The Seeds Of Doom
(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, 31/1/1976-6/3/1976, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, writer: Robert Banks Stewart, director: Douglas Camfield)
Rank: 133
'Hello and welcome to this week's Gardener's Universe. Today I'll be telling you how to prune your Krynoid, what to do if your Vervoid starts talking to you and which aliens work best as compost'.
Gardener’s World gone rogue today and the closest DW ever came to doing ‘Day Of The Triffids’, with an Alan Titchmarsh-like green-fingered psychopath obsessed with the sanctity of plants over human life even when they come from space. Fittingly for a story that’s the opposite of tree-hugging this six-parter is a surprisingly grim and violent one that you have to be in the right mood for compared to other DW stories – where usually DW leaves you uplifted and hopeful about the future this one just leaves you frustrated and more than a little drained. On the plus side what could easily have been a silly story about overgrown walking alien bushes is all played impressively straight, with a tiny cast who are all committed to making this as tense a drama as any in the 1970s (once we’re onto episode three there’s basically two goodies, three baddies and a plant; one of them is John Challis with a beard long before his role in ‘Only Fools and Horses’. Clue: he’s not the plant). This is a story that, ulike some other more fairytale ones on distant planets, looks as if it hurts for one and all. Unlike some 4th Doctor stories where Tom Baker breezes in and out the plot, solving it between chomping jelly babies and playing with his yo-yo, he’s really pushed to his limits and beyond in this one. His plans don’t always work out and he knowingly puts himself or Sarah Jane in harm’s way and its one of the few stories where the Doctor gets visibly physically hurt (without regenerating that is).Tony Beckley excels as Harrison Chase, a baddy that’s the Doctor’s equal and often a few steps in front of him who, far from being a ranting hooligan, is an educated softly spoken man with a vision who just happens to have a pretty low idea of humanity – after a series where we’ve had ranting possessed Humans, ranting Kraals and ranting exiled timelords and will have ranting crystal-based Kastrians he’s a rose between Stephen Thornes, as it were, and his death in the hands of a great compositing machine is one of the most satisfying in DW (even if it means we never got a sequel, which is a shame - of all stories it makes sense this one should be used for recycling). There’s a great set-up too, with an opening two episodes set in Antarctica where the alien pod is discovered that would normally be handled in a pre-credits sequence or a voice-over but which really gives this story depth by showing the added danger humanity is in by showing the havoc it wreaks on a closed community before the pod breaks loose and spores havoc across England and then the world (and of course its England. It’s always England. They don’t even bother to explain that in the script anymore, its just accepted that we’re a target for mad professors, eccentric aliens and millionaires with more money than sense by now). If anything the first two parts are better than the main story comes later, taut and gritty with a great deal at stake that, ahem, ‘plants’ the themes of evolution and destruction in your mind for the finale and you feel the Doctor’s frustrations that no one is listening to him even though he’s saved this wretched planet so many times already – Tom Baker is at his chilling best and becomes impossibly smug when the body count starts piling up and people start turning green (a rare space virus that actually seems to be painful). Later on he even gets to beat the baddy’s henchman up and watch him drown – presumably Mary Whitehouse wasn’t watching that week or she’d have had kittens; even I think this story tips over a little too far into gratuitous violence at times, though it’s the sort of story where the stakes feel so high the Doctor’s just being pushed further than he’s ever been before that you can understand it more in this story than most. It still feels wrong though; the Doctor doesn’t even try to talk his way out of trouble first as he usually does. What ‘Seeds Of Death’ doesn’t have is the variety or lightness of touch that makes a very good story great or a good bit of telly a great bit of Dr Who. It really is 150 minutes of the Doctor and Sarah running around and getting captured in what are basically three locations: inside Chase’s mansion (Athelhampton Hall in Dorset), the plant-filled grounds of Chase’s mansion and The South Pole (actually a quarry decorated in fake snow, quite convincingly compared to the way quarries tend to stand in for alien planets). Once the Tardis arrives a few minutes in there isn’t any scene that doesn’t connect to the main plot in some way and there’s only so many times you can be threatened and hissed at by the same tiny cast before the storyline begins to drag. The foliage foe, The Krynoids, aren’t the best of DW creatures either – this isn’t a show that’s ever done menacing intergalactic vegetables well and though fondly remembered they don’t look much more believable than the much-mocked human tree in Mark Of The Rani or The Vervoids (though the model shot of it eating the mansion is superb). Mostly, though, ‘Seeds Of Doom’ just about gets away with its downsides, mostly thanks to the acting and the direction from Who regular Douglas Camfield that finally comes good on the ‘screaming jungle’ principle DW’s been trying so hard to turn into a thing since its second story. More than anything else it’s the sort of story you can show non-fans who only know about DW’s mostly unfounded reputation for wobbling sets, wobbly ideas and wobblier acting: most of this story is set outside, the plot is easy to follow with no scifi gobbledegook and the acting is what sells everything the most. As a fan though it’s a bit action-hero and James Bondy for a series as gloriously eccentric as DW and the violence tied to a simpler plot than normal left me shaken rather than stirred the way the very very best DW scripts do. Still, its a story that lingers long in the memory this one and I’ve never looked at a compost bin the same way again.
+
This is still, sadly, the closest we ever come to getting an official
DW story set in the Antarctic. I don’t know why – it’s a
location crying out for a DW plot.
I mean it
was the last place on Earth that mankind could explore and set out
into the great unknown – a cornerstone of DW as a whole. There
are loads of
Antarctica plots in
other
scifi
shows
about
what’s lying there trapped under the ice from days when continents
were still connected and all the things that fly in from other
planets, not to mention Hitler’s obsession with forgotten
technology legends said to
still lie there buries.
You’d think that the Doctor would have dropped in on Scott or
Amundsen
as
part of his name-dropping by
now too. Maybe
they thought it would be hard to pull off on a BBC budget, but
The Antarctic sets are super
convincing, even if the joke of Sarah Jane being dressed in a bikini
for a holiday is a bit much in the one gag in the story (she’d have
surely died of frostbite in the time it took the Tardis
door to open dressed
like that – and she does it twice, with no ill effects beyond a
bit of shivering).
It’s worth mentioning here that the excellent but unofficial
‘AudioVisual’ series, which is basically Big Finish before they
got a license from the BBC and with Nicholas Briggs
as an un-numbered ‘future Doctor’ before he became more of a
writer and director for
the series and chief Dalek for new-Who,
did a most excellent Antarctic
story
named ‘Endurance’ (the
best of a highly impressive run) so
it does work in the DW format.
- The
last appearance of UNIT till ‘Battlefield’ in 1989, it’s a
real shame that they’ve devolved into a bunch of anonymous
soldiers who only turn up at the end once everything’s sorted out.
It would have made the stakes that much higher had someone else we’d
known and trusted got into trouble like the Brigadier, Benton or
Harry but our friends of old aren’t even mentioned in this story.
The Doctor’s offhand attitude suggests he just sees them as
expendable extras too not friends which seems odd after so many
years living amongst them –something that goes double for Sarah,
who still very much belongs to this time even if the Doctor’s
moved on by now.
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