Written by Tom
The TARDIS breaks down in the Himalayas (Didn’t we just fix the TARDIS? For the second time in a row?), causing Team TARDIS to cross paths with Marco Polo. Polo’s travelling to meet Kublai Khan and ask for passage to his home country of Venice, planning to curry favour with Khan by giving him the TARDIS, something the Doctor doesn’t appreciate. Meanwhile the war lord Tegana (who is also travelling with Marco Polo, doesn’t like Team TARDIS, and shouldn’t be confused with Tegan, the 80s Australian air hostess) has suspicious machinations going on…
After Doctor Who’s soft reboot in “The Brink of Disaster“, we immediately get a very different show to what’s gone before. To put it succinctly, this is the first episode of Doctor Who which is actually aiming to be straightforwardly pleasant to watch. The environment they’re in is being played for its grandure and not its brutal inhumanity. Team TARDIS aren’t constantly arguing with each other. The Doctor might still be a grouch but he’s grouchy at his situation and not his companions. These are all small remodels but they make our main characters much nicer and more sympathetic.
Having setup this more sympathetic and pleasant mode, “The Roof of the World” is then freed to embrace subtler storytelling than is usual for the show, resulting in deeper emotional payoffs. Marco Polo is a fascinating antagonist due to the way that he actually seems to like Team TARDIS despite still representing their biggest obstacle. He steals the TARDIS not because he’s a Machiavellian villain but because he assumes Team TARDIS to be humans who could just build themselves a new one. In response, we get one of the most disquieting scenes of Doctor Who so far when the Doctor, facing losing his TARDIS without any idea of what to do, breaks down into uncontrollable laughter. Given that the Doctor is now known for his tendency to get into angry strops with people, this laughter is quite out of character for him and thus genuinely unsettling to observe, really selling that Team TARDIS are in the shit this time. It’s much more compelling than if we were still in the mode where everyone’s angry with each other all the time. *
The pleasantness of the episode also comes from the way that the production team are very obviously using this episode to celebrate Doctor Who‘s extension from a 13-part series to a continuous serial. Knowing that they now have a long list of episodes ahead with which to do whatever they want, “The Roof of the World” is allowed to embrace a markedly slow and methodical pace, not even properly establishing its stakes until the penultimate scene some twenty minutes into the twenty-three minute episode. This lack of urgency then allows it to go all in on local colour and set design, something the production team dives into with aplomb. The entire serial is designed to luxuriate in its own space and show off what the Doctor Who team can do. It’s a much more confident and happy programme all round.
There is also a big narrative trick hiding in the middle of the episode which feels absolutely massive, yet has been rarely talked about by anyone else and is now very tricky to figure out the exact mechanics of. About two-thirds of the way into the episode, a voice-over of Marco Polo narrating his and Team TARDIS’ journey starts playing, its job being to provide some exposition which smooths over the episode’s transition from Act Two to Act Three. The thing is that Doctor Who has never done a voice-over before. It’s an entirely new narrative device that comes out of nowhere at the end of a random episode.
But there seems to be two versions of the voice-over scene, both of which would work in subtly different ways. To those who don’t know (though I’m impressed you’ve have got as far into this blog series as you have without being the type of person who does know this), this episode doesn’t exist in the BBC archives anymore. Neither do the next six episodes, nor do 91 other Doctor Who episodes spread over the first two Doctors’ eras. The reasons for this are pretty well documented. With there being no real way for the average person to record and play something off the TV in the 1960s, TV was considered to be a largely ephemeral medium where things would be recorded, broadcast and never seen again.** Within this cultural context, and bearing in mind how expensive film stock was and how much of it the BBC would use in the average year, it became common practice for the BBC to wipe old tv programmes which it had already broadcast so that they could use the film stock to record something else. The result is that pretty much every UK TV show which ran for long enough in the 1960s has massive holes in its library, assuming they exist at all. It’s a testament to how important Doctor Who is that we have as many episodes as we do.
But this makes it difficult to tell how to read certain episodes because we don’t know how certain things were presented. Take Marco Polo’s voiceover. Watching the Loose Cannon reconstruction of the episode as part of a series marathon, Marco Polo’s voiceover is an incredibly striking moment. Firstly, it comes out of nowhere. Secondly, it plays over a map of China which shows our main character’s journey ala Indiana Jones / the Dad’s Army intro. It’s not that this type of visual is a revolutionary technique – the map imagery comes from action adventure serials of the 30s/40s, if not sooner. Instead, the important thing is that this is something entirely unlike anything Doctor Who has done before.
You see, the camera in Doctor Who has largely been used to follow Team TARDIS around while providing the occasional cutaway to other groups whenever the plot has required it, and our only insights into the characters’ minds have been what we can glean from their dialogue, movements and actions. Put another way, we’ve been traditionally positioned as outside observers of Team TARDIS with the implication being that what we see on-screen is a direct representation of how the events of the story played out in-universe. Given this, the sudden introduction of the map and the voice over is an absolutely massive shift in the nature of the programme because it introduces the idea of non-representational narrative techniques. Suddenly we can get direct insights into character’s heads and plot information which is communicated in markedly different ways than just “whatever the camera is showing is important”. This changes the game significantly.
This type of narrative trickery is especially important in Doctor Who because of its metafictional bent. From its second episode onwards, if not from its opening credits, Doctor Who has been a show about throwing different genres together and seeing which ones come out on top. This type of narrative is one in which the concept of the narrator becomes incredibly important because whoever is driving a story is also the person controlling it. In this case, Doctor Who crashes into a biopic about actual-historical-figure Marco Polo. Marco Polo then proceeds to lock Team TARDIS out of the TARDIS and make them join him on his adventures. Once he does this, the show starts porting alien narrative techniques from travelogues and globetrotting adventure serials, confirming that we’re now out of the Doctor’s programme and are in Marco Polo’s. Now Team TARDIS need to figure out how to take control of the narrative and get back into their own show.
This all assumes that this is what actually happens on screen though, and there are reasons to doubt that. As mentioned, because this episode doesn’t exist, I am instead watching a reconstruction of it done by the fan-group Loose Cannon. In this reconstruction, Loose Cannon has taken the episode’s soundtrack, screengrabs of the episodes, production photos, clips from other episodes, and the occasional piece of Photoshop, and edited them together into their best guess of what the episode might’ve looked like. There’s no way for this to be entirely accurate though. We don’t know such things as shot duration, we don’t know every angle used, we don’t know about how the actors moved through scenes, and we don’t know if there are any non-verbal things hiding around the edges. Loose Cannon’s “Marco Polo” is a particularly loose reconstruction too, the team making the decision to produce the reconstruction in colour when it had never been shot that way. When considering the above reading, we thus do have to ask how likely it is that a fan production company working in the early 2000s, looking for an easy way to get some visual interest into a scene, might decide upon using a map to depict the character’s journey through China despite it not actually being what appeared on screen. I wouldn’t say it’s unlikely.
Meanwhile there are transcripts out there which say that the voice-over scene features Marco Polo at his writing desk, the words we hear him speak being the words he’s writing down. [Indeed, future episodes of the recon feature this set-up. I have no idea why they didn’t use it in this episode.] They also mention the potential use of insert shots to illustrate the things he writes about – for example, Polo’s description of his crew putting the TARDIS on a sled was apparently accompanied by, well, Polo’s crew putting the TARDIS on a sled. There are still new narrative devices being introduced here, breaking down such things as the idea that the events that we see have happened in the same order as they did in-universe, and thus this still represents Polo taking over the episode by supplanting his own narrative rules into it. What is notable though is how much more the audience is being guided through these rules. The result feels less confrontational and more like Marco Polo is used as a conduit through which to introduce new narrative techniques to Doctor Who. Turns out Doctor Who might have something to learn from its interactions with this other genre.
Both versions of the scene feed into the main focusses of this episode: namely writing characters who are more likable and have more interiority while expanding what the show can do narratively. What is lost is the specifics – whether it’s still being edited confrontationally or if it’s aiming for something quieter and subtler. My money is personally on the show using the “Marco Polo at his writing desk” version of the scene as I think that’s more in tune with what the rest of the episode is doing. That’s the point though – we can’t know for sure. Nevertheless, what stands out about this episode is how actively and successfully it reinvents Doctor Who into a show which is even more ambitious, largescale and happy than it has ever been before. It truly is a new beginning for the programme – the first episode of Series Two. Doctor Who is dead, long live Doctor Who.
* Yes, we also have Tegana who fills the card-carrying villain role that Marco Polo doesn’t, but even he’s made more interesting by the decision to not have him interact with Team TARDIS much, turning him into more of a hanging dagger than an immediate threat. Though how unfortunate is it that the first episode written by Europeans about China features a sympathetic European, a villainous Chinese man, and a faceless band of Chinese people who all seem vaguely superstitious and unpleasant? Thank God for the Ping-Cho.
** This isn’t to say that repeats were unheard of (indeed, the first repeat of a Doctor Who episode had already occurred by the airing of “The Roof of the World”; “An Unearthly Child” got a second airing just before “The Cave of Skulls” because it had originally premiered on the same day as the Kennedy assassination and the BBC were worried that this might have caused people to miss the first episode of their new ongoing serial) but they were rare.
FNORD 