Day 216 — August 4th 2021
The Seeds of Doom Parts Five and Six
The Seeds of Doom — Part Five
If Part Two of this story was a tour de force for Tom Baker, giving us his best performance in the show so far, then this episode is all about giving Elisabeth Sladen the chance to do the same. Seriously, she’s incredible in this one. When Baker was doing his shouting I was thinking about how hard it is to pull off a performance like that — to be angry and forceful and powerful all at once and to make people listen. I considered that if I were to try shouting those lines it would be considerably less effective. I even thought about the likes of Jon Pertwee, who’s an undeniably good actor, doing the scene and it didn’t have the same impact. Here, Lis Sladen shows that it can be done.
Sladen has been fantastic ever since she joined the programme, but it’s nice to see the show giving her some new things to do as we approach the end of her time in the TARDIS. There’s a danger that the part of the companion can slip into being a bit generic, and while she’s always made sure that Sarah stands out from the crowd, there’s been an element of her having ot go through the motions a little in recent stories. Seeing her turn in a powerful performance like this just reminds me how incredible she is.
This episode has been a bit of an odd one for me. Every time I think there’s something really brilliant happening it then swings round to being spoiled, but then there’s things that initially left me cold which end up being my favourite parts of the episode. Overall I’m going with another 8/10, so it’s a good one, but I feel a bit like I’ve gotten whiplash from watching it.
Take the noises made by the Krynoid creature while it traps our heroes in the cottage. They’re genuinely very scary, all rasps and clicks, and as I listened to the sounds I found myself thinking about how much more effective a monster like this is compared to ones who can speak. So you can imagine my disappointment about twenty seconds later;
Doctor Who: ‘You don’t scare us, Keeler. You hear? You don’t scare us!’
Krynoid: ‘The human was Keeler. Now us. Now belongs.’
Sarah: ‘It speaks!’
It was like a real life version of that scene from Blink where Doctor Who is able to talk to people via a pre-recorded message. Just as I was writing down that I love that the Krynoid can’t talk… it does! Hah! Luckily it doesn’t have an awful lot to say, and before too long it’s become fully vegetable and loses the ability to communicate on its own. Instead it’s taken control of Chase, who does the talking on its behalf. I think that’s much more effective, and Tony beckley puts in a subtly different performance post-possession which is really effective. There’s a brilliant moment where he sits cross-legged on the floor of his ‘green cathedral’ and gets the plants to rise up around him, which is a beautifully directed moment.
The native plant life rebelling against the ‘animals’ is probably my favourite part of this episode. It’s not a new idea in Doctor Who — they’ve been doing it (mostly in Terry Nation stories) as far back as The Keys of Marinus — but it’s rarely done as well as it is here. Some of the effects look fantasic even though you know it’s just some poor stage hand shaking some plastic ivy towards the camera.
It’s one of the elements which really threw me, though, because we’ve not had any indication of this element of the story so far. There’s been no suggestion that the Krynoid can take control of other vegetation and use it as a weapon, but Doctor Who treats the situation as though it’s always been the case. When he arrives at the World Ecology Bureau with the news that people have been found strangled in their gardens it’s a total out of the blue moment, but it’s treated as information that shouldn’t surprise us.
Although I went on to really enjoy that, it threw me for a moment, and I think I lost some time wondering if I’d missed something earlier on in the story.
The other thing which was a bit of a shame here is that when UNIT finally arrive, they could be absolutely any old bunch of soldiers. We’re told that the Brigadier is still in Geneva (the same excuse used for Nick Courtney’s absence in The Android Invasion) and there’s no mention of anyone else. It feels like a real shame that UNIT’s final appearance in the series for ages comes in the form of a bunch of people we’ve never seen before. It should be Benton in the greenhouse with Doctor Who and Sarah, fighting off the attacking plants!
I’m also sad to see Amelia Ducat bowing out here with a brief final scene. It’s as brilliant as all her other involvement in the story (and the mention of her service during the war makes me long to see it!) but I was hoping she’d stick around for the rest of the story, and be involved in the final episode. I’m surprised the character has never been revisited on audio, because I’d pay to hear a series of adventures where Ducat travels around with Tom Baker’s Doctor Who!
The cliffhanger to this one brings us back to the main threat, with the ever-growing Krynoid towering over the house, and it’s a much better effect than the cliffhanger to the last episode. You suspect that it could look ridiculous, and in the hands of a less competent director it probably would, but here I think it works brilliantly.
The Seeds of Doom — Part Six
I bet Mary Whitehouse had a field day with this episode — the death of Harrison Chase in the workings of his own composting machine has good claim for being the single most horrific thing to ever happen in Doctor Who. On top of that you’ve got the death of Scorby, the house being consumed by the Krynoid and a full scale bombing attack from the RAF.
Tell you what, though, my two year old loved it. He’s watched plenty of Doctor Who with me this year — often the best time of day for me to get an episode in is at about 6am when he’s decided it’s time to get up, so I fire up BritBox in the playroom and he watches along. He loves the Daleks (to the point that he roars with laughter if you chase him around pretending to be one), was often captivated by the black and white Cybermen stories (he didn’t care about Revenge), and he’ll sit and watch bits with me here and there. This, though, I think is the first time he’s ever sat still on the sofa and watched the entire episode with me. Clearly he’s going to be a gardener when he grows up.
I’m pleased to say that the story has pulled it all together brilliantly in the final episode, and I’ll award it a 9/10 here and now. It manages to sustain the tension right the way through, which wasn't a given, and in places this manages to be one of the best episodes of the story.
It’s helped along by loads of fantastic modelwork. I’ve always thought the shot of the Krynoid engulfing the house looked a bit naff — so obviously a model shot — but I was completely wrong about that because in context it holds up incredibly well. They also use model work to do other little sequences, like seeing a tentacle smash through a corner of the ceiling, and pairing it with Tom Baker being pelted with debris on the full-scale set. It’s little moments like that which really stand out because they’re so rare. Similarly, the explosion of the house is made all the more effective by the amount of rubble which comes flying at the camera. Somehow that makes it all the more effective.
There’s a handful of other effects shots in this one which also stand out as being pretty good — there’s a great one early on, for example, where the Krynoid is seen towering over the house while our heroes run around beneath it, and it holds up really well even now. It’s one of those times when you realise how CSO can be a great thing when used sparingly.
And despite this episode being all about a giant plant trying to attack an old country house, it still finds time to do some really deft character work. Scorby has been probably the best served character in the entire story, and I think he’s been given the most depth throughout. It comes to something that when he’s starting to lose it and panic here you actually feel sorry for him, even after everything we’ve seen him do in the story so far. I’ve mentioned how horrific the idea of Chase’s death is, but I think Scorby’s might be even more awful, because there’s something so horrifically plausible about it. When the weeds rise up from the lake and drag him under… yeah, that would have given me nightmares as a kid.
I think my only real issue with this episode is the same one I had with Part Five; it falls a little flat that none of the UNIT characters attacking the kynoid are people we know. It’s especially galling when you realise that after the Brigadier has spent the Pertwee era ordering RAF attacks which never end up happening, here Doctor Who tells UNIT that it’s the only solution. I think there would have been a really nice sense of ‘end of an era’ had it been the Brig having the radio conversation with our hero, rather than some bloke we only met ten minutes ago. It’s the one fly in the ointment of this episode, and the only thing stopping this from achieving a perfect 10.
This episode really is the end of an era, and not just because it’s the last UNIT appearance for a long time. In the closing moments, Doctor Who and Sarah arrive back at the Antarctic by accident (I won’t comment on the bizarre plot hole of Doctor Who forgetting to ‘cancel the coordinate programme’, given that they arrived by helicopter in Part One). The TARDIS prop looks beautiful on arrival — Douglas Camfield always shoots it so well — and it’s a good thing because it’s the last time we’ll be seeing the original prop introduced more than 400 episodes ago right back in An Unearthly Child.
The story which often gets told is that when the prop was carted out to location in the first week of December 1975 the roof collapsed in on Baker and Sladen, who were waiting inside to record the scene. I’m fairly certain that story has been embellished over the years, but all the same it was decided that the time had come for a brand new prop to be constructed, which will debut at the start of the next season.
I find something a bit magical in the idea that this TARDIS prop has appeared in so many stories, right back to the very first. This prop is the same one we saw arrive in the desert of 100,000BC, stand proud in the petrified forest of Skaro, and 12 years later it’s still transporting our hero all through time and space. It’s had lots of little modifications over the years — I suppose it’s only about 40% the same box as the one which appeared in those stories, given that the roof and sides were replaced during The War Machines — but it’s still to me basically the same. The doors have never changed, which means that all our regulars have used them over the years, and that’s what matters to me.
What happened to the box after this? Well, it’s a bit of a mystery. It was certainly still hanging around the BBC about a year later, looking considerably worse for wear in a photograph with Robert Holmes.
After that it’s likely that it ended up in a skip somewhere, but I like to imagine that like several of the missing episodes, some BBC employee decided not to let it go to waste, took it home, and spruced it up. I love the idea that — just like the real TARDIS — it could be anywhere out there.
