Day 178 — June 27th 2021
The Green Death Episodes One and Two
The Green Death — Episode One
Back in April I celebrated an anniversary — ten years since I upped roots and moved to Wales. I’ve been here ever since and I love it here. I didn’t move just because of the Doctor Who connection, but I can’t deny that it played a part. You can’t move for locations from the show around these parts. The house from Blink is only a couple of minutes walk from my front door, and I spent several years in Cardiff Bay where I could see the Torchwood Hub from my kitchen window.
Sometimes I go to locations specifically because they are locations. A friend came to visit for the day last week and I took him to see Bannerman Road. There’s a special thrill about seeing Sarah Jane’s house which never goes away. Other times you stumble into locations completely by accident. I was at a wedding this weekend where we went to take some photos overlooking the ocean… and about halfway through the shoot I realised we were stood about a hundred yards from where the TARDIS landed in New Earth.
Because of all the locations I’ve ended up in the last few weeks, I realised I didn’t know where The Green Death was filmed. I mean I knew it was Wales, but not any specific locations. I checked it out and discovered that it was mostly filmed about 45 minutes north of where we live, in an area I’ve never been to.
The location used for the Llanfairfach colliery has since been redeveloped into some rather lovely parkland, so after downloading the episodes from Britbox and hopping in the car I can now claim to have watched these first two episodes of The Green Death ‘in situ’ on the very spot (or close enough) where it was made. I’m going to tell myself that I was sat in the exact spot where Stevens addresses the miners at the start of the first episode.
Drastic? Yes, probably. But hey, it got me out of the house for an afternoon…!
As for the episode itself… well, it gives us plenty of great set up, doesn’t it? It feels weird to be back on Earth and with UNIT again after the last three stories — The Three Doctors feels like a lifetime ago, somehow, even though it was just last week. Oddly the episode feels like it’s ignored a lot of the development we’ve had since then. Doctor Who is back to trying to work on bits of the TARDIS (Jo even wonders if it’s the dematerialisation circuit) and there’s almost a moment of realisation that he’s free to leave whenever he likes.
Planet of the Daleks introduced the interesting idea that we’d gone back to first principals, with our hero unable to really steer the TARDIS, but this one seems to go against that to some extent;
Doctor Who: ‘I can now take the Tardis wherever and whenever I like. I’ve got absolute control over her.’
Of course there’s always the possibility that he’s overstating things a bit here — there’s a weird tendency with science fiction to simply trust everything we’re told as fact while we’d be more sceptical of a bloke with a dodgy car in a soap — but he does finally make it to Metebilis Three, which he’d been aiming for in Carnival of Monsters. That makes this the first alien planet to be filmed in Wales, too; there’ll be a lot more to come.
This same opening scene is also going a long way to preparing us for Jo’s departure at the end of the story. It’s lovely to see them putting so much work into giving her a good send off. They’ve been establishing for a few episodes that she’s keen to be back on Earth, they’ve toyed with romance already, and now she admits to fancying a man who reminds her a lot of Doctor Who. It’s hard not to feel the pang of sadness as Doctor Who watches her leave for Llanfairfach;
Jo: ‘Right. Bye!’
Doctor Who: ‘Goodbye. So… the fledgling flies the coop.’
It’s especially nice to see the set up being put in place now, given that our last companion — Liz — vanished between stories and only got a cursory line to explain where she’d gone. While Liz was only with us for the one season, Jo has been around three times as long, and it’s going to feel really strange to not have her around any more. She wasn’t always best served in Season Eight, but she’s gone from strength to strength since, and I’ve grown to really adore her.
On the subject of Season Eight, when The Dæmons I stuck on the Production Subtitles for a couple of episodes. They noted that writer Robert Sloman was keen on linking his scenes up — so in that story one scene ends with a mention of the devil calling (or similar) before the next opens with a ringing telephone. It’s something I noticed again in The Time Monster, too. He seems to be taking that to extremes in this episode, though. Almost every scene seems to link up in one way or another. Perhaps the most obvious is when Evans decides to go down the pit, and then we cut directly to Stevens;
Evans: ‘Dangerous? I’ve spent twenty years of my life down there. Think it scares me now?’
Bert: ‘Oh, why bother?’
Dave: ‘Aye, don’t panic, man.’
Evans: ‘I’m going down.’Stevens: ‘…Therefore, I think it imperative that nobody should go down the mine. It must be sealed off completely.’
I think this example only stood out so much because it follows so many others. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing — they use it quite cleverly to give us the exposition by cutting between Stevens / the Brigadier and Cliff / Jo. That said, I sort of wish I’d not seen it pointed out on the subtitles, because now I’ve not been able to avoid noticing it!
Something which has stood out in this episode is the massive variance in the quality of the special effects. There’s a shot early on of the miner making his way back to the surface in a lift which is among the worst CSO work we’ve had in the series to date. The yellow fringing is incredibly bad, and it feels like a massive step backwards given how brilliantly they handled it every time in the last story.
By contrast there’s also some brilliant effects in here. The miner glowing bright green is fantastic, and it’s no wonder that images from this story stuck in the minds of the generation who saw it on broadcast. And then there’s Metebilis Three, which is possibly the most alien planet the series has ever given us, and all achieved in a few brief shots on a night shoot by a cliff in Wales. The swinging bird legs were especially good fun.
All in all a good start for the story, and a 7/10.
The Green Death — Episode Two
Given all the call backs and celebrations they’ve been doing to celebrate Doctor Who’s tenth season, you could be forgiven for expecting the Cybermen to be revealed as the baddies in this one. There’s so many little bits in this episode especially which put me in mind of The Invasion. Of course you’ve got UNIT on hand (or the Brigadier at least), and we’re in an industrial factory complex owned by a powerful company. There’s moments during Doctor Who’s exploration of the factory which feel very close to the sneaking around in the earlier story.
And then we’ve got the boss of said company speaking to a robotic voice in his office, walking the line between taking orders and trying to be in control. The computerised voice isn’t especially Cyberman-esque, but the warning when Doctor Who is detected roaming around (‘Ground sensors picking up unauthorised footsteps’) definitely is. There’s even talk of human characters being processed, and the device they use to do it — a giant pair of metal earmuffs — doesn’t look all that dissimilar to the iconic handlebar design.
I know any Pertwee-era Cyberman story would be likely to be a simple rehash of The Invasion, but I don’t think I’d mind that. All these little moments that remind me of that story are making me long for a proper match up between the Third Doctor Who and one of his greatest foes.
Of course we do get a callback to the past in this story, and I only spotted it by chance. Jo spends a lot of time in this one paired up with Bert, who’s face looked familiar. I spent most of the episode trying to work out where I knew the actor from and was quite excited when I realised that he was one of the delegates in The Daleks’ Master Plan! I had to double check the actor’s name — Roy Evans — afterwards, but I was quite pleased for recognising him, because I’m usually pretty rubbish at that. I’m also pleased that it means there’s some call back to the past in every episode of Season Ten without being overbearing. It gives the whole thing an air of celebration.
Something else which has been nice across the season is the picture quality of the episodes. I don’t know that I’d especially noticed it before, but there were a few shots in this episode which felt like they were on film rather than video, and it made me realise just how good the show has looked since The Three Doctors. Pertwee’s first few seasons are plagued with rubbish picture quality, so it’s great to see that finally coming to an end. Fingers crossed it stays this way from now on.
Of course there is plenty of film material in this episode, and as ever it looks gorgeous. I so wish the original film existed so it could have been presented in full HD on the Blu-ray, but I can’t complain at what we get. It feels like a real return to basics for the Pertwee era to see him sneaking around an industrial location — it could easily be a setting lifted from Season Seven.
One of the sequences we get on film is Doctor Who fighting off three guards as part of his break in. It’s a scene I’ve always thought of as being a bit silly, complete with a James Bond sounding quip (‘I’m quite spry for my age, actually’), but in context it’s a lot of fun. Pertwee manages to make it feel somehow right that his Doctor Who should fight people off in a hand-to-hand manner, though perhaps it’s a good thing we can’t see the fight in HD, because it’s fairly clear at points that we’re not watching Pertwee himself…!
The final minutes of the episode, in which our heroes encounter a cavern of maggots who then begin to break through the walls and move in to attack is a bit of an odd one. There’s no real sense of scale, and the footage of real maggots sadly looks like just that — you don’t realise that they’re supposed to be giant, and neither Doctor Who or Jo brings it up. Even when you cut to the large props you can’t really tell that you’re supposed to be looking at anything other than a regular sized larvae.
And yet… god it’s effective. The shot of the cavern full of maggots is one of the first things in this Doctor Who marathon that has actually given my stomach a bit of a flip and a sense of actual fright. I’d already worked out where the scene was going, so it’s not that I was surprised by it, just that it’s an image which manages to be genuinely grotesque and scary. About a decade ago my cat managed to get into his pouches of food and had gotten a half-full packet lodged behind a cupboard in the kitchen. By the time I found it a week or two later the whole thing was infested with maggots and it was as disgusting then in reality as it is here on screen. I was wondering in Episode One why this story was so imprinted on the minds of the viewers at the time, and if this sequence was as effective for them as it was for me, I think I’ve answered that question…!
Another 7/10.
