Doctor Who A-Z #48: The Seeds of Death (1969)

The Seeds of Death is the Patrick Troughton era’s last business-as-usual story, the final one that fits into the “base-under-siege” mould that series guides often reduce it to. It’s not a wholly unfair summary; Troughton’s first ever story fits this mould, and by Season Five it’s become something close to a formula. But this overlooks the amount of experimentation in his final season, in which The Seeds of Death is the only story that fits comfortably in the base-under-siege format. And even here, something of that experimental spirit infects this potentially straightforward serial.

For a start, it’s got Michael Ferguson behind the camera, a director whose first serial – The War Machines – reinvented Doctor Who‘s location shooting in ways the series still harks back to today. True to form, his work here is visibly punchier and more cinematic in its compositions and camera moves than the series norm. It has one of Patrick Troughton’s most charming performances as the Doctor as well, and given how charming he usually is that’s quite an accomplishment. One of the endearing things about Troughton is that he allows his Doctor to be more vulnerable than would be possible in later serials, and that’s true here. He’s literally out of his depth in the Ice Warriors’ toxic foam, to the visible amusement of Wendy Padbury, and he’s also gravely afraid when the experimental rocket flight he, Jamie and Zoe are on goes awry at the end of episode two.

The fact that The Seeds of Death has packed its heroes on an experimental spaceship by the end of part two is testament to how much Brian Hayles’s script moves… well, like a rocket, frankly. I think most fans see Hayles as a writer in the mould of Terry Nation, or Gerry Davis: one who came up with a good recurring monster, realised that, in Doctor Who terms, this is your ticket to guaranteed future employment, and rode it as far as it would go. But that doesn’t really reckon with his two Hartnell-era scripts, which are as different from each other as they are to his later work. Even after he created the Ice Warriors, he remained (with the lamentable exception of The Monster of Peladon) reluctant to do the same thing twice.

For someone who stayed with the show for so long, Hayles was often in need of a severe rewrite: some series guides go so far as to credit The Seeds of Death with being co-written by the new script editor Terrance Dicks. Perhaps this is all the explanation we need for his work’s diversity; maybe the difference in quality between The Ice Warriors and The Celestial Toymaker is just the difference between having a production team who knew exactly what they were doing, and a production team that fell apart completely during the making of the serial. Equally, though, I think Hayles himself is attentive to the structure of the show around him, and the way it’s changed since he first came aboard.

At its root, The Seeds of Death is the work of someone who’s realised 1969 is the earliest point when Doctor Who can be said to have a playbook for handling recurring monsters. By this stage, two approaches have been established. The first, exemplified in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Web of Fear, is to bring the monsters out from a fantasy setting into something that resembles contemporary Britain. The second approach, which can be seen in The Moonbase and this story, is to invent some piece of infrastructure that a future human society depends on and have the monsters attack that. The thing that might not be obvious in retrospect is this: both of these involve bringing the monsters closer to the viewers’ own world. The Moonbase and The Seeds of Death were both broadcast at the pinnacle of the race to the moon, a time when lunar weather control systems and global teleportation networks seemed like fairly common-sense attempts to guess what the future would be like.

When Professor Eldred apparently knocks together a spaceship over the course of a long afternoon, it might seem like an absurd plot contrivance today. In its time, it was a prediction: who would bet against us having prefab spaceships by 2080? The space race was moving so quickly, Dicks had to make an emergency edit when he realised Eldred’s boast of building the first successful lunar lander might be outdated by the time the show was broadcast. (It wasn’t, but only by a matter of weeks, not decades) At this point, it seemed like the space race would never stop accelerating. Comparing this to the tone of the next story Ferguson would direct, The Ambassadors of Death, shows how quickly the air went out of that balloon. Exactly one year on, and space travel had passed from miraculous to mundane.

Underneath all this glistening Apollo-era futurism, there are some older, creepier ideas. The aforementioned global teleportation system, T-Mat, is used to beam goods all over the world, which certainly feel like the kind of space mission Jeff Bezos would initiate. Yet the Ice Warriors’ plan to use T-Mat to spread a killer fungus across the world recalls nothing more futuristic than the dirt-filled coffins Dracula shipped over to Britain. The serial is too firmly rooted in the space-age to exploit this Gothic quality as fully as the Tom Baker era later would, but it does bring to light how unexpectedly Gothic the Ice Warriors themselves are. Half-masked villains from an aristocratic society, they’re the Phantom of the Opera in the body of Karloff’s Monster, and unfortunately – despite a fair few episodes here being built around chase sequences – they follow their inspirations in being unable to outrun a slug. But they lumber well, and in any case Hayles and Dicks’s script could never be accused of lumbering alongside them. Maybe Hayles is a Terry Nation kind of a writer after all; like Nation, what he lacks in depth and polish he makes up for in breathless pacing and all-out inventiveness.

Next: The Space Pirates (1969)

Graham’s Archive – The Seeds of Death

Full Doctor Who Archive Here