Written by Victor Pemberton
PLOT SPOILERS scream from the depths of this review
"It's down there, in the darkness, in the pipeline, waiting!"
”Weeeeeeeeed!”
Google-image this story, and see what you see. Admittedly, as we’re on another lost one, the options are limited to the surviving stills. But most hits are of that grotesque gurn (coming later) or the Doctor using a stethoscope on a piece of pipe (above). Both gloriously absurd, the sort of thing we love this show for. From them, I’d always imagined this would be at very least a good episode.
Alas not.
It's clearly another direct lift from Quatermass, though this time by a circuitous route. Hammer had intended ’X The Unknown’ (1956) as a sequel to their ’Quatermass Xperiment’ from the previous year. Ever-irascible, Nigel Kneale refused use of his character. But they just substituted a different name and used another ‘X’ in the title as the connecting element.
The threat this time was animate earth on the rampage. Which Victor Pemberton borrowed, tried to pitch it as a ’Who’ script, failed and so turned it into the radio drama ’The Slide’ (broadcast 1966). Through reasons unclear the rejection was then reconsidered, but with animate earth now used goods it was switched to sentient seaweed.
Now, seaweed and foam are not, at the end of the day, particularly blood-curdling things. In fact, when rooms start to fill with foam, your first response is to wonder if this is turning into an Ibiza-style party.
But none of these are in themselves reasons to fail. In fact the show has already got away with worse. (David Whitaker apparently rejected it for the recycling, which is a little like the miner calling the steelworker red.) ’The Moonbase’ was barely any less generic but made use of its story type and, at least in its first half, generated a genuine air of menace and mystery. This is more like repeating something by rote, knowing you already know it. It’s not, by a strict definition, bad. It’s more flat, devoid of fizz.
Similarly ’X The Unknown’ had worked a whole lot better before the big bad was revealed to be not terribly big or bad, but did stir up an effective air of foreboding till then. With this, you spend a long time waiting for stuff to happen, then when it finally does it scarcely seems worth the wait.
Yes the stethoscope thing is brilliantly bonkers, but it’s gone within seconds. When the sinister Oak and Quill show up in the second episode things definitely perk up. (Helped by their scenes surviving. They were clipped out by Australian censors, and are now ironically all that remains.) Their menace is effective through being laced with comedy, and vice versa.
Quill’s open-wide gurn verges on cartoony. Yet this Guardian review of the animated reconstruction (which I’ve not seen) makes the interesting point that when he’s actually rendered as a cartoon the effect is diminished. It needs that uncanny valley.
But they don’t seem to have much in common with the other taken-over characters, who act more… well, taken over. And, as if there’s no way to resolve this, they get successively marginalised from later episodes and disappear before the end. Yet if they don’t make any sense, they do work – which kind of feels more important. And there’ll be more of that.
Against Vegetable Malevolence
The seaweed is forever taking over people, but only speaks at a couple of points. One of which is to insist: “The mind does not exist. It is tired. It is dead. It is obsolete. Only our new masters can offer us life. The body does not exist. Soon we shall all be one.”
Rather than standing for Those Darn Commies (like people are wont to claim), the weed does function as actual seaweed. Its a nature’s revenge story, stirred into retaliation at its abode being trespassed on by that intrusive oil drilling. And the point is how unlike us its vegetable malevolence is. Even with the Cybermen, becoming like them means becoming another iteration of them, another unit in the ranks. This is a step beyond that, we’ll all merge together in one vast undifferentiated blob. The earlier line “come over to us, come over to us” is perhaps repeated for both its literal and underlying meaning.
Now there’s an obvious objection here, which would run something like…
“Give up on this consciousness business. It’s no good, you know.”
“If you don’t have consciousness, how come you’re able to tell us to give up on it?”
“What? To advance the plot, fool!”
But then again, it does need conveying in some way and about the only means available back then was dialogue. In fact there should be more of it. “I have existed for millennia, you mayfly creatures must succumb to my enduring truth, soon all will be as it was before”… that sort of thing. Perhaps with several taken-over humans talking in unison. It would have been more involving than the endless “let’s do something”/”no let’s not” debates which take up most of the time.
Similarly, when the taken-over Maggie and Robson meet on the beach they speak more like… well, like they’re two people that the manifestations of one entity. Maggie walking into the waves makes no story sense. But it’s a good representation of de-evolution, a more sinister version of the Reggie Perrin opening.
And in offering an end to separation, a way to rejoin the all, the seaweed represents something at least partly attractive. We could be back where we belong, never confused or isolated again. All truly horrific things are also part enticing.
Interestingly, there are those who see this as another classic story. Some may simply want more ’Doctor Who’, and the more like more *’Doctor Who’* it is the better. But others may seize upon these few hints and suggestions and construct a whole story out of them, their minds overpainting all the generic features with something more colourful. A story which, had it just been served them, wouldn’t have been as involving as the one they felt invited to create.
This is always going to be the case to some degree, for watching or reading is never a purely passive act. But ’Doctor Who’ seems to invite it more than other things. Which is surely a large part of the reason why it came to have such a large fandom. We may even have a preference for an incomplete experience such as this, as it gives us gaps we can fill in as we choose.
And to say I can be sympathetic to this view would be an understatement. That’s exactly what I did over ‘The Celestial Toymaker’, at the very least. It’s what I tried to do here, though this time with more limited success. But there’s got to be some collaboration between you and the text, or you’re just daydreaming with the TV on. And this marks my limit.
Always a Base Chief, Always a Companion
As always, there’s the base chief who stubbornly distrusts the Doctor up to at least episode four. He’s been given other names, this time its Robson. At the same time, everything unique about this instance makes it worse. He’s worked his way up through the ranks and so has retained a shopkeeper’s shillings-and-pence brain, fixated upon production quotas. This leads him to thunderingly shout down the plummy voices of the boffins who try to talk more educated sense to him, the endlessly repeated set-piece arguments setting their different accents at odds. He seems so defensive as to be actively paranoid.
It’s not as extreme as the scheming Bragen in ‘Power of the Daleks’ but there’s a strong sense of power being placed in the wrong hands, inverting natural class hierarchies. There are those who will rightly raise the alarm when the show becomes racist, but show no concern over this sort of thing.
It’s true that time is put into Victoria’s send-off, rather than it just being tagged onto the end. And many celebrate this story for that. But assigning time isn’t the same thing as using it.
Companions tend to start well but degenerate into screamers, like Susan. Or some go the other way, starting out as tedious simperers then inexplicably gaining some gumption in their very last story, like Vicki. (Some don’t do either, like Dodo. Who should really have been called Don’tdon’t.)
Curiously, in her last story Victoria seems to go for both. She suddenly gains the ability to get out of locked rooms with a hairpin, but also perpetually blubs about all the danger like she’s only just noticed its there. Susan went off to get married, Vicki to have adventures with her new-found boyfriend. Victoria gets doled out substitute parents. Ho hum.
The weed being susceptible to her screaming is a good meta gag, even if it gets scant intra-story explanation. (It’s the “particular pattern of sound” is all we’re told. Is seaweed supposed to have ears?) God only knows whether this makes her more or less pro-active, but you can’t help but think for the weed to really be in trouble its weakness would have been whingeing.
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