#whorewatch

This is a first for this ‘rewatch’: not only is it the first reconstructed story I’m watching (I’m going for the black-and-white Loose Cannon recon, if anyone cares), but it’s also the first story I’ve never watched before in full. I’ve previously only seen the half-hour version on the Edge of Destruction DVD – and this is a seven-parter, so that version had to cut one or two things out.

Having given us seven weeks of hard science fiction and a two-act character play, we’ve circled back round to Doctor Who’s educational remit for a purely historical tale based around the real-life figure of Marco Polo. We do learn a bit about Polo, his relationships and his journey, but mostly he’s there as a friendly antagonist for the TARDIS crew to play against. Mark Eden does a sterling job as the charismatic Polo, who is charming enough that you can almost accept how readily the regulars accept their situation for much of the story.

Polo is widely regarded as one of Doctor Who’s great lost epics, and in some ways it’s easy to see why; in terrestrial terms the story covers a vast distance, and we’re periodically reminded of the amount of ground being traversed with the help of Indiana Jones-style maps and excerpts from Polo’s diaries. The existing photos suggest that this was a lavish production, with sets and costumes befitting the delay in this serial’s production. The BBC has always been good at producing period dramas, and this serial plays to those strengths.

The flip side of this is that not an awful lot actually happens in the story, and by the midpoint it starts to feel quite formulaic - arrive somewhere, have the TARDIS crew bicker with Marco and fail to get their key back, show Tegana looking a bit shifty and move to the next location. And it’s another anticlimax of an ending, as Marco eventually just shrugs and gives the Doctor his key back.

But what Marco Polo lacks in plot, it makes up for in character. The regulars may not have much to do in the story, but we get to spend a lot of time with them, and Susan in particular benefits as she befriends young servant Ping Cho - after the running with scissors incident in the last story, it’s a welcome change to see her just being a teenager for a while. Marco Polo may not quite live up to its reputation, but it’s a solid tale whose absence from the archives is a great shame.

Memorable Moments:

Ian and Barbara’s joy at being back on Earth at the start of the story is a nice moment after some pretty unrelenting misery for the unwitting travellers. The script spends just enough time touching on this arc before launching the pair into inquisitive adventure mode.

The Doctor’s absence from all but a single scene of episode two sticks out like a sore thumb, with the explanation that the old man is simply in his room having a sulk for the whole episode struggling to ring true. Certainly if any Doctor is going to have a sulk it’s Hartnell, but for him not to emerge during the raging sandstorm - especially when they learn his granddaughter is caught up in it - just feels wrong.

Speaking of the sandstorm, it’s a pretty horrible experience - both for the characters, in an already oppressive episode, and for the viewer; I have no idea what a sandstorm sounds like, but here the Radiophonic Workshop somehow manage to tap into the sound of hell.

The scenes between Tegana and Marco, particularly in episode two, are among the story’s most engaging; two charismatic antagonists trading double-edged barbs under the guise of civility, with a lot more being said between the two than it first appears.

Ping-Cho’s story in Part Three may bring proceedings to a grinding halt (Almost as much as when she decides to stop and look at some pretty fishies in Part Five), but it does inspire the first - and presumably the only - mention of hashish in Doctor Who. Purely medicinal, I’m sure.

A scene that doesn’t get served well by the reconstruction is the end of Part 3, in which Susan enters the cave which she’s been told contains hundreds of stone masks - and screams because she sees a stone mask. The recon contains a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of human eyes behind the mask - but I blinked, I missed it, and the whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous until the start of the next episode, in which we’re reliably informed that the mask moved. Yeah, if you say so.

Either the sixties were a different time or the Doctor Who production team were massive racists, because Part Four introduces us to several ‘comedy characters’ with names like Ling Tau and Wang Lo - all played by Caucasian men in yellowface. It might be one of the few times that Doctor Who has actually made me want to hide behind the sofa.

On the plus side, Ian Chesterton pretending to be drunk is probably one of the greatest moments from Doctor Who’s history that are missing from the archives. If only we could see him staggering around while listening to him slur his words, I think the world would be a better place.

Something I’m glad we don’t have to see is William Hartnell exaggerating his aches and pains in Kublai Khan’s court - just listening to him over-egging it is bad enough. But I really like that they gave the Doctor a friend to bond over being past it with; it makes me wish Marco’s caravan had one fewer stop along the way and arrived at Khan’s palace much sooner.

And lastly, having spent two whole episodes building it up, Ping Cho’s arranged marriage subplot is waved away with a comment that her intended has died off screen. Granted, it was one of the less important storylines that needed wrapping up, but you have to wonder why they bothered to introduce it at all if they were going to throw it away in such an offhand manner.

Lingering Questions:

I’m sure many of us have been guilty of letting people take advantage of our good nature at some point in our lives, but it’s hard not to wonder about Marco Polo here. He extends the hand of friendship to the Doctor and friends, and in return they spend seven episodes bickering with him and then plotting and scheming behind his back. They’re also a considerable drain on Polo’s already stretched resources, and yet Marco remains kind to them throughout, through some sort of misplaced code of ethics. Why, particularly after the Doctor calls him a ‘poor, pathetic, stupid savage’, doesn’t Marco just leave these idiots in the desert to rot?

This question might be a bit of a cheat, given that we now know plenty of things about the TARDIS that neither the viewers nor writers were aware of back in 1964, but exactly how had the TARDIS, whose dimensions are practically infinite, run out of water? Had the Doctor drained the swimming pool? Had Ian gone in and swiped the last of the orange juice from the cricket pavilion? Were the TARDIS gardens experiencing a particularly dry winter?

One that seems less forgiveable is the notion of condensation gathering in the TARDIS because of the temperature differential. Though we’ve not seen it put to the test in any extreme way, the interior and exterior dimensions of the ship are clearly separate; it’s a central conceit of the series. You can heat the exterior up as much as you like, but the interior shouldn’t be affected - certainly not by such a piffling difference. Doctor Who should have ended with the Doctor and friends dying a slow and painful death in the desert, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.