Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 370: The Green Death The One with the Maggots, Episode Two
Dear diary,
‘The One with the Maggots’ is often brought up when I speak to people about Doctor Who. You know the type of situation - as Who fans, we’ve all been there. You’re introduced to someone new and whoever is making the introduction makes a point of saying ‘Will’s something of an expert about Doctor Who. The conversation from here goes in one of three ways;
1) They instantly make a point of telling you that they don’t like Doctor Who, and change the subject (or, in one case, when I was being introduced to a member of the crew, the person introducing me told them I was ‘something of an expert’ before adding that they didn’t like the show, and thought it was rubbish).
2) They mention how they really liked David Tennant, but don’t really care much for ‘the new chap’. Smith seems to have remained ‘the new chap’ to people I’ve met over the last three years who aren’t what you’d call fans.
3) They tell me how they remember watching Doctor Who when they were younger. You know, the original Doctor Who with Peter Troughton and the Daleks made of tin foil. If the conversation takes this direction, ‘The One with the Maggots’ seems to crop up more often than not.
Which is odd, in some ways, because this particular story achieved the lowest average ratings for the entire Tenth Series (no fault of the story, really. The last story in three of the five Pertwee seasons was always the weakest, ratings-wise). This was one of the stories to get an omnibus repeat later in the year, though, during which it scored almost 3 million more in the ratings, so perhaps that’s where the fond memories come from?
Because there’s no doubting that you would remember this story if you’d seen it as an impressionable eight-year-old. The first shot, with the live maggots crawling around is genuinely quite a shock (partly because I didn’t realise they’d used live maggots at all in the story), and even some dodgy CSO cutting around Pertwee doesn’t let it down. Then in the closing moments when the models of the giant creatures start to show up… well they’re bloody well done, aren’t they?
And yet, the story having this big selling point often used to describe it - it’s got giant maggots in! - robs it of some tension. Had I not known they were going to be in there as the monster, and had The Green Death been one of my ‘blackspots’ from this era of the programme, I’d have been trying really pretty hard to work out what’s going on here. For the first time since perhaps as far back as Fury From the Deep, there’s lots of things that make me think a previous foe could be making a reappearance.
The look of the tunnels couples with the overalls and hardhats recall similar scenes in Doctor Who and the Silurians. The idea of pollution being so central makes me think of the Autons. There’s a mysterious green slime, similar to (well… identical to) that from Inferno. We’ve got a mysterious computer controlling things from behind the scenes and brainwashing innocent people into working for it, just like in The War Machines. I’d love to come to this story after all the previous ones, but with no knowledge of what’s coming up in these six episodes - I’d love to see the reaction.
