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Season 01 / Story 005 / Production code E
The Keys Of Marinus
The Doctors?: William Hartnell
The Companions: Susan Foreman | Barbara Wright | Ian Chesterton
Other Main Characters:
Terry Nation: Writer
John Gorrie: Director
Verity Lambert: Producer
The TARDIS materialises on a beach of glass bordering a sea of acid on an island on the planet Marinus. There the four time travellers discover some transparent submarines, empty save in one case for a rubber suit bearing a small tear through which the acid has apparently seeped and dissolved the wearer. Stalked by the submarines' other rubber-suited occupants, the travellers eventually make their way to a large pyramid they have seen in the distance.
Inside the pyramid they encounter Arbitan, the keeper of the Conscience of Marinus? - a machine designed to eliminate fear and aggression from the minds of the planet's inhabitants. Arbitan explains that four of the five micro-circuit keys required to activate the Conscience have been concealed in different locations around the planet to prevent them from falling into the hands of a creature called Yartek and his followers the Voords? - the rubber-suited assailants - who have developed a resistance to the machine's influence and plan to turn it to their own evil purposes. The machine has now been modified to overcome the Voords' resistance and Arbitan, by placing an impenetrable force field around the TARDIS, coerces the Doctor and his companions into undertaking the retrieval of the keys. He gives them wristwatch-like travel dials which will transport them instantaneously to each of the keys' locations in turn.
In their quest, the travellers visit such exotic locations as the city of Morphoton?, where they almost fall prey to the hypnotic influence of disembodied brains and join forces with Arbitan's daughter Sabetha and friend Altos; a ruined citadel, home to Arbitan's friend Darrius, which is being overrun by rampaging plant life; a snowy wasteland where the dangers include wolves, an unscrupulous hunter named Vasor and a group of fearsome Ice Soldiers ; and Millenius?, a city where Ian is falsely accused of murder and learns from prosecutor Tarron that the legal rule is 'guilty until proven innocent'.
Eventually, having found the four keys, and also one fake, the travellers return to the island. In their absence, the Voords have murdered Arbitan and taken control, but Ian tricks Yartek into using the fake key along with three of the real ones and, as a result, the Conscience machine is destroyed - a fact about which the Doctor is not altogether unhappy as he considers that man was not meant to be controlled by machine.
6 episodes:
- The Sea of Death - 11 April 1964
- The Velvet Web - 18 April 1964
- The Screaming Jungle - 25 April 1964
- The Snows of Terror - 02 May 1964
- Sentence of Death - 09 May 1964
- The Keys of Marinus - 16 May 1964
Script available in print from Titan Books.
