Continuing my full Doctor Who rewatch (previously: The Edge of Destruction). Watched on The Internet Archive.
With only the fourth-ever Doctor Who serial, we already encounter two significant landmarks: the first true “historical”, and the first gap. The entirety of the elaborate seven-episode epic Marco Polo is missing.
Not to get sidetracked on the topic of missing episodes, but: it’s reasonable for the BBC to erase and reuse the expensive videotape format used during production, but to then later deliberately destroy all copies does seem inexcusably short sighted, especially since the practice continued well into the late 70s. There’s more lingering heartache about lost Doctor Who than almost anything else the BBC junked, including precious Beatles appearances.
The unofficial “Loose Cannon” fan-made reconstructions available on the Internet Archive are more watchable than I had been warned. For the uninitiated, these are the full original soundtracks, accompanied by surviving stills and production photos. Wikipedia states that there is an unusually copious amount of imagery for Marco Polo, so perhaps later reconstructions won’t go down as easy. Still, all that said, I found the experience much less engaging than the moving image, only slightly removed from a podcast or radio drama.
Despite the low-quality images, it’s apparent Marco Polo was an impressively lavish studio production, certainly compared to the previous three serials. I predict I will make the following observation for every historical to come: if they look better than the sci-fi serials, I’m imagining BBC warehouses full of props and costumes for almost any historical period the Doctor Who production team might want.
There isn’t much material for Barbara in this story. And seen through today’s eyes, it definitely reads as if Ping-Cho and Susan fall in love.
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