Doctor Who A-Z #69: The Green Death (1973)

Classic seasons of Doctor Who aren’t designed as a holistic experience like the new seasons are, but as far back as the Troughton era there’s been a sense that a season finale should offer something big. Quite what that bigness involves changes over time. The Troughton finales still mostly register as epic even in a modern context, but most of Tom Baker’s seasons simply save their only six-parter until the end. (Seasons Nineteen and Twenty-One make the odd decision to hold off their biggest disasters until the end, which I guess is a kind of bigness) Perhaps the most telling take on what a Doctor Who season finale might mean comes during the Pertwee years, when producer Barry Letts and his regular writing partner Robert Sloman turned each year’s final story into a kind of office Christmas party.

The Morris dancing in The Daemons, the mildly saucy camp of The Time Monster, the everything of Planet of the Spiders… if your main complaint about this stretch of the show is that it’s cosy and sitcommy, these stories might grate on your nerves. There are a few, though, that offer something beyond this end-of-term mood, and The Green Death is one of them. It’s one of Doctor Who‘s most political stories, beginning in the midst of a three-way fight between Welsh miners, environmental activists and the ominous Global Chemical bosses. It’s also one of the most iconographic Doctor Who stories, to the extent that viewers of a certain age might be forgiven for remembering the title as Doctor Who and the One with the Giant Maggots.

The maggots are, indeed, completely repulsive, the most horrible thing to appear in the series since the Autons got into the doll-manufacturing business. Given this, it might seem perverse to question their efficiency as a story element, but I’m going to do it anyway. There are a lot of Doctor Who stories where the monsters and the principal villain aren’t the same people, and in those stories the monsters are positioned as the villain’s henchmen, or hired thugs. Here, though, the maggots aren’t servants of BOSS, the extremely dramatic artificial intelligence running Global Chemicals, they’re more a side-effect of it. Once both BOSS and the maggots have been introduced, there’s no real way to tie the two strands together, and the script just shrugs and accepts the necessity to keep cutting between the Doctor sassing a computer and the Brigadier blowing up big creepy-crawlies.

Well, fair enough – there are worse things to be cutting in between. Sloman and Letts’s scripts are rarely a model of Aristotlean dramatic unity, but here they manage to use that undisciplined quality in short, precise bursts where the script needs it – ironically, they’re very disciplined about being undisciplined. A particularly clear example comes in the first episode, which cuts between the Brigadier and Jo on Earth and the Doctor involved in some huge, unspecified adventure on Metebelis Three. The Metebelis Three scenes cannot be described as anything other than a “cutaway gag” of the kind that became popular after The Simpsons, meaning this is a remarkably forward-looking narrative technique for the show to be experimenting with in 1973. There’s also a very impressive stretch of the episode where it cuts from Global Chemicals’ owners feeding the Brigadier some PR line about their revolutionary new technologies to the environmentalists debunking it for Jo. It’s much pacier than most 1970s television, resembling the sort of quick-cutting style Peter Grimwade would bring to the show just shy of a decade later. It also reveals how absolutely invested Letts, at least, was about the still-current debates about sustainability and pollution threaded through the script.

It’s a shame that, having set up a three-way clash between corporations, workers and activists, the show quickly forgets about the middle group. Doctor Who, under Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, was essentially a liberal show, and as is generally the case with liberalism it’s more comfortable with abstract principle than on-the-ground organising. It is fascinating, though, that Global Chemicals’ insistence that their new processes will create jobs and wealth is rejected so quickly by the Doctor and the Brigadier, considering we’re only six years away from a Prime Minister who will enshrine wealth creation as the one moral cause. Fascinating, too, that the “Nuthutch” – a direct action group whose causes are much closer to real-world current affairs than the science fiction this show usually traffics in – are portrayed so sympathetically. This is probably what conservatives think all BBC programming is like.

The Nuthutch have to be a likeable lot, because Jo Grant famously leaves the Doctor to work alongside them. There is a romance between Jo and the Nuthutch’s leader Professor Clifford Jones, whose irritable haughtiness suggests Jo definitely has a type. But this isn’t like the quickly-sketched romances that saw Susan and Vicki out the door, and it’s certainly an improvement on Liz Shaw being shunted away in between seasons. It’s very close to the logic the show adopted under Russell T Davies, where it became axiomatic that the only thing that could tempt a companion to leave the TARDIS of their own volition was a cause closer to home. There’s some messy stuff in the last two episodes of The Green Death, some of which was caused by adverse weather conditions on set, some of which is down to Letts and Sloman’s story structure. The giant dragonfly, too, should have been nixed at script stage. But there are some ideas here that will keep the show running well into the 21st century, and they strike with a revelatory power that makes the serial’s flaws easy to overlook.

Next: The Time Warrior (1973-4)

Graham’s Archive – The Green Death

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