The resolution to last week’s cliffhanger is brilliant: challenged to prevent Ian’s death, Barbara grabs a knife and holds it to Tlotoxl’s throat. It’s hard to imagine another companion until Leela having the wherewithal to do such a thing. It’s also the crux of the whole plot: Tlotoxl is suddenly placed on the back foot, and humiliated, which makes him even more dangerous and determined.

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The duels established in the previous episode start to get complicated here. The episode begins with a blazing row between the Doctor and Barbara – the first one they’ve had since The Edge of Destruction. The Doctor is furious at Barbara’s attempt to interfere in history – this one lapse has placed all of them in grave danger. I’m positive this scene inspired the 2005 episode Father’s Day, when Rose similarly tries to rewrite history and is rewarded with a massive dressing down by a furious Doctor. But just as the ninth Doctor can’t stay angry with a contrite Rose, so the first Doctor apologises for his harsh words and starts to look for a practical solution. Sadly, as in Father’s Day, words aren’t enough to repair the damage done by one intemperate act, and while the later story revolves around the SF conceit of temporal parasites feeding on the paradox, here it’s the rather more prosaic impact on Tlotoxl that’s the biggest problem.

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The TARDIS dematerialises from one pyramid and lands at another, but the similarities to The Keys of Marinus end there. Within the first few lines of dialogue the audience has been alerted that this is going to be another history episode. And a couple of lines later John Lucarotti has set up the whole thrust of the story:

SUSAN: The little I know about [the Aztecs] doesn’t impress me. Cutting out people’s hearts.

BARBARA: Oh, that was only one side to their nature. The other side was highly civilised.

SUSAN: The Spanish didn’t think so.

BARBARA: They only saw the acts of sacrifice. That was the tragedy of the Aztecs. The whole civilisation was completely destroyed, the good as well as the evil.

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The first half of this episode resolves the Millenius plot, and is the weakest part of the whole adventure. After last week relied on Ayden blurting out the truth under pressure, this week his widow, Kala, does exactly the same thing, revealing in the most hackneyed way possible a piece of information she couldn’t possibly have known UNLESS SHE IS THE VILLAIN. If Marco Polo did one thing well it was making it difficult for Susan and Ping-Cho to convince Marco of Tegana’s treachery on the basis of this kind of flimsy evidence, so it’s a shame to see Nation resort to it here. And not once – but twice, because Yartek reveals himself to Ian with a similarly clumsy slip of the tongue, claiming Altos is a stranger when he was a friend of the real Arbitan.

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The courtroom drama is pretty inevitable in any long-running series (for example, The Avengers had put Steed on trial for the murder of Cathy Gale six months earlier), and the early 1960s were a golden age for them following a string of high-profile trial moves, like 12 Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution and To Kill a Mockingbird. So it’s not surprising to see Doctor Who jump on the bandwagon.

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The inspiration has suddenly run out. Although the middle episodes of Marco Polo were repetitive, this feels like the first one that’s a collection of clichés plucked from previous episodes. Susan and Sabetha getting stuck in a cave desperate to make fire; Ian and Barbara having to navigate a subterranean ravine; a fur-clad figure looming out of the snow; statues that come to life – just like last week. The bulk of the episode is all pretty run of the mill. Even the Ice Soldiers are hardly the ‘stuff that makes legends’ – their surprised ‘milling about’ acting, not once, but twice is hilarious.

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This episode notably introduces that old Terry Nation standby: aggressive vegetation, as seen in practically every one of his subsequent scripts. But whereas in The Chase or Planet of the Daleks it’s just alien flora, here there’s a conscious attempt to explain it in scientific terms. The scientist Darrius (an old bearded man in a robe, like something out of a Christopher H. Bidmead story) has been experimenting with accelerating entropy, nature’s ‘fixed tempo of destruction’, which is causing the jungle to encroach on the temple ruins increasingly quickly and aggressively.

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Russell T Davies was a big fan of ‘vertical’ stories – many of his scripts feature characters trying to get up or down a building, or an environment, from the gridlocked motorway of New Earth to Adipose HQ. Davies thought this added a sense of movement and pace to episodes. Similarly, Nation’s 1960s Doctor Who serials tend to feature expeditions through dangerous environments, which create momentum and imply progress week on week. After the pyramids and rubber monsters of The Sea of Death, this week’s episode moves the story to a new location: the city of Morphoton.

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The impressive model shot that opens the episode immediately indicates that this is going to be another space adventure. Like Terry Nation’s last set of scripts, it starts out on an apparently dead planet – instead of a petrified jungle there’s a glass beach in an acid sea, and the regulars spend the first part of the episode exploring this alien environment and narrowly avoiding some of its dangers. But there’s a real confidence to this that wasn’t quite there in The Dead Planet. By this point the series was a success, and perhaps buoyed by this and the knowledge that the Daleks had been massively popular, Nation has written a very ambitious episode that’s very demanding of the production team, requiring a beach set, a giant pyramid, catacombs, loads of model work, and a new set of monsters. Luckily, they’re absolutely up to the job: this one looks as impressive as the tele-snaps from Marco Polo. The enormous Conscience of Marinus set is particularly good.

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In the end, it all comes down to the roll of a dice. Five weeks earlier there was a big chess metaphor, with Tegana relishing the game of strategy. Here, it’s the Doctor and the Khan playing a game of chance for the TARDIS (or Tardis, as most of the characters charmingly refer to it). Initially, these are the only stakes that are raised, but as the episode unfolds we learn Ping-Cho’s elderly fiancé has arrived ready to claim his child bride, and then Tegana, successfully turning the Khan against Marco and the time travellers, comes close to executing his strategy, slaying the Khan and claiming Cathay for Noghai.

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