Written by Tom
Ian and Barbara end up in a icy wasteland. They are saved by Vasor, a ham-hock of a man who turns out to have trapped the rest of the cast in a cave. (A Terry Nation episode set in a cave? How novel!) Ian and Barbara go into the cave, are reunited with the others, and find the next Key of Marinus in a block of ice surrounded by four frozen knights. Using some of the copper piping that someone’s installed in the cave (?) to thaw out the key, they end up resurrecting the knights too. Running back to Vasor’s hut, Team TARDIS gets their stuff back and transport to the next episode, leaving Vasor to get shanked by the knights.
It’s a Cave Episode! Every Doctor Who serial so far has had at least one episode primarily dedicated to people moving around caves, whether that be “The Cave of Skulls“, “The Firemaker“, “The Ordeal“, “Five Hundred Eyes“, “The Wall of Lies“, or this. The only exception to this rule has been the TARDIS serial, and that’s presumably purely because that was entirely set in the TARDIS. If the TARDIS had a cave section, they would’ve used it. I assume that the cave is a dramatic location that’s easy to make a set of, while also being a pretty common type of location both in genre fiction and the real world. It’s convenient, in other words. How could we have Doctor Who without caves at this point?
More than that, we have Terry Nation repeating the plot of “The Ordeal” where the episode’s cast has to get over a large cave crevasse. “The Ordeal” is still the worst episode of Doctor Who to have aired so far, but at least Nation seems to have learnt from its mistakes. The crevasse is just one obstacle in an otherwise pretty full episode rather than something which takes up most of the show. There’s a rope bridge for some extra visual interest/jeopardy. Plus, the whole episode is just happier to be silly pulp fiction than the relatively serious Dalek serial was, giving it more leeway. You can get away an element being a bit subpar when it’s one of many elements and most of the other pieces are pulling their weight. *
Indeed, the serial’s dedication to cramming as much stuff as possible into each episode continues. This time, we have strange men in the wilderness, a harsh snowy environment, [stock footage of] wolves, ice caves, Crusades-era knights (again), plumbing, etc. We also have an impressive number of twists and reveals: Team TARDIS and Vasor taking it in turns to get one-up over each other; the knights turning out to be alive; the split in the middle of the episode where it moves from Vasor’s cabin to the ice caves.
It is perhaps appropriate that this is therefore the episode where the serial just completely gives up on making sense. According to its backstory, a bunch of Crusades-era knights trapped a key in a block of ice such that no-one would ever be able to use it, then built a modern copper plumbing system around it (complete with valves) should they want to defrost it. The knights are frozen in the ice cave too, then come back to life when the copper piping goes on, despite us being no reason to suspect that the knights are anything but normal people for Marinus and despite the rest of the serial treating Marinus’ residents as basically human. None of this holds together.
But there is something about the image of four Crusade knights stood in an ice cave that has a genuine mythic heft, as there was with carnivorous plants attacking a monastery or, to a lesser extent, evil brains running a society. Without the space or inclination to make any of its stories make sense, the serial is now working purely by associative logic. The Crusades-era knights are valued in the episode because they’re a cool image, and they thus get treated as images rather than people. Luckily the image is as cool as the episode thinks it is, and thus we as an audience are willing to go along with it.
In many ways, this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that the Marinus serial’s been using is just as much as a production flex as the Marco Polo serial was. When talking about that serial, everyone talks about how intricate and beautiful its sets are, something which informed our reading of it as an explicit lap of honour for the show’s production team. If anything, the Marinus serial has been more ambitious though. TV serials usually establish a stable numbers of core sets and cast members for the entirety of their duration, allowing them to make the episode more cheaply and easily as they just have less components to be faffing around with. For all of its grandeur, the Marco Polo serial ultimately boils down to the same seven people sitting around a tent, a desert or several very similar towns. These are either environments which wouldn’t be too hard to make or which allow the use of repeated elements, making them relatively manageable. In contrast, the Marinus serial has required at least five new sets every week, a completely new cast every week, and has only maintained two regular guest actors throughout its entire run. This is, as far as production requirements go, insane. Even when the production has been slipping up more than usual, the fact that they’re keeping up with Nation’s scribble is just as impressive as the production of the Marco Polo serial, if not moreso.
As you might be able to tell, this serial is slowly winning me over. Is it Terry Nation resting on weird remixes of action-adventure cliches? 100%. Does any of it make sense? Not in the slightest. Are the pure number of arresting images in here reaching sufficient mass that they’re becoming worthwhile just on their own sake? I think so. Slowly but surely, I’m learning to love the Cave Episode.
* If there is an element that slightly fights against the pulpy tone of the episode, it’s probably how sexually charged Vasor’s treatment of Barbara is – there’s a lot of non-consensual hand touching, people being worried about leaving Barbara alone with him, and gaslighting veiled threats going on here. Though I suppose the mistreatment of women on sexually coded grounds isn’t exactly rare in pulp fiction.
FNORD 