Series 1 Episode 23: The Screaming Jungle

Serial: The Keys of Marinus
Episode: 3 (The Screaming Jungle)
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: Terry Nation
Director: John Gorrie
Producer: Verity Lambert
Original Air Date: 25/04/1964

IANDIANA JONES AND THE BABS CRUSADE (and other stories)

In which Barbara and Ian fall foul of a handsy stone idol, there are more booby-traps than you can shake a pickaxe at, the first meeting of the Jungle Branch of the Marinus Book Club takes place, and no fucking of the patriarchy goes unpunished.

Earplugs at the ready, everyone, because Susan is having some sort of telepathic episode where she can hear the jungle screaming. A screaming jungle, if you will.

Enter the rest of Team Tardis (minus the Doctor plus Altos and Sabetha…which I’m going to call Team Tassles in honour of Altos’s ludicrous hemline); Ian put Susan into a half-Chesterton (only one shoulder shaken) in an effort to get her to tell them what’s spooked her so much; Susan decides to cuddle Barbara instead.

When children play favourites...

Sabetha, rather ominously, pronounces the jungle ‘a dead place’. Altos has found a hidden archway covered in creepers behind which he reckons there must be a key.

Meanwhile, Susan and Barbara get to have another lovely (albeit brief) Susan and Barbara Chat in which we get another glimmer of all-too-rare character development for our Poor Wand’ring One:

SUSAN: And was grandfather all right?
BARBARA: Yes.
SUSAN: I didn't want to stay until the last possible moment. I…I don't like to say goodbye.
BARBARA: No, I know.

Well my heart just broke a little bit. I love that we get this continuity from Marco Polo – a serial during which a) there was that gorgeous conversation between Susan and Barbara in the desert where the former seemed genuinely alarmed at the prospect of having to say goodbye to the latter at some point in the nearish future and b) Susan had to say goodbye to Ping-Cho. I also love that because Barbara was a) obviously a part of that earlier conversation and b) the first member of Team Tardis to see how important Ping-Cho was to Susan, she gets it straight away. Her ‘I know’ isn’t just a platitude to calm Susan down; it’s a moment of real, understated understanding between the two women. Good script editing, guys.

Ian reckons they should all go take a walk around the walls to see if they can find an entrance that isn’t covered in creepers that would take a day to hack down. Altos and Sabetha are eager beavers and want to come, too. Barbara, however, out of what I’m going to assume is sensitivity towards the still rather shaken Susan, tells Ian she’s going to stay behind and look for branches etc. in case they have to force their way through that wall. Ian, rather patronisingly, tells her that’s ‘a good idea’, and compounds his paternalistic asshattery by telling her ‘but don’t do anything until we get back’. Then this happens:

YES BARBARA! I’m so, so glad this is actually being said and that we do (eventually and after a bit of a shaky start) get a flash of Susan’s wicked goldfish side when she seems rather taken with the idea of rebelling against the patriarchy. It’s not that long since the two of them were verbally sticking it to Marco Polo and Tegana on the subject of Ping-Cho’s creepy forced marriage after all.

Anyway, there are more tantalising hints as to Susan’s character and abilities when Babs asks her what did happen back there:

SUSAN: Well it was a sound, a noise, like…like tapping and…and whirring mixed up with a sort of screeching. I…I've heard it before.
BARBARA: Where?
SUSAN: Well that's just it, I can't remember. I…I just recognise it as…being something evil.

Well that IS tantalising. I think this is what Carole Ann Ford meant when she complained about the fact that Susan was meant to have these fantastic telepathic abilities but they never really got developed despite there being early hints at that sort of thing. I know she gets to stretch her powers in The Sensorites, but otherwise I agree about it being a total waste. I want to know where Susan’s heard that tappy-screechy-whirry Sound of Evil before. Somebody please take Capaldi down this road.

Barbara, however, doesn’t seem to be as interested in all this as I am, and moves on rather unceremoniously to the subject of the vegetation covering the opening in the wall beyond which the key supposedly lies. But while Babs goes blithely on about how the vegetation ‘isn’t half as dense as it looks’, a creeper starts winding its way around Susan’s legs! SENTIENT FOLIAGE ALERT!

Susan screams for Barbara, who, fresh from her quadruple murder in Morphoton, wastes no time in pulling the creeper away and smashing it with a rock.

Barbara Wright: violent gardener

Which one would assume means Barbara thinks it’s alive. But no, she’s now being Teacherishly Firm with Susan and telling her to stop with all this OMG IT WAS ALIVE nonsense because it was ‘just your imagination’. Poor Susan. What is it with jungles and nobody believing her about having been menaced by something sentient?

Anyway, the combination of the Chesterton Method and the Cuddle Method seems to calm Susan down, and the two of them decide to concentrate on getting into the Secret Garden. Which they do with ludicrous ease, as it turns out you don’t have to hack through the creepers, you just have to push them aside and move past them. Which is probably true of human creepers, too.

Intrepid Barbara finds herself in a foliage tunnel, at the end of which is an idol with suspiciously human-looking arms. Susan begs her not to go any further, but Babs seems to be enjoying her ‘fuck the patriarchy’ moment too much to heed her. As if to reinforce this, Ian chooses this very moment to return and protest at Barbara’s refusal to obey his order to ‘wait until we got back’. Barbara, however, is unrepentant. In fact she’s only gone and found the key hanging on top of the idol, and what’s more can manage perfectly well by herself, thank-you-very-much, clambering triumphantly onto the idol’s lap and retrieving the all-important micro-circuit.

But OH BLOODY HELL we should’ve known it was all too good to be true. Have we not learned from Marco Polo that women who wander off alone in defiance of the orders of their nearest male authority figure are to be punished by the Scriptwriting Gods and ought to expect any manner of hideous misfortune to befall them (up to and including almost being murdered by a man who won the privilege of slitting your throat in a game of dice)? Because no sooner has Barbara crowed in triumph than this happens:

OH THOSE SPECIAL EFFECTS. I’ll bet that handsy idol is in some way related to Sutek’s handsy chair. Perhaps they’re cousins.

Anyway, prop-related hilarity aside, it’s incredibly annoying that everything Barbara has said about Ian being needlessly overprotective has essentially been undermined by the fact that minutes later she’s screaming his name and being Indiana Jonesed into unknown peril having had the presumption to act on her own initiative.

Ian is, alas, too slow, and is immediately both angry and panicky. He storms back out into the open because he ‘can’t think in here’, and, as is usually the case when Babs is missing presumed imperilled, any capacity he may have had for seeing the bigger picture goes out of the window:

ALTOS: At least we've found the micro-key.
IAN: Oh, I don't care about that now. The only thing that matters is getting Barbara out of there.

Oh Ian. I’m with Babs in that I think he’s downright overbearing at times (in case you hadn’t noticed), and maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but it’s almost endearing how he immediately goes to pieces every time he thinks Bae-bara is in danger. He’s also hilariously honest about his priorities. Though in fairness, it’s not like Team Tardis was ever invested in their quest beyond a ‘let’s find these sodding keys so we can get the Tardis back’ level.

At this point, Sabetha becomes the voice of reason: if Babs was wearing her travel dial – which she was – she can always use it to pop away from whatever danger she’s in…presuming she’s not been incapacitated in some way. Ian is still panicking, but Susan’s spotted something – the idol’s rotated back around, arms open, and no sign of Barbara! Ian has a brief moment of thinking he’s Hamlet or something as he turns away from his companions towards the camera to murmur that Bae ‘may have been injured, or even…’ and Sabetha adds fuel to his fears by speculating that Babs might still be in mortal peril even if she did use the travel dial because they don’t know what danger awaits them there either. Nice one, Sabetha.

The upshot is, Ian’s staying to check whether Barbara’s on the other side of the trap wall, and the others are jumping ahead. Susan wants to stay; Ian thinks not; Altos takes Susan under his wing. And OH MISFORTUNE UPON MISFORTUNE, Sabetha’s noticed that Barbara’s key is actually a fake, so Ian’s got to try and find the real key on top of everything else.

Resignedly, Ian allows himself to be fondled by the grabby idol:

Those hands never get old.

Anyway, on the other side of the wall is an overgrown courtyard full of statues and the like. One of them is a big chainmail-clad warrior with a very large axe, and when Ian steps on a trap flagstone IT COMES TO LIFE AND RAISES ITS AXE AND IS ABOUT TO BEHEAD HIM. Cripes. But HURRAH FOR BARBARA (WHO IS NOT DEAD) and who yells a warning just in time; Ian ducks, and the axe thuds into the stone floor. He runs over to Babs and is all for dwelling on the fact that she saved his bacon, but she’s got no time for that shit because this whole place is ‘one big booby trap’ and if he hadn’t turned up in half an hour she’d have turned the travel dial. Ian fills her in on the key situation, and they decide to ‘take it very slowly’…'it’ being the search for the real key, obvs.

They decide the best place to look is in the building, but the door is locked and can’t be broken down. Barbara notes that the vegetation ‘seems to be trying to get in’; Ian, having learned from his mistakes of bygone serials, doesn’t pooh-pooh the idea but rather seems more determined than ever to ‘get the micro-key and get out of here’. Babs sends him off to get an iron bar to break down the door; as she stands waiting the creepers in the background get longer.

Meanwhile, inside the building, an old man dressed like a monk is creeping (get it?) on the courtyard situation and shuffles into action.

Outside, the door opens, apparently of its own accord. The creepers that had been growing behind Babs move themselves obligingly out of the way as she moves to investigate. She calls for Ian, who says he’ll be right with her (once he’s finished faffing about with iron bars). She goes in anyway. Which by the Laws of Telly can’t end well.

Sure enough, no sooner has Babs wandered inside than a net falls from the ceiling, flattening her hairdo and apparently weighing her to the ground despite its not being weighted (good job, J-Hill).

As she turns herself onto her back and looks up, what should she see but…HOLY INDIANA JONES it’s a ceiling full of daggers!

Well actually they look more like plastic birds’ feet, but still, YIKES. Also I’m pretty sure spiked ceilings and revolving idols (and guys with monkeys and eyepatches) are ten-a-penny tropes in action films, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that there’s literally nothing in Indiana Jones that wasn’t in some way nicked from Doctor Who. That said, the spiked ceiling in Indiana Jones and the Very Racist Portrayal of Indian People Temple of Doom looks like it could do a lot more damage than the shoestring budget sixties kids’ TV show version.

Anyway, she lets out a blood-curdling scream, and Ian springs to action. Ever the practical person, he decides to take along this lethal-looking pickaxe he’s found on the floor, but some idiot has chained it to the ground. He tugs at it in frustration…which triggers another trap! A portcullis-type thingie clangs down in front of him, meaning he can’t get to Babs in time! Oh no! More haste, less speed, Ian. He grabs the discarded pickaxe and immediately starts trying to crowbar his way out.

So effort. Much try.

Meanwhile, Babs is still netted on the floor yelling ‘help me, Ian’. I know she’s panicking and disorientated and there are ceiling spikes, but she absolutely has time to roll herself out of danger, net or no net. However, seeing as they spent all their budget on foliage this week, I suppose they had no option but to throw the net from the back of a football goal over Jacqueline Hill and tell her to act as though it had weights on the end or something.

Fortunately for Babs, the ceiling is whisked away at this point to reveal one Darrius, the old monk who presumably set all the traps. There’s a reasonably hilarious scene in which he doggedly and dodderingly asks her a) who she is b) what she is (seeing as she’s not a Voord…though what do Voords actually look like?) and c) what interest she has in the keys. Babs, however, just wants someone to give her a hand with this bloody netting, protesting ‘I can’t talk to you like this’, and ends up having to remove it by herself as she attempts to convince the hysterically slow-talking Darrius that Arbitan sent her. She also wants to know what he’s done with Ian, seeing as how a Universe in which Ian does not immediately come rushing to Barbara’s aid is a Universe in which Ian is incapacitated in some way. She gives Arbitan her travel dial and he takes it away to check whether it’s been programmed correctly; if it has, he’ll know it’s from Arbitan. Babs continues to extricate herself from the net.

Don't look now, Babs, but your hair is...interesting.

Outside, better late than never, Ian manages to crowbar one of the…er…bars out of the way. He’s really rather adorably pleased with himself.

SUCCESS!

But oh how the tables turn! Darrius is now calling for help, and is being throttled by a creeper that’s made it inside the building! Babs is now almost entirely net-free, and she directs Ian into the room with the choking geriatric in it. Ian hits the creeper with a stick until it lets go, and Darrius is freed. He’s also raving: ‘It's coming again. The jungle is coming, when the whispering starts. It's death, I tell you, death…’

Blimey.

Later on, Darrius is coming round…only for Barbara to say he’s probably dying. Because of reasons? Ian asks Slowly and Loudly about the key. Darrius mumbles about how only those warned by Arbitan could have avoided his traps, which begs the question of why the hell Arbitan didn’t warn them about the traps. After further prompting, and in lieu of elaborating, Darrius gives our heroes the following information: ‘D…E…3…O…2.’ He burbles about the whispering starting when the darkness comes and promptly snuffs it.

Out with the old and...well. Just out with the old.

Hardened adventurers that they now are, Barbara and Ian put a blanket over the corpse and move on to the next bit of the story. They haven’t even checked to see whether Darrius is actually dead – he could just have passed out, but no, Ian closes his eyes and Babs covers his face and the move the hell on. Clearly he’s dead to them at any rate.

Ian reckons C3PO DE3O2 could be the combination to a safe. Which is unlikely in Space, but they also have plenty of other Earth Stuff around so actually why not? The next room is a botany lab, and lo and behold it does indeed contain a safe! Ian tries the combination but it doesn’t work. Babs reckons seeing as how Darrius was a trap-happy old coot the obvious place is probably the last place the key would be. They start going over the room.

Later on, something beautiful has happened: Barbara and Ian are reading books to each other. Babs is wondering what all that business about the darkness and the whispering was all about and whether it has anything to do with Susan’s telepathic episode, but Ian is more concerned with geeking out over Darrius’s biology experiments which are recorded in his diary:

IAN: Biology seems to have been his field as far as I can make out.
BARBARA: Well, judging by the specimens in here, I'd say he was very successful.
IAN: Yes. Last couple of entries are a bit strange. All about the balance of nature and increased destructive forces. Listen to this. "Nature has a fixed tempo of destruction, water dripping on a stone may take a thousand years to produce any sign of wear."
BARBARA: Well that's not very original.
IAN: It is if you could speed up everything. The wear on the stone could happen in one day.
BARBARA: But that's ridiculous!
IAN: Is it? He didn't seem to think so. He ends up by saying, "The growth accelerator has changed nature's tempo of destruction entirely."
BARBARA: Yes, well that may all be very fascinating…but we are supposed to be looking for the combination to that safe.
IAN: (Laughing.) All right, all right.

Oh that’s gorgeous. This is a lot like the Barbara and Ian we met in Ian’s lab at the very beginning of the series. Barbara is hilariously snarky, and I love that Ian is actually taking a genuine interest in the science aspect. It’s also interesting that this sort of brings their fields together and I can’t believe I’m about to say this because academic buzzwords make me die inside but I’d love to see more of this interdisciplinary approach to temporality in the show – Ian geeking out over geographical time scales only to be brought down by Barbara ‘yeah have you ever heard of longue durée’ Wright and a dose of practical thinking that brings the here-and-now back into sharp focus. (I’m rambling. Clearly I also need a Barbara to bring me back down to Earth.) Also this raises the question of whether the overgrown jungle is one of Darrius’s experiments gone wrong, because it certainly sounds like it.

Anyway, they both sit (or stand) and read for a while.

Which is beautiful.

Until a noise from outside makes them look up in comical synchronicity.

It’s the whispering! Barbara reckons this must be what Susan heard, and Ian points out that what she said about the jungle trying to get in earlier must be right; Babs immediately tries to discredit her own theory, possibly out of panic, but at any rate the plants are now definitely coming to get them. Because of the tempo of destruction having been accelerated. Fucking Darrius.

And OH NO a creeper has wound itself around Barbara’s ankles! She screams, and there’s a hilarious little scene of just their feet where W-Russ is mostly trying to get the creeper away while J-Hill just keeps shoving it back into shot to make it look like it’s attacking her. Actor-led SFX for the win.

When you're making out but some creeper's in the way.

The creeper is vanquished, but Ian has knocked over a jar in the process…a jar with a chemical formula on it. LIGHTBULB! DE3O2 must be a chemical formula! Admittedly it’s not one I’ve ever heard of, seeing as how to my knowledge there’s no D and no E in the periodic table, but hey, this is an alien planet and they probably have different elements or different names for them at any rate. It also explains why Ian hadn’t thought of it earlier.

Babs locates the correct jar, finds the key, and scurries back to Ian, who is busy smacking foliage out of the way.

They turn their travel dials and…OOOOOOOOOOOOOH (that was meant to be ethereal singing) they arrive in a sub-zero snowy wasteland. Babs immediately sinks to the ground, too cold to move, while the far more scantily-clad Ian entreats her to move so they can find shelter and not…y’know…freeze to death.

SNOWY CRIPES WILL OUR BROTP PERISH IN A WHIMPER OF HYPOTHERMIA? HAS TEAM TASSLES ALREADY BEEN WIND-MACHINED TO DEATH WHILE THE TEACHERS WERE BUSY PLAYING JACKANORY? HAS ALTOS ALREADY LOST HIS LEGS TO THE COLD? WILL SUSAN GET TO HAVE MORE FUN BEING TELEPATHIC? WILL IAN FIND A MORE SUITABLE JACKET? WILL BARBARA FINALLY GET TO FUCK THE PATRIARCHY WITHOUT BEING PUNISHED BY THE WRITERS? WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS D AND E? WILL THE SCREAMING JUNGLE EVENTUALLY CONSUME THE ENTIRE PLANET ONCE TEAM TARDIS DEMATERIALISES, RENDERING THE WHOLE THING WITH THE VOORDS AND THE KEYS AND THE REVOLUTION IN MORPHOTON UTTERLY MEANINGLESS? IS THIS WHERE BABY KRYNOIDS COME FROM?

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? Indeed it does!

Is the gaze problematic? Not especially.

Is/are the woman companion(s) dressed 'for the Dads'? No. Altos, on the other hand...

Does a woman fall over/twist her ankle (whilst running from peril)? No.

Does a woman wander off alone for the sole dramatic purpose of getting into trouble so she can be rescued later? AND HOW.

Is/are the woman companion(s) captured? Yup. In a net, no less.

Does the Doctor/a man companion/any other man have to rescue the woman companion(s) from peril? Yup.

Is/are the woman companion's/s' first/only reaction(s) to peril gratuitous screaming? Barbara's screaming is a tad gratuitous this week.

Does a woman companion go into hysterics over something reasonably minor? Susan a teeny bit but she can hear evil pant noises in her head so I suppose that's not so minor.

Is a woman 'spared' the ordeal of having to do/witness something unpleasant by a man who makes a decision on her behalf/keeps her deliberately ignorant? Ian is pretty adamant about keeping Susan and Babs a long way from the action.

Does a man automatically disbelieve or belittle something a woman (companion) says happened to her? No actually. Barbara gets a bit sharp with Susan over the whole 'I hear Evil Vegetation' thing, but Ian accepts Barbara's theory about the jungle trying to get in without question. He's learning.

Does a man talk over a woman or talk about a woman as though she isn't there? Not as far as I can recall.

Does the woman companion have to be calmed/comforted by the Doctor/a man companion/a man? It's mostly Barbara on 'everyone calm the fuck down' duty this week.

Is a woman the first/only person to be (most gratuitously) menaced by the episode's antagonist(s)? Yup. Barbara. Ian has to dodge a couple of traps, but when it comes to being menaced, it's all about terrorising poor old Babs.

Is a man shamed into doing/not doing something because the alternative is a woman doing/not doing something? No.

Does the woman companion come up with a plan? Sabetha shows a lot of short-term initiative, Babs is intrepid, and Babs is the one who suggests looking anywhere but the safe, but the plans this week are mostly short-term and involve Ian trying to find Barbara.

Does the woman companion do something stupid/banal/weird which inspires a man to be a Man with a Plan? Nope. Though smashing a jar whilst playing foliage footsy with Babs makes Ian realise DE3O2 is a chemical formula.

Does a woman come up with a theory and is it ridiculed by the Doctor/a man? Yes and no. 

Does a woman call the Doctor out on his bullshit? The Doctor isn't here this week.

Does a woman get to be a badass? Unless you count Babs hitting a plant with a rock, then absolutely not.

Is the young, strong, straight, white male lead the person most often in control of the situation? Yup.

Is there past/future/alien sexism? Not specifically. Just Ian being paternalistic as per.

Does a 'present'-day character call anybody out on past/future/alien sexism? Babs call Ian out on his everyday sexism.

Did a woman write/direct/produce this episode? No/No/Yes.

Verdict

A mixed bag this week. Barbara gets a gorgeous 'actually fuck Ian's well-meaning everyday sexism because I've got this whole key thing sussed' moment, only to be punished by the Scriptwriting Gods for her intrepid presumption by being gratuitously imperilled by assorted booby-traps. Tantalising character development for Susan - more of that, please. And more scenes between Barbara and Susan where they get to talk instead of just cuddling as and when Susan gets spooked. Sabetha's got a lot of common sense, and Altos is...a bit redundant, if I'm honest. Ian, meanwhile, is ridiculous, but does get called out on it, and actually he and Barbara have some lovely friendship moments in their book club scenes. Also the special effects were So Special this week. Bravo, plant-life puppeteers.