Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 446: The Seeds of Doom, Episode Six
Dear diary,
Oh, there’s something rather sad about all of this. UNIT have been a part of Doctor Who since Season Six (and some characters, like the Brigadier, stretch back even further into Season Five), and for a while they’ve been a huge part of the programme. Now we’ve reached their last appearance for a good long time, and instead of going out in a triumphant blaze of glory, they’re leaving in a slightly diminished form. It’s like a popular TV series limping on for one more season once all the main cast have departed, and then facing a slow, agonising death.
We’ve been watching the break up of the ‘UNIT family’ for a long time now. If anything, it started as far back as Season Eight, with the Third Doctor’s first excursion off-Earth, and then continued on from there, with less and less time being spent on Terra Firma. Then we see Mike leave (he returns, of course, for Planet of the Spiders, but it’s not really the same), the Brigadier parts with Terror of the Zygons and has been stuck in Geneva ever since, while Benton bowed out with The Android Invasion earlier this year. That same story introduces Colonel Faraday to the UNIT team, but here he’s not even mentioned, and we’re left in the hands of Sergeant Henderson and Lieutenant Beresford.
It’s just not the same. This lot are all wearing the right uniform and running around in the right style to be UNIT soldiers, but there’s none of the shared history we have during the early 1970s. Part of the fun when Benton turns up in Ambassadors of Death is that we previously saw him helping the Second Doctor and Jamie repel the Cyberman invasion of London. By the time Mike turns on the rest of his colleagues, it holds impact because we’ve watched him work alongside them for so long. In this story, when Henderson is subjected to the composting machine it’s a shock because it’s such a brutal death, not because they’ve killed off one of our UNIT team. We’ll not see the organisation back properly for another thirteen years, when we’ll be given another new UNIT during Battlefield, so it’s been a shame to watch them face diminishing returns over the last few seasons.
It’s not enough to ruin the episode, mind, and there’s still an awful lot in here to love. After my praise for the shot of the house-sized Krynoid at the end of yesterday’s episode, I was sorry to see a similar shot not being done as well here, but it’s only a brief distraction because we spend much of this episode seeing the creature in the form of a model monster atop a model mansion… and that looks fantastic! There’s plenty of shots where the tentacles writhe and thrash around, while the building starts to crumble underneath them, and it’s all really effective.
And then of course – as is traditional – they blow up the model at the end. I joke about how often it happens, but it is always a very good effect. That we see it happen in stages here makes it a little different to the usual, but surely someone must have started noticing that every time UNIT get involved in a situation, the location ends up in flames!
The one thing that I don’t get… the adventure is over. The Doctor and Sarah decide that they need to go on holiday. I mean, it’s only natural – in the last few weeks, they’ve come up against alien doubles, sentient planets, Egyptian gods, alien doubles again, Frankenstein’s monster, and now this. Sarah’s got her swimsuit on, the beach ball is ready… and they arrive in Antarctica. Back where they started because the Doctor hasn’t cleared the co-ordinates from earlier in the story. Did they initially plan to take the TARDIS to the snow base before opting for the more traditional jet (don’t forget that they’ve spent most of this season trying to get back to UNIT HQ via the TARDIS, and failing spectacularly)? It’s a bit of an odd end to the adventure, but it’s a great way to end the season – with the Doctor and Sarah joking and laughing, and completely reaffirming his earlier statement that they’re the best of friends. Their time in the TARDIS is short now, with only a couple more adventures for the pair, so I’m glad that I’m enjoying them so much at the moment.
