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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Every time this adventure seems to be about to grind to a halt, John Lucarotti throws in the next stage of the journey. But it’s always one step forward, two steps back. At the end of the previous episode the TARDIS crew looked on the verge of escape, but were dragged back into Marco’s trek. In Mighty Kublai Khan, three of the time travellers finally dare to go to Xanadu (where, disappointingly, no neon lights are shining), but another has to go backwards in order to rescue Ping-Cho, who has decided she doesn’t fancy the idea of marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather.

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It’s interesting watching this episode to see the evolution of Doctor Who’s approach to time travel. In John Lucarotti’s next script, he’ll introduce the idea that ‘You can’t change history, not one line.’ That’s often held to be the standard for Season One. But between the TARDIS crew showing the secret of fire (and humanity) to the Tribe of Gum, and the Doctor’s readiness, in this episode, to whisk away Marco and his retinue in the TARDIS to escape a bandit attack, I’m guessing the ‘not one line’ rule hadn’t been invented yet. That’s probably because the whole idea of changing history hasn’t really been touched on: for all that they’re prisoners and subjected to repeated conspiracies by Tegana, the TARDIS crew still seem to be treating this adventure as a mildly diverting holiday, and their need to escape never seems especially desperate.

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This episode starts to pay off the growing tension there’s been between Marco and the TARDIS crew. Tegana changes tack slightly from scheming to kill Marco and his followers to sowing the seeds of mistrust in the camp. This feels like a necessary development, because by now Tegana’s previous plots have all failed, and he’s starting to look as incompetent a villain as Wily E. Coyote. Instead of yet another episode where he lurks about having conversations with this week’s minion and cackling, he starts to drip poison in Marco’s ear, exploiting the Doctor’s awkwardness, and twisting Barbara and Susan’s actions to make them seem conniving and untrustworthy. There’s also a shockingly gruesome moment when he swears he’ll finish the ‘magician’ Doctor off with a stake through the heart.

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The first half focuses on resolving the water plot from last week. Lucarotti comes up with an ingenious solution: condensation inside the TARDIS, which is also an opportunity for Ian to give Marco another Science 101 lesson. I wonder if this is what Sydney Newman had in mind when he said the series should be educational? Later, there’s a charming scene in which Ping-Cho tells the story of Ala-eddin and the Hashashins, and Ian gets to tell us how the word assassin came about. It’s all very worthy, but quite how any of it advances the story is anyone’s guess. I listened to Ping-Cho’s tale wondering if there’d be some thematic link to Tegana’s plotting, but if there was it escaped me. At moments, Five Hundred Eyes risks being little more than a particularly interactive Coal Hill School class.

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There’s a chess game motif in this episode that is unsubtle but quite fun. Tegana sees it as a ‘fascinating game of strategy of war’ between two equally-balanced armies. The Khan is obviously Marco’s ruler, hence Tegana’s later line ‘Marco, can you save your king?’ Elsewhere, Tegana proves himself a cunning player of games, slipping out of the encampment after hours, then later, offering to brief Marco’s guards, and finally, playing saviour to the group when he promises to ride off in search of water. Sometimes Marco falls for it, sometimes not, but the rivalry between the two men is compelling, and makes for an interesting episode.

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It’s interesting that the opening minutes of this episode play with audience expectations by implying that the TARDIS crew are about to meet the abominable snowmen. Clearly there’s the footprint, which is based on Eric Shipton’s famous photos from the 1951 Himalayas expedition, and then Barbara encounters something hairy and scary that vanishes off into the mountains when she sees it. Given the 1950s interest in yeti, which sparked a Daily Mail-sponsored expedition, a Nigel Kneale BBC serial and a Hammer film, I’m sure a contemporary audience might have been expecting this to go down the route of another ‘monster’ episode. So, when the yeti turns out to be Tegana, it might have been a bit of a let down.

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I think this is an improvement over the previous episode because it’s a bit tighter and there’s a greater attempt to make both the TARDIS and the Doctor more threatening. The lights go dim towards the end, as the TARDIS approaches the brink of disaster, which made me sorry this wasn’t done sooner to add a bit more atmosphere. The Doctor and Susan turning on Ian and Barbara at the start of the episode is genuinely nasty, and Hill’s horrified reaction really sells the danger she and the unconscious Ian are in. It’s a pity this tension dissipates so quickly, as Susan almost immediately changes sides.

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