Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 444: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Four
Dear diary,
During Season Twelve, when the programme first started trying out some experiments with outside broadcast video for location work, I was less than keen on the results. Robot came across as looking a bit like a fan-made video in places, and The Sontaran Experiment was just lacking any kind of texture or depth for me. I thought that those two stories were the only examples (pre Trial of a Time Lord) of the programme using ‘all video’ inside and out, but it turns out that The Seeds of Doom falls into the same category. I can guess why. I know that the Krynoid will end up growing bigger than the house before the story is out, and I’m guessing that they’ll be using all-video so that they can do some effects with that later on.
What’s surprising to me is how much I’m enjoying the location sequences in this one, and how the video look to them isn’t putting me off in the same way it did last season. I don’t know if I’ve simply grown used to the feel of stories being made in this way, or if it’s because Douglas Camfield is back in the director’s chair (he could make anything look good), but I’m actually quite liking the finished product. It has the effect of making the studio-bound inside of the house and the location-recorded outside feel like they belong in the same place - you never get that switch which tells you that we’ve picked up the recording some weeks later and somewhere completely different.
Don’t get me wrong - I think I’ll always prefer the film look for the programme (and in some ways, I’m sad to see Camfield - the master of film sequences - going out without a final chance to use it), but this is the most I’ve enjoyed them attempting outside broadcast to date. Ten years from now, in Season Twenty-Three, this will become the norm for Doctor Who’s production, so I’m hoping this story is a step in the right direction.
Something which really does help, and can’t be underestimated, if just how great the locations themselves are. The Antarctic setting, the quarry, the grounds, and the house… there’s a real scope to this story, and all of the locations have been brilliant. It’s also nice to see them taking part in a night shoot outside the mansion - it’s still a relatively rare occurrence in the programme at this point, but it really does add a whole new atmosphere to things. My only slight gripe is that the lighting for these sequences is a little off, maybe a tad too bright. It’s only a minor quibble, though, and it doesn’t spoil the effect.
One of those things people tend to know about The Seeds of Doom is that one stage of the Krynoid’s evolution is produced by dragging an Axon costume out of storage and painting it green. They even did a similar thing with the action figure, so you can have both monsters on your shelf pulled from the same mold. I’m surprised to see how little tho version of the creature is actually used, though. It turns up most prominently during the first couple of episodes, when it’s the main form of the creature as it stalks around the snow base. Here, it’s only around for a matter of minutes before we move on to another - previously unseen - stage of the lifecycle. I think the version we see in the closing moments of today’s episode is perhaps a weaker design than the repurposed Axon, though, and the way it shuffles towards the camera in the final seconds is a bit reminiscent of the Slyther for me!
I’m not sure where it’s going from here, design-wise, because this feels like a far more cumbersome costume to use for two whole episodes than the one we had earlier on. I’m assuming that at some stage they’ll try and lure the creature towards the compost machine to destroy it (far too much is made of the device here to simply be for injecting drama to the Doctor’s situation), although I know that we’ll be escaping that fate before UNIT turn up at the end.
Everything is connected together a lot more than I was expecting it to be, actually. I’ve known for a long time that UNIT rock up at the end of Episode Six to save the day (sans any of our regular faces), but I’d assumed they came out of nowhere when the story was running out of time and needed a resolution. Here, though, they’re already being woven into the plot, with characters making reference to calling them in as the situation grows larger and larger. We’ve even got characters like Amelia Ducat creeping back into the narrative - I’d assumed she only featured in yesterday’s episode to provide some light relief! In many ways, this is making it feel more thought-through than your average Doctor Who story. Everything is tied to everything else, and it’s making for a very satisfying story.
