Written by Tom
Barbara is saved from the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes. She, Susan and Ping-Cho are now massively suspicious of Tegana, though Tegana is currently busy making Marco Polo suspicious of them. When Tegana shows Polo that the Doctor has been going in and out of the TARDIS, Marco Polo imprisons Team TARDIS in their own tent. Ian breaks out and is ready to attack their guard, only to find the guard’s already been murdered…
Plot! Glorious, lovely plot! It’s amazing how much the serial would have been improved if you reduced the past two episodes into one by cutting out the water subplot. Have the first half of episode two be Susan and Ping-Cho following Tegana into the sandstorm, have the second half be Barbara following him into the Cave of Skulls, then you’d have this as Episode Three with Barbara, Susan and Ping-Cho teaming up to start threatening Tegana. Instead, they shoved the water subplot in as a thirty minute diversion spread across two episodes and hoped that no-one would notice as it stopped the plot dead. Trust me, watching this thing at the rate of half an hour a week, you notice.
The good news is that we have finally arrived at the good stuff. Team TARDIS and Tegana both trying to get Marco Polo to their side; the fact that Team TARDIS are disadvantaged by a lack of standing or evidence (also the fact that they tend to do things like work behind Marco Polo’s back and plot to kidnap him) – it’s nice to see the various characters actually put in loggerheads and having to work around each other. The episode even continues “The Roof of the World”‘s dedication to focussing on character complexity and avoiding complete unpleasantness. Marco Polo is genuinely trying to be as nice as possible while still taking the TARDIS; this has pushed Team TARDIS into increasingly shady looking antics; which in turn is giving Tegana ammunition. There’s a moral dimension here outside of “good people good, bad people bad”, making for something really quite tragic (in the Shakespearean definition of the word).
While the plot is having a week off from being non-functional though, this leaves us space to discuss the serial’s other flaw – mainly that it’s a little bit racist. All the Chinese characters other than Ping-Cho are still people in yellowface (and Ping-Cho’s actress is of Burmese descent, not Chinese). Four episodes in and all the Chinese characters other than Ping-Cho are these vaguely villainous characters who mostly exist to get in the main characters’ way. The scene where Tegana tells the bloodthirsty Mongol to murder Team TARDIS is the one with the most prominently and stereotypically Chinese music playing in the background. At one point, the Doctor shouts that he doesn’t like Ping-Cho because “that Chinese child makes me nervous” – the person you’ve known for weeks has a name Doc, and is it really worthwhile singling someone as the “Chinese” one when you’re literally in China? The aggregate result is an overall Othering of the Chinese characters, despite this being a serial which is set in China and focussing on a bunch of Europeans who are much more “Others” than the rest of the characters in this context.
It’s not that I think the show is trying to be racist. Indeed, it’s laudable that Doctor Who, on it’s first major attempt to do a marque serial, has picked “let’s attempt to do an in-depth look at the history of a non-Western culture” as its major goal. John Lucarotti has done his research, having written several series about this period of history during his career, meaning that no point does the production half-arse anything because it’s a foreign culture and no-one’s going to notice a few errors. Yellowface was unfortunately a common part of the British television landscape at the time and would be for a long time to come; an 1960s British television show about China in which everyone’s played by English people in yellowface is what a “sensitive” portrayal of ancient China would’ve looked like back then. Hell, the way the show prefers to focus on European characters in its Big China Serial could be seen as a way of trying to minimise the amount of yellowface it might’ve otherwise used. I 100% believe that the production team are going out of their way to produce a non-racist serial here; it’s just that they’re a bunch of middle class white people from the 1960s working in a medium which is institutionally racist.
This doesn’t stop the racist elements from being racist though. If I wanted to, I could’ve used this section in a review of one the worse plotted entries and used it to lambast the entire serial from all angles. Instead, the serial is back to something close to full cylinders and doing stuff which should largely be admired. There’s a few asterisks to apply to this statement though which we should probably keep in mind as we continue through the show.
FNORD 