Hm. I find myself with worryingly little to say about this episode. I very much hope that this is a one-off situation or the blog may not last much longer!
Marco Polo's actions are starting to look very confused. Trusting Ian to go off and fetch Ping-Cho when the TARDIS is in the same direction seems a step too far, a case of acting stupid for the sake of the story. The travellers have already refused to give their word that they won't try to escape, after all.
Barbara and Susan don't get much to do this episode. The section where the Doctor meets Kublai Khan is obviously intended to introduce some comedy, but for me it falls a little flat. William Hartnell is usually good at this sort of thing, so the fact that he doesn't rise to the occasion makes me think the novelty of the new story is wearing thin and he's getting too tired again despite being given some very light episodes.
Apart from the two old men, the focus is on Ian and Ping-Cho. The shenanigans at Cheng-Ting and on the Karakorum road work well, with Wang-Lo less annoying than last time, and it's an exciting cliffhanger to end. How will a schoolteacher fare in combat against a warlord? The answer may be surprising.
What else? I've already talked about the economic advantages of longer stories, so maybe - in a not-at-all-self-referential way, of course - it's time to talk about padding.
Let's be honest: seven episodes is too long for most Who serials, and even the four-to-six-parters sometimes suffer. There are a few tricks to get around this, and over the years the script writers and production team have used all of them. The first is simply to reduce the number of episodes, either by knocking one off and tacking it onto another serial instead (as with The Dominators and The Mind Robber) or by splitting it into two stories {The Ark in Space and The Sontaran Experiment). The second is to weave two stories together. Often this happens when a subplot grows to become a significant part of the serial, as with the parallel world in Inferno. Probably the most common, though, is the escape-recapture loop.
I've talked about this a bit before, but just to recap: the idea is that the TARDIS crew escape imprisonment, run around for a bit, and then get recaptured. Plenty of excitement (hopefully), but the story pauses. How successful this is depends on how cleverly it's done, and success can be a little subjective. Frontier in Space, for example, is packed full of these cycles and the plot only edges forward as the Doctor and Jo are moved to different prisons; but this is done with such style that, although many people find it tedious, I think it's a classic. Episode 3, The Forest of Fear, avoids being boring because the relationships between the characters develop. Marco Polo has had a couple of these cycles (most recently last episode), but the variety has mostly kept it fresh. I thought this episode was going to be another, but it went in a different direction instead, which is a plus in a fairly ho-hum outing.
A bit like this entry, really, which I will now abandon. Fingers crossed for something more next time!
Broadcast:
Date: Saturday, 28th March 1964
Viewers: 8.4 million
Chart Position: 49
Appreciation Index: 59
Rating:
4/10.
Next Time:
Assassin at Peking.
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