Doctor Whosday: Six Episodes, Five Keys, Four Quests, Three Companions, Two Hangers-On, One Sexual Assault, No Joy

Fresh off his success creating The Daleks, which catapulted Doctor Who into television history, writer Terry Nation wanted to do a historical story. When that fell through, the producers asked him to create another extremely marketable villain, like the Daleks had been. It was with this directive in mind that Nation wrote "The Keys of Marinus".

The serial was a series of quests for the titular keys, with each episode encompassing another adventure, with another key as the object. This plot would be replayed on a season-wide scale during the excellent "Key to Time" season, with Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor.

Unlike that story, The Keys of Marinus is crap. Welcome to Doctor Whosday!

As always, you can read about this serial over at the Tardis Wiki.

The Voord wear all black, and one impersonates
Arbitan, so... wow, they just ripped this one off
for the Key to Time, didn't they?

To be fair, this was a somewhat daring experiment. One of my criticisms of Nation's "The Daleks" was that it went on two or three episodes longer than it should, causing the action to drag. That is not a problem here. Since each episode is essentially its own mini-adventure, Nation has a tight 25 minutes to tell a self-contained story.

This should have worked well. Episodes One and Six frame the story, while each of the other four episodes had their own unique feel. Episode Two was a cerebral sci-fi adventure, Episode Three was a somewhat horrific tale with booby traps and killer plants, Episode Four was a survival tale in a harsh blizzard, and Episode Five was a murder mystery.

But while the action is tighter than "The Daleks", The Keys of Marinus suffers from its own slew of problems. With only 25 minutes for each story, there are plot holes galore, and more than a few cut corners and poorly written moments.

No relation.

But let's start with the new villains! They are called the Voord, and they were Terry Nation's new monster that was supposed to become as famous as the Daleks! And they looked like a sillier version of Black Manta from Aquaman.

All right, so looking silly does not mean you will not become popular. Look at the Daleks. Silly Nazi R2-D2s. But the Daleks were good villains because they had distinct personalities, and a ruthless desire to exterminate.

The Voord don't even speak until the last episode, and they do nothing to distinguish themselves in any way from typical villains. They may as well be humans in suits... which they might be, since we never see them out of the suits.

Why are they attacking Marinus? We have no idea. Why do they kill Arbitan, the keeper of the machine? We have no idea. The machine itself is some kind of mind control device which Arbitan wants to re-activate in order to make the Voord peaceful, but he cannot do so without the five keys. He has one, but the other four were scattered to keep anyone evil from activating the machine.

Pictured: Crazy soldier in a wetsuit

Apparently they were scattered by Arbitan himself, so one wonders why he bothered if he just wanted to get them back again. Maybe the Voord attack was unforeseen... but we would never know, because we are never told. For all we know the Voord have always been crazy soldiers in wetsuits. Or maybe the Voord are a peace loving, democratic nation trying to stop Arbitan and his evil mind-control machine. We have no idea!

Also, what the heck is up with Marinus? It has seas of acid. Why? What does this do? We are never told. It just becomes a reason to let the producers kill people on screen, just by showing them fall into water. Broadcast standards and practices can't complain about that!

And what about the different locations where the keys are hidden? The Doctor and companions get there via wrist teleporters, but are the teleporters transporting them to different places on the same planet, or different planets in the same system, or to the remnants of an intergalactic empire? Arbitan clearly hid all the keys himself, or arranged for them to be hidden himself, and he is treated with some respect by many of the characters they meet, so is he the leader of a fallen galactic empire? These would all be great things to mention so that we actually cared about any of these people.

But no, we don't care. And that is a problem.

Our heroes don't really care either. Arbitan has to put the TARDIS in a force-field in order to blackmail the Doctor and company into going on his quest for the four missing keys. Unbeknownst to our heroes, as soon as they leave one of the Voord murders Arbitan. Which means our heroes will be delivering the keys into the hands of the Voord! Oh no!

The first place they visit is a decadent space-Greco-Roman world where all desires are instantly provided. Perhaps in the sixties, to schoolchildren, this was not obvious, but for all of us who are more genre-savvy it takes about five seconds to realize that all the decadence is an illusion and it's part of an evil plot to brainwash the Doctor and companions into a workforce.

Points to this episode for making Barbara the heroine who is not fooled, thus making her the one who must rescue her increasingly-brainwashed friends (and the scene where a brainwashed Ian betrays her is a truly horrifying moment). Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing in this episode.

There are too many questions. Barbara's brainwashing device falls off because she turns her head in her sleep. What? What if someone else had turned their head? What sort of advanced technology is defeated by the slightest tossing and turning? Then there's also the fact that as soon as Barbara goes a night without the brainwashing device, she sees the world for the ragged, dirty place it is. Yet as soon as our heroes arrived they saw the magnificent illusion, and no brainwashing devices were used until that night. So... what, does the technology have a 24 hour grace period or something?

Brain and brain! WHAT IS BRAIN?

And then, of course, there is the truly hilarious moment where you see the masters of this dystopian nightmare.

Not only did they add googly eyes to disembodied brains, but the brains bring Barbara close enough for her to smash all of their jars, and kill them all, freeing the people of this... city? Country? Planet? I don't know. The point is they're free, and one of them is Arbitan's daughter, and another one is her sweetheart. Arbitan's daughter already has one of the keys (presumably snatched before the brains got to her), and so the two of them join the Doctor's party.

At this point the Doctor decides to go on ahead, mostly to give William Hartnell two weeks of vacation while the rest of the cast go adventuring. Fair enough.

How is it that everyone just forgot about this?

Susan jumps to the next region, or planet, or galaxy, or whatever first, only to be overcome with strange chattering noises which cause her to clutch her head and start screaming. I know we're supposed to think that this is some threat, but I cannot help assuming that Susan's just going psycho again, and is going to grab for the nearest scissors.

The rest of them join her and desperately try not to let on that they think Susan has cracked. They find they are in an overgrown jungle, but there is a stone building where the key hangs in plain sight on a creepy looking idol. Well, that seems easy enough! So Barbara walks over and grabs the key.

I wish this was the worst humiliation Barbara
suffers in this story.

Unfortunately for her, it turns out that the statue is actually a pervert golem, because in response to her presence it gropes her, and tries to abscond with her to its mother's basement.

Luckily the key is knocked loose, so Ian, Susan, and the two expendable characters at least have that. So they decide to leave Barbara behind.

Okay, okay, they don't do that, but they do reason that Barbara has used her travel-wristwatch to go on to the next location, and they should meet her there. Ian resolves to stay behind just in case Barbara hasn't left, while the others go on. It is only after Susan and expendable guy leave that expendable girl discovers that the key is ever-so-slightly different than the first one. It's a fake! Now knowing that the real key must be inside the stone building somewhere, Ian... tells expendable girl to go on with the others.

Well... all right then.

Throwing himself willingly into the arms of the perv golem, Ian finds Barbara, but also finds all sorts of booby traps that almost kill them. Apparently Arbitan ordered that the key be guarded, and that he would tell anyone he sent to retrieve the key how to defeat the booby traps.

So that didn't happen. Just like how Arbitan did not tell them the exact location of any of the keys, despite clearly setting many of them there himself.

Ian regretted wearing his schoolgirl outfit...

Anyway, the booby traps are set by an old guy, but he is not the main problem. The main problem is that his scientific experiments have gone awry, and now the forest growth has accelerated and is going to smash them all! Cue the creeping vine-tentacles of death!

Before the vines kill the old man, he whispers a cryptic formula, DE3O2. After seeing a labeled beaker with a chemical formula, Ian realizes the DE3O2 must be the chemical formula of the jar that holds the key!

Except, of course, that DE3O2 is not a chemical formula. Neither D nor E are elements.

"Ah," I hear you say, "But what if it's an alien elemental system!" Well first of all, why would the letters of the formula be in English? If the TARDIS is translating, wouldn't it have translated them into their English-equivalent symbols as well? And second of all, Ian gets this revelation by seeing a jar of ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3), which uses the correct notation.

Ian's a science teacher. He wouldn't at least mention the discrepancy? No? Anyway, they find the real key, and they get away just in time.

Yeah. This is a thing that happens.

This lands them on a snowy mountainside, where Ian and Barbara succumb to perhaps the quickest case of hypothermia ever recorded. They're down in seconds. They are rescued by what appears to be a gruff and kindly trapper, who lends Ian furs so he can go out and look for Susan and the Expendables. And then he reveals that's he's actually a needlessly evil murderer who tries to rape Barbara.

So let's talk about this. I'm a writer myself, and I understand the allure of making a villain a rapist. You want something shocking and beyond-the-pale for some villains to do, to establish that they are truly beyond redemption. And rape is an easy thing to make them do.

Which is why dime-a-dozen hacks do it all the time, and it makes rape cheap. Now I'm not saying there should never be rape in stories, or that events that might be traumatic for some readers have no place. But it needs to be done deliberately, cautiously, with some skill. And when a writer puts in a rape or attempted-rape scene just to show that their villain is bad, for no other reason, they show themselves to be a hack. A good writer could have shown the trapper's evil without resorting to this. Terry Nation, apparently, is not a good writer.

Kudos to Barbara for fighting him off until Ian and Expendable Guy show up, though.

Don't worry. He dies by the end of the episode.

Anyway, Ian and the expendable guy save the day, and they force the trapper to take them to where the girls are (because he knows where they are, because he's evil). He does so under guard and under protest, waiting until they have their backs turned to take down a suspension bridge and trap them. Because they all turned their backs on him, and it was incredibly obvious what he was going to do.

But at least they find the key. Now this is sort of clever. The key is in a giant block of ice, guarded by four frozen corpses dressed as medieval knights. A valve releases hot water from a volcanic spring that melts the ice, but also thaws out the indestructible ice zombies.

Oh yes, I said indestructible ice zombies. Why are they here? Why doesn't Arbitan have hundreds of them out fighting the Voord? Who knows? The story doesn't tell us. Just oh, indestructible ice zombies, what're you going to do?

They grab the key, manage to hang the bridge back up, and run to the trapper's cabin because the trapper had stolen some of the travel watches. They grab them and teleport out, leaving the trapper to die a horrible death at the hands of ice zombies. Because he's evil, so it's fine to leave him to die.

For some reason Ian appears alone in the next region/planet/whatever, which is never explained. There's a dead guard, and the final key in a museum display. Ian reaches for it, gets hit on the back of the head with a mace, and then a mysterious figure steals the key and plants the mace on Ian, who is quickly arrested for murder.

The punishment is to have a propeller beanie
nailed to your head!

Of all the stories, this is the best. The culture they are in demands that defendants prove their innocence, rather than presuming it. Thus, if Ian cannot show that he is not the murderer, he will be executed for murder.

Ian does not do much. It is mostly the Doctor, Barbara, Susan, and the expendables working to clear him. They quickly surmise that the guard who "discovered" the murder must have done the deed, as there was no time to escape the vault once the alarm sounded. But it turns out he is just a patsy for his incredibly evil wife and the equally evil prosecuting attorney.

While the plot itself is fairly stereotypical, there are some decent twists. How the key was smuggled out of the vault is clever enough, and the twist of a justice system being based on presumed guilt, while a staple of sci-fi, allows for great scenes like the guard being killed before he could reveal his accomplice, leading the court to assume the accomplice is Ian.

Most sci-fi shows would have such a court be hopelessly corrupt, with no possible way for Ian to prove his innocence, but in this case the system seems sincere enough. If Ian can present sufficient evidence, he will be set free. One wonders how a maxim like "guilty until proven innocent," so antithetical to justice, could have remained in a system that is otherwise enlightened.

Duh-hyuk-hyuk-hyuk-hyuk-hyuk!
DUH-HYUK-HYUK-HYUK-HYUK-HYUK! Gawrsh!

But ultimately the villain is the wife, which was obvious from the first time she smiled.

Finally the Doctor realizes where the key is hidden, and they set up a sting for the real murderer. He is caught, Ian is freed, and with all four missing keys in their possession they all travel back to Arbitan.

Who is now dead, of course, and is being impersonated by a Voord in his hood. The fact that the hood barely fits over the Voord handles does not seem to matter one bit. Nor does the Voord's different voice. Nor does anything else.

Finally Ian twigs onto the fact that Arbitan sent expendable guy with expendable girl to find the key, but fake Arbitan does not know who expendable guy is. Rather than just assuming that, like the audience, Arbitan found him entirely forgettable, Ian decides to play it safe and gives him a fake key instead of the final real one.

When this is plugged into the machine it blows up Arbitan's entire base, killing all the Voord, but giving the Doctor, his companions, and the expendables just enough time to escape. Convenient that. Why the false key caused the machine to blow up rather than, say, simply not work is never explained.

The Doctor tells the expendables that they can start a new civilization without using mind control, and having destroyed both of the dominant powers in the region, thus completely destabilizing it, and leaving two teenagers-to-early-twenty-somethings in charge, the Doctor and friends blithely leave for another adventure.

Not only do the Voord fail as exciting villains, but each episode seems like just a string of events that occur for no reason. Oh, some of the events are certainly exciting and action-packed, but why are they happening? Why exactly are the keys hidden where they are? Why is there no failsafe way to retrieve them? Why does Arbitan tell them so little about their mission?

In the end, Keys of Marinus is utterly forgettable, which is just as well, because, you know... attempted rape scene.

What were you thinking, Terry Nation?

Leave the expendables behind! They're dead weight!