The Fourth Doctor tries his hand at a James Bond movie in a story that waits until the climax for the alien monster to take center stage, while spending most of its time in action-hero fight scenes, chases, and undercover intrigue against main villain Harrison Chase, a mad millionaire with a botany fetish who will stop at nothing to own the alien seed pod recently discovered in Antarctica. This is the kind of story that dominated the Third Doctor’s era— you can easily imagine the Master in place of Chase, wanting to grab the Krynoid in order to threaten the world with it, only to see it get out of his control at the end.
But it’s not the Master this time, and despite the similarity in genre to a Pertwee story, the whole style of the episode roots it firmly in the “gothic horror” of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era of the series. There’s the homage to classic monster movies— in this case “The Thing” in the opening two episodes set in the base in Antarctica and then “Day of the Triffids” in the nature of the Krynoid. There’s a much stronger horror element than would have been seen in the earlier era, especially in the prolonged transformation of the seed pod’s human victims into Krynoids. Even when playing action hero, the Fourth Doctor presents quite a different character from the third. The Third Doctor would have spent most of his time in a story like this working in his laboratory at UNIT headquarters coming up with a very clever countermeasure against the Krynoid, but the Fourth Doctor stays on the scene making it up as he goes.
Speaking of UNIT, at this point the series still feels the need to mention them in an Earthbound story, but they’re barely in evidence. It’s the Doctor’s UNIT affiliation that gets him involved with the discovery in Antarctica, and at the climax a small group of UNIT soldiers show up to try and fight the Krynoid, but once again the Brigadier is in Geneva and the little squad of total strangers in UNIT uniforms don’t play much of any role in the plot. The phase-out of UNIT is now almost complete.
I’ve gotten this far and I haven’t mentioned whether the story is actually good or not. Well, it’s season 13— I’d only be repeating myself.
Details:
- This story is the finale of season 13, but it wasn’t supposed to be. The production team were at work on a story called “The Hand of Fear” but it was delayed for some reason. To fill in the gap, Hinchcliffe went to writer Robert Banks Stewart who had previously written “Terror of the Zygons.” Stewart came up with the idea of a mad millionaire who owned his own botanical garden trying to steal an alien plant, and Robert Holmes added the touch that it would be found in Antarctica (thus giving them a way to spend two episodes on a mostly self-contained story at the Antarctic base, leaving 4 episodes for the main story and so avoiding the pacing problems that 6-parters otherwise often had).
- The Doctor is in fine form in this story with a constant stream of quips, most of them mocking Chase’s lead thug, Scorby (to Scorby’s constant fury). One of my favorites: early on, Scorby has the Doctor and Sarah at gunpoint and orders, “Talk!” The Doctor replies, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had perfect pitch. And he—” Scorby has to interrupt, “Talk about the POD.”
- Sarah gets her own good dig in at Scorby late in the story, when the Krynoid has grown into plantzilla and has the characters trapped in Chase’s manor house. On hearing that the guards have left their posts and fled, Scorby angrily says, “Typical! Like a lot of women!” Minutes later something dangerous needs to be done and Scorby refuses. Sarah gives him an icy stare, asks, “What were you saying about women?” and then goes and does it herself.
Next week:
“The Masque of Mandragora,” 4 episodes, the season 14 premiere.
