A new director, Frank Cox, takes over from Mervyn Pinfield for the final two episodes of this adventure. He’d previously handled The Brink of Disaster, which was an immediate improvement over Richard Martin’s The Edge of Destruction. The difference is less perceptible here, mainly because Pinfield did a decent job with the earlier episodes, but I did notice more use of close ups (Kidnap begins with a close up on Hartnell and ends with one of Ilona Rodgers), and a neat cross-fade to represent telepathic communication. I also had a slight sense that this is a bit under-rehearsed – nearly everyone fluffs a bit (especially the Sensorite that takes an age to spit out the mangled line ‘I heard them over- over- over-talking’), and steps on each other’s lines.

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Watching episode by episode from the start, it’s fascinating to see the Doctor go from a slightly sinister antagonist for Ian and Barbara to the heroic central character in his own series. Aside from a slight, and perfectly reasonable grumpiness towards the flip-flopping First Elder, there’s not a hint of the selfish, suspicious anti-hero of An Unearthly Child. Instead, the Doctor’s pledging to find an antidote to the poison, cure everyone, and to top it off, go down into the caves under the Sensorite city to confront the problem at its source. 30 episodes earlier, he’d be plotting to steal back the TARDIS lock and leg it. Now, when he’s warned that ‘there are monsters!’ in the aqueduct, he’s positively excited by the idea.

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Back in The Forest of Fear we learned ‘fear makes companions of us all.’ The message of The Sensorites is ‘it’s suspicion that’s making them enemies’. After The Unwilling Warriors removed some of the peril from the Sensorites, Hidden Danger pretty much completes the job, transforming them from the sinister menace of Strangers in Space into ‘timid little people’ pained by loud noises, and wailing piteously when Ian turns the lights out. Even by July 1964, Doctor Who was becoming synonymous with monsters – after the success of the Daleks we’ve had the Voord, the Brains of Morphoton, and the screaming jungle. This means that the series is already able to play with the audience’s preconceptions of funny-looking aliens, so that the reveal that they’re civilised people much like human beings is a surprise that’s only blunted by the fact most of us already know the general plot going in.

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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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