DW EP-BY-EP BONUS: Season One (The Story So Far)

Written by Tom

[So we’ve officially finished reviewing Doctor Who Season One in its entirety. Might as well do some overall conclusions and sketch out some final thoughts before we venture onto Doctor Who 2.0 {which, given our analysis of the show so far, should actually be Doctor Who 3.0 at least, but you get my point}.

Part One: But Wait a Minute, Is This Actually Where Season One Ends?

Before we start though, let’s do a little bit of admin that’s going to prove very useful for our analyses of the first few serials of Season Two. Firstly, let’s ask ourselves a question that feels like it should be obvious: do the Doctor Who episodes running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” actually constitute Doctor Who Season One?

There are multiple ways of defining what a season of television is. By far the most common definition is that a season of television is a single block of episodes produced under the same banner which all air in sequence one after another, usually on a weekly basis. Each season is then separated from each other by a large period where the show isn’t being broadcast. Ergo, Doctor Who Season One consists of the serials running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” because these aired in the same weekly timeslot one-after-another before stopping for a few weeks, this break in the broadcast marking the end of the season and its return marking the beginning of Season Two. Simple.

Classic Doctor Who does challenge this paradigm though. Take, for example, the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who which started airing at the end of one year and finished airing at the start of the next, taking a break in the middle so that people wouldn’t miss a few episodes during Christmas and New Years. No-one’s really going to claim that “The Brain of Morbius” and “The Seeds of Doom” actually constitute Doctor Who Season 14 purely because Christmas forced there to be a small gap between them and the rest of Season 13, surely?

We’re Too Busy For That, Marco (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P7: “Assassin at Peking” Review)

Written by Tom

Turns out that Marco Polo don’t know shit and didn’t actually have the right to commander the TARDIS – this doesn’t matter though as the Doctor’s re-lost the TARDIS in a game of backgammon anyway. Ping-Cho’s husband-to-be dies off-screen. Tegana finally tries to assassinate Kublai Khan. Having figured out what Tegana’s doing, Team TARDIS warn Marco Polo who rushes in and saves the day. To repay them, he gives the Doctor the TARDIS key and Team TARDIS legs it.

It was another one of the those episodes where the components worked on a beat-by-beat basis but didn’t necessarily add up to a satisfying part of the serial overall. All Team TARDIS had to do to get the TARDIS back was arrive at Kublai Khan’s palace, wait for Tegana to make his move, stop said move, then regain the TARDIS as a thank you present. The only things that needed setting up for this ending were that Marco Polo had the TARDIS, that Team TARDIS were now part of his caravan and that no-one trusted Tegana, a status quo the scripts had managed by Episode Four at least. Everything else turned out to be delaying tactics and filler.

Indeed, it’s weird how much of this episode’s plot relied upon chance circumstances. The serial could’ve ended twenty minutes earlier had the Doctor won his backgammon game for the TARDIS. Ping-Cho’s plotline ended with us being informed that her off-screen husband had randomly poisoned himself during dinner. (Presumably a Tegana assassination attempt gone wrong, thus requiring Tegana to attack Kublai Khan with a sword later? That’s never actually specified, relying on us remembering the first episode’s cliffhanger from two months ago.) And it’s very convenient how Team TARDIS finally decide to stop Tegana a few seconds before he tries to kill Kublai Khan.

A Long Day of Riding (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P6: “Mighty Kublai Khan” Review)

Written by Tom

Tegana reveals Team TARDIS’ latest attempted escape to Marco Polo, though Polo seems to have frankly stopped caring. Ping-Cho, worried that Marco’s going to be pissed about her stealing the TARDIS key, runs back to the town from last episode. There, she crosses paths with Tegana’s criminal chum while he’s stealing the TARDIS. Ian comes back to the town, finds Ping-Cho, discovers that the TARDIS has been stolen, deduces where it’s probably been taken, confronts the criminal, and finally gets it confirmed that Tegana’s the bad guy (gasp!). Meanwhile Marco Polo, the Doctor, Barbara and Susan finally meet Kublai Khan. The Doctor and Kublai Khan instantly bond over the fact that they’re old and achy, going off to have a bath together. (I swear these summaries keep getting longer.)

This is an episode whose joys are in the details. Wang-Lo is back and as delightfully camp as ever. The scene where Ian tries to get Marco Polo to give him the TARDIS key by explaining that he’s a time traveller and the TARDIS is a spaceship is a really novel scene for a historical, showing Ian trying to reassert Doctor Who‘s narrative logic back into the show only for Marco Polo to deny him by refusing to believe in it. The decision to have Kublai Khan, grand emperor of the Mongolian Empire, be an old man doddering around while complaining about ailments is a gloriously fun one, subverting an expectation which has been maintained for five-and-a-half episodes now. His friendship with the Doctor, based purely on both of them being crotchety, is also a joy. John Lucarotti knows how to pick little details and go down unexpected routes with them. It’s really fun.

There’s a surprising lack of set pieces to it though, particularly given that this is meant to be the penultimate episode where everything’s coming to a head. To be fair, we do get Kublai Khan turn up after five episodes of set-up along with an eye-wateringly detailed set and a whole new secondary cast, but we also spend a lot of time flapping back and forth between stuff we’ve already done. Team TARDIS’ continued escape attempts have become quite a frustrating case of a diminishing returns, particularly given that there’s barely been half an episode between their previous failed escape and this week’s one. While the rest of the plot goes forwards, Ian and Ping-Cho instead leap backwards in order to reuse all the same sets from last week. And their part of the plot does also feel a bit easy – they essentially guess where the TARDIS is, walk straight up to it and dispatch Tegana’s criminal chum with surprisingly little effort. While certainly nowhere near bad, it’s also never quite exceptional.

Out Beyond It Onto the Plain (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P5: “Rider From Shang-Tu” Review)

Written by Tom

The murdered man outside Team TARDIS’ tent turns out to be a prelude to an entire Mongol attack of the camp. Ian warns Marco about the attack and, when they defeat it, gets Team TARDIS a pardon, reverting us back to the status quo of about midway through the last episode. The Doctor finally figures out that Tegana’s evil. [There are like four scenes throughout the serial where Team TARDIS get together and figure out that Tegana’s the bad guy.] Everyone stops off at another way station. Ping-Cho betrays Marco Polo by giving Susan the TARDIS key. Team TARDIS escape into the TARDIS, only for Susan to ruin everything by sneaking off mid-escape to say goodbye to Ping-Cho and getting caught by Tegana.

It’s another episode of stuff happening! And I do like the structure the serial is using. The plot has been split into distinct half-an-hour chunks (the sandstorm, the water drought, the cave, Team TARDIS captured). Instead of covering each chunk in one episode though, they’ve been transposed thus that every episode provides the end of one chunk and the start of another. The result is that the story maintains a distinct episodic feel which only requires you to remember the general plot of last week’s episode, yet is still constantly on the move and progresses you onto the next bit of the narrative every time you watch it. It’s a clever structure for your two-month-long serial.

That said, the requirement to keep this plotline going is stretching bits of the serial to breaking point. Take the cliffhanger. It wouldn’t make sense for Team TARDIS to give up and not be constantly trying to get the TARDIS back, so we have to have another plotline in which this is their main aim. Simultaneously, we still have two episodes to go, meaning that we need to find another way of stopping them from escaping. This time round, they start their escape only for Susan to decide to say goodbye to Ping Cho and thus get herself captured. The problem is that this is absolutely moronic stuff from Susan. Given than Ping Cho is the person who made their escape possible and that Susan and Ping Cho apparently share rooms, why didn’t she say goodbye to Ping Cho before she attempted to escape? The sole answer is because we have two more episodes of this serial to go and need a cliffhanger.

Suspicion and Discontent (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P4: “The Wall of Lies” Review)

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).

I Inched Our Caravan Forward (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P3: “Five Hundred Eyes” Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor and Susan find condensation inside the TARDIS, allowing them to fix Marco Polo’s water problem. Everyone arrives at a town. Tegena goes into the Cave of Skulls… I mean, the Skaro Caves… I mean, the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes. There he meets with his evil Mongol friends and arranges for them to steal the TARDIS. A suspicious Barbara follows them and gets captured by Mongols. Several search parties are sent out. The Doctor, Susan and Ping-Cho arrive at the cave just as Barbara’s about to be killed…

Well more definitely happens in this episode than it did last week. It even retroactively justifies some of the last episode’s weird plotting. Why was the Doctor never seen during its first half? Because otherwise we’d have seen him making the fake TARDIS key which becomes important this episode. Why did Tegena leave the tent to seemingly do nothing, and why was the sandstorm sequence in that episode at all? Because Tegena was going to meet with his Mongol friends but the sandstorm stopped it from happening, all of which leads to this week’s cave sequences. The minutiae of the plotting has been worked out to an exacting degree. There’s no hole in the plot which hasn’t been pre-empted and filled in.

Given this, why do I keep wanting to poke holes in the plot? I was able to get through the first episodes of the Dalek serial while praising them to the heavens, yet give me a Marco Polo serial which is successfully doing much more sophisticated things and my reaction has been to wonder if any of it is working or not.

Our Progress Towards the Oasis Becomes Less (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P2: “The Singing Sands” Review)

Written by Tom

Marco Polo’s crew are travelling through the desert. One night, Susan and Ping-Cho see Tegena sneaking out of the tent and follow him before getting caught in a sandstorm. The next night, Tegena sabotages the crew’s water, trying to drive them back to the town where he has machinations waiting. Instead, Ian convinces Marco Polo to go to a nearby oasis. With Marco Polo and Team TARDIS on the brink of dying of thirst, Tegena pretends to go to the oasis to collect water for the team. Little to they know that he’s keeping it for himself and now waiting for the crew to die.

Last week, we congratulated “The Roof of the World” for its slow and methodical plotting which, in its immediate post “The Brink of Disaster” context, came off as the show being supremely confident in itself. Here we have the flipside of this – did anything actually happen in this episode?

So the first 15 minutes are dedicated to Susan and Ping-Cho going out of the tent in the middle of the night, spotting Tegena being shady, following him and getting caught in a sandstorm. During the sandstorm, we get a lot of people shouting about how they can’t do anything (which looks a lot like people doing nothing, only louder) before Susan and Ping-Cho find their way back to the tent anyway, the plot conveniently sorting itself out off-screen. The way this advances the plot is that Susan is now vaguely suspicious of Tegena, though this doesn’t come up at all during the back half of the episode (indeed, from the end of the sandstorm on, Susan drops out of the episode almost entirely). It’s not the dramatic highpoint it’s aiming for.

The Commerce and Culture of a Thousand Years (Doctor Who: Marco Polo P1: “The Roof of the World” Review)

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. *