As a countdown to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who I and my wife will be watching an episode a day until we are caught up to whatever the Beeb has planned. This is a record of my initial reaction to each day's episode published with minimal editing and crappy synopsis.
There's a part of me that's glad that Ray Cusick outlived Terry Nation. Terry Nation was the writer who created the Daleks; Ray Cusick was the man who took Nation's scripts and, despite a shoestring budget, managed to create a science fiction icon. Cusick didn't see any of the royalties while Nation's estate has received millions.
This is Terry Nation's second story for the series. Knowing the limitations of the budget he still wrote a story that began in one place and hopped all over a planet before coming back to the origin point. Poor Cusick had to imagine and build a new civilization every week for five weeks on a budget of 2,500 pounds. The Peter Cushing Dalek movie had a budget of about 175,000 just to give some perspective.
We're not talking simple sets either. This episode features an island fortress in the middle of a sea of acid. Elaborate sets (and models) that won't be seen again for five episodes.
Cusick is a saint for not telling Terry where to cram it and with what condiment.
The TARDIS arrives on the planet Marinus and the series is returned to full video after a week of missing episodes. The first image that we see is the island fortress surrounded by a sea of what we soon discover is acid. It's only a model, but it's not half bad. The fact that there's a reflection cast in the acid scores points with me. It's a small touch, but it goes to show that they were trying to make good television on no money.
Nation's script treads the same ground as The Dead Planet; arrive on alien world, find something unnatural that looks natural, see an alien building/city, explore the city, get captured.
We're introduced to the second big monster of the series, the Voord. The Voord look like deep-sea divers cosplaying as Teletubbies. This is theIR first and last appearance on screen. They made some appearances in the comic strips of the time, but they never caught on. In the 80's Grant Morrison would write them into the comic section of Doctor Who Magazine. His story involved the Voord being the people who became the Cybermen. It was a cool story with the sixth Doctor and a wizened Jamie McCrimmon. That's the coolest that the Voord ever got; a side note to the origin of a much better monster in a piece of illustrated fanfic written 20 years after their only shot at the brass ring.
The Voord are trying to get to The Conscience of Marinus, a machine that has turned the planet into something between a police state and a hippy commune. It's a little vague.
The Conscience is defended by Arbitan an old man who broke the core doohickeys of the whatchamacallits into five keys. Arbitan has one of them, the others are scattered around Marinus. He's sent people to retrieve them. Friends and followers have gone never to be seen again.
Arbitan asks the travelers to get the keys for him so that he can use it's improved power to thwart the Voord. This is such a D&D adventure hook that I was glad that the Doctor did the sensible thing and turned him down.
Arbitan is a dick though and encloses the TARDIS in a force field. If the travelers get him the keys then he'll drop the field and let them go on their merry way. To help them along he gives them travel dials that will teleport them to the hiding places of the keys.
The Doctor is familiar with the tech. The series will later call it a transmat.
The actor playing Arbitan didn't seem to put much into his performance. He knew he was going to die before the end credits rolled.
Next up: The Velvet Web
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