Day 118 — April 28th 2021
The Seeds of Death Episodes One and Two
The Seeds of Death — Episode One
Something that gets said quite often about the production of Doctor Who is that the stories at the start of the season get to soak up all the money, leaving only scraps for the ones that fall later in the run. It’s certainly evident in some places — The Armageddon Factor and Time-Flight both come out looking perhaps less well-served than their peers from earlier in their respective seasons.
But it’s not always as simple as each subsequent serial having less money to play with — it must also be down to them picking and choosing where the money should be spent. Season Six has just given us the perfect example — this opening episode of The Seeds of Death looks like it has ten times the budget of all four episodes of The Krotons combined.
There we had some fairly rubbish sets, which looked pokey and awkward but not — I suspect — in the way they’d hoped. Here, though, we go straight into the vast control centre set on Earth, where it looks like they’ve filled basically the entire studio with this one location.
When we cut to other sets I was genuinely surprised, because I thought we might stay in one spot for the entire duration.
I’d love to see one of those Doctor Who Magazine features looking at how the space in studio was used for this one, as I’d be genuinely interested to find out how they fitted everything together.
The direction here makes full use of the space, too. It’s Michael Furguson back on direction duties for the first time since The War Machines, which I also praised for some inventive camera work. I particularly love the shot of Radnor coming in to demand some answers, where he’s out of focus way in the background until he’s brought forward. It helps to sell the scale of the place, and I honestly can’t remember the last time we had a space this large.
It’s not only the use of the space that’s clever in the camera work today, either. We don’t get the reveal of the Ice Warriors until almost the very last moment, instead giving us some striking point-of-view shots as they massacre the crew on the Moon Centre. It kicks off with a monster lumbering towards the crew down a corridor, but it carries on far past that, meaning that we get some great shots of people taking directly into the camera. We’ve not really had anything quite like this before, so it works wonders here.
And as I’ve already alluded, we get a bit of a massacre in this one. Three members of the guest cast are dispatched before the episode is through, and two of them looked set to be players across the entire story. When Osgood is dispatched surprisingly early I was honestly shocked — he’d been set up so much as being someone who’d be taking part in more of the story than the first fifteen minutes.
It reminds me a lot of The Invasion — where the van driver is killed in Episode One and Doctor Who never knows about it. Our hero has spent the entire episode stuck at Eldred’s museum, so he’s not even ware that there is a threat, let alone that people have already started being bumped off. Somehow that makes the situation on the moon all the more dangerous. These people are able to die because Doctor Who hasn’t arrived to save them yet.
And just quickly — I think you’re supposed to dislike Fewsham. He’s presented as incompetent at his job, a source of frustration and regret to his colleagues. He’s a bit mopey and down on himself when brought to book about his failures, and he turns on the other humans the second he thinks it might save his skin. And yet I also think he’s one of the best depictions of how most people would act when faced with a situation like this. Lord knows when the Ice Warriors actually do invade and tell us to fix some machinery or die, I’ll be first in line for a screwdriver.
A decent start, with room for promise of more to come. A 7/10.
The Seeds of Death — Episode Two
I’m going to sound like a broken record here, because I think most of this entry is going to be about praising Michael Furguson. The episode looks brilliant, and is filled with interesting visual flourishes which is probably for the best because the script itself isn’t up to very much.
Most of the best shots here are featuring the Ice Warriors. I’m particularly keen on the view of two Ice Warriors shot through a hole in some equipment, simply because it makes things look a little bit more filmic than your usual ‘get it in the can by 10pm’ material.
And then there’s the sequence in which Phipps tries to avoid the Ice Warrior who’s pursuing him. It’s another one of those instances where I’m thankful that the episode exists for us to watch, as it’s a lengthy dialogue-free sequence which perhaps wouldn’t translate well to audio.
We had one of those in Furguson’s last Doctor Who, too, so maybe it’s a trademark of his? I’ll have to keep an aye out in a few weeks when he comes back with Pertwee.
Anyway, the sequence is shot almost entirely from a single static camera, which would usually be a bit of a no-no. I’d usually be lamenting the lack of close ups or cut aways (although we get both here, they’re used sparingly), but this sequence is shot from a high-up camera, giving us a great view down on all of the action. It looks brilliant, and really adds to the tension.
I spend a lot of time on this blog praising the work of Douglas Camfield — and rightly so, I reckon — but I’ve never given Furguson the appreciation I think he deserves. He’s quickly become one of my favourite directors on this marathon.
Admittedly, there’s less visual interest in the shots featuring our regulars, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s because those scenes are generally less interesting? I was impressed in Episode One that so much had happened before Doctor Who and his friends had truly gotten involved, but by the end of this episode it’s starting to feel like a deliberate attempt to keep them out of the action.
They spend the first half of the episode on the fringes of an argument about the feasibility of sending a rocket to the moon, and the second half actively on the rocket. It was probably quite interesting at the time — this episode went out only a few months before we landed on the moon for real, so it was certainly topical — but it drags a little here. It’s also rendered useless by T-Mat coming back into action while they’re in the rocket, meaning that after all the bickering and posturing, Miss Kelly is able to reach the moon in a matter of seconds while our heroes drift slowly in that general direction.
Something that is keeping me amused is watching Troughton’s sideburns. My one over-riding memory of this story is that they take on a life of their own by the last episode, and you can already see them as a work in progress here!
Oh, and Doctor Who and Jamie are definitely still in the middle of whatever fight they’ve been having. When he’s asked if he’s taking both of his companions with him on the rocket, he admits that he ‘hadn’t thought’ about taking Jamie — he wanted to be alone with Zoe again!
I’m going to drop to a 5/10 for this one, and it would probably be a point or two lower if it wasn’t for the direction keeping me interested. Here’s hoping that Episode Three — with all the characters where they need to be — can pick things back up.
