Episode 15: The Singing Sands

Synopsis:

Whilst Marco Polo's caravan stops over at Lop, the warlord Tegana procures some poison - determined to kill his fellow travellers and seize the TARDIS for his master Noghai...

The caravan soon sets off across the Gobi Desert. Water will be a concern but they have eight gourds full and this should be sufficient. The Doctor is in a bad mood due to Marco's control over access to the TARDIS, and the journey is troubling his bad back. He takes to a cart and sulks.

Susan shares a tent with Ping-Cho, and they talk about the journey. They spot Tegana walking off into the desert and decide to see where he is going.

A sandstorm suddenly falls on the caravan. The two girls quickly become disorientated and find themselves lost.

Marco tells Ian and Barbara that he has experienced such storms before and that the wind can sound like human voices, which can lead the unwary astray. They discover that Tegana, Cho-Je and Susan are all absent from the camp.

Susan hears what she thinks is Ian calling out to them, but it proves to be Tegana. He leads them back to the caravan.

The next day, the warlord cuts open most of the water gourds. This is not discovered until later, and Marco realises that they now only have enough water for a single day. The sabotage is believed to have been the work of bandits, who wait until travellers are near death before attacking and robbing them.

Marco knows of an oasis to the north, but this will take a week to reach.

They cut their water ration to the absolute minimum but their progress north slows each day. Tegana offers to ride on ahead and bring water back for them.

The Doctor has collapsed due to dehydration and Marco agrees that he can rest alone in the TARDIS.

At the oasis, with as much water as he wants, Tegana mocks the absent travellers as they perish from thirst...

Next episode: Five Hundred Eyes

Data:

Written by: John Lucarotti

Recorded: Friday 7th February, 1964

First broadcast: 5:15pm, Saturday 29th February, 1964

Ratings: 9.4 million / AI 62

Designer: Barry Newbery

Director: Waris Hussein

Critique:

This episode had a troubled production as star William Hartnell fell ill at the start of rehearsals. Fortunately he was well enough to come in for the actual recording, but his role in the episode had to be drastically reduced. He appears in a single scene near the end of the episode, and has only two lines of dialogue.

A major scene between the Doctor and Susan earlier on was given to Barbara and Susan instead, whilst other sequences were cut altogether. This major scene should have been of the Doctor reassuring Susan that they would get the TARDIS back. The Doctor would have been very rude about Marco.

The revised script sees the Doctor spend most of this episode sulking in a caravan, refusing to speak even to his granddaughter. 

This is actually a good thing for his co-stars, who get more screen time this week. It is an especially good episode for Carole Ann Ford, as Susan and Ping-Cho's friendship comes to the fore.

We see the travellers settle into life with the caravan, with Ian playing chess with Marco, Susan and Ping-Cho bonding, and Tegana and Marco discussing the latter's need to maintain a journal.

With seven episodes to fill, the story can afford to move at a leisurely pace.

Some questions arise from the script this week concerning Tegana's motivations. Why does he rescue Susan and Ping-Cho from the sandstorm, when he's intent on killing everyone in the caravan anyway?

And why does he get rid of the caravan's water, when he has just secured poison that he could add to it?

A single short sequence, lasting less than a minute, has the caravan travel for some five days. This is achieved on screen thanks to the device of Marco's journal narration, with an animated map graphic superimposed over the screen. Many Doctor Who stories cover a time span of only a few hours, perhaps only a couple of days at most.

This story has the longest time span of any in the classic series. Over the course of its seven weeks, the TARDIS crew must journey with the caravan for several months.

Trivia:

• The caption at the close of this episode actually stated that the next episode would be titled "The Cave of Five Hundred Eyes", but was this reduced to just Five Hundred Eyes when the instalment came to be broadcast. The longer title had been a working title only.
• The sandstorm scene mixed footage from Ealing with studio work involving a wind machine. Zienia Merton reported being blinded by sawdust until the next camera break, whilst Waris Hussein thought it wasn't very effective, thinking it just looked like TV interference.
• To date, this is the only episode of Doctor Who ever to make its broadcast debut on the extra Leap Year day of 29th February.
• A few days after this episode was transmitted, a young viewer wrote to Mark Eden warning: "Dear Marco Polo. Don't drink the water in the well. Tegana has poisoned it".