Doctor Who A-Z #05: The Keys of Marinus (1964)

The Keys of Marinus is the first Terry Nation story. I know, I know he’s already done The Daleks, and any analysis of the show’s history will rightly record that serial as being more of a landmark than this one. But The Keys of Marinus is the first one that really defines what a Terry Nation script will entail: a restless peregrination, possessed of little depth but masses of spectacle and brain-tickling ideas, quite unlike anything seen on British television before. It’s easy to find fault with, but it’s also worth remembering that we can see those faults more clearly because others picked these ideas up and executed them more effectively. Without this flawed first draft, this show’s bank of ideas would be a lot poorer.

Chief among Nation’s realisations is that Doctor Who‘s narrative engine is a machine that can take the heroes anywhere in time and space, and there’s no reason to limit that power to the beginning and ending of a story. He hasn’t quite taken this idea to its logical conclusion yet; here, the Doctor and his friends travel across Marinus using a special teleporter device, with the TARDIS rendered inaccessible as it usually is in Season One. It’ll be over a year before The Chase, in which Nation realises that you can tell this kind of story using the TARDIS, a breakthrough that all manner of future stories from City of Death to Flux couldn’t exist without. Credit to Nation for coming up with the most flamboyant way of rendering the TARDIS unreachable, though, with Arbitan’s force field replacing the usual rockslide or engine failure.

Having the Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan teleporting around Marinus means this six-parter zips along like few others, and there are some unexpected benefits too. Marinus is introduced to us as one of Terry Nation’s “say what you see” planets, like Aridus or Exxilon, where the world’s name reflects its main characteristic. After the first episode, though, each time they travel to a new part of Marinus they’re in a completely different adventure-story environment: the Huxleyesque pleasure dystopia, the impenetrable jungle, the inaccessible mountain. You find yourself wondering if the death sentence Ian is threatened with in Millennius would be legally binding in Morphoton. It’s extremely rare that an alien planet in Doctor Who has such a convincing range of different climates and societies. Hell, even Doctor Who‘s depiction of Earth frequently ends up in a quarry somewhere in Surrey.

One of the stranger flaws of The Keys of Marinus is that, despite the episodes being largely self-contained, they still feel like they’re in the wrong order. The courtroom drama in Millennius spills over into the final episode, leaving Nation with too little time to actually sort out the matter of the Keys. It’s also the kind of plot that only makes sense if the travellers aren’t aware they can very easily spirit themselves away to somewhere they’ll never be found; once you know there’s an empty hut that used to belong to a dead rapist somewhere on the side of an inaccessible mountain, it’s hard to think of a reason not to just teleport out of custody. The Morphoton segment, too, is more of a Last Temptation than an opening gambit. If it was presented as a reward for weary adventurers, there might be some dilemma as to whether the Doctor and his friends might stay there. As it is, it’s the first new place they visit after they’re given their mission, and we know there’s no chance of them actually spending the next five episodes kicking back and refusing to find the Keys.

Moving the Morphoton section to the end of the story would give additional climactic weight to one of the serial’s most astonishing moments – Barbara smashing the life support systems of the city’s bodiless rulers. Despite Nation’s usual problem of writing Susan like a scared child, The Keys of Marinus is a good showcase for the series’ original companion team, not least because it contains the second of this year’s scheduled holidays for William Hartnell. Again, the episodic format means this works far better than it did in Marco Polo: the Doctor can simply tell Ian, Barbara and Susan that he’s off to find another Key, and if they can pick an extra one up while he’s gone he’ll meet them in a couple of weeks’ time. It does rely on that old cliche of the adventure serial where the heroes inexplicably decide they’re stronger apart than together, but it’s much more natural than simply dropping the show’s lead out for a week and hoping no-one notices.

In the future, Nation would be the first to offer an answer to that question which preoccupies modern Doctor Who writers like Russell T Davies, namely, what happens to the Doctor Who universe when the Doctor isn’t around? The slightly off-brand feel of the middle two episodes – most notably the heavy implication that the hunter Vasor wants to rape Barbara, which really isn’t the kind of threat the show would return to – feels almost as if it’s triggered by the absence of the Doctor’s reassuring presence. Everyone will have a least favourite segment of The Keys of Marinus, but the story’s status as essentially a series of one- and two-parters means they’re never around for long. Even the predictable final twist is mostly predictable because so many other stories have built on the morality Nation establishes for the Doctor when he rejects the right of machines to rule people.

A deeply flawed story, The Keys of Marinus is nevertheless central to the show’s evolving sense of what it is, and what it can do that other shows can’t. And it looks, barring the ropey TARDIS miniature in episode one, fantastic – so good that you have to remind yourself the BBC hadn’t attempted anything like this before. It is well-known that The Keys of Marinus was written in a hurry to replace no less than three potential scripts which were deemed unusable. The most telling detail, though, is that one of those scripts was a story about the TARDIS crew being miniaturised, an idea which producer Verity Lambert thought was unachievable on the show’s budget. Less than a year later, that exact same concept would open Season Two. Clearly, something in Season One persuaded Lambert that this massively ambitious idea wasn’t, in fact, beyond her grasp, and it’s hard to imagine it was anything other than Terry Nation’s two extravagant, epic stories.

Next: The Aztecs (1964)

Graham’s Archive – The Keys of Marinus

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