A great title for a good episode - I've always liked puns and double meanings. Finally the travellers are sure about Tegana and all working off the same page, but he has had time to plan his defence and firm up his position with Polo. Ping-Cho knows about the TARDIS key, and we're set for interesting contretemps.
The characterisation is spot on, if you ignore the excessive screaming near the start. Barbara shows how perceptive she can be, and the Doctor's attitude to the "natives" is quite shockingly dismissive. Ian - comfortable in the role of action hero - finds himself instead having to manipulate and deceive, and turns out to be rather inept at this. Susan and Ping-Cho affirm their friendship and try to think their way out of the situation, but without luck. Tegana plots and schemes coolly; Polo tries to follow his best reasoning. In fact, given his background, I can see why he would take the word of a respected warlord over that of an irresponsible girl and some proven liars. The travellers really have made things worse for themselves.
This episode rattles along at a good pace, and gives us the payoff we've been hoping for from all the pussyfooting of the past few episodes. The cliffhanger is excellent, not because anyone is in immediate danger but because it could go in a number of directions (including Polo blaming Ian for the guard's death).
This episode was directed by John Crockett rather than Waris Hussein. It's hard to tell how much of the increased pace is due to this and how much to John Lucarotti's script - I suspect mostly the latter - but one unfortunate result of the change is that we have no telesnaps. Loose Cannon did such a good job that I failed to spot this until afterwards, but it's another one that works well with just audio anyway.
And that's all I really want to say about the episode, so there's plenty of space to include something that's been hanging about since The Roof of the World:
Look and Feel, Part 1: Pulp Adventure
One of the great things about Doctor Who is that it can be almost anything. The TARDIS travels not only in time and space but also in genre - this is more obvious in some stories than others, The Gunfighters being particularly blatant. The pulp serials of the early twentieth century - both in magazines and film - provide a particularly easy fit, sharing features such as cliffhangers, screaming women and a focus on exotic locations. With Marco Polo, though, John Lucarotti and Waris Hussein have taken on some more of the trappings. The way the map is used is a classic pulp serial technique to show the passage of time and geography, particularly in travelogue-based stories such as this. Similarly, Polo's journal is used to give the story more authority, a device I first encountered in books by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
In the 1930s when my mum was a teenager she used to read Burroughs (along with H. Rider Haggard, and others). Her favourites were the Tarzan stories, but she also enjoyed John Carter of Mars. When it came to books she was as much of a hoarder as my dad; she still had some of them in the 1970s, and I read them. My preference was for the Mars books (though I did enjoy Tarzan films, particularly Johnny Weissmuller's), and I hunted down the ones she didn't have. Now, those of you who read science fiction in the 1970s will remember that there were only two types of paperback book cover: spaceships by Chris Foss and his imitators, and women in déshabillé. This was true even for books that featured no spaceships and no women. You can guess which category planetary romances like the John Carter books fell into. I found them embarassing to buy, though fortunately because of the subject matter I didn't feel an urge to hide them from my mother, who also read them.
My mum was not, in the main, a fan of science fiction. She observed that when she was young it was still just about possible to imagine strange civilizations in uncharted reaches of Africa and the Amazon, whereas by my time we had to go to other planets for the same effect. A smart woman.
Anyway, the technique I'm talking about is used in the books as a framing device: quite simply, John Carter has given the story to Burroughs to publish. This distances the author from the story and gives it an added layer of realism. In Marco Polo, of course, we have the added benefit that it is from Polo's own account that we know of his journeys - The Travels of Marco Polo was written by someone who shared a cell with the explorer when he was imprisoned in Genoa and listened to his stories - but it is still a deliberate use of the device. It also means that the narrated soundtrack actually has two narrators!
There are some aspects of the pulps that are absent from the story. There is no emphasis on violence as a solution to problems, for example, and I for one am glad of it as what we have is much more interesting.
I'll have more to say about the pulp influence when I tackle the serial E. But that won't be for a while yet...
Broadcast:
Date: Saturday, 14th March 1964
Viewers: 9.9 million
Chart Position: 31
Appreciation Index: 60
Rating:
7.5/10.
Next Time:
Rider from Shang-Tu.
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