Yeah, she was the one good exception. I wonder why they cast someone ethnically closer to the role she was playing but then cast a bunch of white dudes as the rest of the Chinese?
Probably because Merton was one of the very, very few Anglo-Asian actors who'd managed to break into the industry at the time. And that was probably because she was half-European and could pass for white (although "Marco Polo" was her television debut).
It's been years since I've watched that serial (along with the fan reconstructed episodes) so I'll have to take your word for it on that critique. I just remember loving the story as a whole, particularly Julian Glover as Richard the Lionheart.
Oh, sure, it's great. It's just constrained by the need to shift focus away from the real historical parts in the last episode. "The Reign of Terror" had a similar problem, with the cast ending up being basically just spectators to history toward the end.
I guess there were a variety of different ways the historicals handled the issue of the leads' involvement with history. "An Unearthly Child" had the advantage of being a
pre-historical, so they were able to have the TARDIS crew influence one of the most important events in human history, the invention of fire, since there are no records of the event to contradict. "Marco Polo" got around it by focusing on a fictitious threat to the real historical figures. "The Aztecs" dealt with it by focusing on the overall ways of the culture and Barbara's inability to change them, rather than involving the crew in a specific, known historical event. "The Romans"
did give the Doctor credit for inspiring Nero to burn down Rome, although the historicity of Nero's culpability for the fire is disputed. So that's another major event involving fire that the Doctor was given credit/blame for. "The Myth Makers" managed to work the crew into key roles because the events were more myth than history, so the Doctor got credit for thinking up the Trojan Horse and Vicki became Cressida (a character from medieval literature rather than myth or history). "The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve" had Steven focus on a few individuals caught up in the larger event, and get into a really powerful argument with the Doctor about the ethics of allowing historical evils to remain unchanged. (It was always kind of arbitrary the way the Doctor considered events in Earth's past, relative to the 1960s, to be off-limits while events at any time in an alien planet's history were subject to intervention and change.) "The Gunfighters"... hell, it just threw the historical facts out the window, but it still had the main cast become peripheral to the climactic action. "The Smugglers" was a fictional aftermath to a real event, the pirate career and death of Henry Avery (who much later appeared in "The Curse of the Black Spot"). And "The Highlanders" is similarly about the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden rather than the battle itself.
