Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 441: The Seeds of Doom, Episode One
Dear diary,
Much like The Enemy of the World, or The Web of Fear, toady is exciting because I get to watch an episode which was lost from the BBC’s archives before being returned. The only difference is that The Seeds of Doom Episode One remains the only episode of Doctor Who history to be lost from the BBC before it was shown on television! The story has always fascinated me - this episode was filmed, edited, signed off… and then went missing! In a newspaper article at the time, Philip Hinchcliffe explained:
”Our tapes for the entire six-part serial were tucked away safely - we thought - the actors had all gone away, and the sets had been dismantled. We rang the library asking for our first episode and, after a check, the answer came back that they couldn’t find it. It had just vanished!
”Panic? It was more like a mass rave. They started checking, and I started making plans to re-edit the serial - a mammoth job with very little time to spare. Finally, after two days, they found it. It had been wrongly numbered. But in that time, I’d aged about 20 years!“
I’d love to know what the contingency would have been. It’s one of my favourite little bits of Doctor Who trivia, and in some ways I’m a little sorry that the episode didn’t turn up until years later - it would have made for a great, Shada style ‘lost episode’ saga!
I’m glad that it did turn up, though, because this episode is really rather good. The Seeds of Death is yet another one of those stories that I’ve never seen, but I know the general premise of. Alien seed pod is found buried in the ice at the South Pole. It turns people into plants, and they take over a country house. But I didn’t know that some of the story was properly set in the Antarctic. I thought that the majority of the story took place in (or around) said country house, so it’s a nice surprise to find ourselves somewhere a little more unexpected.
And it’s also nice to be in the company of some great guest characters. The three researchers at the polar base feel like real people, and they laugh and joke as though they’re real colleagues working together in tough conditions. We get plenty of time to bond with them, too, because aside from a brief scene with the Doctor at the World Ecology Bureau, our regulars don’t really show their faces until half-way through the episode. Until then, we’re left to bond with new characters, and get caught up in their lives.
Once our heroes do arrive, though, they’re on fine form as usual. I seem to be saying it under every single story at the moment (I had a similar issue when Troughton first took on the role. It’ll wear off slowly…), but Tom Baker really is great value for money. I could watch him all day long. The way he plays with his yo-yo during his briefing is great fun, and his warning (‘remember - no touch pod!’) is as childish and patronising as it could be - impossible not to love. And then once he’s reached the snowy setting down south, he’s back to serious, worried mode again. There’s something great about showing him as unable to feel the cold, and it helps with the kind of aloof, alien performance he’s giving throughout these scenes.
The whole episode is filled with a great atmosphere, the same as pretty much everything else this season, and it’s good to see them using stock footage again to set the scene right at the beginning. They used the same trick at the start of Pyramids of Mars, and it really does help to expand the scope of the series’ setting. Even though we’ve got lots of time spent on near-contemporary Earth (Zygons, The Android Invasion, and this story all take place in the same decade, while Pyramids of Mars is only set around half a century out), the scale of the series here feels much wider than it did during the Pertwee years.
This is another one of those stories that people insist on rating very highly, and it’s off to a good start…
