As part of this, I vividly remember my brothers and my sister howling with derision at a moment in this episode. Can you guess which bit plunged them into fits of hysteria? No? It was the shot of the three-pin plug adaptor. Oh, yes. My siblings had been brought up on Doctor Who and liked it – but they’d drifted away from it to such a degree, the sight of something so mundane yanked them out of the drama. I was baffled for the longest time as to why that of all things pushed them over the edge. You get so much more out of a programme if you just accept such things and get on with being entertained; could it be that we, as Doctor Who fans, interpret the language of television in a different way from the mainstream audience?
Anyway, back in the future, the Ice Warriors are vacillating between shots where they look fantastic and threatening, and others where they’re just a bit silly. There’s a great bit where, after they’ve shot the portly, waddling extra and the tall handsome extra (at point blank range!), they tower threateningly over Gia Kelly and seem really menacing. (I have to wonder, though – does anyone ask her what happened to the two extras when she gets back to Earth, or do they join Harvey in the Great Anonymous Supernumery Heaven in the sky?) But there are also more ridiculous moments where they wobble about in an ungainly fashion, complete with sound effects that make it seem like they have a grumbly tummy or a toilet cistern for a stomach. Alan Bennion, at least, is very good as the Ice Lord Slaar; he’s very sleek and poised, and moves beautifully. You need someone with good body language if they’re encased in latex, and he brings a grace and regality to his gait that’s at terrifying odds with his guttural, hissed threats. It’s easy to take someone like him for granted, but he’s bloody good in the role.
Stylistically, though, this episode is probably most remembered for that sequence of pure padding where the Doctor gets chased, accompanied by such silent movie piano twinkling that it’s no wonder Troughton capers his way through it, throwing his arms up in dialogue-free shock and comic horror. I don’t really understand why a moonbase would be equipped with a Hall of Mirrors, but at least everything climaxes with the Doctor’s oft-quoted and (rightfully) much loved line, “You can’t kill me, I am a genius...” Actually, what really sells it for me is the deflated way he delivers the end of this statement, and his look of genuine surprise when the gambit works!
April 29th
The Seeds of Death episode four
R: I remember when I first watched this, years ago, and what I thought. It all seemed very contrived. So the Ice Warriors have the Doctor, a man that at the moment they have no particular reason to see as any unusual threat, and against whom they wouldn’t want to exact any special revenge. And they decide to kill him, as he lies on the ground unconscious. Not merely by shooting him with their sonic guns, as they’ve despatched everyone else so far, but by T-Matting him into deep space. Even though that requires the work of a technician to realign the setting of the T-Mat. Even though after this strange murder has been carried out, it’ll delay their plans to send deadly seeds to Earth cities, and the T-Mat will have to be adjusted again. I remember thinking, why?
I was putting the cart before the horse, I think. This is sadism on the part of Slaar, certainly. But it’s not sadism against the Doctor. He’s not awake to experience what’s going on, and his death will be instantaneous – of all the ways the Doctor might have been bumped off over the years, this is one of the nicest. No, this is sadism against Fewsham. Against the man who to save his own hide has been sending packages to Earth without question. He’s a traitor, and the cruelty of the Ice Warriors is that after he’s done what he’s been instructed, they want him to understand the implications of that treachery. He pleads with them that he can’t be a murderer, that he doesn’t want to be directly responsible for the taking of another life. And this is the point – the Ice Warriors want him to appreciate that whether he kills the Doctor or not, he already has blood on his hands. Because of his cowardice, he’s effectively destroyed the human race. By making him execute the Doctor too, they just want to rub that fact in. They’re hard to please, these Martians. If you disobey them, they’ll shoot you dead without a thought. If you follow their orders, they’ll so despise you that they’ll make you confront the guilt of what you’ve done in full force.
Doctor Who always hates the coward. Only a few weeks ago, in The Invasion, when the UNIT soldiers are down the sewers, you can tell which one of them is going to snuff it – it’s the one that panics and doesn’t show the proper British backbone that’ll get blasted down by a Cyberman. (And as soon as Phipps begins to freak out in the ventilation tunnels, you know that he’s a marked man too – sure enough, he’s dead by the episode’s end. Which is a bit unfair on him, really, because for the past few weeks he’s been the sole human who’s been courageous and resourceful – but one flair of nerves, and he’s a marked man.) What’s great about The Seeds of Death is that for the first time in the series it explores the cowardice of a character properly. Fewsham cooperates with the Ice Warriors because the alternative is death. Every single other man on the moonbase decides instead to take the admirable course, and to stand up against the aliens and their demands – and they all get killed for their courage. Doctor Who despises its Fewshams, but let’s be honest – we’d mostly be Fewshams too. Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary crises, and out of fear doing anything in their power to stay alive. Other stories would have by now made Fewsham someone much more unsympathetic – a Klieg who’s actively trying to betray his fellows, a Vaughn who thinks he can make the aliens his allies. Terry Scully gives a terrific performance as an everyman who puts the lives of everyone in Earth in jeopardy because when push comes to shove, he’s just not a hero. And that’s what I love about Seeds of Death: it’s a story at first about heroism, about the remarkable men who’ll travel into space – and then a study of a man who finds the resolve to become a hero in spite of himself.
The cruelty of the Ice Warriors – making Fewsham kill the Doctor, making Fewsham hate himself – is the same cruelty that we’re habitually expected to feel to characters who aren’t supercool and are just like us. The heart of The Seeds of Death is that it feels sorry for the weakling.
T: You’re absolutely right, but I’d like to also mention the tragic “Oh no...” that escapes from Terry Scully as Slaar rubs in the enormity of what he has done. It’s desperately sad, and Scully’s wounded face and wiry frame really sell Fewsham as a broken man, battered by circumstance. I’m glad you mention poor old Phipps too – Christopher Coll has something very solid and likeable about him, and he gets to be all Bruce Willis in this episode, charging about in the ventilation tunnels and eavesdropping on the enemy. Give the man a white T-Shirt (as well as some advice about sticking your arm through any grille you’re attempting to climb through – you’ll never get anywhere going shoulder first).
Meanwhile, the Ice Warriors are slowly evolving in terms of their appearance and who enacts them. I notice their helmets are a uniform shape – for now, there are no big, outsized heads to be seen. And it’s interesting to note how it takes some time for Sonny Caldinez to become the No. 1 go-to guy when you want someone to play an Ice Warrior; it’s only here, in episode four, that he appears in this story, and he was the first Warrior they got rid off in the Martians’ debut tale. Nonetheless, in future he will displace fellow Warrior enactors Steve Peters and Tony Harwood – they must have been irked, as Caldinez was only in the Conference League of Lizards, whereas they were in the Premiership. And yet, Caldinez will get all the Martian gigs from now on, leaving the two of them in the cold (where, as they’re method actors, they should be quite comfortable).
I continue to have some logic-niggles, though. Having previously overlooked Phipps, an Ice Warrior here wanders into a storeroom and, astonishingly, fails to notice the unconscious Doctor. (Was my waxwork theory actually correct?) And in a continuing theme of the story, does the Ice Warrior who seems to perform the Arriving on Earth Dance only refrain from killing Eldred and Radnor becau
se they’re not extras? (Their guards, on the other hand, are toast as soon as walk into the room.) And why oh why is a big ship’s wheel used to set the moonbase’s temperature? If the Ice Warriors had been allergic to light, would all the dimmer switches have been the size of plates?
The Seeds of Death episode five
R: See, Fewsham came good in the end! I knew he would. His death scene is terrific. At the moment he meets his maker, Terry Scully refuses to overplay it – he grimly stares the inevitable down, gets shot, then just slumps over the Ice Warrior radar thing. Lovely.
I’m torn about the fact that this deadly fungus sucking the oxygen from the atmosphere can be foiled by water. I love the simplicity of it in theory – and I think the scene where a panicked Troughton refuses to run to safety, instead risking his life to find the right chemical that will destroy the seed, is really terrific. But I live in London. It always rains in London. It’s raining right now. It’d be a miracle if it weren’t raining. I can see what the production team are doing; we’ve already had weather control operations in The Moonbase and The Ice Warriors, so this story is rather cleverly feeding off the future history that the series has already established. (It’s really rare for Doctor Who at this stage to build upon its long-term continuity like that.) But I think a story can be too clever – we’re now required to keep in our heads not only a society that’s based on instant transmission of matter, but also one where the weather is influenced by the flick of a switch – and it just dilutes the premise of both. So, yes, we’ve got scenes where an Ice Warrior goes over to a weather control station to destroy the controls so it can’t rain. But that doesn’t matter, we’ve already been shown exactly how this story is going to end. Someone’s going to fix those controls, and by golly, rain it shall. We had this situation in The Ice Warriors too; but there, Brian Hayles was making the point that although we knew that the world would be saved by someone pushing a button, the drama was all about the characters finding the courage to push it. We don’t have the same situation here. Hayles played upon the dilemma of Fewsham to brilliant effect, and in so doing made him the most interesting and developed character of the story. And he’s dead. Without him, there’s no dilemma left, and no mystery. Just lots of foam, and a few hissing reptiles.
T: Director Michael Ferguson doesn’t get enough attention. Perhaps it’s because he only worked on four stories, none of which are deemed classics, but you can tell that he’s put a strong effort into this. He’s even bothered to mount the obligatory opening titles in an interesting fashion, overlaying them on an establishing shot of the Earth and the moon. He also makes use of silhouetting people against that big glowing wall on the moonbase, and there’s a wonderful shot of the foam and a seed pod gradually blotting out the camera’s view of Weather Control.
It seems, however, that we’ve moved into a phase where it’s not just the extras who are getting short shrift in death. Zoe rather dismissively announces Phipps’ demise before banging on about how brilliant Fewsham is. “[Fewsham] saved my life,” she says, sniffily... well, so did poor old Phipps – he even seemed to have magical hiding properties! – yet he may as well not have bothered, for all the ceremony he gets post-mortem. (We can only hope that poor old Harvey has a drink waiting for Phipps in the afterlife.) Fewsham, at least, gets as brilliant a send off as you’ve said – the only downside is that in his final shot, wherein he defiantly tells Slaar that Earth now knows about the Warriors’ plans, he looks remarkably like David Jason. If only they’d shot him by the hatch of a bar, he could have earned a fortune from clip shows that continuously featured him falling through it...
Otherwise, little bits of this episode give me enjoyment. Sir James Gregson is the first, ahem, seed sown for the pompous bureaucrats who will lock horns with the Doctor’s later incarnations. I adore the Doctor’s response to Radnor’s assertion that nothing will destroy the fungus – “Have you tried to understand it?”, he says with the disarming patience of a grown-up trying to tell an infant not to attack its pet hamster with a cricket bat. And it’s either amusing or irritating (take your pick) that the Weather Control prop has only got two settings, Wet and Dry. What about more subtle variations? Couldn’t they have a switch for Light Showers with a Gentle Breeze and Moments of Sunshine Later? Or even Snow? And after the rewrites that plagued The Celestial Toymaker, and script editor Terrance Dicks having to do heavy surgery on this story, is it fair to say that we can expect a Hayles storm?
April 30th
The Seeds of Death episode six
R: Patrick Troughton’s departure was announced by the press during the recording of The Seeds of Death. And so there’s inevitably a valedictory air to the story. It feels like a celebration of all that made Troughton so great – and the images of him here are wonderful, whether that be of him running down corridors from big lumbering monsters covered from head to foot with foam bubbles, or of his taking on an entire base under siege armed with a couple of lamps and wires draped messily over his body. The general public weren’t to know, of course, that this last stand he takes against the monsters was to be his last stand against any monsters. But we know – and it means there’s a beauty to this, to the triumphant way he closes his eyes ready for death, having so calmly told Slaar that his plans have been foiled. Against the bulk of the Ice Warriors hissing and seething at him, this little impish Doctor has never looked so vulnerable – and has never been so wily either. This is a goodbye to all that made the Troughton stories such wonderful escapism, the little anarchist standing up to the monsters. For that it’s gorgeous. And also terribly sad.
I love too the way that before dying, Slaar has to learn from his commander that he’s a failure. That his operation has been such a cock-up that he’s destroyed the entire invasion fleet, and sent it into the sun. There’s not much room for expression on an Ice Warrior’s face, but Alan Bennion nevertheless manages to manoeuvre it into appalled embarrassment. In his last scene, this vicious sadist is chewed out by his boss, is made to be just another loser. He becomes a Fewsham. Poor, picked upon, Fewsham. There’s a wonderful poetic justice to that – that Slaar is killed accidentally by one of his lackey’s guns, the clumsy death of a fool, is just the icing on the cake.
T: Gosh, the whole “Troughton has fought his last monster” thing hadn’t occurred to me. You’re right, he’ll spend his last 16 episodes bereft of any such opponents. Is that some sort of record? (I think it might be.) And it’s also the first time a major con is used to resolve a cliffhanger, with loads of extra footage that places Zoe behind the door the Doctor is desperately trying to get through, even though she resolutely wasn’t seen there last episode. (You could find the same sort of cliffhanger-cheat on a number of those hokey old serials that they sometimes showed on BBC 2 when I was a boy – Daredevils of the Red Circle was one, King of the Rocket Men another.)
But the Ice Warriors seen here would have drawn my attention regardless of their getting the privilege of having a last go at their hated enemy – I love the way one of them nonchalantly tilts his head as the famous ricochet sound effect indicates the uselessness of the guards’ guns. Slaar dies like someone has punctured him, all the air escaping from his body in one big hiss, but he’s been one of the most effective talking monsters we’ve ever had in the series. I can’t think of a better Man In A Suit performance thus far, can you? I even liked his cracked skin and pointy teeth – a crusty and alien chin augmented by sharp and malevolent dentures. And it’s a nice detail that Graham Leaman, as the Grand Marshall, can speak properly because he’s in the Martians’ natural environment; it gives his desperate, final lament an added level of grimness, as one realises that as a result of the Doctor’s tinkering, the whole population of a space fleet is going to die a horrible, inexorable death. (And it just occurred to me: between this and The Macra Terror, Leaman is making a habit of getting bumped off on a monitor.)
Troughton himself is remarkably low-key in the finale... the Doctor seems almost resigned to death, which
gives a fairly straightforward confrontation some unexpected depth and gravitas. I like to think that the actor himself is a little preoccupied, getting his head around the implications of leaving this career-defining part. (I know he’s more likely just a bit tired, or bored, or thinking about the shopping, but I can dream can’t I?) But if nothing else, the scene with him under a desk, pulling out a whole tangle of wires and cheerfully accepting that he’s going to have to sort through them, is a wonderful, definitive second Doctor moment.
The Space Pirates episode one
R: Well, I’m sure it all looked lovely.
I’ve been spoiled. I’ve just got used to the idea that I can actually watch Doctor Who from now on, not listen to the thing and try to imagine. And up comes The Space Pirates, the very last story not neat and complete, and with a rather foggier soundtrack to boot. I can’t help but feel a bit irritated by it.
The DVD extras on the Lost in Time package suggest that the model work for this was terrific. And I’m quite sure those shots of astronauts laying detonation charges whilst doing space walks were gorgeous. The problem is... there seems to be rather a lot of them. Just like The Seeds of Death before it, The Space Pirates takes its inspiration from awed fascination with space exploration. The difference between the two is that Seeds used that fascination ironically, presenting us with characters who were disillusioned by the whole process. Whereas it’s rather hard to grasp any characters at all yet in The Space Pirates. A whole slew of conflicting accents do not personalities make. That it takes 15 full minutes before the TARDIS crew show up and start chatting on the soundtrack would be dangerous enough at the best of times – but here, where there’s so little to distinguish the actors between pirates and police, it feels like a particularly bad idea. There’s lots of talk about Beta Dart and Minnow spaceships, so that when we finally hear the traditional wheezing ‘n’ groaning, there’s an almost comedic contrast. And it’s lovely that the first thing the Doctor and his friends get to do is run around corridors dodging laser blasts. But for all the dazzling eye candy no doubt on display, this is painfully repetitious stuff. When at the cliffhanger one of the beacons blows up, this is the third time we’d have been expected to watch this in 25 minutes. That the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are in jeopardy this time around isn’t enough. Two times earlier, and this might have felt involving.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 69
