We, dear readers, are Doctor Who fans.

That means we can love the same programme, and then relentlessly squabble among ourselves for endless hours over the use and placement of a single word.

In which connection – it’s difficult to entirely see why this release is being classed as an “Unbound” story, given that stories with this cast, lifted wholesale from the 2013 (yes, really!) docu-drama, An Adventure in Space and Time, have frequently been listed simply as “First Doctor Adventures.”

Sure, now Stephen Noonan has now stepped in as the First Doctor in stories given such a straightforward label, so there’s room to argue that the Bradley cast have evolved into an Unbound status, but the amount of online chatter about the implementation of the U-Word is frankly enough to drive a deranged Dalek up the wall.

Let’s, for the sake of sanity and storytelling, do everyone a favour and decide we absolutely do not care. There are a couple of First Doctors in the universe – there has been more than one since The Five Doctors in 1983, some 43 years ago. If we haven’t learned to live with it by now, we probably don’t deserve the joy that comes in Doctor Who-shaped packages.

Besides, there are much better things to talk about when looking at Return To Marinus, by Jonathan Morris.

The biggest and best of which is – we’re going back to Marinus!

Marinus II – The Sequel

The Keys of Marinus is a gloriously weird six-part story from Terry (the Daleks) Nation, that took the time travellers on a series of mini-quests to find the eponymous keys, by which the planet’s always-dodgy-sounding Conscience Machine could be activated, and the people of Marinus saved from the predatory Voord – and, technically, from all the riotous wildness of their own freedom of thought.

As a piece of TV, it practically guaranteed engagement, because each episode’s quest was entirely different from what came before it, and what would follow it, so if you missed an episode, you were lost. 

What’s more, Nation was something of a TV Midas, and after launching the Daleks on an unsuspecting world in 1963, his 1964 creation, the Voord, remained lodged in at least the visual imagination of fans for many a decade. Skin tight rubber wetsuits will do that.

Not to mention the fact that Keys introduced the gloriously Flash Gordon-sounding Morphotron – your absolutely stone-cold classic ‘brains-in-jars’ monster.

So the notion of taking that same first Tardis crew back to Marinus, some decades after they left, is practically irresistible, retrospectively borrowing a trick from 1966’s The Ark to show the nature of consequences and the changes wrought on a civilisation by the arrival and open interference of time travellers.

The Marinus Dilemma

But Morris is faced with a dilemma in taking us back there – he has to hit enough familiar beats from the original to make it worthwhile setting his adventure on Marinus at all, but he can’t in any sense offer up a straightforward re-run of Keys, because nobody in the world needs one, and oh how the fans would carp were they to be served such cold and uninspired fare.

This being Jonathan Morris, you prrrrobably don’t need me to tell you he not only successfully walks this tightrope of expectation and thrill, he delivers a full Singing In The Rain dance routine on that knife-edge of potential preposterous failure, and long before the drama reaches its peak, you’re punching the air, chomping imaginary popcorn like it’s going out of fashion, and gasping at some of the twists he throws in just to keep us all guessing.

Speaking of twists, the cover art for this story is properly spoilerific – Big Voord in their classic black rubber combat-wetsuit, big Dalek front and centre. 

So yes, there are both Voord and Daleks in Return To Marinus, but that’s about all you can know for certain, because Morris puts in the intellectual yards to give you something that’s a lot more nuanced than a shooty-shooty baddie-off. 

In fact, Return To Marinus begins in semi-comic tone, with the time travellers arriving just in time to see themselves immortalised on stage in a legendary retelling of their first adventure on the planet. It quickly evolves though, into something of which Terry Nation would probably be proud, all emotional regulation to the point of authoritarianism by technological means, and the subsequent ethical dilemmas such a power entails.

Yes, the dubious Conscience Machine of Marinus is back for Round 2, and the Tardis travellers are pitched into a race against time (and in some senses, space) as they journey back around Marinus trying to find out who is responsible and what their larger (ahem) master plan might be.

The Quest Is The Quest

That’s enough to get the listener invested in the “episodic quest” mindset of the original Keys of Marinus, which checks a major box for this return trip – it absolutely has to feel like Marinus, and the quest for answers that can only be found by schlepping all over the planet does enough to deliver on that.

What’s more, Morris expands what we learned of Marinus the first time round, and gives us a new set of environments and people on the planet, making Marinus feel for the second time like a real, vivid, complex planet of challenges, viewpoints and social strata – itself a joyous cry against the use of something as insidious and monolithic as the Conscience Machine. How do you apply a single “conscience” to so many different cultures across a vividly diverse world? And perhaps as importantly, whose conscience do you dare apply, if anyone’s?

 

When the Voord arrive in the story, we’re treated to a deviation from their original TV appearance and nature in a way that’s very Big Finish – the Voord have been not only expanded in Big Finish stories over the years, but almost been the subjects of an Ice Warrior or Zygon-style rehabilitation. 

Going back to Marinus allows us not only to explore their culture and practice a lot more, but also to expand them from the Sixties-style monolithic representation that Nation originally gave them when he needed an out-and-out villain for his six-parter. 

In particular, it’s entertaining to hear what these somewhat more nuanced Voord think of Yartek, The Keys of Marinus’ lead Voord villain, a judgment which is delivered as a kind of companion-piece to the plays written about the time travellers. Time and distance from events, Return To Marinus shows us, changes the appreciation of those events – and the people who played a role in them.

Extermi-What-Now?

Annnd then there’s the Daleks.

In the interests of retaining some mystery about their role in the whole arc of the story, we’re not going to tell you what they’re doing on Marinus. All we’ll say is that the cover image tells only the surface truth about their involvement in the affairs of the planet and the resurgence of the Conscience Machine.

Morris delivers something that’s both technically logical and distinctly surprising, blending what we learned in Keys with everything that’s layered into the groundwork of Return. When you hear it, you’ll get a shock, which melts into a warm appreciation for both the sheer ambition of what’s been done, and the skill with which it’s achieved. 

Think of the Daleks as the after-dinner chocolate of armoured hate after the nourishing, nostalgic, surprising meal of Return to Marinus if you like.

Go ahead, try getting that image out of your head.

The pace of the story is such that – much like the original – it runs fairly fast for a large chunk of its mid-section, and then ends with a flurry of planet-saving action, but again, that’s balanced well between the demands of Marinus’ complexity and the demands of effective storytelling, so it never feels like you’ve been short-changed by the shift between  a belting pace and a sudden, satisfying conclusion

Return To Marinus charts a tricky course between delivering the nostalgia of a second story on one of the Sixties’ most evocative and richly populated planets, finding a new way of using traditional elements to ask relevant questions about authoritarianism and behavioural policing in our day and age, and the necessity to tell a punchy, fast-paced story for a modern audience. 

It does all of that well and elegantly, delivering an engaging second visit with the Voord that feels believable as part of the First Doctor’s adventuring – Unbound or not. Tony Fyler

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