Here’s a vintage Who entry – from the series’ very first season, in fact – that proves the show was wholly capable of producing crap from the very beginning. Indeed, from now on, when I hear some old fogey complaining that the new series isn’t as good as the old, I’m going to point them in the direction of “Marinus” and tell them to keep walking. Apparently, “Marinus” was a last minute replacement for another story that fell through. It was scripted by Terry Nation, who’d written the far more successful “The Daleks” earlier in the season, but he seems to have spent little more than a couple days cobbling together this tale. Actually, I’m being a tad unfair, because one of the six episodes of this tale is actually very good, but we’re not quite there yet, so hang tight.In the first episode, which is actually titled “The Sea of Death” (this is back when every single episode of Who had its own individual title), the TARDIS lands on the planet Marinus, where the beach is made of glass, and the sea is made of acid – and a tab of LSD would certainly have done wonders for my perception of this story.
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