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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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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