With this episode, I am now officially annoyed with Susan.She’s only in the first quarter-to-a-third of this half hour, and her time is spent screaming, crying and whining. She contributes nothing to the flow of the story. Carol Ann Ford is a lovely person, I’m sure, but if Susan is supposed to be our identification character, she is failing something fierce at her job.
That being said...
Ian and Barbara investigate the site of the second key, a building in the middle of a dense jungle. The denizen within is a dying biologist whose experiments in....plant growth?...has caused the foiliage outside to literally come alive. As the jungle breaks through the walls of his lab, the two must figure out the seemingly random series of letters and numbers and obtain the key before it overwhelms them.
According to my esteemed colleague Dave Probert of Jackdaw Meanderings, this and the next episode in the serial is the 60‘s equivalent of NuWho’s Second Unit Episodes--Hartnell was on vacation, so Altos and Sabetha serve as the companions for the original companions, who do the heavy lifting in Hartnell’s place. Of course, imagine my consternation when these five characters proceed to...split up into smaller crews, thus making me ask why they couldn’t break up into three teams last episode. It’s all Ian and Barbara--Ian, incidentally, still wearing that really suave Asian get-up--as they dodge various traps set by the biologist (who I don’t think ever introduces himself, but is called Darrius in the end credits) and puzzle out the problem as plants break through the walls.
This leg of the search...isn’t very good. I was a little pissed, especially after her display of Action-tude last episode and her wish Ian wouldn't treat her as 'Dresden China', at how Barbara is a little too reliant on her screams once the couple take center stage. Between this and ‘The Daleks,’ Terry Nation has not shown much use for female characters as a whole and, while I acknowledge that 1964 is a way different mindset than ours, it’s beginning to stick out strongly. And evidence that Nation was a little on the lazy side grows with the use of the travel dials to vroop our school teaching friends out before things get too dire.
There is a wonderfully low-tech bit of business near the top of the show, when Barbara triggers a secret entrance way by retrieving a false key from this funky-looking dog idol. I did not realize the hands of the idol were the arms of an actor, stained to match the idol, until the trap was triggered. It’s a nice solution to a problem that I found kind of charming, a way to make things happen within the constraints of a very small budget. The phony vines being led by strings...well, not so much.
I am getting more and more convinced that ‘Keys to Marinus’ was a major inspiration for Graham William’s ‘Key To Time’ arc that encompassed the series’ sixteenth season. The business with Barbara finding the false key could be seen as an inspiration for the opening of ‘The Androids of Tara,’ arguably the best serial Williams ever produced.
You would think that the literally episodic nature of this serial would better disguise the length of this serial...and yet I’m tiring of this a lot quicker than I did ‘The Daleks.’ I guess we’ll see if I continue to tire as I slog towards its conclusion.
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