The Green Death

Chapter The 226th, which features death and is very green. (Green! Green meaning environmentally conscious, yeah? You get it.)

Plot:

Global Chemicals, based in a facility in Llanfairfach, Wales, is running a government-sponsored (i.e. evil) project to make petrol more efficiently; this produces a green sludge waste product, which the company is pumping into an abandoned mine nearby. When a miner doing an annual check goes down the pit and comes into contact with the stuff, he ends up bright green and dead; UNIT are brought in to investigate. The Doctor declines the Brigadier's entreaties to come to Wales as he is instead finally going to the planet Metebelis 3 to pick up one of the blue crystals they have there. Jo accompanies the Brig, choosing not to go with the Doctor, as she wants to join up with Cliff Jones, a crusading eco-campaigner and Nobel prize-winning scientist working on cultivating an edible high-protein fungus as an alternative food source. He has set up a commune in Llanfairfach. After meeting with Stevens, a director at Global Chemicals, the Brigadier comes under pressure from senior levels of the government not to probe too deeply into the affair, and to instead help the company contain it; the Brig contrives to get Captain Yates inside Global's headquarters as a spy. The Doctor returns from his time/space jaunt, and buzzes up to Wales in a super-charged Bessie. He meets the Brigadier, and they go to the mine only to find that Jo has gone down, accompanied by a miner called Bert, in search of another miner that had gone investigating.

The lift has been sabotaged by Global Chemicals henchman Hinks. The Doctor needs cutting equipment to rig up a mechanism to allow anyone to follow Jo down into the pit. Global Chemicals are unhelpful, and the staff members behave in an odd, hypnotised way. Luckily, the Brig finds cutting equipment in a local garage. The Doctor goes down, and finds Jo, but both miners have come into contact with the sludge and end up green and dead. Escaping through a shaft leading up to the Global Chemicals facility, the Doctor and Jo find giant maggots in the mine, somehow enlarged by the chemical waste. They get away, and spend the night at Professor Jones' commune. Cliff comforts Jo as she is feeling sad about Bert's death, and they seem to be getting very close. The Doctor interrupts them, calling Cliff off to help him investigate how to destroy the maggots. The Brig blows up the mine, but that only throws up lots of maggots onto the surface of the slag heap. He then brings in the RAF to bomb them, but they survive this. Jo has gone to capture a maggot for Cliff to experiment on, and while she's away he finds out that (by a lucky coincidence) his current fungus hybrid is lethal to the maggots. Before he can tell anyone, he rushes off to rescue Jo from her suicidal mission. He gets knocked out during the bombing sweep, comes into contact with the goo and starts to glow green.

The Doctor breaks in to Global Chemicals, goes to the top floor and meets BOSS, the company computer (with hypnotic powers) that is controlling everything. The Doctor escapes but Yates is still trapped, and is hypnotised to come after the Doctor and shoot him and the Brig. The Doctor uses the powers of the blue Metebelis 3 crystal to break Yates's conditioning. Meanwhile, as Cliff fights for his life, the Doctor finds out (by another lucky coincidence) about the fungus's maggot-killing properties, as a stray maggot has died eating some. The Doctor and Sergeant Benton drive around the slag heap throwing out samples of the fungus, which the maggots tuck in to, finishing them off. They also encounter the one giant fly that has hatched from a maggot, and manage to destroy that too. BOSS is going to connect with other computers worldwide and enslave the Earth, so the Doctor confronts Stevens, but he's now under BOSS's full control. The Doctor pulls the blue crystal trick once more. Freed, Stevens sacrifices himself, overloading the circuits and blowing up the computer and the facility, after the Doctor has exited. Cliff is saved (by yet another lucky coincidence) as the fungus cures him too. He proposes to Jo, and she accepts. She's going to join him on an expedition to the Amazon to find a new even better fungus than the one that's comprehensively saved the day. The Doctor gives the crystal to Jo as an engagement present. Everyone celebrates at Jones's commune, except the Doctor who - sad at losing his friend - drives off into the sunset.

Context:

The story was watched an episode a night, from the Blu-ray in the season 10 collection box set, stripped across a week in early April 2022 starting on a Sunday. I watched each episode in the late afternoon to allow opportunity for other members of the family to join me, and to be fair they did for short periods, even the Better Half briefly. The only person who wasn't interested at all was the eldest (boy of 15). It might not be anything to do with Doctor Who, though; he and his brother (boy of 12) have been requesting recently to watch Stranger Things from the beginning (before now, I'd considered it a bit too scary); we're a couple of episodes in to the first series, and the eldest has already bailed - he might just be getting to that age where seeing his mates, etc. is more of a draw than watching TV shows. I wonder if I'll ever reach that age?! Both the other two children and the Better Half commented on the poor effects work to achieve the scenes of characters in the lift going down into the mine; there is very visible 'fringing' between the background keyed-in and the foreground characters, "It's the worst green screen ever!" was a representative comment. The Better Half creased up on hearing the badly dubbed lines added to a location film scene towards the end of episode one, which were also included in the recap of the next episode, where the Brig says "Someone's going down!" and the Doc adds "We must stop them!" in a manner that's both melodramatic and a bit flat simultaneously. She conceded that the front-axial projection glowing green make-up effect was good, though.

First Time Round:

In November and December 1993, as part of the celebrations of Doctor Who's 30th anniversary (of which more in the Deeper Thoughts section below), Planet of the Daleks was repeated weekly on BBC1. To make the presentation fill a 30-minute slot, each 25-minute episode was padded out with a preceding documentary short. The last one was a jokey UNIT recruitment film, which ended with a phone number on screen to call if one was interested in joining up and being blown to bits by aliens. I wasn't curious enough to phone the number; if I had, a recorded message by Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney would have informed me that another Jon Pertwee story - The Green Death, the story that followed Planet when they were originally shown - would be repeated in the new year. As there was no other advance publicity, I had no idea it was happening and so missed episode one of a story I'd never before seen and would have been very eager to catch. The story was shown weekly on BBC2 on Sunday lunchtimes, starting on 2nd January 1994. Between the first and second episode, I found out about it - can't remember how - and weekly started recording the story onto a VHS tape; by this time I had travelled back to university in Durham after the Christmas vacation. I'd finished my studies, got a job and moved out of home into a flat with the Better Half by the time I got to see that missing first episode. This was when the sell-through VHS of the story came out in October 1996. The release had been delayed twice; it was originally slated for early 1994 before the story was chosen for repeat; this pushed it back to early 1996, whereupon all classic Who videos were paused, so as not to pull focus from the new Paul McGann TV movie and its home video release. This was overridden later in the year so that The Green Death tape could act as a celebration and commemoration of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, after the actor had sadly died earlier in the year.

Reaction:

The Green Death is so iconic a Doctor Who story that it even has it's own Friends-style nickname title - it is and forever will be "The One with the Maggots". The micro beasties gone macro are depicted with varying degrees of success in the story, but they are never not memorable, and in most cases very striking. The large models made by visual effects designer Colin Mapson are particularly good, and they're shot well by the VFX film unit, and by director Michael E Briant in their studio appearances. The production team in the early 1970s had hit on a formula for the season finale (an innovation, as it wasn't something they bothered much with in the 1960s when the break between Doctor Who seasons was short). It would be written by the producer Barry Letts with a writing partner Robert Sloman (though the former wasn't credited), and it would have a nice bit of business in it for each of the 'UNIT family' of regular characters, often seeing them in civvies or doing more relaxed and more comic scenes. For the first two of the finales, that meant including Roger Delgado as the Master - he was playing the wicked uncle of the family, if you will - but he was featuring in fewer stories by season 10 (Pertwee's fourth year), and would tragically die young around the time that The Green Death was broadcast. The absence of the normally contracted villain for the production left space for what had been missing the previous couple of times, a memorable monster. The maggots were an imaginatively nasty choice, and had such a great impact that they reused a tweaked version of the basic idea for the following year's finale (it was giant spiders that time).

There's so much more to this story than just maggots, however. Six-parters of this vintage tend to drag at some point, but the presence of so many elements to fashion the narrative around means that The Green Death is always moving at a pace, and always engaging. This is, for example, a rare case of a story being filmed and set outside the home counties. Yes, the depiction of Wales is mostly as caricatured as the later depiction of Scotland in Terror of the Zygons but it is still refreshing. Anyway, as well as many "boyos", a few miners straight from central casting, and a miserable, grumbling milkman ("Old Jones the Milk says they're going to blow up the mine!"), there is a proud Welshman depicted who's a young Nobel prize-winning professor living an alternative lifestyle, and you don't see Welsh hippies that often in any TV or film of the period. Also refreshing is the presence of working class characters in a 20th century Doctor Who; yes, it's not done very well, but for half a story (the interests of the mining community into what's going on in the mine are not followed up after episode 3, and only middle-class people propel the narrative forward after that) it was good to see. While they're on screen, the characterisations might be a bit dodgy, but the characters' actions are pretty noble, all told. Miners, environmentalists, soldiers, Time lords, companions, all are allowed agency and some respect by the narrative. Businessmen and politicians maybe not so much.

Two of the Global Chemicals employees, Elgin and Stevens, do show a tiny bit of individuality in resisting control, including at the climax where Stevens sacrifices himself to destroy BOSS, but the capitalist elements of the script are there to provide the panto villain rather than nuance. Even then, there are moments where more than one viewpoint is allowed, like the beginning where Professor Jones and the unemployed miners clash regarding economic necessity versus ecological safety. John Dearth's fruity voice performance as BOSS is a boon for the production (he would return in the following finale to again play an interesting antagonist), and it lifts the somewhat hackneyed idea of the controlling computer by letting him gloriously attack great dialogue about Nietzschean Supermen and hum classical music during climactic moments. It is a somewhat hackneyed idea, though, almost exactly the same plot as a previous Doctor Who story from seven years earlier, The War Machines: a computer starts controlling people and builds up to a climax where it will link into a network of other computers across the globe and take over. Why is it that everybody thought computers were going to develop a way to hypnotise people? Why is it anyone thought they would need to? As good as Dearth makes BOSS, it's a shame to have a computer in control as it dilutes the main theme that people are quite capable of doing such awful things in the name of capitalism without mind control. It does though allow BOSS to act as the anthropomorphised company itself, with Stevens pleadingly asking it whether the death and destruction is worth it.

One other character in Global Chemicals that stands out is Hinks, the Londoner henchman that appears to have wandered in from a Euston films production, but it works; it's a shame that he becomes victim of a maggot halfway through. Despite being packed with plot, there are still a few 'loop' scenes in the story, which fill up time with incident that ultimately doesn't lead anywhere. One such is the Doctor's breaking in to Global Chemicals early on to look for cutting equipment, but I will forgive it anything for the Doctor/Hinks confrontation that's in there, where the captured Doctor says he's quite spry for his age, and Hinks gets the wonderful line "Oh, going to have a go? Tu-wiffic!" before they have a fight with many a "Hai!". All the regulars get fun things to do, though some of the more comedic moments work better than others; Jon Pertwee in drag as a cleaning lady, and Richard Franklin's reaction to this, is so broad that it feels like they're breaking character and doing a sketch. Much better are the lovely intercut scenes in the first episode where the Doctor on Metebelis 3 battles against outrageous obstacles, almost as an aside, while his friends engage with the real plot of the week. Nicholas Courtney's line "I never thought I'd fire in anger at a dratted caterpillar" isn't quite in the same league as "Chap with wings there, five rounds rapid", but otherwise I think the story bests The Daemons, the only other serious contender for best Pertwee finale; despite its adventure plot resolution relying on a series of massive coincidences, The Green Death is much more coherent and meaningful.

This comes from a strong subplot that brings in more emotional character change than usual. The story's ultimately not about defeating the maggots, or stopping Global Chemicals - it's about Jo's romance with Professor Clifford Jones, and her eventual departure. Jo leaving to continue adventuring and saving the world with a younger, human version of the Doctor is exactly right, but it would only work if the casting was perfect. Reportedly, this did cause them some trouble, but luckily Katy Manning was finally able to bring in her actor boyfriend of the time, Stewart Bevan. He nails it. As well as great chemistry with Manning (not necessarily guaranteed, even if there's chemistry in real life), he personifies the principled, resolute and heroic aspects of the Doctor too. Jon Pertwee performs his side of this triangle with an interesting ambiguity; it could be taken as just the actions of an overprotective parent feeling neglected when their fledgling is flying the coop, but the scene where he deliberately splits up Jo and Cliff as they're getting romantic smacks of a (sexual?) jealousy of the younger man. The subtext is there if you want to see it, and not if you don't; it all feels very new series, in the best possible way. Jo's character arc reaches a point of resolution: she's still getting herself into trouble, as she does when getting caught up in the bombing raid while on her maggot-finding mission; but, crucially, she now doesn't need anyone's help to get back out of trouble. Her rewiring the radio once Cliff has been knocked out mirrors gadgetry jiggery-pokery she's seen the Doctor do previously (e.g. in The Sea Devils). Finally, there's the call-back to her very first appearance, calling in a favour from her influential uncle, and the beautifully shot sequence of the Doctor leaving the party and driving off alone. It's the perfect end to one of the most enjoyably watchable stories of classic Who.

Connectivity: 

Both The Green Death and The Invisible Enemy feature an infection that spreads between members of the cast, and both include invertebrates (maggots, a prawn) expanded to massive size.

Deeper Thoughts:

3D Glasses as Proust's Madeleine: 1993/94 and all that. This is going to be a bit indulgent, apologies - blame the TV schedulers (they are usually to blame for my excesses!). At the time of writing, the BBC pop documentary series "Top of the Pops: The story of..." has reached 1994, and I just watched the 1993 and 1994 editions, plus the separate shows that are compilations of hits from those years, back to back. A wave of nostalgia washed me up on the shores of a particular time, autumn / winter 1993 and early 1994, and in particular the events and televisual offerings that surrounded the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. It was a strange kind of celebration. Other big anniversaries each decade on from the show's start in 1963 looked to the past, of course, but also looked to the future. Regular production of the programme was ongoing when the 10th, 20th and 50th anniversaries were celebrated, as will be the case for the 60th next year. Just before the 40th anniversary, the new series went into the early stages of pre-production following the most exciting announcement conceivable for Doctor Who fans, that it was back, back, back for the 21st century. For the 30th anniversary, there were rumours of a possible co-production with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television; but the years since the last run of the show in 1989 and cancellation were rife with rumours, not just of other potential TV co-production deals, but also script and casting speculation for a Doctor Who motion picture that Coast to Coast Productions had been trying to get off the ground for a few years by then. Nobody set much store by such title-tattle; Doctor Who was seen as a show that was done, finished, ended, dead.

Paradoxically, by 1993, dead Doctor Who seemed to have a much higher profile than when last alive in 1989, but as a heritage concept. The show's long and rich history was being regularly exploited in the early 1990s through repeats and sell-through VHS. Old stories were being released on tape at a rate of 10 -15 per year in the first half of the 1990s; plus, on each of an amazing 54 weeks between January 1992 and March 1994, a different old episode of Doctor Who was shown on either BBC2 or BBC1, almost doubling the TV presence it had when Sylvester McCoy had taken over as the Doctor in the latter years of the 1980s. The 30th anniversary was very much the culmination of the trend, but I couldn't help feel then that it was unsustainable. It was like Northern Soul, a new phenomenon creating something vital for a brief moment out of something old, and finite - once all the old records were rediscovered, with nothing new being made, the musical movement would be no more. Similarly, Doctor Who couldn't keep repeating old shows without making new ones. For a few weeks late in 1993, though, one might have thought different. There was new factual material on BBC1, including a showpiece documentary. The Doctor had a big presence in the prestigious and worthy Children in Need telethon, it appeared in a crossover with a popular soap in 3D, and the show got a front cover of the Radio Times once more (something it hadn't achieved for ten years prior to that).

I had started my third and final year at St. Aidan's College in the University of Durham that autumn. Myself and a dozen others got to move in to one of many newly built self-contained houses on college grounds, comprising individual rooms with communal kitchen and living room areas. We early on obtained a TV for the year by all chipping in and getting one from Radio Rentals; someone had brought a toploader video recorder from home, which was wired up to said telly and we were all set, or at least I was. (Look, I spent all my meagre student money on Doctor Who videos, and had not much left for going out and enjoying the springtime of my life, so a TV and a video was all I needed to be happy, pathetic I know.) Not to get too À la recherche du temps perdu about it, but some items from back then can produce what Proust afficionados would call 'involuntary memory'. One such would be a pair of a particular kind of 3D glasses. These one could buy in 1993 in Woollies and Smiths, with some of the proceeds going to the Children In Need charity. Just seeing a picture of these takes me back to those days when I and many others were part of an experiment to give as many TV watchers as possible motion sickness. I josh, of course. It was really something of a trial for a new system of 3D with dark and light tinted lenses, rather than the old red/green lens approach, meaning that the programme would still be watchable for someone who didn't have the special glasses. The problem was that to make the 3D effect work, there needed to be objects kept in the foreground in front of the action, and the camera had to constantly move. It could certainly make one feel giddy. The 3D trial lasted a week around the broadcast of the BBC Children in Need telethon.

Another item that can transport me back to 1993 is the double CD single. Thinking and writing about this phenomenon now I can't believe it ever existed, but just like a bunch of 78 records collected in a booklet to form a song sequence or the movements of a symphony (this is where the word 'album' originally came from, pop pickers), they were a historic quirk of physical media. To sustain a song's sales, the first disc of the set would come out one week, often in an attractive case with a tauntingly empty space for the second disc of the set. This second disc would come out the following week, and you'd pay separately for both. I only fell for this con a few times; one was a Pet Shop Boys single that came out around this time, I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing. I really didn't need that second disc of remixes, but the packaging - a soft, bumpy tactile clear-plastic wallet - was nice. Anyway, Tennant and Lowe performed the song on the telethon, wearing Beatle wigs and funny glasses, with the camera circling them over and over, and with odd CG shapes superimposed floating around in the foreground. It wasn't the oddest presentation of the night, though: that would have to be part 1 of Dimensions in Time, the aforementioned Doctor Who / Eastenders crossover skit. It is bewildering now to speculate as to how this came about. Yes, it was Who's anniversary year, but it was a recently - and infamously - cancelled show; having a skit putting together the highest-rated current BBC show with a show that had been seen as old and tried only four years previously was bizarre to say the least.

For thoughts on the story (loosely speaking) of Dimensions in Time, see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Five Doctors blog post. Interesting too was the material broadcast around it. The two parts of the piece were presented within Noel's House Party, Noel Edmonds's somehow popular Saturday night entertainment format of the time (it gave the country Mr. Blobby, who was imminently going to secure the Christmas number one in the UK at the end of 1993). The first part on the Friday night was in a House Party styled section of Children in Need, which saw an in-costume, in-character Jon Pertwee being comedy rude to Noel. The second followed the next evening within that week's House Party edition, though Noel in his somewhat passive-aggressive introduction did not appear to want it there too much. For me, it was exciting to see Doctor Who on such a big, popular Saturday night programme (even one that was a bit naff, and definitely embarrassing to watch as a third year student at the time). I was also disproportionately pleased to see 30 Years in the TARDIS, a primetime broadcast documentary shown within the same week. It will seem like I'm being sarcastic, but I was genuinely thrilled to see people like Toyah Wilcox, Mike Gatting and Lowri Turner enthusing about Doctor Who, that's how much we fans needed validation in those so-called wilderness years. Paused for a week for Dimensions in Time midway through it's run, the BBC1 repeat of Planet of the Daleks resumed the week after, and finished on 17th December. The ratings for the New Year BBC2 showings of The Green Death (see above) were disappointing, so they tried a Tom Baker classic, and the ratings got even worse, so they gave up. That new 3D system was never mentioned again. The bubble had burst, but for a brief period Doctor Who had taken over television again. It wouldn't be the last time it was to do so, and the next time it would be with new material...

In Summary:

This sounds like the slogan of the worst possible product ever, but: there's more to it than just the maggots.