The frustrating thing about this adventure is how nearly it resembles what are going to become one of the archetypal styles of the show. The small cast of human characters, isolated and besieged by threatening aliens, creeping round gloomy spaceship corridors and battling mental possession are all characteristic of half a dozen Patrick Troughton serials. While The Unwilling Warriors is much less formulaic than those later stories, it’s also much creakier, and Mervyn Pinfield doesn’t take advantage of some of the potential scares implied by the script. For example, the Sensorites are effectively creepy, especially when they advance, silently and relentlessly, on Ian and Barbara. But once they start talking, that menace dissipates, and it doesn’t help when the Doctor starts comparing them to cats and surmising that they’re afraid of the dark. You can’t really criticise this for not being made in 1966, but it does suggest the production team didn’t really know quite what to do with this.

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After the relentless excitement of The Day of Darkness, Strangers in Space is a much gentler episode – this, despite it featuring zombified human beings, a crashing spaceship and a creeping unknown alien force. It begins with a fairly lengthy TARDIS sequence that I find utterly charming, but seems like it’s there just to pad out the episode. After running through the different adventures the time travellers have had (like they’re Nineties fans having a chat at the Tavern), the Doctor has a giggling fit about an adventure with Henry VIII (I’m amazed Big Finish hasn’t made this one). The Doctor also gets one of his great, quotable lines: ‘It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.’ And then, rather than go anywhere with all these observations, the Doctor says, ‘However, now, let us get back to this little problem’, and the plot, which has been on hold while the time travellers reminisce, kicks back in again.

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Compared to Lucarotti’s previous scripts, for Marco Polo, this adventure is notably pacier, and places a lot more emphasis on the regular cast. Comparing the climaxes is informative, because whereas the TARDIS crew slipped away during the confrontation between Marco and Tegana in the earlier adventure, here it’s Ian who gets the showdown with Ixta. And whereas the last word in Assassin at Peking belongs to Marco, here it’s an exchange between the Doctor and Barbara. This perhaps represents a slight refocusing for the series, from visiting and discovering strange environments to the regular cast being adventurers.

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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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