Chapter the 314th, where confidence is a preference for the habitual collector of what is known as ... plant life!
Plot:
A three-man scientific team in Antarctica discover a large, green plant pod in the ice. They send word to the World Ecology Bureau, who bring in UNIT as the pod's presence is unexplainable. The Doctor and Sarah travel to the scientists' base. Not heeding the Doctor's warning not to touch the pod, the scientists examine it, and one of them is attacked by a shoot that whips out of it. He starts to go green and transform into a plant. Meanwhile, a civil servant from the Bureau, Dunbar, makes some money selling information about the pod to a millionaire plant enthusiast Harrison Chase. Harrison sends his Head of Security, a mercenary called Scorby, and nervy pet scientist Keeler off to Antarctica to fetch the pod. The Doctor knows all about the pod, and knows that there will be a second one buried in the snow, duly uncovering it. It is a Krynoid, a carnivorous alien plant creature that will kill everyone on Earth if it isn't stopped. The scientist transforming into a Krynoid goes on the rampage. Scorby and Keeler steal the other pod, escaping after setting a bomb on a timer. It blows up the base, destroying the Krynoid. Luckily, the Doctor and Sarah survive. They are picked up by a rescue team and return to the UK. They trace the second pod to Harrison Chase's estate and sneak in to the house. Sarah is captured, and Chase intends her to be the second victim of the Krynoid. The Doctor rescues her, and Keeler is instead the one attacked.
Keeler begins to transform, and the insane Chase - desperate to see what sort of plant he will grow into - imprisons him in a cottage in the grounds and has him fed raw meat. Dunbar, trying to make amends, enters Chase's estate to confront him. He is killed by the escaped Krynoid, which has now grown bigger than a human. The Doctor, Sarah and Scorby are trapped in the cottage with the Krynoid outside, now grown almost as big as the cottage. The Doctor devises a plan, and escapes to return with reinforcements. Scorby and Sarah hide in the main house. The Krynoid can now control nearby plant life; vines and ivy smash through the windows of the house. Chase has somehow developed a mental link with the Krynoid and wants it to succeed. The Doctor returns with UNIT troops who use weedkiller sprays to keep the plants at bay. Scorby makes a break for it, but plants drag him to his death in a pond in the grounds. Chase tries to kill the Doctor by putting him in his industrial-size compost maker, but ends up falling in and getting minced himself. UNIT contact the RAF who blow up the Krynoid (now the size of Chase's manor). The Doctor takes Sarah on a holiday in the TARDIS, but they end up back in Antarctica again.
Watched from the DVD with the individual episodes spread out a little bit (I watched one every other day, approx.) during late October and early November 2024. People from the household would drift in and out during my viewings, but nobody sat down and watched the story with me. The Better Half was in the room, if not actually fully watching, for a couple of the episodes. She commented at one point that Tony Beckley's velvety villainous performance as Harrison Chase - one of my all-time favourite turns in classic Who - was, quote "A bit like Dick Dastardly". I thought this was a mightily unfair assessment, but after that there were a couple of scenes where Chase rants about how he's "surrounded by idiots", so maybe there's a little truth in it. As it turned out, I made a good choice to watch from the DVD. Had I viewed the story on the BBC iplayer, the story would have disappeared halfway through my watch. Both The Seeds of Doom and Terror of the Zygons were taken down from the streaming platform on the 1st November 2024, a year after being made available as part of the wider 'Whoniverse' section. There are two things unique about those two stories in the Doctor Who canon - they're the only ones written by Robert Banks Stewart, and the only two scored by Geoffrey Burgon. Presumably an agreement with the estates of one of those gentlemen (most likely Stewart) ran out after a year.
Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, and not just any Doctor. Completing every one of the stories starring Tom Baker, the longest-running Doctor ever having been in the role for seven years, was a big milestone. I'll go into more detail to mark this in the Deeper Thoughts section below. Tom is the fifth Doctor completed so far (the seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth Doctors having been completed before Baker). This post also marks the completion of another season, the 30th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, and 13).
First Time Round:
The obsessive detailing of every aspect of Doctor Who on the internet helps me to precisely date when I first watched particular stories. It works only if the first time I watched a story is when it was broadcast or repeated or released on a home video medium (the dates of which are freely available online for every story); there are a few, though, that are more difficult to pin down exactly because I first encountered them on a pirated video tape, the sort that was lent out or exchanged between fans in the 1980s and 90s. The Seeds of Doom was one of these: I know that my first glimpse of the story was on the Tom Baker Years clip compendium released on VHS in September 1992 (I was a bit bemused as to what was going on when watching a clip of various characters carrying pot plants from one place to another). So it was sometime after that but before the sell-through VHS release in August 1994. In that period, the only person who would have provided me stories that hadn't been officially released yet was fan friend David (mentioned many times before on this blog). I'd met David at university, but he was a few years ahead of me, and in 1992 had graduated. He did come to visit sometimes, though, so my guess is on one of those visits he brought a tape with him for us to watch. It was most likely early 1993 (I remember that Doctor Who was being repeated on BBC2 when he came back up to Durham in my second year). The reason why I'm particularly interested is that, given all the evidence above, I first watched The Seeds of Doom in my early 20s, but the one thing I can remember very clearly about that first watch is that the story creeped me out. I thought I was beyond being scared of Doctor Who by that age, but The Seeds of Doom still had the power to horrify.
Reaction:
Just as I started to write up my reaction to The Seeds of Doom, the final story I had to blog of the early and popular Tom Baker era produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and script-edited by Robert Holmes, the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 610) was sent out to subscribers and dropped through my letter box. It was momentarily disconcerting to flick through the magazine and find this era and in particular Hinchcliffe himself was being covered in unprecedented detail, taking up about a third of the magazine. I thought for a terrible moment that he'd died, but happily this was not the case. It seems that his reaching his 80th birthday was the prompt for an in-depth and lengthy interview on his years working on the programme. Because he is so ubiquitously lauded by fandom, I probably react against that and tend to underestimate Hinchcliffe's input into the stories of his that I've covered here over the years. Undoubtedly he made a huge contribution to The Seeds of Doom. The most obvious sign of this is that the story's roots are showing; as with many a story that he and Holmes elicited from writers for Who, there is an obvious monster movie inspiration, or inspirations plural in this case: the first two-episode section set in Antarctica steals like a genius from the 1951 film The Thing From Another World. The second four-part section is a mash-up of Quatermass and The Day of the Triffids. That innovative way of structuring a six-part story in two sections is also something Hinchcliffe and Holmes brought in, and writer Robert Banks Stewart makes the most of it. As the audience has seen the impact on a human attacked by the pod once, there's enhanced dramatic energy in the third episode as the anticipation builds about who will be the second victim, and then the next three episodes show the process happening again, quickly progressing beyond what had been seen before.
Although all of that input from producer, script editor and writer is significant, it's the contributions from director Douglas Camfield and composer Geoffrey Burgon that are most important - they provide the eerie atmosphere I felt on my first watch that is this story's defining factor. The same people worked on the beginning story of the season as well as this season finale. They achieved a similar atmosphere in that story at first, but as I'll mention in the Deeper Thoughts section below the drama and excitement couldn't be sustained in the Zygons story. In this their second attempt of the year, they almost manage to sustain it for the full six episode length. Only once the interesting villain and henchman are dispatched do things start to fall apart. The solution to the Krynoid monster, that has grown to the the size of a mansion, is simply to blow it up. This is disappointingly prosaic, particularly as the Doctor has been quoted earlier in the serial saying that "Bullets and bombs aren't the answer to everything". Then, there's a supposedly humorous coda where the Doctor and Sarah end up back in Antarctica because the Doctor has failed to reset the TARDIS coordinates. Not only is this a continuity error (they didn't travel there in the first place by TARDIS but were helicoptered in) but it is also obscure. They join in reciting "Have we been here before ... or are we yet to come?" portentously, and then burst into laughter. But it's not a joke and it's not a quotation, so what does it mean? It's a bizarre way to end both story and season. It's a shame that the only major negative aspects of the story are saved for the very end, as everything else is pretty wonderful.
There are some good action set pieces: another thing that Camfield regularly brings to stories is well-shot scenes where soldiers blow things up, and he doesn't disappoint here. The soldiers in question are a kind of zombie UNIT. Technically this counts as the final UNIT story of their initial era, but none of the regulars of Jon Pertwee's time are featured, all having bowed out in stories earlier in the run; as such, this lot may as well be any old squaddies. There's a couple of moments where the Doctor behaves quite violently for the time - a neck twist he gives Scorby is particularly nasty - but these are brief. A rightfully praised bravura moment sees the Doctor smash down into a room through a skylight, knock out a baddie, grab a gun, save Sarah and deliver a quip (when asked drily by Chase what he does for an encore, he replies "I win") then exit the room, all in about 30 seconds. The production design is great (the skylight that Baker breaks and the room he drops into look real. The effects are all of high quality; Some scenes creating Antarctica are more impressionistic than realistic, but they work. The model work is intricate and excellent throughout. The stages of Krynoid transformation are mostly good, with only the wobbly version that attacks Dunbar at the end of episode four looking a bit too Monthy Python to be scary. Small lapses like that don't matter too much, though, as all the actors are playing the material with utmost conviction, and the material is rich. Baker is at his most brooding; the line "You must help yourselves", when suggesting that one scientist amputate the other's arm to stop the infection, is a moment that shows the Doctor at his most alien. Lis Sladen gets to challenge the baddies in some emotive scenes too.
The three scientists in the first two episodes are good, particularly as two of them have to deliver their performances from behind awfully fake beards, but it's the main guest characters that feature throughout or in the last four episodes that make this story special. Tony Beckley is fantastic at the velvety villainy, and does a plausible take on a rapid descent into madness. His childlike delivery of the line "I could have had two pods" is telling and chilling in equal measure. To my mind, though, he is marginally bested by his henchman. John Challis's turn as Scorby is one of the all-time best performances in the classic era of Doctor Who. Even though he is at first glance a stock heavy, Challis takes Robert Banks Stewart's words, which already give the character more depth than usual, and adds more to make Scorby a living, breathing and three-dimensional creation, and every scene he appears in is lifted by his presence. That's not to ignore some other great character performances, like repentant sell-out Dunbar (Kenneth Gilbert) or nervy reluctant accomplice turned victim Keeler (Mark Jones). The scene where the partially transformed Keeler starts to rant at Sarah, chanting "You want me to die" over and over is one of the moments in Doctor Who that most scared me - and, as mentioned above, I was in my 20s before I saw it for the first time. Even a minor character like Amelia Ducat (Sylvia Coleridge) shines. It's a nice bit of writing that she looks like a one-scene comic relief character, then unexpectedly returns as a complication factor, threatening Chase's plans. Just when we believe that she's coincidentally blundered in to things, it turns out she's a spy, deliberately investigating. It's no coincidence that when all these characters have exited or been killed off, the story runs out of steam - a giant green monster just isn't as interesting.
Connectivity:
I don't think this has ever happened before, but the titles of this story and the last one on the blog rhyme. The Seeds of Doom follows Boom. Bada-bing, bada-boom! Apart from that, both stories feature soldiers and an explosive device with a countdown. There's a reference in Boom to sentient mud, which is I suppose not that far from sentient plants, though the mud in the Ncuti story turns out not to be sentient in the end.
Deeper Thoughts:
Milestone Watch Extra. As mentioned a couple of times before in blog posts this year, I have given up social media. As such, I have to get my news, including my Doctor Who news, from other sources. There's a certain obsessive fan flavour of FOMO - what if a box set was announced and I didn't hear about it to pre-order until the next Doctor Who Magazine arrived, and what if that was too late and they'd sold out, arrggh! - that compels me to regularly do an online search on the phrase 'Doctor Who' and check the News tab. There's very rarely any actual news, of course, but there are always hits. Nine out of ten of the hits will be clickbait articles on 'entertainment sites' speculating about something or other, or investigating some continuity error from a decade ago, or extrapolating a major character's return from something an old actor said at a convention. The tenth hit will invariably be an unconnected article with a headline along the lines of "Colorado doctor who slept with dozens of his patients jailed". I'd still rather get my Doctor Who news this way, though. This is because there's one thing I don't ever have to deal with using my approach: seeing Tom Baker trending, and having to investigate to confirm that the worst has not happened. My FFOMO, my fan fear of missing out, does not cross that boundary. The news that one day is sure to come, and may it be a long way off, that Tom has passed on is news that I'm happy to miss out on for as long as possible. I didn't grow up with Tom Baker's Doctor. I first watched Doctor Who when he'd just left the role, and the first story I ever saw of his was his swansong Logopolis when it was repeated in late 1981. Yet, such is the significant impact Baker had on the show in his time in the title role and ever since, that I feel it is required to take stock in the Deeper Thoughts section now I've completed blogging all his stories.
I promise I won't make a habit of this in posts to come (I'm near the end now, so most blog posts from this point on will be finishing some era or other). But, completing Tom Baker's era - seven years, 41 (or 42) stories, 170+ episodes, the exact numbers will depend on whether you count Shada or not - is the biggest mountain in the range I have had to climb, and is worth dwelling upon for a while. As I mentioned above, I only got into Doctor Who after Tom had left the role, so my experience of watching his stories was in a random order, which I then emulated in the way I've watched every Doctor's stories for this blog. After the repeat of Logopolis, the main way for me to watch his stories was when they came out on VHS as part of the official range. That range was slow to get going, but when tapes did start to be released the majority of them were for those stories starring Tom Baker. The first story of his I saw on tape was Revenge of the Cybermen, and the first one I bought was Pyramids of Mars. As noted in the First Time Round section above, there were eventually other ways to see Baker stories for the first time; I did see a few from pirated videos, and watched a few on UK Gold. The one thing I never did after Logopolis was catch a Tom Baker repeat on the BBC. This was mainly because the Beeb kept showing the same story (Genesis of the Daleks) whenever they repeated one of Tom's ones, and I'd already watched it on video. I worked out when I blogged it that the final Tom Baker I watched was The Sun Makers, when that story was released on VHS in 2001, so it took me 20 years to view every part of Tom's Who oeuvre (or Whoeuvre, if you will).
It didn't take 20 years to rewatch all the stories randomly for this blog, but it was getting on for half as long. The first one to come up was The Armageddon Factor - not an auspicious start - which I blogged in July 2015; nine years and four months later, the job was done. Tom stories came up with a reasonable regularity in the years in between. It didn't take too long (up to October 2017) for the blog to land upon Tom's first ever story, as the chronometer flies, Robot - the Deeper Thoughts section of whose post contains my tribute to the man behind the scarf, including mention of the time I met and had a book signed by Tom (a tale I think I may have told elsewhere on the blog too - apologies, I'm an old man who sometimes repeats himself). It took a lot longer before I blogged his last ever story (and the first of his I ever saw) Logopolis. I finally blogged it in December 2021. I had a few surprising reactions to stories over the years; the most disappointing watch was probably Terror of the Zygons. I'd always enjoyed viewing the story, never seeing - until the watch for the blog in September 2021 - that the story falls apart half way through. The same team (writer, director and composer) worked on The Seeds of Doom, and second time round they manage to put off the point where things fall apart until late on in the final episode, so it's overall much better. The Robots of Death maintains its high quality with every watch, including the one in December 2022 for the blog; Horror of Fang Rock gets better every time I see it, and might well turn out to be my favourite Tom in a couple of viewings' time. Underworld is nowhere near as bad as you might think. All in all, this body of work is a decent legacy for the great man. Seeing as they'll seemingly let anyone have a go at being president (twice, even) no matter how manifestly unfit and unqualified they might be, I'd say let Mister Baker do it. Tom for President!
In Summary:
It's got atmosphere, it's got pace, it's got engaging characters and a lot of incident... it just hasn't got an ending.
