Old Who Reviews - Serial 004: "Marco Polo"

"No, my lord. They would not believe half the things that I have seen in Cathay. But what is the truth? I wonder where they are now? The past or the future?"
~Marco Polo

When I said I wanted to review all of the old "Doctor Who" serials, I truly meant ALL of them. Those of you who know a thing or two about the old serials would know that a great deal of them no longer exist. There was a great tragedy where miscommunication and standard practices of the BBC in the 60's led to the destruction of most of the serials from the first few series. While some of them have since been rediscovered and remastered and while more are found every decade, a great deal of them remain lost, including the vast majority of the Second Doctor's run.

So of course I'll be skipping these episodes, right?

Wrong.

For you see, even in the 60's there were rabid television fans. Unfortunately, since videotape had yet to be brought to a wide commercial audience, people could only enjoy old episodes of their favorite television shows during reruns. However, some geeks (and I use that term lovingly) wanted to be able to enjoy the experience whenever they wanted without having to wait for reruns, particularly for serialized shows like "Doctor Who" where continuity was important, so they would record the audio of entire episodes on tape and listen to them like a radio drama.

Obsessive? Perhaps, but thanks to these wonderful geeks, we too can enjoy these old episodes in a limited capacity, which is certainly better than nothing.

To improve matters, a long-standing group of fans called "Loose Cannon Productions" have collected the audio from all of the remaining lost episodes and timed them with promotional images and text descriptions for certain actions in order to give a more complete understanding of what's happening. The result is a sort of slideshow/audiobook hybrid that are referred to as "reconstructions" or "recons". Reconstructions currently exist for every lost serial, though since Loose Cannon is a fan group and they don't own any part of "Doctor Who", they don't actually SELL these episodes. You send them VHS tapes with return postage and tell them what serials you want (up to three at a time), and they send the tapes back to you with the recons you requested. BBC has officially released one or two reconstructions of their own that you actually can purchase (and Loose Cannon does not provide recons for any episodes officially sold by BBC), but for dozens of lost serials, Loose Cannon recons are the best and only option. They can be found as digital downloads, but Loose Cannon does not (and will not) sanction them and the legality of it is dubious at best.

OK, so now that we understand what a recon is, let's jump right into our first such serial, "Marco Polo", which is obviously about Cybermen.

No, not really, but that probably would have made this serial far more interesting.

To summarize, the TARDIS gets taken by Marco Polo to be given as a gift to Kublai Khan, forcing the Doctor and his companions to join Polo's caravan and thwart the evil plans of a power-hungry warlord.

One of the original intents of "Doctor Who" was to act as a sort of edutainment show to teach about science and history. While the first few serials mostly focused on scientific elements, this one focuses almost exclusively on history as a sort of fictional retelling of a part of Marco Polo's journey through the Gobi Desert.

I'm going to say this right now, if you aren't interested in 13th century Chinese history, then don't bother with this episode. It is well-written, has some good character moments (which I shall try to highlight in this review), but the plot is almost entirely focused on the historical characters rather than on the Doctor and his companions. The plot is more or less contrived to force the characters to stay out of the TARDIS and with the caravan as much as possible so we can learn as much about the historical characters and their politics as we can. And this serial is seven episodes long, roughly 3 hours in total. If the idea of hanging out with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sounds boring, just don't even bother, particularly since it's currently only available as a reconstruction, which already makes it a little difficult to watch.

Now that I've gotten all of the disclaimers out of the way, let's get on with the show.