The Seeds of Death

The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie peruse the rocketry museum

Episode One, 25 January 1969
Episode Two, 1 February 1969
Episode Three, 8 February 1969
Episode Four, 15 February 1969
Episode Five, 22 February 1969
Episode Six, 1 March 1969

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot

It's the end of the twenty-first century.  Travel on Earth has been revolutionised by the invention of T-Mat, a teleportation device able to transport people and goods instantly from anywhere with a T-Mat terminal to anywhere else with a T-Mat terminal.  Life on Earth is now fully integrated with T-Mat; food and medical supplies are teleported across the globe all day long, such that a sudden breakdown in T-Mat would lead to massive food shortages in Earth's major cities within just a few hours, and to complete societal breakdown shortly after that.

(Spoiler: Earth is about to have to endure a total shutdown of the T-Mat network.)

Humanity's reliance on T-Mat has become so total, and so second-nature, that they don't even have a backup transport system for if T-Mat fails--no rockets or other forms of physical transport.  This also means exploration into the solar system has stopped; T-Mat can't send you anywhere that doesn't already have a T-Mat terminal at the far end, and no one is interested in travelling by rocket to set T-Mat terminals up in outer space.  So humanity has only ever got as far as the Moon, where we've set up the most important T-Mat terminal of all--a relay station whose good operation is essential for keeping Earth's T-Mat network running.

So there's a lot of consternation when the T-Mat moon base suddenly shuts down totally.  T-Mat stops working all over the world, and those vital food and medical shipments stop flowing.  And communications with moon base have also been cut off--T-Mat Control in London can't raise them on the radio.  Without a backup fleet of rockets, there's no way for technicians from Earth to get up to the Moon to find out what's wrong.

Luckily, and in a spectacular piece of plot-helping good luck, the TARDIS materliases on Earth at just this time, and it actually lands in a museum dedicated to the lost art of space rocketry, run by a cantankerous old man who just happens to be the respected former colleague of Commander Radnor, who's now in charge of the T-Mat system.

And but so, in short order we've got Jamie, Zoe and the Doctor piloting Earth's one working rocket up to moon base to see what's up.  I don't know about you, but if I were responsible for restoring Earth's teleport network and alleviating an imminent global societal collapse that's entirely down to my own failure to keep a backup rocket in reserve, I'd certainly be sending in three strangers who conveniently showed up right when the teleport system collapsed, and not any of my own expert technicians.

Anyway.  Our heroes get up to moon base, and discover it's been taken over by Ice Warriors, the spearhead of an invasion force from Mars.  They've killed everyone on the base except for two men, one who escaped into its labyrinthine corridors and another who agreed to help the Ice Warriors rather than be executed.

(Fewsham, the technician who collaborates with the Ice Warriors, is probably the most interesting character in the whole serial.  He really looks like a moral coward for the first four episodes--"I don't want to die like that!  I want to live!"--but then saves Zoe's life from an Ice Warrior at the start of episode five.  When everyone else T-Mats back down to Earth, however, he tricks them into letting him stay behind, and goes back to working for the Ice Warriors.  But he secretly opens a direct video link to Earth, so that T-Mat Control hear everything the Ice Warriors say to each other and thereby learn their invasion plan; when the Ice Warriors discover this, Fewsham faces his execution defiantly and bravely.)

The Ice Warriors' full plan is to take control of T-Mat, then teleport some special seeds to major cities throughout Earth's cold-weather regions.  These seeds release spores, and the spores quickly grow into a fungus that covers much of the planet, sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere at a rate that will reduce Earth's atmosphere to a level comparable to Mars's (and kill most human life in the process).  One Ice Warrior will teleport down to Earth's weather control building to stop the weather control bureau from making any rain over the affected parts of Earth, as water (in a rather comic-book development) is the fungus's one weakness.  A radio signal from moon base will then guide the rest of the Ice Warrior invasion fleet into Earth orbit, and the Ice Warrior army will land on the depopulated planet and take it over.

The TARDIS team and the Ice Warriors spend a couple of episodes chasing each other around the corridors of moon base, until the Doctor defeats them by using their own comic-book weakness, turning up the heat.  (Moon base turns out to have both the most baroque and fastest-acting thermostat in the solar system.)

By that time, however, the fungus has already been released and is threatening the Earth, so next the TARDIS team have to head to weather-control in London, where they get to spend another episode chasing the last Ice Warrior around corridors that look remarkably like the moon base corridors.  After that's taken care of, the Doctor then sends a satellite into orbit broadcasting a signal that mimics the guidance signal for the Ice Warrior invasion fleet, so that instead of entering Earth orbit, the signal leads the fleet into plunging straight into the Sun.

All done and dusted in time for tea.

What Lisa thought

She really liked this one, which was a big pickup from "The Invasion", which she hadn't liked.  She found Fewsham's character arc a compelling one, and she was also fascinated with the idea of T-Mat.  It's a concept that had had a degree of thought put into it, with side-effects like the idea that Earth had completely abandoned space exploration beyond the Moon.

The next story is "The Space Pirates", an effort from Robert Holmes.  It's also the very last Doctor Who story with missing episodes, so we'll be missing it and heading on to "The War Games".

The Ice Warriors

Miss Garrett: That's not a weapon. It's a scientific instrument.
Varga: I see things differently.

An Ice Warrior hunts Victoria in the glacier caves.

One, 11 November 1967
Two, 18 November 1967
Three, 25 November 1967
Four, 2 December 1967
Five, 9 December 1967
Six, 16 December 1967

Episodes in italics have been lost.

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Peter Bryant
Producer: Innes Lloyd

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (later extant appearance)

In the distant future, Earth has entered a Second Ice Age. We have brought this upon ourselves: as our population expanded in the late twentieth century, we deforested the planet in order to create enough space in which to house our increasing numbers. This vastly reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (!), thereby initiating a period of massive global cooling (!!).

Most of the population has been relocated to temperate Africa. The glaciers are swallowing much of the northern hemisphere, held back only by a series of undermanned bases that use a technology called the ioniser to raise the temperature at the glaciers' perimeter, thereby preventing them from expanding.

In the ice, a survey team from one of the bases has found a frozen prehistoric man. Only it's not a man--it's an alien. When defrosted, he reveals himself to be Varga, an Ice Warrior from the planet Mars, who has been frozen beneath the ice for millennia. He kidnaps Victoria and has her help him find his ship, also buried in the ice, and revive three more members of his crew, so that he will then have the resources to decide whether to go back to Mars or stay and conquer the Earth.

The Doctor and the staff of the base realise that they can use the ioniser either to free the Ice Warriors' ship from the ice, or destroy it, but there's an issue--they don't know what sort of drive the ship has. If it has an atomic drive, the ioniser could well cause an explosion, destroying the base along with the spaceship. The Doctor sets off for the ship to try and find out what the situation is.

But while he's gone, the Ice Warriors stage a takeover of the base and proceed to steal the ioniser's fuel cells to replenish their ship's power supply--though of course, that will result in the destruction of the ioniser and the overrunning of Europe by the glaciers. Before they can make their getaway, though, the Doctor--now at their spaceship--is able to reconfigure the cannon they have pointing at the base, restructuring it the beam it projects so that it is destructive to Ice Warriors but not to humans. The Ice Warriors therefore have to flee the base, abandoning the fuel cells.

It's now been determined that directing the ioniser at the spaceship could indeed result in an atomic explosion. The staff's human crew have been accustomed to turning all decisions over to their control computer, but the risks here are so finely balanced--directing the ioniser at the glacier, leading to atomic explosion, or not doing so, leading to the base being swallowed by the glacier--that it refuses to make a decision. The base's staff are paralysed by fear, until ultimately their rogue lead scientist, Penley, chooses to risk attacking the Ice Warriors. Their spaceship explodes--killing the aliens--but the explosion is contained within the glacier and does not harm the base. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria slip away while the base staff celebrate.

What Lisa thought
She wasn't too impressed with this one. It's pretty thin on plot--I managed to detail the entire six-episode storyline in six paragraphs, after all, and even that was stretching it. Essentially, the plot of "The Ice Warriors" is Ice Age, aliens pulled from glacier, aliens threaten the Earth, the ioniser can stop them, the ioniser does stop them. To draw this out, seriously four episodes are devoted to debating whether or not to use the ioniser.

Besides the first appearance of the Ice Warriors, there are a couple of noteworthy elements here. The first is the appearance of a young Peter Sallis ("young" being a very relative term for an actor whose main claim to fame is forty years as the star of Last of the Summer Wine) as the renegade scientist Penley. Then there's also the quaint expectation that the Earth's rising population would actually lead to a loss of carbon dioxide, triggering another Ice Age

And finally there's the prediction of us growing to rely on computers so much that we need their assessments to make all our decisions for us, and are paralysed by indecision when they prove incapable of doing so. It's easy to dismiss that as being just as incorrect as the idea of global cooling, but I'm not so sure--I think that might really be a pretty solid extrapolation of where we're going, with our drive to renounce responsibility as much as possible and our reliance upon computers to make determinations in situations where variables change too quickly for the human mind to keep track of them.

The next serial after this is "The Enemy of the World", in which the TARDIS team fight Salamander, dictator of much of the world in the early twenty-first century--and the physical double of the Doctor.

Then comes "The Web of Fear", in which the Yeti that the Doctor fought in "The Abominable Snowmen" invade the London Underground. The Doctor is assisted in combatting them by the British Army, led by a mysterious colonel by the name of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, making his first appearance on the programme.

Then is "Fury From the Deep", in which hypnotic evil seaweed attempts to take over a North Sea oil rig. The Doctor realises the seaweed is susceptible to high-pitched sound, so he defeats it by amplifying the sound of Victoria's screams of terror, in what must undoubtedly be Doctor Who's most metatextual climax until 2011's "The Wedding of River Song". (How, how can this story by missing and unavailable to us?) Victoria leaves at the end of this one, staying behind with the family of one of the rig workers, Harris.

And then there's "The Wheel in Space", in which the Doctor and Jamie defeat an attempt by Cybermen to take over a human space station, the Wheel. When they depart at the story's end, the Doctor and Jamie take with them one of the station's crew, a young mathematical genius named Zoe Heriot.

All these stories are, sadly, lost, so we'll pick up our rewatch with the next story after "The Wheel in Space", "The Dominators".

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