Doctor Who A-Z #42: Fury From the Deep (1968)

No Doctor saw their work cast aside as brutally by the BBC as Patrick Troughton, who has a mere seven complete serials in the archives. It’s a particular shame because his Doctor is perhaps the hardest to appreciate on audio. Tom Baker or Christopher Eccleston’s performances can command the attention through voice alone, but Troughton is the Columbo of Doctors, happy to blend into the background and let his enemies dismiss him as a shabby little man until the time comes to reveal the extent of his brilliance. It’s the sort of trick the show could only get away with at this early stage, back when the Doctor had only saved the universe three or four times, the lightweight.

Prior to the animated version released in 2020, the only way to see Fury from the Deep was a fan-made reconstruction using photographs and surviving clips. The latter of those are worth an explanation. Sometimes a surviving clip is simply a piece of stock footage that’s been successfully identified in another show, meaning we see quite a bit of the helicopter in episode five. But sometimes it comes from a selection of clips which were censored when the show was sold to Australia, which is interesting. Not just because this excised material seems to have been preserved more carefully than the actual full episodes, though that is very odd, but because of its effect on these reconstructions. Put simply, every time the pictures start to move, you know something scary is about to happen.

That happens quite a bit in Fury From the Deep, which has no complete episodes known to exist but which has a fair bit of surviving footage thanks to its child-unfriendly freakiness. The most infamous scene sees oil refinery technicians Mr. Oak and Mr. Quill, possessed by a sentient species of seaweed, open their mouths wider than an Edvard Munch painting and render someone unconscious by exhaling noxious gas. On paper it’s ridiculous – this week, the villains have the power of halitosis! – but on screen it’s unnerving enough for the Discontinuity Guide to name it as perhaps Doctor Who‘s scariest ever moment. Without this extraordinary clip, Oak and Quill would barely register in the reconstruction. They tend to skulk around the back of scenes silently – even less obtrusive than Troughton’s Doctor, who at least gets a classic “explaining what the threat is in a way that makes me look like a lunatic” scene. 

Normally when a non-humanoid enemy has humanoid servants the purpose of the latter is to personalise the threat, give the Doctor someone to talk to, perhaps be a tragic figure in the manner of The Talons of Weng-Chiang‘s Li H’sen Chang or The Invasion‘s Tobias Vaughn. But Oak and Quill are almost as silent and mysterious as the seaweed. Fury From the Deep is a classic Troughton base-under-siege story, it’s true, but it’s also another step towards the Pertwee era, which would return to this disaster-movie model in stories like The Silurians, Inferno and The Green Death. Like those stories, there are monsters here but they’re not the sole threat in the way they usually are. The suspense also comes from the unheeded warnings and institutional failures that lead up to a disaster. It’s a good choice of story for Doctor Who, so much that you’re surprised to realise this is the first time anyone’s attempted it.

There are other idiosyncrasies. There is no indication that the intelligent seaweed that’s possessing the base’s staff is actually an alien, making this one of a very small number of Doctor Who stories where the monster is an Earth-based cryptid. All the Silurian stories fit this mould, and the new series had Thin Ice, but other than that I’m struggling to come up with anything. It’s hard to know why an intelligent seaweed is so frightening – perhaps it is, ironically, the banality of it, the suspicion that any waving fronds you next saw at the beach could be a threat. This is another idea which the series would return to again and again in the Pertwee years (and get into a lot of trouble for it in Terror of the Autons). It’s also another area where director Hugh David, a former actor who was briefly considered for the role of the First Doctor, deserves credit. Like Oak and Quill’s killer breath, the idea of a Doctor Who story where seaweed and foam are the monsters sounds utterly absurd on paper, but the imagery – fronds creeping out from under people’s sleeves and collars, people being swallowed up by masses of foam – is so disturbing that, thanks to Australian TV censors, we can see it in motion.

Fury from the Deep isn’t purely a directorial triumph, though. Victor Pemberton’s script has its problems – out of all the many six-parters in Season Five, this is second only to The Abominable Snowmen as the one where I can feel the length. But it’s also got some interesting ideas, not least its treatment of the companions. For all Jamie and Victoria are the first TARDIS team to come exclusively from Earth’s past, they’ve also felt much more modern than most of the First Doctor’s companions. Previous Doctor Who companions didn’t flirt with the guest stars like Jamie does in The Faceless Ones, they didn’t often reference their back-stories, they didn’t do a lot of things that the series would later routinely do to establish a companion’s character. And they didn’t have leaving stories like this.

Fury from the Deep was broadcast in the year of the show’s fifth anniversary. This was slightly too early for the kind of multi-Doctor anniversary bonanza that became de rigueur five years later, but it isn’t too early for the show to be working out what kind of programme it is. Nothing in Sydney Newman and C.E. Webber’s initial planning document indicated that Doctor Who would have a high cast turnover, but by Season Four there wasn’t a single original cast member on screen. Pemberton’s breakthrough is to notice this and write the first companion exit story – not just a story where the companion leaves at the end, as had been the case previously, but a story where their reasons for leaving are a running theme that threads through the story and builds to a convincing, satisfying, in-character finale. It’s a simple thing, but shows that Doctor Who is experimenting and expanding its range of storytelling devices even in the middle of a season usually praised for its adherence to a winning formula.

Next: The Wheel in Space (1968)

Graham’s Archive – Fury From The Deep

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