Free Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) by Robert Shearman, Toby Hadoke Page B

forgive that, I think, for the intelligent way that he steers himself into this new characterisation – and especially for that gorgeous moment where he admits to Ian that he’s lied to the women about how much time they all have left to live, then asks whether the schoolteacher can stand and face oblivion with him.
    T: The weirdness of this story seems to be bleeding into the real world – my TARDIS money box has, with no external stimulus or prompting, just starting randomly making stuttering sounds! I’m not kidding. This would only have been more perfect and strange had it coincided with Susan’s line that “ Everything can’t be wrong!”
    Meanwhile, the approach to doomsday is very effective – the lighting gets very atmospheric, helped no end by the recurring explosions that rock the Ship. It builds a fantastic, oppressive momentum that climaxes as the camera creeps up on Hartnell as he delivers his big moment. I sympathise with your mates who mock him (especially the slightly mad hand clasp he does at the end), but he looks so magnificent, and the scene is lit with such brilliance, I think it’s churlish to criticise. The Doctor is awed by the magnificence of the birth of a solar system, so of course he’s going to get a bit hysterical.
    But what’s important about this two-parter is that the regulars all pull together – Susan does some helpful counting, and the Doctor confides the truth about the oncoming oblivion to Ian, but most importantly Barbara becomes the brains of the outfit and pieces a solution together from the clues they’ve witnessed. (Just how the hell she does this, though, I’ve no idea – when all is said and done, does the evidence actually add up the way Barbara thinks it adds up? Clearly, she’s a dab hand at cryptic crosswords, and we’re not meant to question her methodology.) Later on, Jacqueline Hill is great when the Doctor tries to apologise for his behaviour, with Hartnell suggesting that a lot of the Doctor’s jolly bluster is to cover up his embarrassment at pesky interpersonal interaction. It lays the groundwork for so much characterisation to come.
    The fact that the production team did this story at all is amazing, and it beautifully complements the previous two adventures in terms of variety: so far, each story has been markedly different to the one before it. My knowledge of sixties TV is limited, but I like to think that the people making this programme went for broke and decided they could do anything, and did it wholeheartedly. For all I know, there’s a Z-Cars episode that’s told from the point of view of one of the cars, but I very much doubt it. This isn’t a story I’ll watch again in a hurry, but the fact that it exists is proof that Doctor Who is the flexible, crazy, unformulaic show we all love it for being.

January 8th
    The Roof of the World (Marco Polo episode one)
    R: Our first missing episode! And it’s hard, when you listen to the soundtrack of Marco Polo, and look at the telesnaps, and pore over the gorgeous colour photographs, not to feel cheated – that of all the stories to be wiped, this is Doctor Who’s first casualty. After two episodes stuck inside the TARDIS jumping at shadows, this adventure sounds sumptuous – and you want to see the pictures move. And there’s an irony of sorts, I think, in that following a story that purported to be about the TARDIS, we have here a story in which the TARDIS is the pivot around which the plot turns. The Edge of Destruction featured a TARDIS that was revealed as sentient, that was trying to communicate with its travellers, but it’s this episode that makes it seem especially magical and mysterious. It’s a flying caravan, a piece of Buddhist wonder and the key to Marco Polo’s freedom.
    And after the fairly simplistic portrait of goodies and baddies on the planet Skaro, it’s refreshing to have an episode in which the threats that the TARDIS crew confront are somewhat more ambiguous. The