Marco Polo - Five Hundred Eyes

After the enjoyable previous episode we get an episode that doesn’t quite match it. There is another narration from Marco Polo. There seems to be a bit more of the narration in this episode but it’s still a welcome part of the story as we get to know what’s going on inside Marco polo’s mind without him showing his true feelings to the others. After resting in the TARDIS to get away from the heat. The Doctor discovers that condensation has formed inside the TARDIS and due to this everyone can drink water. His excitement at this is extinguished by Marco Polo. Marco Polo’s lack of trust of the Doctor and his ‘caravan’ is starting to get a bit stale.

Zienia Merton gets a nice bit of dialogue where she gets to tell as story. She does it very well and I continue to be impressed with her performances despite the character not being specially interesting. Mark Eden doesn’t have a particularly strong episode here but I think that after two episodes it was only a matter of time before he comes back to the forefront of the story. Derren Nesbitt isn’t quite as menacing as he was in the previous episodes but like Eden, I think that he will come back in future episodes.

After his lack of presence in the previous episodes, William Hartnell makes up for it here. I thought that he was quite fun to listen to as he tries to pull the wool over Marco Polo’s eyes as he has another TARDIS key made after he gave the original to Polo. Barbara is suspicious of Tegana and whilst Ian, the Doctor and Susan listening to Ping-Cho, Barbara follows him. She’s very active in this episode as she is the to one that gets put into danger. Judging by the telesnaps, the scene in the caves would have looked very good. William Russell doesn’t have a whole lot to do. His most interesting contribution comes when he talks about the English translation of Assassin. Carole Ann Ford’s involvement is fairly good and at least she doesn’t act child like which has been a recurring theme in her performances in recent episodes. She shrieks at the end but its kind of justified.

It’s another episode where there’s an awful lot of not much happening but then once the action moves into the caves that it is where it became entertaining drama. The cliffhanger was ok. It had a certain amount of drama to it but not very much and it doesn’t work as well on audio. It ends with Susan screaming and noticing the eyes in the paintings are moving but to be honest it was Barbara’s predicament that I found more interesting. So far the story is continuing to maintain my interest, it didn’t have the same sort of excitement that the previous episode had but once it got going then I started to enjoy the episode more.