinus, is not ruinously ambitious; on the contrary, it is perfectly crafted to be realised excellently by the people and resources of the BBC in the 1970s. Except, perhaps, in one aspect. And just because they were playing it safe to a certain extent does not take anything away from the extra effort everyone has gone into to make Talons a bit special. Except in one aspect - and I'm not talking about the dodgy giant rat costume. This story has recently become a talking point because its first episode was covered in the latest issue (529) by the new young diverse Doctor Who Magazine time team (see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Brain in Morbius for more details on them). And the new young diverse Doctor Who Magazine time team took one look at The Talons of Weng-Chiang and considered it racist. I'm not cynical, and I don't believe the retooling of this feature is deliberately designed to bait older fans into clicking about their complaints on social media, but yet again that is what has come to pass. And yet again, all I see on my feed are people complaining about the original complaints: I never actually see anyone being intolerant in the first place. Imagining both sides of this debate, though, I wondered where exactly I stood.

In my wondering, I can't avoid being the old white guy defining racism, so I'll have to go with it: yes, it's a bit questionable that all the Chinese characters in Talons are villains. There's no get-out clause either that the piece is riffing on Dr. Fu Manchu, as that source is not subverted enough to exonerate anyone. This aspect, though, I would not change. The Tongs are clearly not representative of their race as a whole, and the biggest villain, who's arguably manipulating the others, is from Brisbane. Besides, who wouldn't want to play the villain in Doctor Who? Something that is often forgotten is that there's a plumb role in Talons taken by a non-white actor: Mr. Sin as played by Deep Roy. And I challenge any actor not to want that part: original, memorable, visually interesting and operatically nasty. It's a gift.

I don't think, meanwhile, that the 'yellowface' make-up used on John Bennett, a white actor, playing Li H'sen Chang, a Chinese character, is racist. It's grossly insensitive, yes, and was destined not to be accepted even a few years after Talons was made. What makes it even more problematical - it's hard to state this but it's the truth - is that it's a very good make-up job, from a technical point of view; it's a great performance too: clever, sly, with depth and a confounding of expectations. At the time, there was a limited pool of Chinese actors in Equity, so perhaps they shouldn't have tried at all to create a story revolving round a part they'd have trouble casting. But every Who fan knows how hard it was to get scripts together for the series, let alone excellent scripts (the time team all responded well to the story itself, with comments like "it's taking itself seriously", "all the costumes look gorgeous", and that is was "Like, really, really good"). All that's good in John Bennett's performance comes from the page: Li H'sen Chang is a great character. So, yes, it is tempting to think it would be good to do a remake with an actor more appropriate to the part's ethnicity; but whoever plays him, I think it's better than Li H'sen not existing at all. 

In Summary:

A lucky dip with a bit too much straw.