Marco Polo

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Marco Polo

Author	John Lucarotti
Published	1985
ISBN	0 426 19967 7
First Edition Cover	David McAllister

Back cover blurb: Polo is on his way to the Emperor's court in Peking when he meets the intrepid time-travellers, for the TARDIS has landed on Earth in the year 1289. Marco Polo recognises in the TARDIS a means of winning favour with the Emperor. But in the end the Doctor has no one but himself to blame for the loss of his wondrous travelling machine - which he gambles away to Kublai Khan...

• Epic Journey in Ancient Cathay by Andrew Feryok
• William Hartnell by Jason A. Miller

Epic Journey in Ancient Cathay by Andrew Feryok 13/7/13

"Bear me witness. I wear the gold seal of mighty Kublai Khan and by the authority it invests in me, I do hereby seize and hold your flying caravan." He pointed his sword at each of them [the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan] in turn. "Be warned, any resistance to this decree is instantly punishable by death. Now return to your rooms." The Doctor looked at Marco and shook his head sadly. "Oh you poor, misguided, stupid, pathetic savage," he said and walked back in to the way-station.
- Marco Polo seizes the TARDIS, Marco Polo, page 81, Chapter 9

I am happy to say it was the special edition!

I was intrigued by John Lucarotti's novelization and thought that it was going to be a straightforward adaptation along the lines of Terrance Dicks books. Instead, like William Emm's Galaxy Four, Lucarotti surprised me and delivered a much different story from the TV version. All the same troubles are there from the TV episode, but he changes things in order to emphasize other aspects of the story. For instance, while the TV story is driven by the menace and manipulation of Tegana, his villainy is actually downplayed in favor of Marco Polo's paranoia, thus making him just as much a villain as Tegana, if not more so. This especially comes out in one of my favorite cliffhangers (episode 5) where the time travelers almost look like they are about to get away when Tegana suddenly takes Susan hostage and forces them to reveal their treachery, in stealing back the TARDIS key and attempting an escape, to Marco or Susan will die. In the book, Tegana plays no part in this scene and in fact Marco has already suspected Ping-cho's treachery in helping the time travelers acquire the key to their ship and is waiting with guards in the stables to ambush them when they try to escape.

The Doctor is also played up as the hero of the story much more than Ian or Barbara. In fact, a lot of Ian's heroics are instead given to the Doctor. I suspect Lucarotti did this in order to make him more familiar to 1980s fans who are used to a more heroic Doctor when in fact this was still the days when the Doctor was an anti-hero who observed events passively. Things like the use of exploding bamboo to scare bandits away or remembering the Khan's secret backgammon room so that they can sneak into the throne room and save the Khan from Tegana are now heroic acts performed by the Doctor instead of Ian.

Ling-Tau is also played up as a major character in the book whereas he was just a minor character in the TV episode. Instead, he becomes Ping-cho's romantic hero throughout the ending of the book. The Empress, noticing their glances, even has Ling-Tau promoted so that they can be married! The entire ending of the book is also changed. The subplot from the episodes 6 and 7 where Tegana attempts to kill Ian and Ping-cho at the Karakorum road and then has them imprisoned at the Khan's palace for "stealing the Khan's property" (meaning the TARDIS) has all been deleted. Instead, Lucarotti plays up the romance of Ping-cho and Ling-Tau and the backgammon contest between the Khan and the Doctor for control of the TARDIS. In fact, by the end, Tegana almost becomes a minor nuisance to the plot to be resolved rather than a major villain getting his comeuppance. Marco Polo also has a major change of heart and twice tries to give the Doctor back the keys to his TARDIS only for the Doctor refuse them since he is a man of honor and feels he must honor the Khan's debt after losing his backgammon game. I found this pretty incredible especially for the first Doctor. I could imagine the more polite and genial Fifth Doctor naively doing this, but not the conniving and crafty First Doctor. Thank goodness Marco and the Khan decide to give him the key back when he saves the Khan's life or he may have been stuck in Cathay for a lot longer. Also with the ending, there is no final duel between Marco and Tegana, and he is instead killed by an arrow from Ling-Tau. Rather appropriate given how villainous Marco was during the book and how much Ling-Tau was played up at the end.

On the whole, this is one of the best William Hartnell books, which could almost stand on its own as a book in its own right rather than part of the Doctor Who novelization series. Lucarotti grandly expands his story well beyond what we see (or these days hear) on TV and produces something which is an intriguing sidestep in the world of Doctor Who fiction much in the same spirit as David Whitaker's Doctor Who in An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. Doctor Who historicals don't get any more epic than this and if you like Lucarotti and this genre, you definitely should not miss this book. 10/10

William Hartnell by Jason A. Miller 14/1/24

In Doctor Who's first three televised serials, the Doctor was an antagonist for Ian and Barbara to overcome, as much an antagonist as Kal or the Daleks or the TARDIS's telepathic circuits, and if not for the presence of Susan, who bridged her grandfather with the schoolteachers, he might have been an outright villain rather than merely an antagonist. However, all that was dispensed with for Marco Polo, where, from here on out, there's never any doubting that the travelers are on the same team.

That being said, William Hartnell had a fairly minimal role in Marco Polo the TV episodes - absent almost entirely from Episode 2, and with Ian handling the lion's share of the on-screen heroics, such as resolving the Episodes 4 and 6 cliffhangers all by himself. Hartnell on TV in early 1964 was no longer an antagonist, but was not quite a hero; that would come later, starting in Episode 5 of The Keys of Marinus, but, in Marco Polo, not yet, not yet.

What the Marco Polo novelization does well, in restructuring the TV scripts as so persuasively described by Andrew Feryok above, is to restore the Doctor to center stage in 1984, in a way that Lucarotti presumably wasn't allowed to do when writing these scripts 20 years earlier. The TV episodes are great, don't get me wrong; they're brimming with philosophical debates and verbal swordfights. The episodes told their story through words, as much as through sets and costumes, because it was hard on the budget and studio to stage pitched action sequences. However, a TV script is supposed to run about one page for each minute of televised action, so Marco Polo, were it to exist in movie format (or, sadly, were it to exist at all), would be about 175 minutes long, but the novelization only runs 144 pages. So Lucarotti had two tasks in adapting the scripts. First, he had to restructure the TV episodes for a 1980s audience expecting heroism out of their Doctor. And, second, he had to remove a lot of dialogue, an awful lot of dialogue.

At times, the slicing and dicing of the TV scripts is painful. Much of Tegana's careful baiting of Marco into distrusting the TARDIS crew is pared away, as is Marco's poetic imagery when debating with Ian whether or not the TARDIS can truly travel in time. The book adheres to the structure of the TV story, at least through the Episode 4 cliffhanger, but there are much fewer words on the page than on TV, and in the case of Marco's "Captain's Log" updates, those are either turned into prose or jettisoned entirely.

But the restructuring of the story to fit the book and to render the Doctor more heroic mostly work well. The Episode 5 cliffhanger is frustrating on TV because it's a Gilligan's Island moment, Susan stupidly foiling an escape attempt in the TARDIS; the cliffhanger is resolved by Marco arguing with Tegana about the TARDIS crew's true intentions, and that's the sort of long debate for which the book doesn't have space. So the cliffhanger is restructured, as Mr. Feryok describes above, and works better.

I would have liked to see the scripted Episode 6 cliffhanger in print - the one that at long last confirms Tegana's villainy to Ian, a fact revealed to the audience at the end of Episode 1 but which was only suspected by the TARDIS crew. But the cliffhanger was problematic in that Ian should not have brought Ping-Cho, a 15-year-old girl, along on a rescue mission, and the arrival of Ling-Tau early in Episode 7, to break up Ian and Tegana's fight, is a bit of a deus ex machina. Lucarotti instead puts Ling-Tau into Episode 6 (Paul Carson was absent from that TV episode) and has him send Tegana directly on to Peking - which on TV happened after the Episode 7 cliffhanger; and it's Ling-Tau in the book who helps Ian liberate the TARDIS, but from Kuiju, not from Tegana. This sets up Ling-Tau as a strong romantic lead for Ping-Cho; Susan's sweet exhortation to Ling-Tau at the end of the book to "cherish her" is an improvement over the TV scripts, where any relationship between the two is merely implied. That makes the Marco Polo book an unabashed love story, which it wasn't on TV.

(Also, in the book, Ling-Tau is not a white actor in yellowface, and Kuiju gets to survive the Episode 6 cliffhanger - a happy ending denied to Tutte Lemkow in all three of his Hartnell-era performances. So those are improvements, too.)

As for the Doctor, here late in the Episode 5 material he gets an ambiguous but charming discussion with Marco, over wine, which is not present at all on TV (and the Doctor is restored to the Episode 2 material, too, by the way). In the Episode 7 material, the Doctor takes a more active part in the final thwarting of Tegana, and the return of the TARDIS to him is a royal gift; on TV, he had to be shooed out of the Khan's palace and into the TARDIS to escape on a second's notice. The Doctor of the Marco Polo novelization is given lines and actions that weren't present on TV, and you'd have loved to have heard Hartnell read these lines for the audiobook version, had he not died a decade before the book was written.

But I appreciate this novelization more than just for how it adapts the TV scripts. I bought the Marco Polo book in 1985, when I was 11 going on 12. My parents did not understand my Doctor Who obsession and made various efforts to limit my access to the show. I then had my mother read the Marco Polo novelization, figuring a historical would be more appealing to her than, say, the garish and lurid covers of the Planet of Fire or Caves of Androzani novelizations. Reading Marco Polo helped my mother "get" Doctor Who and come to terms with my obsession, and thus I've remained a fan of the show for at least another 35 years, without interruption. So as great as the First Doctor comes across in the Marco Polo book, William Hartnell is not the only hero of this story, for me.