Saturday 11 April 1964

The Keys of Marinus

Splitting the Party up for No Reason

Taranium Core, Episode 2
Sunday 23 August 2026

Terry Nation has left the Daleks at home this week, but he’s still bristling with so many ideas that the TARDIS crew rush through no less than five mini-stories in six weeks, proving that while the sea-bathing on the planet Marinus is basically lethal, there’s still a lot there to keep the tourists occupied.

Notes and links

Nathan refers to the entry on The Keys of Marinus in About Time, a nine-volume series of reference books on the making and reception of Doctor Who through all of the Classic Series and the first five years of the New Series.

Peter mentions a number of story and script ideas that were floating around in the early days of Doctor Who’s production, including The Red Fort by Terry Nation, which was to be set in India during the British Raj but then abandoned in favour of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Masters of Luxor (AKA The Robots) by An Unearthly Child scriptwriter Anthony Coburn, and The Hidden Planet (AKA Beyond the Sun) by Malcolm Hulke, which would have featured a twin planet to Earth which was dominated by women, inevitably.

Simon likens the storytelling in The Keys of Marinus to the books in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, fantasy gamebooks that allowed you to affect the outcome of the story by choosing actions that send you off to different pages of the books. These are still being made, but their heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were among the most popular children’s book series in the world, selling 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998.

Fans of podcasts about Terry Nation’s television work will also enjoy Maximum Power, a podcast in which the hosts of Flight Through Entirety and the hosts of the Trap One podcast join forces to discuss Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7.

And here’s a 2015 obituary in The Guardian for Robin Phillips, who plays Altos in this story and who had a long career as an actor, a theatre director, and the artistic director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Keys of Marinus in Episode 2: So Maudlin, released on Saturday 21 June 2014. We returned to Marinus to record a disgracefully inebriated commentary episode in Episode 91: The Velvet Commentary, released on Sunday 30 October 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll chase you around our ski lodge in a way that is not really acceptable in this more enlightened era.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we gave Barbara a week off and watched The Day After Tomorrow, a one-off educational drama produced by Gerry Anderson between Series 1 and 2 of Space: 1999. Were we entertained? No. Were we disappointed in any way? Also no.

In the most recent episode of The Three Handed Game, the Annette Andre experience concludes with an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards, in which Miss Andre’s Suzy Miller finds out that her husband is (1) a Cold War sleeper agent, and soon afterwards, (2) dead.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a strange experimental episode of Star Trek: Short Treks called Ephraim and Dot, a vivid, propulsive and charming love letter to the Original Series.

Recorded on Sunday 24 May 2026 · Download Splitting the Party up for No Reason (59.8 MB)
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Transcript for Splitting the Party up for No Reason