Hello all and welcome to another review. This time its an episode with William Hartnell, aka Doctor no.1 and this is his first clunker. The companions of this story are his granddaughter (yes the Doctor has a granddaughter) Susan and two teachers from her school; Ian a science teacher and Barbara a history teacher.

The TARDIS lands on an island on the planet Marinus. The beach is made of glass and it is surrounded by a sea of acid. Inside a vast pyramid the TARDIS crew meet an old guy named Arbetius who has a machine which causes people not to be jerks and be mindless zombies of good and kindness. Arbetius tells the crew that a while ago he took out four of the five keys of the machine (he has the fifth) and scattered them across Marinus to protect them from the evil Voord...who are evil because they wear wetsuits, the pesky villains! He threatens to leave them trapped on the island without food or water and unable to enter the TARDIS unless they help him find the remaining keys with the help of special time dials he gives them. The rest of the story is basically the TARDIS crew travelling to various locations looking for the keys, including;
-A sinister city called Morphotron ruled by brains in jars
-A jungle full of screaming plants
-An icy wasteland with frozen knights and a creepy hunter in a cabin who tries molesting one of the companions, we’ll get to him later
-A boring butt-numbing trial in a dull random city.

The Keys of Marinus is a 6 episode long story and was Doctor Who’s first dud. Its the fifth ever story ever broadcast and it really shows that it was rushed production. The sets look cheap and flimsy compared to the other stories around it, even with black and white film (Doctor Who’s best friend.) and everything just has this tired air about it. With the exception of the pyramid and acidic sea in the first episode and the Morphotron city, the rest of the story is a drag to get through.
Lets start off with the biggest thing everyone who watches this story (and stays awake all the way through) and remembers; the Voord. The Voord are the DrWho’s first attempt to make a new long running villain, since they had a huge success with the Daleks. But sadly the Voord fail to make much of an impression, mostly because they are barely featured, only appearing at the beginning and the end of the story, limiting their impact and the fact they look utterly silly doesn’t help; men in flippers and wetsuits with things on their heads who can’t see where they are going just didn’t have the same impact as the Daleks. But to its credit the first episode is quite atmospheric, if a bit cheapy; again budget issues.
Another strength of this story is that each episode is distinct and brings up a new threat and location, so you don’t know what you will get….unless if you read this and I spoil it in which case, I’m really sorry! And unlike the new wimpy series that cries whenever we leave modern day Earth, the classic series wasn’t afraid to try alien worlds, despite the tiny budget. So kudos? Maybe?

The Morphotron city episode is probably the best of the bunch, even though the Voord don’t even show up. It is an apparently idyllic city where everyone is drugged to imagine it as a beautiful Utopia, where in fact its dilapidated and filthy, and slowly become the slaves of a bunch of brains in jars. There are some great camera angles and the set design is actually pretty good here. If the rest of the story was like this episode, it would have been much more interesting. Its also here where William Hartnell takes a holiday for a few weeks, so the Doctor leaves and to replace him until the penultimate episode we have two nothing characters; Altos and Sabetha. The actors playing them are fine, but they just don’t have much in the way of personality.

Sadly though we come up to the jungle full of screams. This is a pretty dull and slow episode. The jungle has overgrown a building (Temple? Lets go with temple) because some silly hermit scientist sprinkled some fertiliser he made onto it and what do you know, the obvious happens. The crew find the key in a jar of seeds….end of that story then.

Anyways onto the next bit of boredom, the Snows of Terror! This episode has the same issues of the previous one in that its slow and the world building is trite, but there’s the added layer of creepy. The crew and their two new lumps of stale tofu end up in a snowy mountainous wasteland of polystyrene snow and stock footage wolves and get separated. Barbara and Ian luckily (?) run into a hunter guy named Vasor who looks kind of like Hagrid;
“You’re a wizard Barbara.”

He takes them back to his cabin and then tells Ian that the others have gone ahead to some cardboard, er I mean ice caves and Ian heads off to try and find them, leaving Barbara with Vasor. But soon Barbara finds that Vasor has stolen the Time dials. Vasor then starts chasing Barbara around his cabin and this is the uncomfortable part. There’s nothing explicit shown on screen, but the image of a giant guy chasing a woman while panting and creepily laughing doesn’t paint a pretty picture. This sort of thing would not happen in the new show, thankfully.
But luckily before Vasor can use his magic wand that hides in his pants, Ian and Altos break up the party and force Vasor to accompany them to the caves. Here they find the key locked in a solid block of ice linked to a heating system. They have to heat up the block to get to the key, simple right? Well there is a catch; around the cavern are frozen knights in plastic capes. Who are they? Why are they frozen? Where they voluntary frozen by that Arbetius bloke? Why do they attack the crew randomly without asking them who they are and what they want? NEVER EXPLAINED! You’d think the knights would ask whether or not it Arbetius send them or why they wanted the key before swinging swords at them. But nope, they’re just silent threats...not even that threatening actually. But, thank Ra, they do kill off the creepy Vasor. If only they had replaced the frozen knights with the Voord then we’d have more tension and a greater emphasis on how dangerous our villains are meant to be...but nope, frozen knights it is.

So from cardboard snow and perverts we go onto the penultimate episode which is set in some random city that consists of five rooms. Where is this place? Dunno. Ian is falsely accused of the murder of someone else who was looking for the keys and oh boy, a trial episode. I won’t go into detail here, because it would probably take too long and honestly if you’ve seen any courtroom drama you’d probably know all the beats...heck even if you haven’t its probably clear who the real murderer is. Its boring, its bland and its so slow, but its nice to see the Doctor again. The court stuff runs into half of, or maybe even more (I was barely awake at this moment) the final episode, leading to a rushed climax where those lazy wetsuited Voord reappear, yeah remember them? But it finally finally ends with Yartek the leader of the Voord (who has just been introduced 2 hours into the whole story) putting in a fake key that the Doctor has substituted into the machine which destroys it and there’s a message about letting people decide instead of having a machine making everyone good. Which means that every thing that has happened in the last 5 episodes was completely pointless. It just makes me wonder; why the heck didn’t Arbetius do it all himself?

The Keys of Marinus is not liked among the DrWho fandom. Its slow, boring and not pretty to look at. Most of the actors do ok, though Arbetius, played by George Coulouris from Citizen Kane seems so tired and flat. If Yartek and the Voord had featured more maybe they would have been a credible threat, but as is they’re just a bunch of losers. As is the Keys of Marinus stands as the weakest story in the otherwise very strong first season of DrWho. Maybe if it were a film with a full movie budget, maybe that would help, but the script is still the biggest issue overall. It can be enjoyed in an ‘its so bad its good’ kind of way, but even in that regard it pales to other sorts of episodes in that can be fit into that category...one of whom we will be discussing next time, The Horns of Nimon.

So the Keys of Marinus….it tried to be different, sadly everything else was against it.