Day 103 — April 13th 2021
Fury From the Deep Episodes Five and Six
Fury From the Deep — Episode Five
I said a couple of days ago that last time I listened to it Fury From the Deep felt more like a ‘Greatest Hits’ than a story in its own right, and that feels like it’s never more true than in this episode. Specifically this one feels a lot like The Web of Fear — there’ talk of there being a traitor among the crew who’s secretly under the control of the enemy. It worked really well in that story, and I’m sure it would be effective here, too, if it weren’t coming so hot on the heels of the last time.
We’ve even got a token Welsh character thrown into the mix just to add to the Web of Fear feeling! Sadly, Megan Jones feels far more bland than Driver Evans was, despite being played by the always brilliant Margaret John.
See also the cliffhanger to this episode. It’s really good — Doctor Who and Jamie enter a room to find it filled with foam and a sinister figure stands in the centre and welcomes its foes in an ominous whispering voice…
…but that just puts me in mind of Web all over again. The sibilant whisper, the masses of foam, it’s all just a bit ‘been there, seen that’. The cliffhanger is also one of those moments where the version in my head was SO much more effective than the one they actually got on screen.
When I’m doing these episodes, I tend to listen to the Narrated Soundtracks and then go through and look at the tele-snaps afterwards. I pictured the cliffhanger to this episode as looking like it might have been directed by Douglas Camfield, all shadows and atmosphere, while the tele-snap shows it just looked like Victor Maddern got a bit too physical during the washing up.
I actually put the Blu-ray back in the player to see how the animation team handled the moment, and see if they went with something closer to the image I had in my head, but the answer is no. They’ve gone for their own interpretation which while not totally my taste I actually thought was well done all the same.
I think I’m having to resign myself to the fact that Fury From the Deep just isn’t a story for me. I’m going for a 5/10 on this episode.
Fury From the Deep — Episode Six
It feels proper churlish of me to keep complaining about Victoria’s departure, given that it’s so much better than the departures the last three or four companions have received. Ben, Polly and Dodo all vanish in the middle of an adventure (although Ben and Polly at least get a farewell) and even Steven just decides to stay behind out of the blue at the end of a story. Vicki did similar, although at least she had been flirting with one of the locals.
Victoria’s departure is the polar opposite to all of those, and it’s probably the most thought-through we’ve had since Susan’s. For the last few episodes she’s been pining for a place she can belong, and when she makes up her mind to stay behind here it’s given time to breathe and have some emotional impact. Doctor Who and Jamie even hang on an extra day to make sure she’s happy with her choice. That feels especially powerful given that during Innes Lloyd’s tenure the TARDIS crew were quick to depart ASAP. Even in the last story — largely put together under the ‘old’ team even though it was made by the ‘new’ — they run away the second the action has concluded.
Victoria’s goodbye feels like it holds some real weight, and I love that her final scene is entirely dialogue free. As with the last few departures, I’ve come to love the series with the current line up and it feels like a real sad thing to be seeing the end of an era. I’m not sure I buy that she’d particularly choose to stay here of all times and places, and to live with people who she’s spent next to no time with during the adventure, but I appreciate that her departure has been given more thought than usual.
It’s just a shame that it comes at the end of an episode — and a story — which hasn’t served her particularly well. Oh, sure, you might argue that she saves the day here, as it’s Victoria’s screams which defeat the Weed Creature, but she whines about having to record her screaming, calls it silly and then gets stage fright when the crucial moment comes. Once again she’s not given a whole lot of agency, even when she’s crucial to the plot.
And although we’ve established that the Sonic Screwdriver hadn’t been invented at this stage and is thus absent from the climax to the story, it really does feel ironic that the story which introduces the Sonic and features a creature which is defeated by Sonic Waves doesn’t use Doctor Who’s all-purpose tool as part of the climax!
The downside of having plenty of room for Victoria’s departure to breathe is that the actual defeat of the Weed is all a little rushed, and feels a bit easy after the set up that it’s been given over the last few episodes. I feel like I never really understood what the creature wanted or how it was going to achieve world domination. In the finished serial the implication is that it will possess all humans and rule like that, while the original outlines suggest the far more interesting theory that the creature would pump its poison gas through the pipelines and suffocate humanity, thus taking back the planet. As with so many of the stories this season it feels like we’re a draft away from being a really good story.
And it’s only a little thing, but I genuinely hate that all the characters come out of this one unscathed. The stakes are raised pretty high in some of the most dramatic moments of the serial — like Maggie walking off into the ocean at the end of Episode Three — but then it’s all sort of shrugged off here. None of it mattered, everyone got out alive and there were no ill-effects. It leaves me wondering why we had that brilliant cliffhanger in the first place, because I’m not sure it actually went anywhere in the plot!
So on the whole, Fury From the Deep has been something of a frustrating one. My hopes that it would see my opinion changed were dashed, and my attempt to give the animations a go simply reinforced my opinion that they’re just not for me. A 5/10 again for this episode, which makes Fury my lowest-rated story of the season so far. here’s hoping The Wheel in Space will see us ending the year on a high…
