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Plot:
Sometime in the 21st century, the Earth has become dependent on a instantaneous matter transportation system for goods and people called T-Mat. Space exploration has ceased and humans have traveled no further than the moon, upon which there is a base from where T-Mat is controlled. The Ice Warriors - led by an Ice Lord - invade this base as part of an Earth invasion plan. They kill most of the crew, but not before one of them knocks T-Mat out of action. Helped by cowardly Fewsham, the assistant director of the Moon's T-Mat operation, who just wants to save his own skin, the warriors work to repair the system. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive at a space museum run by Professor Eldred. Eldred yearns for the lost days of rockets and astronauts, and to this end is working on a secret rocket project. His old colleague, Radnor, now in a senior management position on the T-Mat programme (which Eldred sees as the ultimate betrayal) arrives, with T-Mat expert Gia Kelly. The world is in turmoil because of T-Mat going out of action, meaning disrupted delivery of needed supplies (this is the problem with Just In Time supply lines). They want to use Eldred's rocket to go to the moon and investigate what's wrong. The Doctor Jamie and Zoe agree to be the rocket's three-man crew.
Despite many upsets and malfunctions on the way, the rocket reaches the moon but is too damaged to travel back again. Miss Kelly is also enticed up to the moon; when Fewsham finishes repairs on the emergency T-Mat link from Earth to Moon, she travels up and repairs T-Mat properly, only to find that the Ice Warriors have tricked her. She escapes and joins up with the Doctor and his companions, while the Ice Warriors send seed pods by the now fully-functional T-Mat to various population centres around the world. The seed pods burst and spread gaseous spore clouds into the atmosphere that create a foamy fungus that spreads across the Earth's surface, eventually to change its atmosphere to something more amenable to the Martians. The fungus is susceptible to water, so a Warrior is dispatched to London to attack the Weather Control Bureau there, to prevent the humans making it rain. On the moon, the Ice Lord has gone back to his ship to liaise with his invasion fleet; our heroes turn up the heating and incapacitate the remaining warriors. Fewsham sends Gia and the TARDIS trio back to London by T-mat, and says he will continue after them, but does not come. Instead, when the Ice Lord returns and turns down the thermostat, he pretends he was overpowered by the other humans. This is a ruse to allow him to broadcast the Ice Lord talking about his invasion plans, including the homing signal the Martians will use to guide their fleet to the moon
Fewsham gets killed for his troubles, but the signal has been recorded. Eldrad, Radnor and Kelly work on sending a satellite into space that will broadcast a fake signal to draw the invasion fleet off course. The Doctor follows Jamie and Zoe over to the Weather Control Bureau where they tackle a warrior and fix the rain-making machine it has damaged. Then, the Doctor, followed by Jamie, T-Mat up to the moon to ensure the Martian's signal device is deactivated. The fleet veers off course into an orbit around the sun, and the Doctor and Jamie manage to kill the last couple of Ice Warriors left on the moon. Rain comes, washing away the fungus, and the TARDIS team make a quiet exit, returning to the TARDIS and dematerialising off to adventures new.
Context:
Watched stripped across a week, an episode a night, from the 'Revisited' DVD edition. The whole family (The Better Half, and three kids, boy of 14, boy of 10, girl of 8) joined me for most of the episodes, each one of them missing one part here and there (they have no staying power, honestly!). The Better Half likes this story and imitated John Witty's distinctive computer voice when she first heard it "Moscow sending now, Tokyo receiving now, dispatch completed". She and the middle child were particularly obsessed with the sonic guns mounted on the Ice Warrior's claw hands, as they were - to their delight - just pen torches sellotaped to the costume. Other points of note for the fam were around the behaviour of the Ice Warriors, mainly that they could not possibly hope to ever win at a game of hide and seek, as they're so very slow to move they couldn't catch anyone, and anyway they have no peripheral vision; various characters escape capture by them by just standing nearby very still. As this seemed to be the obvious secret of survival in The Seeds of Death, many of my viewing partners got a bit irate at the many characters during the story who make a pointless break for it only to get zapped by the sonic gun of an Ice Warrior and go all wibbly. Finally, the Better Half was bemused throughout with male fashions of the 21st century as depicted here, particularly the penchant for tailors of the T-Mat era to add gaffer tape detailing to everyone's standard issue boiler-suits to give the illusion of underwear worn on the outside.
First time round:
It's apt that The Seeds of Death happened to come up at this significant point (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details) in my random and directionless journey blogging my way through the Doctor Who back catalogue. For this is the story where that journey started (sort of). I'd caught glimpses of the odd story here and there before the autumn of 1981, but never sat down and watched it. I'd enjoyed a curated set of repeats of stories towards the end of that year (the 'Five Faces of Doctor Who'), and had then watched avidly from 1982, Peter Davison's first year on the job. But all this was programmed for me, and I had no choice to follow along prosaically, story after story. It wasn't until home video recorders became affordable that one could set one's own schedule in some minimal way. The order of events was as follows: late 1985, my Mum purchased the first VCR our household ever had; about a year later, I taped (with various degrees of aptitude and success) the episodes of the latest series of Doctor Who off the telly, to save and rewatch ad infinitum. Alas, this was the year of The Trial of a Time Lord, so none of the stories were fully self-contained, and the latitude for peripatetic wandering of viewing was limited.
Sometime towards the end of 1986, or possibly early 1987, my school friend Dominic bought a copy of Revenge of the Cybermen on VHS, the first ever Doctor Who release on video. We watched it together many many times. It had been out in different versions for a few years, but this was a repackaged release at an affordable price, and it was at this point that building up a collection started as a possibility for those that weren't rich (i.e. me). I ended up buying that tape from Dominic eventually, but before that, I bought my first ever tape new in a shop with my own money. And it was The Seeds of Death. This was early in the summer of 1987, as best I can date it. My parents had been divorced a few years by then - they'd managed 20 years of marriage by the year before Doctor Who reached it's own china anniversary, but then they went on a rather more permanent hiatus than Doctor Who managed shortly after. My sister and I would visit my Dad every other week, travelling from Worthing to his place in Bognor Regis. The sliver lining was that this gave me two towns to regularly scour for Doctor Who purchases. Finding copies of novelisations or videos in those days was pot luck; nowhere I knew of in Worthing stocked the videos at all, but one day on a weekend visit I found that they were being stocked in W. H. Smiths in Bognor's high street.
They only had Revenge of the Cybermen and The Seeds of Death, and so I bought the one I hadn't seen already. I couldn't watch it straight away, though, as my Dad didn't own a VCR. I must have read the blurb on that video box a hundred times over that weekend, and examined every photo on the packaging until I could draw them all from memory. The goodies within remained locked up until I got back home on Sunday evening, when I'm guessing, as I can't remember, that I would have run into the house, put the tape into the slot without so much as a Hello to my Mum, and watched the whole thing before going to bed late (it's six episodes, so even edited together as an omnibus as it was, it was still around two and a half hours long). A few months later, though it seemed like years, I got Pyramids of Mars. A few months after that, though it seemed like forever, I got Death to the Daleks. The journey had begun, bouncing from Doctor to Doctor, era to era. I'm still on that journey now: 160 stories blogged, and counting...
Reaction:
This is an apt story as a first (both my first one to own, and the first black and white video release right at the beginning of the range), as it is the epitome of a particular type of Doctor Who story, common in the 1960s but one that has appeared throughout its history, the no-nonsense action adventure story. Exactly right to entice the curious would-be collector like my younger self. These tales channel large amounts of Jules Verne, and have lots of episodic scrapes as our heroes battle against environmental forces, or evil adversaries. They don't have much in the way of interpersonal drama or deeper subtexts to confuse the issue. Even the horror inflections that were part of the house style of Troughton's stories the year before are mostly gone. The odd scare moment in The Seeds of Death is more on the level of a Scooby Doo cartoon. In fact, this period of Doctor Who has more than a bit in common with the adventures of the Mystery Machine gang: fun characters, simple but engaging plot, a moment where the crazy kids investigate putting themselves in danger (Jame and Zoe going off to the Weather Control Bureau on their own), and a lot of slapstick shenanigans including a lame joke at the end. Every story couldn't be like that, but Who got into this groove for a few stories in 1968 and 1969, from The Invasion through to The Space Pirates, and it's a period I like very much.
This is not to say that the story is just archetypal and average, mind. There's lots of interesting ideas and moments in there to keep the interest up over a long running time. In an echo of writer Brian Hayles's story from the previous Troughton season, The Ice Warriors, which introduced the Martian meanies, there is a sci-fi exploration of impacts of technology and impacts to the environment. It's a little scaled down here compared to that earlier story, but it's quite clever to cover something as topical as a rocket trip to the moon in 1969 while simultaneously depicting this as something that's old hat in the world of the story. Also similar to The Ice Warriors is the subplot about professional interactions and intrigue. The subplot about Radnor and Eldred is like the Clent / Penley interactions in the earlier story in miniature. More interesting for me here, though, is Fewsham's story. Terry Scully does impeccable work with the character: palm-sweaty desperation to avoid death early on, gradually turning to a resolve to redeem himself, with a brief and magical moment of sheer panic and terror midway when he thinks he has killed the Doctor. (The eldest spoilt this a tad by pointing out that the Ice Warriors have no way of checking that Fewsham has T-matted the Doctor into the vacuum of space, as they ordered, so he could have just sent him safely to New York or Tokyo or somewhere.) Frankly, Scully's performance is a bit too good compared to the exciting but somewhat superficial surrounding action, and the character is definitely my favourite part of the story.
A close second would be how the story sounds. The music and special sound for this story (by Dudley Simpson and Brian Hodgson respectively) are so distinctive, I think I'd be able to name the story from only a five second blast of either. Rather than score the episodes, Simpson has provided a library of cues to use and reuse through the story as a whole, which means there is much repetition, and occasionally the music could fit the action better, but each one is such a belter that even a few episodes of hearing them again and again is enough to seed them into your mind forever, Martian fungus style. Hodgson's bleeps and bloops are great too, with the homing signals for the human and Martian ships to follow being particular stand-outs. Director Michael Ferguson and the production team do not let the visual side down either, with some great shots, particularly those of the lone Ice Warrior stalking around London parks with the sun behind him.
Combine this with one of the most charming set of regulars in Troughton, Fraser Hines as Jamie, and Wendy Padbury as Zoe, and you have a great though undemanding tale. It isn't without minor flaws - it's a little unsettling, for example, given that future stories will delve deeper into their complexity, honour and nobility, to see how bloodthirsty is the script - and the Doctor - towards the Ice Warriors. Every single one is blown or burnt up without a second thought, and the mass murder of the fleet, as this cold-blooded group faces an unfortunate fate in an orbit close to the Sun, is pretty much laughed off at the end. Earlier in the story, many Ice Warriors are sent off to find the stragglers on the Moonbase and quite a few of them don't come back thanks to the efforts of our heroes, but the Ice Lord in charge doesn't seem to miss them. The story makes a big deal about how T-Mat has replaced all other forms of travel, but an automobile and satellite-carrying rocket are too conveniently found towards the end. These are mere quibbles, though, the main problem is that there just isn't quite enough material to stretch to 6 episodes without a few moments that drag. Troughton's last year was plagued with script troubles, planned stories falling through necessitating others to bulk up, adding extra episodes to meet the quota. One story after another from this era is a big, lumbering beast. The Seeds of Death comes close to managing to be fleet of foot despite carrying a lot of baggage, but it doesn't quite make it.
Connectivity:
Both stories feature a space vessel that has some trouble just after take off, and both include other-worldly warriors in armour.
Deeper Thoughts:
One Hundred and Sixty High and Rising. Reaching my 160th randomly shuffled story for the blog marks an interesting stopping point on this long journey. If I'd decided at the outset to watch Doctor Who in broadcast order, the 160th story would have seen me complete the classic series, up to and including the final story of that run, 1989's Survival. Instead of the Patrick Troughton Doctor, Jame and Zoe rushing back to Professor Eldred's museum and taking off in the TARDIS, my latest scene watched would have been the Sylvester McCoy Doctor and Ace walking off into the sunset arm in arm, while he gives it the full elegiac voiceover treatment about fighting injustice and not letting the tea get cold, etc. etc. There is a little room for interpretation in terms of story numbering within the classic series. so I better show my working. The first 15 years or so are straightforward and generally agreed upon. The Stones of Blood is number 100. A planned but eventually cut scene in that story was going to see the Doctor and Romana celebrating the former's birthday, but this was really a codified reference to the programme reaching its story centenary. The chunks that the episodes of Doctor Who up to that point had been grouped into (episodes, lest we forget, that didn't always have an overall multi-part story title, and that had cliffhangers between as well as within) were all generally agreed upon, and the commercial releases of Doctor Who (videos, CDs, and DVDs) followed this pattern, with individual stories, not episodes or groups of stories, being the standard unit of delivery.
A year after The Stones of Blood, though, and a story is half-made but never broadcast (Shada), a couple of years after that and a spin-off story is shown (K9 & Company), and a few years after that The Trial of a Time Lord is broadcast, nominally a single 14-part story, but also considered a collection of four stories under an umbrella title. How does one account for them? When Dragonfire was broadcast in 1987, some pre-publicity - I remember a Radio Times advert, but it may have been mentioned elsewhere too - described it as the 150th story. It's not legally binding or anything, but it must have been in someone's head, so what exactly did it mean? Probably that they, whoever they were, were discounting Shada and K9 & Company, and counting Trial as 4 stories. That then promotes Dragonfire to the 150 spot. I seem to remember an alternate fan theory expressed by maybe a letter writer into Doctor Who Magazine at the time that it could be that they, whoever they were, were counting Trial as only one story but including Shada, K9 & Company and... Slipback, an inconsequential radio thing starring Colin Baker that had aired on Radio 4 during the 18 months Doctor Who was off the air for its Michael Grade imposed hiatus. It is a bit of a stretch, though, that Slipback would have been on their mind, whoever they were.
I am certainly not counting Slipback, as it wasn't on the telly. I didn't at first intend to cover Shada or K9 & Company for the blog either, but circumstances dictated that they came up, which is fair enough, as it's all supposed to be random and unplanned. And I've counted Trial as four different stories, or else I'd have burned my way through Colin Baker's era even quicker than I have done (he only stars in eight stories in total if Trial only counts as one). The extra two stories bump Dragonfire to position 152, and the eight further stories in Sylvester McCoy's reign leading up to Survival take the total to 160. That puts me just over half way through after five years of blogging, as I make it 140 further stories remaining. The post-2005 batch is not without its points of contention over story groupings either, and there's no option to follow the DVDs either, as they were never released as single stories. Suffice to say, I count Utopia as part of an epic three-part story along with The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords, but Turn Left is standalone. I also don't count Scream of The Shalka, even though it got a DVD release in the official range. By my reckoning, that means that The Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children is story 300.
Notwithstanding the new stories that will be produced (whenever filming will next be able to take place), I should catch up in roughly five years. What a prospect! Of the stories I currently have left to cover in that time, there's a reasonably even split between classic and new series stories, 68 to 72 respectively. Of the older segment, there are 21 remaining stories in the black and white format of the first two Doctors, and of them 10 have some or all of their episodes missing (though some have animated versions to plug the holes). It's probably going to be too packed a schedule for me to change my mind about Scream of the Shalka or Slipback, but give it five years, and you never know!
In Summary:
A fun, solid space adventure story that has loads of good stuff in it, almost enough to fill six episodes. Almost.
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