The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide
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Synopsis
When it was originally published, the Discontinuity Guide was the first attempt to bring together all of the various fictional information seen in BBC TV's DOCTOR WHO, and then present it in a coherent narrative. Often copied but never matched, this is the perfect guide to the 'classic' Doctors. Fulffs, goofs, double entendres, fashion victims, technobabble, dialogue disasters: these are just some of the headings under which every story in the Doctor's first twenty-seven years of his career is analysed. Despite its humorous tone, the book has a serious purpose. Apart from drawing attention to the errors and absurdities that are among the most loveable features of DOCTOR WHO, this reference book provides a complete analysis of the story-by-story creation of the Doctor Who Universe. One sample story, Pyramids of Mars, yields the following gems: TECHNOBABBLE: a crytonic particle accelerator, a relative continuum stabiliser, and triobiphysics. DIALOGUE TRIUMPHS: 'I'm a Time Lord... You don't understand the implications. I'm not a human being. I walk in eternity.' CONTINUITY: the doctor is about 750 years old at this point, and has apparently aged 300 years since Tomb of the Cybermen. He ages about another 300 years between this story and the seventh' Doctor's Time and the Rani. An absolute must for every Doctor Who fan, this new edition of the classic reference guide has not been updated at all for the 50th anniversary.
Release date: October 31, 2013
Publisher: Gateway
Print pages: 427
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The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide
Paul Cornell
Some of our arms may have fallen into Xeron hands, but we are absolutely sane.
We make this point at the outset because any new Doctor Who book needs to justify its existence in a crowded market. Doctor Who – The Discontinuity Guide is a work of reference, but we don’t list every actor or feature plot descriptions. If you’re interested in Doctor Who then you will know such things already.
Our concern is Doctor Who as it appeared on screen, and what follows is a fiction, a game, that evolves from the stated facts.
Doctor Who was made by lots of people, most of whom didn’t know or care about continuity. Its writers were television professionals. Superb hacks in many cases, but still, ultimately, only interested in writing their four episodes. They weren’t normally bothered about how their ideas fitted in with something that was written 20 years previously, nor should they have been. Continuity often spoils creativity, as Robert Holmes proved, time and time again, ignoring things that he himself created if they got in the way.
It is the job of the fan to worry about such things, to ponder the three entirely separate explanations for the sinking of Atlantis.
The task we have set ourselves is to knit together what we see on screen into one big story. We make no apologies for this. As a matter of course any book on the fictional worlds of Doctor Who has to expand upon what is stated or implied on screen.
Sometimes references gel with a kind of beautiful serendipity, as if they were designed that way all along. Sometimes continuity has to be beaten into place with a sledgehammer. Whether you nod your head in agreement or throw the book across a crowded train bellowing ‘Unworthy of the diamond logo!’ it’s all the same to us. This is one of the reasons why we say to you: the game isn’t over. It continues with you. All approaches are valid. Dissent is good. Write and tell us your version and perhaps we’ll be able to use it if there’s a revised edition.
We do not want this book to act as a straitjacket, confining future authors. If you’re writing a Missing Adventure, take what you want and ignore what you don’t. Future continuity cops will just have to adapt to your version.
Despite the large amount of speculation contained within the book, we must stress that such ‘fiction’ is confined to square brackets and the boxed sections. Everything else is stated fact. During the course of writing this book we have discovered that many fondly-held fan beliefs are utterly mythical. Some facts within this book will send you scurrying back to your videos, but, believe us, we’ve checked.
We’d die of boredom if this were all that this book did, however, so we detail fluffed lines, visual goofs and unintentionally hilarious dialogue. This sounds very negative, but – and it’s a very big but – we’ve come to praise Doctor Who, not to bury it. (If it’s good enough for Dennis Potter to nearly write for, it’s good enough for us.) For a series that ran for over a quarter of a century and brought much pleasure to viewing millions, there have been times when it was difficult to find anyone with a good word to say about it. And sometimes the series’ fans were amongst its harshest critics.
A Doctor Who video is a cheap way of getting back a slice of your youth or glimpsing a world you have never seen but have heard so much about. But the harsh reality is that sometimes the video disappoints: the first few minutes produce a rush of nostalgia, but then a bit of bad acting slips in, or a set wobbles, or the first alien made out of egg boxes and tin foil appears. You feel cheated: it’s as if your childhood has been made counterfeit.
Such criticism seems to be an inherent component of devotion: to really love something you have to want to take it apart. So we detail goofs and blunders because they’re there, committed for all eternity to the merciless amber of video. We don’t list such flaws because of an ignorance of the nature and development of television. TV drama, in the 60s and 70s, was almost exclusively ‘event-orientated’, in as much as programmes were designed to be viewed once and then probably never seen again. Certainly, directors in the 1960s could never have envisaged a time when their work would be available for purchase in the High Street, let alone subjected to frame-by-frame scrutiny. Even if they had wanted perfection, the constraints they worked under made this impossible. Most mistakes just had to stay.
We only mock Doctor Who because we are here to celebrate the fan way of watching television, a close attention to detail matched by a total willingness to take the mickey.
We should explain our usage of the established titles for certain early stories (starting with ‘An Unearthly Child’ rather than ‘100,000 BC’). The only canonical titles are those that appear on screen. We maintain that the proper title should remain what the story is known as by most people (we are all familiar with the plays Hamlet, Comedy of Errors, Marat-Sade, but these aren’t the ‘proper’ titles). ‘An Unearthly Child’ is the democratically elected title for the first story, reflected by the BBC in their video releases. Calling it anything else might be a mark of strict accuracy, but it could also be a sign of elitism.
A few of the categories need more detailed explanation:
Roots: In this section we look at the other texts that have (or might have) influenced Doctor Who. We do not suggest plagiarism, but rather seek to highlight links that might not otherwise be obvious. We also note interesting quotations and derivative one-liners.
Goofs: This covers accidental cock-ups, intentional aspects that just don’t work, and gaping holes in the plot.
Technobabble: The science featured in Doctor Who falls into two basic camps. It’s either a fascinating piece of speculation based on the cutting-edge of contemporary research, or it’s utter, meaningless garbage. Star Trek fandom long ago coined the term ‘technobabble’ for just this type of thing.
Dialogue Disasters: There are times when Doctor Who dialogue makes you want to crawl under a stone and die. Here are the all-time greats.
Dialogue Triumphs: Thankfully, there are also times when the dialogue makes your toes tingle. We are especially interested in those lines that survive when stripped of their context and the acting performances that brought them to life.
Continuity: Our definition of continuity is wider than might be expected. Because the concept implies a logical progression – which is at loggerheads with the rationale of Doctor Who – continuity must be retrospectively rewritten. In other words, we need to do more than simply state when story B refers to story A. Therefore, under the heading of continuity we list anything of potential importance in the Doctor Who universe. A key fact about a particular race or planet, for example, has a place in Doctor Who’s continuity, whether it was referred to again or not.
The continuity section is further sub-divided as follows:
Links: Direct references to other transmitted stories not featured in other categories.
Location: The stated place (and time, if known) of the adventure.
Future History: Doctor Who’s vision of Earth history after 1995.
Untelevised Adventures: Incidents mentioned but not seen, including the Doctor’s habit of name-dropping, and various brushes with history.
Q.v.: An aspect of this story is discussed in a boxed section elsewhere.
The Bottom Line: As the phrase suggests, ‘Is it any good?’ Subjectivity is for many people a thing to be feared rather than cherished. There is a huge divergence on what constitutes good Doctor Who, and the opinions of the authors of this book reflect this diversity. However, it’s a nettle worth grasping. We have a reputation for writing controversial books, and we don’t intend to stop now.
25-minute episodes, b&w
1 ‘An Unearthly Child’
23 November 1963, 1 episode
Writers: Anthony Coburn, C. E. Webber (uncredited)
Director: Waris Hussein
Roots: Dixon of Dock Green, Steptoe and Son, Target Luna and its sequels, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the Doctor’s motivation for kidnapping people), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Fluffs: William Hartnell and William Russell interrupt each other whilst examining the clock in the TARDIS.
Goofs: Before Ian gets zapped by the console, somebody in the studio calls out a cue. Ian says that the Doctor closed the door, when in fact it was Susan who did this. At the end of the episode, the caveman’s shadow extends too far across the landscape.
Dialogue Triumphs: The Doctor: ‘This doesn’t roll along on wheels, you know.’
Continuity: The Doctor doesn’t answer to the name Foreman. [An invention of Susan, who took it from the junkyard name. I. M. Foreman would still appear to own the junkyard in 1985 (‘Attack of the Cybermen’), although he obviously does not keep a close watch on the place as the TARDIS was never discovered.]
Susan can read very fast, is a brilliant scientist, and calculates in terms of five dimensions [all Time Lord characteristics]. She likes 20th-century England. The children of the Doctor’s civilisation are advanced (he doesn’t count Susan as a child). There is no suggestion that she isn’t his granddaughter. She and the Doctor are cut off from their own planet, without friends. They’ve been in London for five months [probably mending the TARDIS: the Doctor speaks of replacing a faulty filament]. She was born in ‘another time, another world’, and says she invented the name TARDIS (in this and other early stories, TARDIS is said to stand for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’). [Susan was a precocious young Time Lady, and her name for travel capsules caught on.]
THE DOCTORS FAMILY
Apart from Susan, we never meet any of the rest of the Doctor’s family. He says that they ‘sleep in his mind’ (‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’) and that he isn’t sure if they’re alive (‘The Curse of Fenric’), although he does fondly remember an uncle (‘Time and the Rani’).
The TARDIS console can be electrified, and the ship has a malfunctioning ‘yearometer’ and a radiation counter. Ian and Barbara are knocked out on take-off [either the TARDIS telepathic circuits are also faulty, or they were thrown about by the TARDIS’s movements and physically stunned. The Doctor, aware of the need to dispose of the Hand of Omega secretly (see ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’), deliberately takes Ian and Barbara off with him. Thereafter the TARDIS frequently returns to Earth to allow the Doctor to ensure that the Hand has not been discovered].
Ian teaches science, shares Susan’s knowledge of the pop group John Smith and the Common Men, and owns a car. Barbara teaches history, and lives in a flat.
Location: Coal Hill School and 76 Totters Lane, London, during school term, Winter 1963. (The lab blackboard features the words ‘Homework – Tuesday’, meaning for Tuesday. This means that it can’t be a Monday (it would read ‘Tomorrow’) or a Tuesday (Susan explains about the Top Twenty but isn’t listening to it for the first time), and there is clearly school the next day. So these events must be set on either a Wednesday or a Thursday (probably the latter, since otherwise there would be science classes on consecutive days, which is poor timetabling). See ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’.
Untelevised Adventures: The Doctor and Susan have probably been in France at the time of the Revolution (1789–1799) and in England after the introduction of decimal coinage (1971). [However, Susan, interested in Earth, might have learnt these details while on Gallifrey.]
Q.v.: The Doctor’s Doctorate, ‘The Moonbase’; The TARDIS Scanner, ‘Full Circle’.
The Bottom Line: ‘I know that free movement in time and space is a scientific dream I don’t expect to find solved in a junkyard.’ Twenty-five of the most important minutes in British television. For a ‘family series’, Doctor Who’s debut is a remarkably grownup drama. As well as utilising directorial techniques that would never be seen again, the episode gained a unique aura from real-life events that no other Doctor Who episode would have.
2: The Cave of Skulls 3: The Forest of Fear 4: The Firemaker
30 November 1963 – 14 December 1963, 3 episodes
Writer: Anthony Coburn Director: Waris Hussein
Roots: One Million B.C. (1940), William Golding’s The Inheritors.
Dialogue Triumphs: The Doctor: ‘Fear makes companions of all of us.’
‘If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?’
Continuity: The Doctor smokes a pipe. This is the first time that the [chameleon circuit] has failed. The Doctor claims that if he had established exactly when they had landed, he could have got them straight home [using the fast return switch: see ‘The Edge of Destruction’]. The Doctor keeps a notebook with key codes to all the ship’s machines, and maps of the places he’s visited.
The tribe have lost the secret of fire. [They await winter with trepidation, not the ice age, which took so long to happen they wouldn’t be aware of the changes.]
Location: A stretch of barren land [in Africa or the Asian steppes between the ice ages (non-glacial Europe would have been verdant), 500,000 BC–30,000 BC].
Untelevised Adventures: The Doctor and Susan have visited the classical era [of Greece] and Europe between 1581 and the mid-18th century (the TARDIS has been disguised as an ionic column and a sedan chair). [Alternatively, the ionic column might point to classical revivals in the 18th Century.]
The Bottom Line: ‘That’s not his name. Who is he? Dr who?’ After the wonderful first episode, this is very dull. The Doctor, according to many commentators a sinister, ruthless man, is likeable, telling Barbara that he’s ‘desperately sorry’ for getting her involved.
2 ‘The Daleks’
21 December 1963 – 1 February 1964, 7 episodes
1: The Dead Planet 2: The Survivors 3: The Escape 4: The Ambush 5: The Expedition 6: The Ordeal 7: The Rescue
Writer: Terry Nation
Directors: Christopher Barry, Richard Martin
Roots: The Lord of the Rings, The Time Machine (especially the 1960 film), War of the Worlds, Dan Dare, Pathfinders to Venus (the Doctor sabotaging the TARDIS), Journey into Space, E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’. The harshly-angled corridors of the city are reminiscent of expressionist films, particularly Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari.
Fluffs: We have a ‘setisolidified’ lizard and the immortal line ‘We mustn’t diddle about here’ from William Hartnell. He also gets the words ‘drugs’ and ‘gloves’ muddled up [but then the Doctor is suffering from radiation sickness].
Goofs: The Daleks’ Geiger counter has ‘danger’ written on it in English [a translation convention]. There is a weird conclusion to a Dalek scene in episode two where they all start talking gibberish, and in episode six two Daleks say the same piece of dialogue (with minor differences) at the same time but at different speeds. Why does the Dalek cell contain a bed, something that they themselves would have no need for?
In episode three Susan runs on the spot while stage hands whip her with twigs. It is stated that the Thals have been travelling for four years, but by the next episode the figure is just over a year. Ganatus seems acquainted with 1960s Earth manners: ‘We won’t use one of the customs of your planet: “ladies first”.’
Why does Ian wait for Temmosus to finish his speech before warning the Thals that it’s an ambush? Towards the end it is obvious that much use is being made of photographic blow-up Daleks. In episode six a Dalek turns to consult some instruments and crashes into them. In the same episode, when Ian grabs the rock wall, William Russell ends up with a chunk of white polystyrene in his hand. When the Doctor shorts a Dalek control panel the explosion happens too early. Given that the doors of the city are electrically-powered, how can the Thals get out at the end after turning the power off?
Fashion Victims: The Doctor’s binocular specs are outrageous. The Thal men wear leather trousers with holes cut in them, and as for the women…
Double Entendres: ‘We’re all working towards the same end.’ ‘Now there’s a double meaning for you.’
Continuity: Susan says that, fed with the correct information, the TARDIS can be ‘piloted’ anywhere. However, the TARDIS instrumentation seems unable to pinpoint their location: the Doctor hopes to fix their position [in space and time] by the stars. He also takes readings from a bank of computers in the main corridor/control room. [If the TARDIS was being repaired previous to ‘An Unearthly Child’ then some degree of ‘running in’ might well be necessary: see ‘Time Flight’.] The TARDIS food machine is seen, as is the fault locator. The TARDIS fluid links use mercury.
The Doctor talks about the gulf between Susan’s age and his own, and says that he was once a pioneer amongst his own people.
THE FIRST HISTORY OF THE DALEKS
In this story, Thal records – a mixture of oral legend and historical texts – are said to go back about half a million years. The Thals were a warrior race, while the ancestors of the Daleks (Kaleds) were teachers and philosophers. About 500 years before the events of ‘The Daleks’ a thousand-year-old degenerative war between the two races came to a conclusion (‘Genesis of the Daleks’). Davros, the leading Kaled scientist, developed the Daleks as a ‘housing’ for mutated Kaleds. He was killed by his creatures after slaughtering the majority of his people. As a term of contempt, the Thals termed the (remaining) Kaleds ‘Dalek people’ (or – on one occasion in ‘The Daleks’ – Dals).
Despite these events, the war did not end until the Thals exploded a single neutron bomb. The destruction was so great that the Thals themselves were affected by the radiation. They committed themselves to pacifism as a result.
A group of advanced Daleks survived the explosion by leaving the planet in a hastily constructed spacecraft. Those Daleks left behind were early products of Davros’s experimental programme and, although many survived the neutron bomb, they remained trapped in the bunkers beneath the Kaled city for centuries. These Daleks were dependent on both static electricity and high levels of radiation, and their weapons were comparatively weak. The primitive Daleks were destroyed by the Doctor in this story.
(The Doctor never establishes the date of this story, and his comment in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ – that ‘The Daleks’ is set a million years in the future – is pure (inaccurate) speculation. By the time of ‘Planet of the Daleks’ (the 26th-century) the tale of the Thal’s penetration of the Dalek city has become a legend.)
The more advanced Daleks developed their own technology, which enabled non-Kaleds to become Dalek mutants. A large number then returned to Skaro and began working on time travel technology in conjunction with Theodore Maxtible (‘The Evil of the Daleks’). (The date is difficult to ascertain, but would have to be somewhere between the 19th and mid-22nd centuries.) Civil war broke out on Skaro, and for a long time the Thais were once more able to live there in peace.
One of the ships that escaped the destruction on Skaro crashed on Vulcan in the 21st or early 22nd century. (Therefore, they recognise the second Doctor, and the Earth colonists have not heard of the Daleks.) Mankind’s first major encounter with the Daleks came a little later in 2164. When the Daleks were defeated (‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’) they completed their time travel programme (‘The Daleks discovered the secret of time travel’) and attempted to turn this defeat into victory by going back in time and invading the Earth in the late 21st century (‘We have invaded Earth again. We have changed the pattern of history.’). The Doctor’s intervention a century later (‘Day of the Daleks’) was so successful that this alternative time-line did not happen. (The Daleks knew of the Doctor, but did not recognise his third incarnation, using a mind analysis machine to confirm his identity.)
Stung by their twin defeats, the Daleks pursued the first incarnation of the Doctor (‘The Chase’), reasoning that if his future intervention could be neutralised their plans would succeed.
Between the 23rd and 25th centuries the Daleks encountered the third Doctor in an untelevised adventure, and then developed a deadly space plague (‘Death to the Daleks’). (The Doctor is recognised in ‘Death to the Daleks’, which would seem to take place before ‘Planet of the Daleks’.)
In the 26th century the Daleks planned to destroy the Earth-Draconia pact (‘Frontier in Space’), and then conquer the galaxy with a huge, invisible army (‘Planet of the Daleks’).
On Skaro, meanwhile, the Thals ended a period of pacifistic isolation by developing space craft. Their first lengthy mission was to Spiridon, where, with the Doctor’s help, the Daleks were defeated again. (The Daleks in that story identify the Doctor.)
‘Mission to the Unknown’ states that for over a thousand years the Dalek campaign ignored the Milky Way completely. From approximately 3500 they waged campaigns in the Ninth Galactic System and in the constellation of Mir, conquering 70 and 40 planets in the two regions respectively. The Daleks also returned to Skaro, wiping out the Thals who lived there. They had hoped to receive a new direction from their creator, but Davros had not survived.
In the year 4000 the Daleks returned their attention to the solar system, forging an alliance with other races (‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’). Once again, the Doctor interceded.
Despite all these defeats the Daleks were never entirely wiped out and the Time Lords predicted a time when the Daleks could become the dominant life-form in the cosmos. As a result of the Doctor’s intervention Dalek ‘history’ was massively changed. (See ‘Genesis of the Daleks’.)
Skaro is the twelfth planet of its system. The Thals, going through a full circle of mutation, survived the aftermath of the war thanks to anti-radiation drugs. They became farmers.
The Daleks have statues in their city. They have been growing vegetables with artificial sunlight [do they still need to eat, or are these Varga plants? See ‘Mission to the Unknown’]. The post-nuclear wildlife on Skaro includes an octopus-like creature in the Lake of Mutations and Magnedons, lizards whose bodies, held together by an internal magnetic force, are composed of pliable metal. Only a corpse is seen, and the Thais can recharge their hand-lights with it. The Thals measure length in feet [a translation convention], but the Dalek countdown indicates that their units of time are longer than the second.
Location: Skaro.
Q.v.: The TARDIS Lock, ‘The Sensorites’.
The Bottom Line: ‘I wonder what they’ll be like.’ A game of two halves. The first four episodes helped launch Doctor Who in the public imagination, and are thoughtful and gripping. The last three comprise a B-movie trek through hideous landscapes in order to defeat the monsters: it’s as sophisticated as Flash Gordon. As a whole, ‘The Daleks’ is brilliantly directed, full of inventive touches and wonderful set-pieces. Only in the last battle do the Daleks disappoint.
3 ‘The Edge of Destruction’
8 February 1964 – 15 February 1964, 2 episodes
1: The Edge of Destruction 2: The Brink of Disaster
Writer: David Whitaker
Directors: Richard Martin, Frank Cox
Roots: Haunted house stories, The Time Machine. The claustrophobic atmosphere is reminiscent of The Outer Limits.
Fluffs: William Hartnell has a bit of a nightmare, completely throwing the others during one scene by saying the same line (‘It’s not very likely’) twice, and fumbling ‘You knocked both Susan and I unconscious’. He also omits the scripted explanation for the melted clocks.
‘You’d be blown to atoms by a split second!’
Goofs: ‘Fast Return’ (in English) appears to be written on the TARDIS console in felt-tip [a translation convention].
Continuity: The TARDIS’s power source is held beneath the central column. The TARDIS has an inbuilt memory of previous locations, and the console features a fast return switch (the malfunctioning of which causes the crisis). [The alarm sound the fault locator makes is an early version of the Cloister Bell.] Susan and Barbara share a very spartan sleeping area. Skaro is seen on the TARDIS scanner.
[Susan and the Doctor have a telepathic link, both to each other, and to the TARDIS: its stranger attempts to warn them seem to be visionary in nature. It takes the Doctor a long time to work out what’s going on, and he seems very afraid, suggesting some degree of unfamiliarity with the TARDIS. Ian would surely have mentioned had he heard more than one heartbeat from the Doctor (cf. ‘The Sensorites’).]
Location: Inside the TARDIS.
Untelevised Adventures: The Doctor and Susan have visited the planet Quinnis in the ‘fourth universe’ (‘where we nearly lost the TARDIS four or five journeys ago,’ notes Susan). [Since the Doctor seems not to learn about parallel universes until ‘Inferno’, Susan must mean ‘galaxy’ (cf. ‘Galaxy 4’).] The coat the Doctor loans Ian is said to have been given to him by Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Bottom Line: ‘We’ve had time taken away from us, and now it’s being given back because it’s running out.’ ‘The Edge of Destruction’ manages to flesh out the central figures at the expense of the plot.
4 ‘Marco Polo’
22 February 1964 – 4 April 1964, 7 episodes
1: The Roof of the World 2: The Singing Sands 3: Five Hundred Eyes 4: The Wall of Lies 5: Rider from Shang-Tu 6: Mighty Kublai Khan 7: Assassin at Peking
Writer: John Lucarotti
Directors: Waris Hussein, John Crockett
Roots: Marco Polo’s Travels, John Lucarotti’s Canadian TV series about Polo.
Fluffs: William Hartnell has an odd hysterical fit in episode one, laughing his head off for a full minute at all the troubles that have befallen the travellers.
Goofs: The caption slide at the end of episode two reads: ‘Next Episode: The Cave of Five Hundred Eyes’. In episode seven, Kublai Khan refers to backgammon as a game of cards.
Where are Niccolo and Maffeo Polo (Marco’s father and uncle who travelled with him)? The use of Peking is anachronistic (it should be Khan-balik). In 1289, Polo was anxious to leave China against Kublai’s wishes, so what’s he doing on the Pamir Plateau?
Dialogue Triumphs: Susan: ‘One day we’ll know all the mysteries of the skies and we’ll stop our wanderings.’
How Tegana should kill the Doctor: ‘With a stake through the heart.’
The Doctor on having the TARDIS put in the stables: ‘What does he think it is, a potting shed or something?’
At backgammon, amongst other wonderful wagers, the Doctor wins the ‘total produce of Burma for one year’.
Khan explains to Ping-Cho: ‘Your beloved husband-to-be, so anxious to be worthy of your love, drank a potion of quicksilver and sulphur, the elixir of life and eternal youth. And expired.’
Continuity: One burnt-out circuit in the TARDIS deactivates the lights, water supply and heating. Condensation forms in the interior as it would inside any box in a hot climate [the broken circuit also stopped exterior temperatures affecting the interior]. The Doctor couldn’t create another TARDIS (at least, not with the resources of 13th-century Venice).
The Doctor can play backgammon well, but loses his bet with Kublai Khan over the TARDIS. He can horse-ride, but has back trouble as a result. He also has problems with high altitudes and lack of water, and likes bean sprout soup.
Barbara knows lots of Buddhist history. Ian can ride, sword-fight, isn’t very good at chess and knows lots of O’ level science things, plus the fact that bamboo bangs in fire [he might have travelled abroad, probably on his National Service: see ‘The Web Planet’]. Susan uses words like ‘fab’ and is surprised by the idea of arranged marriages. She’s had ‘many homes in many places’.
Polo says that he’s seen Buddhist monks levitate cups of wine to Kublai Khan’s mouth. [K’Anpo?]
Location: The Himalayas, the Plain of Pamir, Lop, the Gobi desert, Tun-Huang, Sinju, a bamboo forest, Cheng-Ting, the Summer Palace at Shang-Tu and Peking, over at least 30 days (probably a lot more) in Summer 1289.
Untelevised Adventures: Susan has seen the metal seas of Venus.
Q.v.: The TARDIS Lock, ‘The Sensorites’; The Location of Gallifrey, ‘Terror of the Autons’; Venus, ‘The Time Monster’.
The Bottom Line: Obviously wonderful, but a little too loose and unstructured to be the all-conquering classic of repute. Then again, we’re denied the splendour of the costumes and sets. The device of Polo narrating map journey inserts is sweet, and the sheer length of time narrated makes this the longest ‘real time’ Who story.
5 ‘The Keys of Marinus’
11 April 1964 – 16 May 1964, 6 episodes
1: The Sea of Death 2: The Velvet Web 3: The Screaming Jungle 4: The Snows of Terror 5: Sentence of Death 6: The Keys of Marinus
Writer: Terry Nation Director: John Gorrie
Roots: Courtroom drama. 30s serials, quest epics, Celtic myth. Fireball XL5 ‘The Hypnotic Sphere’, the Labours of Hercules.
Fluffs: Susan asks the Doctor if they can go outside, to which William Hartnell
We make this point at the outset because any new Doctor Who book needs to justify its existence in a crowded market. Doctor Who – The Discontinuity Guide is a work of reference, but we don’t list every actor or feature plot descriptions. If you’re interested in Doctor Who then you will know such things already.
Our concern is Doctor Who as it appeared on screen, and what follows is a fiction, a game, that evolves from the stated facts.
Doctor Who was made by lots of people, most of whom didn’t know or care about continuity. Its writers were television professionals. Superb hacks in many cases, but still, ultimately, only interested in writing their four episodes. They weren’t normally bothered about how their ideas fitted in with something that was written 20 years previously, nor should they have been. Continuity often spoils creativity, as Robert Holmes proved, time and time again, ignoring things that he himself created if they got in the way.
It is the job of the fan to worry about such things, to ponder the three entirely separate explanations for the sinking of Atlantis.
The task we have set ourselves is to knit together what we see on screen into one big story. We make no apologies for this. As a matter of course any book on the fictional worlds of Doctor Who has to expand upon what is stated or implied on screen.
Sometimes references gel with a kind of beautiful serendipity, as if they were designed that way all along. Sometimes continuity has to be beaten into place with a sledgehammer. Whether you nod your head in agreement or throw the book across a crowded train bellowing ‘Unworthy of the diamond logo!’ it’s all the same to us. This is one of the reasons why we say to you: the game isn’t over. It continues with you. All approaches are valid. Dissent is good. Write and tell us your version and perhaps we’ll be able to use it if there’s a revised edition.
We do not want this book to act as a straitjacket, confining future authors. If you’re writing a Missing Adventure, take what you want and ignore what you don’t. Future continuity cops will just have to adapt to your version.
Despite the large amount of speculation contained within the book, we must stress that such ‘fiction’ is confined to square brackets and the boxed sections. Everything else is stated fact. During the course of writing this book we have discovered that many fondly-held fan beliefs are utterly mythical. Some facts within this book will send you scurrying back to your videos, but, believe us, we’ve checked.
We’d die of boredom if this were all that this book did, however, so we detail fluffed lines, visual goofs and unintentionally hilarious dialogue. This sounds very negative, but – and it’s a very big but – we’ve come to praise Doctor Who, not to bury it. (If it’s good enough for Dennis Potter to nearly write for, it’s good enough for us.) For a series that ran for over a quarter of a century and brought much pleasure to viewing millions, there have been times when it was difficult to find anyone with a good word to say about it. And sometimes the series’ fans were amongst its harshest critics.
A Doctor Who video is a cheap way of getting back a slice of your youth or glimpsing a world you have never seen but have heard so much about. But the harsh reality is that sometimes the video disappoints: the first few minutes produce a rush of nostalgia, but then a bit of bad acting slips in, or a set wobbles, or the first alien made out of egg boxes and tin foil appears. You feel cheated: it’s as if your childhood has been made counterfeit.
Such criticism seems to be an inherent component of devotion: to really love something you have to want to take it apart. So we detail goofs and blunders because they’re there, committed for all eternity to the merciless amber of video. We don’t list such flaws because of an ignorance of the nature and development of television. TV drama, in the 60s and 70s, was almost exclusively ‘event-orientated’, in as much as programmes were designed to be viewed once and then probably never seen again. Certainly, directors in the 1960s could never have envisaged a time when their work would be available for purchase in the High Street, let alone subjected to frame-by-frame scrutiny. Even if they had wanted perfection, the constraints they worked under made this impossible. Most mistakes just had to stay.
We only mock Doctor Who because we are here to celebrate the fan way of watching television, a close attention to detail matched by a total willingness to take the mickey.
We should explain our usage of the established titles for certain early stories (starting with ‘An Unearthly Child’ rather than ‘100,000 BC’). The only canonical titles are those that appear on screen. We maintain that the proper title should remain what the story is known as by most people (we are all familiar with the plays Hamlet, Comedy of Errors, Marat-Sade, but these aren’t the ‘proper’ titles). ‘An Unearthly Child’ is the democratically elected title for the first story, reflected by the BBC in their video releases. Calling it anything else might be a mark of strict accuracy, but it could also be a sign of elitism.
A few of the categories need more detailed explanation:
Roots: In this section we look at the other texts that have (or might have) influenced Doctor Who. We do not suggest plagiarism, but rather seek to highlight links that might not otherwise be obvious. We also note interesting quotations and derivative one-liners.
Goofs: This covers accidental cock-ups, intentional aspects that just don’t work, and gaping holes in the plot.
Technobabble: The science featured in Doctor Who falls into two basic camps. It’s either a fascinating piece of speculation based on the cutting-edge of contemporary research, or it’s utter, meaningless garbage. Star Trek fandom long ago coined the term ‘technobabble’ for just this type of thing.
Dialogue Disasters: There are times when Doctor Who dialogue makes you want to crawl under a stone and die. Here are the all-time greats.
Dialogue Triumphs: Thankfully, there are also times when the dialogue makes your toes tingle. We are especially interested in those lines that survive when stripped of their context and the acting performances that brought them to life.
Continuity: Our definition of continuity is wider than might be expected. Because the concept implies a logical progression – which is at loggerheads with the rationale of Doctor Who – continuity must be retrospectively rewritten. In other words, we need to do more than simply state when story B refers to story A. Therefore, under the heading of continuity we list anything of potential importance in the Doctor Who universe. A key fact about a particular race or planet, for example, has a place in Doctor Who’s continuity, whether it was referred to again or not.
The continuity section is further sub-divided as follows:
Links: Direct references to other transmitted stories not featured in other categories.
Location: The stated place (and time, if known) of the adventure.
Future History: Doctor Who’s vision of Earth history after 1995.
Untelevised Adventures: Incidents mentioned but not seen, including the Doctor’s habit of name-dropping, and various brushes with history.
Q.v.: An aspect of this story is discussed in a boxed section elsewhere.
The Bottom Line: As the phrase suggests, ‘Is it any good?’ Subjectivity is for many people a thing to be feared rather than cherished. There is a huge divergence on what constitutes good Doctor Who, and the opinions of the authors of this book reflect this diversity. However, it’s a nettle worth grasping. We have a reputation for writing controversial books, and we don’t intend to stop now.
25-minute episodes, b&w
1 ‘An Unearthly Child’
23 November 1963, 1 episode
Writers: Anthony Coburn, C. E. Webber (uncredited)
Director: Waris Hussein
Roots: Dixon of Dock Green, Steptoe and Son, Target Luna and its sequels, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the Doctor’s motivation for kidnapping people), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Fluffs: William Hartnell and William Russell interrupt each other whilst examining the clock in the TARDIS.
Goofs: Before Ian gets zapped by the console, somebody in the studio calls out a cue. Ian says that the Doctor closed the door, when in fact it was Susan who did this. At the end of the episode, the caveman’s shadow extends too far across the landscape.
Dialogue Triumphs: The Doctor: ‘This doesn’t roll along on wheels, you know.’
Continuity: The Doctor doesn’t answer to the name Foreman. [An invention of Susan, who took it from the junkyard name. I. M. Foreman would still appear to own the junkyard in 1985 (‘Attack of the Cybermen’), although he obviously does not keep a close watch on the place as the TARDIS was never discovered.]
Susan can read very fast, is a brilliant scientist, and calculates in terms of five dimensions [all Time Lord characteristics]. She likes 20th-century England. The children of the Doctor’s civilisation are advanced (he doesn’t count Susan as a child). There is no suggestion that she isn’t his granddaughter. She and the Doctor are cut off from their own planet, without friends. They’ve been in London for five months [probably mending the TARDIS: the Doctor speaks of replacing a faulty filament]. She was born in ‘another time, another world’, and says she invented the name TARDIS (in this and other early stories, TARDIS is said to stand for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’). [Susan was a precocious young Time Lady, and her name for travel capsules caught on.]
THE DOCTORS FAMILY
Apart from Susan, we never meet any of the rest of the Doctor’s family. He says that they ‘sleep in his mind’ (‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’) and that he isn’t sure if they’re alive (‘The Curse of Fenric’), although he does fondly remember an uncle (‘Time and the Rani’).
The TARDIS console can be electrified, and the ship has a malfunctioning ‘yearometer’ and a radiation counter. Ian and Barbara are knocked out on take-off [either the TARDIS telepathic circuits are also faulty, or they were thrown about by the TARDIS’s movements and physically stunned. The Doctor, aware of the need to dispose of the Hand of Omega secretly (see ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’), deliberately takes Ian and Barbara off with him. Thereafter the TARDIS frequently returns to Earth to allow the Doctor to ensure that the Hand has not been discovered].
Ian teaches science, shares Susan’s knowledge of the pop group John Smith and the Common Men, and owns a car. Barbara teaches history, and lives in a flat.
Location: Coal Hill School and 76 Totters Lane, London, during school term, Winter 1963. (The lab blackboard features the words ‘Homework – Tuesday’, meaning for Tuesday. This means that it can’t be a Monday (it would read ‘Tomorrow’) or a Tuesday (Susan explains about the Top Twenty but isn’t listening to it for the first time), and there is clearly school the next day. So these events must be set on either a Wednesday or a Thursday (probably the latter, since otherwise there would be science classes on consecutive days, which is poor timetabling). See ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’.
Untelevised Adventures: The Doctor and Susan have probably been in France at the time of the Revolution (1789–1799) and in England after the introduction of decimal coinage (1971). [However, Susan, interested in Earth, might have learnt these details while on Gallifrey.]
Q.v.: The Doctor’s Doctorate, ‘The Moonbase’; The TARDIS Scanner, ‘Full Circle’.
The Bottom Line: ‘I know that free movement in time and space is a scientific dream I don’t expect to find solved in a junkyard.’ Twenty-five of the most important minutes in British television. For a ‘family series’, Doctor Who’s debut is a remarkably grownup drama. As well as utilising directorial techniques that would never be seen again, the episode gained a unique aura from real-life events that no other Doctor Who episode would have.
2: The Cave of Skulls 3: The Forest of Fear 4: The Firemaker
30 November 1963 – 14 December 1963, 3 episodes
Writer: Anthony Coburn Director: Waris Hussein
Roots: One Million B.C. (1940), William Golding’s The Inheritors.
Dialogue Triumphs: The Doctor: ‘Fear makes companions of all of us.’
‘If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?’
Continuity: The Doctor smokes a pipe. This is the first time that the [chameleon circuit] has failed. The Doctor claims that if he had established exactly when they had landed, he could have got them straight home [using the fast return switch: see ‘The Edge of Destruction’]. The Doctor keeps a notebook with key codes to all the ship’s machines, and maps of the places he’s visited.
The tribe have lost the secret of fire. [They await winter with trepidation, not the ice age, which took so long to happen they wouldn’t be aware of the changes.]
Location: A stretch of barren land [in Africa or the Asian steppes between the ice ages (non-glacial Europe would have been verdant), 500,000 BC–30,000 BC].
Untelevised Adventures: The Doctor and Susan have visited the classical era [of Greece] and Europe between 1581 and the mid-18th century (the TARDIS has been disguised as an ionic column and a sedan chair). [Alternatively, the ionic column might point to classical revivals in the 18th Century.]
The Bottom Line: ‘That’s not his name. Who is he? Dr who?’ After the wonderful first episode, this is very dull. The Doctor, according to many commentators a sinister, ruthless man, is likeable, telling Barbara that he’s ‘desperately sorry’ for getting her involved.
2 ‘The Daleks’
21 December 1963 – 1 February 1964, 7 episodes
1: The Dead Planet 2: The Survivors 3: The Escape 4: The Ambush 5: The Expedition 6: The Ordeal 7: The Rescue
Writer: Terry Nation
Directors: Christopher Barry, Richard Martin
Roots: The Lord of the Rings, The Time Machine (especially the 1960 film), War of the Worlds, Dan Dare, Pathfinders to Venus (the Doctor sabotaging the TARDIS), Journey into Space, E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’. The harshly-angled corridors of the city are reminiscent of expressionist films, particularly Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari.
Fluffs: We have a ‘setisolidified’ lizard and the immortal line ‘We mustn’t diddle about here’ from William Hartnell. He also gets the words ‘drugs’ and ‘gloves’ muddled up [but then the Doctor is suffering from radiation sickness].
Goofs: The Daleks’ Geiger counter has ‘danger’ written on it in English [a translation convention]. There is a weird conclusion to a Dalek scene in episode two where they all start talking gibberish, and in episode six two Daleks say the same piece of dialogue (with minor differences) at the same time but at different speeds. Why does the Dalek cell contain a bed, something that they themselves would have no need for?
In episode three Susan runs on the spot while stage hands whip her with twigs. It is stated that the Thals have been travelling for four years, but by the next episode the figure is just over a year. Ganatus seems acquainted with 1960s Earth manners: ‘We won’t use one of the customs of your planet: “ladies first”.’
Why does Ian wait for Temmosus to finish his speech before warning the Thals that it’s an ambush? Towards the end it is obvious that much use is being made of photographic blow-up Daleks. In episode six a Dalek turns to consult some instruments and crashes into them. In the same episode, when Ian grabs the rock wall, William Russell ends up with a chunk of white polystyrene in his hand. When the Doctor shorts a Dalek control panel the explosion happens too early. Given that the doors of the city are electrically-powered, how can the Thals get out at the end after turning the power off?
Fashion Victims: The Doctor’s binocular specs are outrageous. The Thal men wear leather trousers with holes cut in them, and as for the women…
Double Entendres: ‘We’re all working towards the same end.’ ‘Now there’s a double meaning for you.’
Continuity: Susan says that, fed with the correct information, the TARDIS can be ‘piloted’ anywhere. However, the TARDIS instrumentation seems unable to pinpoint their location: the Doctor hopes to fix their position [in space and time] by the stars. He also takes readings from a bank of computers in the main corridor/control room. [If the TARDIS was being repaired previous to ‘An Unearthly Child’ then some degree of ‘running in’ might well be necessary: see ‘Time Flight’.] The TARDIS food machine is seen, as is the fault locator. The TARDIS fluid links use mercury.
The Doctor talks about the gulf between Susan’s age and his own, and says that he was once a pioneer amongst his own people.
THE FIRST HISTORY OF THE DALEKS
In this story, Thal records – a mixture of oral legend and historical texts – are said to go back about half a million years. The Thals were a warrior race, while the ancestors of the Daleks (Kaleds) were teachers and philosophers. About 500 years before the events of ‘The Daleks’ a thousand-year-old degenerative war between the two races came to a conclusion (‘Genesis of the Daleks’). Davros, the leading Kaled scientist, developed the Daleks as a ‘housing’ for mutated Kaleds. He was killed by his creatures after slaughtering the majority of his people. As a term of contempt, the Thals termed the (remaining) Kaleds ‘Dalek people’ (or – on one occasion in ‘The Daleks’ – Dals).
Despite these events, the war did not end until the Thals exploded a single neutron bomb. The destruction was so great that the Thals themselves were affected by the radiation. They committed themselves to pacifism as a result.
A group of advanced Daleks survived the explosion by leaving the planet in a hastily constructed spacecraft. Those Daleks left behind were early products of Davros’s experimental programme and, although many survived the neutron bomb, they remained trapped in the bunkers beneath the Kaled city for centuries. These Daleks were dependent on both static electricity and high levels of radiation, and their weapons were comparatively weak. The primitive Daleks were destroyed by the Doctor in this story.
(The Doctor never establishes the date of this story, and his comment in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ – that ‘The Daleks’ is set a million years in the future – is pure (inaccurate) speculation. By the time of ‘Planet of the Daleks’ (the 26th-century) the tale of the Thal’s penetration of the Dalek city has become a legend.)
The more advanced Daleks developed their own technology, which enabled non-Kaleds to become Dalek mutants. A large number then returned to Skaro and began working on time travel technology in conjunction with Theodore Maxtible (‘The Evil of the Daleks’). (The date is difficult to ascertain, but would have to be somewhere between the 19th and mid-22nd centuries.) Civil war broke out on Skaro, and for a long time the Thais were once more able to live there in peace.
One of the ships that escaped the destruction on Skaro crashed on Vulcan in the 21st or early 22nd century. (Therefore, they recognise the second Doctor, and the Earth colonists have not heard of the Daleks.) Mankind’s first major encounter with the Daleks came a little later in 2164. When the Daleks were defeated (‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’) they completed their time travel programme (‘The Daleks discovered the secret of time travel’) and attempted to turn this defeat into victory by going back in time and invading the Earth in the late 21st century (‘We have invaded Earth again. We have changed the pattern of history.’). The Doctor’s intervention a century later (‘Day of the Daleks’) was so successful that this alternative time-line did not happen. (The Daleks knew of the Doctor, but did not recognise his third incarnation, using a mind analysis machine to confirm his identity.)
Stung by their twin defeats, the Daleks pursued the first incarnation of the Doctor (‘The Chase’), reasoning that if his future intervention could be neutralised their plans would succeed.
Between the 23rd and 25th centuries the Daleks encountered the third Doctor in an untelevised adventure, and then developed a deadly space plague (‘Death to the Daleks’). (The Doctor is recognised in ‘Death to the Daleks’, which would seem to take place before ‘Planet of the Daleks’.)
In the 26th century the Daleks planned to destroy the Earth-Draconia pact (‘Frontier in Space’), and then conquer the galaxy with a huge, invisible army (‘Planet of the Daleks’).
On Skaro, meanwhile, the Thals ended a period of pacifistic isolation by developing space craft. Their first lengthy mission was to Spiridon, where, with the Doctor’s help, the Daleks were defeated again. (The Daleks in that story identify the Doctor.)
‘Mission to the Unknown’ states that for over a thousand years the Dalek campaign ignored the Milky Way completely. From approximately 3500 they waged campaigns in the Ninth Galactic System and in the constellation of Mir, conquering 70 and 40 planets in the two regions respectively. The Daleks also returned to Skaro, wiping out the Thals who lived there. They had hoped to receive a new direction from their creator, but Davros had not survived.
In the year 4000 the Daleks returned their attention to the solar system, forging an alliance with other races (‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’). Once again, the Doctor interceded.
Despite all these defeats the Daleks were never entirely wiped out and the Time Lords predicted a time when the Daleks could become the dominant life-form in the cosmos. As a result of the Doctor’s intervention Dalek ‘history’ was massively changed. (See ‘Genesis of the Daleks’.)
Skaro is the twelfth planet of its system. The Thals, going through a full circle of mutation, survived the aftermath of the war thanks to anti-radiation drugs. They became farmers.
The Daleks have statues in their city. They have been growing vegetables with artificial sunlight [do they still need to eat, or are these Varga plants? See ‘Mission to the Unknown’]. The post-nuclear wildlife on Skaro includes an octopus-like creature in the Lake of Mutations and Magnedons, lizards whose bodies, held together by an internal magnetic force, are composed of pliable metal. Only a corpse is seen, and the Thais can recharge their hand-lights with it. The Thals measure length in feet [a translation convention], but the Dalek countdown indicates that their units of time are longer than the second.
Location: Skaro.
Q.v.: The TARDIS Lock, ‘The Sensorites’.
The Bottom Line: ‘I wonder what they’ll be like.’ A game of two halves. The first four episodes helped launch Doctor Who in the public imagination, and are thoughtful and gripping. The last three comprise a B-movie trek through hideous landscapes in order to defeat the monsters: it’s as sophisticated as Flash Gordon. As a whole, ‘The Daleks’ is brilliantly directed, full of inventive touches and wonderful set-pieces. Only in the last battle do the Daleks disappoint.
3 ‘The Edge of Destruction’
8 February 1964 – 15 February 1964, 2 episodes
1: The Edge of Destruction 2: The Brink of Disaster
Writer: David Whitaker
Directors: Richard Martin, Frank Cox
Roots: Haunted house stories, The Time Machine. The claustrophobic atmosphere is reminiscent of The Outer Limits.
Fluffs: William Hartnell has a bit of a nightmare, completely throwing the others during one scene by saying the same line (‘It’s not very likely’) twice, and fumbling ‘You knocked both Susan and I unconscious’. He also omits the scripted explanation for the melted clocks.
‘You’d be blown to atoms by a split second!’
Goofs: ‘Fast Return’ (in English) appears to be written on the TARDIS console in felt-tip [a translation convention].
Continuity: The TARDIS’s power source is held beneath the central column. The TARDIS has an inbuilt memory of previous locations, and the console features a fast return switch (the malfunctioning of which causes the crisis). [The alarm sound the fault locator makes is an early version of the Cloister Bell.] Susan and Barbara share a very spartan sleeping area. Skaro is seen on the TARDIS scanner.
[Susan and the Doctor have a telepathic link, both to each other, and to the TARDIS: its stranger attempts to warn them seem to be visionary in nature. It takes the Doctor a long time to work out what’s going on, and he seems very afraid, suggesting some degree of unfamiliarity with the TARDIS. Ian would surely have mentioned had he heard more than one heartbeat from the Doctor (cf. ‘The Sensorites’).]
Location: Inside the TARDIS.
Untelevised Adventures: The Doctor and Susan have visited the planet Quinnis in the ‘fourth universe’ (‘where we nearly lost the TARDIS four or five journeys ago,’ notes Susan). [Since the Doctor seems not to learn about parallel universes until ‘Inferno’, Susan must mean ‘galaxy’ (cf. ‘Galaxy 4’).] The coat the Doctor loans Ian is said to have been given to him by Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Bottom Line: ‘We’ve had time taken away from us, and now it’s being given back because it’s running out.’ ‘The Edge of Destruction’ manages to flesh out the central figures at the expense of the plot.
4 ‘Marco Polo’
22 February 1964 – 4 April 1964, 7 episodes
1: The Roof of the World 2: The Singing Sands 3: Five Hundred Eyes 4: The Wall of Lies 5: Rider from Shang-Tu 6: Mighty Kublai Khan 7: Assassin at Peking
Writer: John Lucarotti
Directors: Waris Hussein, John Crockett
Roots: Marco Polo’s Travels, John Lucarotti’s Canadian TV series about Polo.
Fluffs: William Hartnell has an odd hysterical fit in episode one, laughing his head off for a full minute at all the troubles that have befallen the travellers.
Goofs: The caption slide at the end of episode two reads: ‘Next Episode: The Cave of Five Hundred Eyes’. In episode seven, Kublai Khan refers to backgammon as a game of cards.
Where are Niccolo and Maffeo Polo (Marco’s father and uncle who travelled with him)? The use of Peking is anachronistic (it should be Khan-balik). In 1289, Polo was anxious to leave China against Kublai’s wishes, so what’s he doing on the Pamir Plateau?
Dialogue Triumphs: Susan: ‘One day we’ll know all the mysteries of the skies and we’ll stop our wanderings.’
How Tegana should kill the Doctor: ‘With a stake through the heart.’
The Doctor on having the TARDIS put in the stables: ‘What does he think it is, a potting shed or something?’
At backgammon, amongst other wonderful wagers, the Doctor wins the ‘total produce of Burma for one year’.
Khan explains to Ping-Cho: ‘Your beloved husband-to-be, so anxious to be worthy of your love, drank a potion of quicksilver and sulphur, the elixir of life and eternal youth. And expired.’
Continuity: One burnt-out circuit in the TARDIS deactivates the lights, water supply and heating. Condensation forms in the interior as it would inside any box in a hot climate [the broken circuit also stopped exterior temperatures affecting the interior]. The Doctor couldn’t create another TARDIS (at least, not with the resources of 13th-century Venice).
The Doctor can play backgammon well, but loses his bet with Kublai Khan over the TARDIS. He can horse-ride, but has back trouble as a result. He also has problems with high altitudes and lack of water, and likes bean sprout soup.
Barbara knows lots of Buddhist history. Ian can ride, sword-fight, isn’t very good at chess and knows lots of O’ level science things, plus the fact that bamboo bangs in fire [he might have travelled abroad, probably on his National Service: see ‘The Web Planet’]. Susan uses words like ‘fab’ and is surprised by the idea of arranged marriages. She’s had ‘many homes in many places’.
Polo says that he’s seen Buddhist monks levitate cups of wine to Kublai Khan’s mouth. [K’Anpo?]
Location: The Himalayas, the Plain of Pamir, Lop, the Gobi desert, Tun-Huang, Sinju, a bamboo forest, Cheng-Ting, the Summer Palace at Shang-Tu and Peking, over at least 30 days (probably a lot more) in Summer 1289.
Untelevised Adventures: Susan has seen the metal seas of Venus.
Q.v.: The TARDIS Lock, ‘The Sensorites’; The Location of Gallifrey, ‘Terror of the Autons’; Venus, ‘The Time Monster’.
The Bottom Line: Obviously wonderful, but a little too loose and unstructured to be the all-conquering classic of repute. Then again, we’re denied the splendour of the costumes and sets. The device of Polo narrating map journey inserts is sweet, and the sheer length of time narrated makes this the longest ‘real time’ Who story.
5 ‘The Keys of Marinus’
11 April 1964 – 16 May 1964, 6 episodes
1: The Sea of Death 2: The Velvet Web 3: The Screaming Jungle 4: The Snows of Terror 5: Sentence of Death 6: The Keys of Marinus
Writer: Terry Nation Director: John Gorrie
Roots: Courtroom drama. 30s serials, quest epics, Celtic myth. Fireball XL5 ‘The Hypnotic Sphere’, the Labours of Hercules.
Fluffs: Susan asks the Doctor if they can go outside, to which William Hartnell
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The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide
Paul Cornell
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