The Keys of Marinus - Broadcast and Reception

Broadcast and Reception

Following the debut of BBC2, "The Screaming Jungle" was the first Doctor Who episode to be shown on BBC1 (the previous episodes had been screened on BBC-TV, the single channel available ).

In retrospective reviews, The Keys of Marinus received generally unfavorable reception. Radio Times reviewer Patrick Mulkern wrote that "standards slip appreciably" after the four preceding serials in terms of "ambitious but slapdash" script quality and the below-par sets and supporting characters. DVD Talk's J. Doyle Wallis gave the serial a rating of two and a half stars out of five, feeling that the weakness was attributed to the Doctor's absence (deeming the two episodes Hartnell was absent for as the weakest of the serial), the lack of a main antagonist that would thread the episodes together, the "lacking and disparate" world of Marinus and the "ramshackle" execution of the concept. Arnold T. Blumburg of IGN gave The Keys of Marinus a score of 4 out of 10, describing it as "a clichéd premise ... handled poorly and with no spark at all apart from Hartnell's late-hour rally". He cited the poor production quality and the "hodge-podge" leaps to various locations on Marinus which were "boring if not inept".

However, the story and its structure was met with some positive reception. Graham Kibble-White in Doctor Who Magazine derided Susan's character for "devolving into a bit of a shrill" but was generally positive towards the episodic story structure and the timing of Hartnell's holiday. Despite this, he wrote that the scripts of the final two episodes "never truly engages with the tenets of courtroom drama". A Den of Geek felt that the different locations structure "works incredibly well" by keeping the momentum and making each episode "fresh".