6.5: The Seeds of Death
- Doctor: Patrick Troughton
- Companions: Jamie, Zoe
- Creators: Bryan Hayles, Michael Ferguson (Director), Innes Lloyd (Producer)
- Season 6
What's the rating?
Worth Watching.
What's interesting about it?
Our travelers take a while to show up, and in the meantime we're treated to several minutes of people arriving for work and bitching at each other in the catty manner of a typical office. Except that the mode of travel is the Trans-mat (or T-Mat), a teleporter, to which everyone is entirely accustomed and finds no more exciting than using a bicycle.
And of course before long something goes wrong when a bad guy shows up, but we don't know who...for the first time I can recall in the series, we get the point of view of the bad guy while being deliberately kept from seeing him or having any idea what kind of creature he is (unless you've looked at the DVD box).
Eventually the T-Mat system gets disabled. The only option for traveling to the moon is an old-fashioned rocket, of which there are none available anymore (why build rockets when you have teleporters?) Except, of course, there is one option...a rocket being built by an old fuddy-duddy who maintains a space museum and romanticizes the past, when space travel was exciting and involved tangible things like rockets.
Here I must be honest. I found myself distracted and not following things too closely, and the story seemed to be a bit boring and pointless, at least as of the end of episode 2. But I had a nagging feeling that it was better than I was giving it credit for, and, unusually, I decided to look up what others had to say before completing the story myself. In the excellent book Running Through Corridors, Rob Shearer points out that the theme here is the 60s-style science fiction romanticization of the future versus the inevitable reality: Eventually everything is going to become commonplace, no matter how exciting it was when we originally dreamed about it.
Remarkably, this story was broadcast before the actual moon landing and yet was already envisioning the how mundane it would quickly become (no one was paying attention to moon trips -- or later, shuttle launches -- after the first couple). Rob's insight injected some juice into the story for me, picking up my interest; especially given that I grew up on classic science fiction and find the nostalgic view of the future the most interesting.
The planet models are surprisingly good, and the director goes out of his way to spice things up with visually intruiging shots and sequences. Some of these are in service of the story, and some seem gratuitous and a bit distracting, but I give him points for working hard to keep things interesting.
The director is audacious enough to attempt to show a quasi-realistic moon landing sequence on the budget of Doctor Who, and does surprisingly well.
The romance of technology and the tension between dreaming the future and actually living it are the background for the main story: Foiling the Ice Warriors' rather dastardly plan to depopulate the Earth with a creative use of foam so they can move in.
This may be the first time Doctor Who uses science fiction to speculate about the near-future in interesting ways that resonate with my childhood reading habits, and for that I ultimately find it Worth Watching.