Hogan Reviews

Kicking off this run of Fourth Doctor reviews is one of my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories: “The Seeds of Doom”, which features the plant-based Krynoids and spends one third of the story in Antarctica and the other two-thirds in the British countryside, leading to a fun six parter that doesn’t lose steam like so many of its peers. Let’s take a look!

The story starts off in true “Thing” fashion as a team of scientists uncover a mysterious pod buried in the snow outside their science lab deep in the Antarctic. One of the team, Charles Winlett (John Gleeson) gets “stung” by a tendril that suddenly erupts out of the pod and gets infected, just as The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) arrive, the duo expecting a sunny beach location but being bitterly (in more ways than one!) disappointed. The Doctor tries to convince Winlett’s two co-workers to lop his arm off to stop the spread of infection as he identifies the pod as a “Krynoid”, an alien plant that spreads across the planets they land on and robs them of all animal life, before heading off and finding a second pod near where the previous one was found, deciding to put it into deep freeze to stop it from waking.

“What is it?” “I don’t know… I’ll poke it with a sharp thing!”

(as you can probably tell these screenshots comes from the poorly “upscaled” blu-ray, complete with plastic-skin and blended textures. Sadly I’d already packed my DVDs of this season away and just couldn’t be bothered to go fetch them…)

While all this is going on plant-obsessed rich man Harrison Chase (Tony Beckley) is tipped off to the existence of this one-of-a-kind (well, two of a kind I guess…) plant thanks to his mole in the British secret service and so dispatches his two henchmen in Scorby (John Challis) and Keeler (Mark Jones) to the base to steal it for him. I have to say I love the duo, Scorby is the dumb and violent thug type while Keeler is your more wimpy “do we have to do things like this?” sidekick and they play the roles perfectly. They pose as friendly until Winlett fully succumbs to the infection and becomes a walking plant-man who then kills both his co-workers. Scorby manages to find the other pod and despite Keeler seeing the writing on the wall and not wanting to bring the killer plant back with them the duo not only take it but try to kill The Doctor and Sarah to cover their tracks.

The Doctor and Sarah survive however, the Winlett Krynoid creature being destroyed in an explosion, and so the duo head back to London to try and convince the higher ups how dangerous the Pod is, but it falls on deaf ears (mostly because a lot of them are in the pocket of Harrison Chase) so they head to Chase’s manor house using local artist Amelia Ducat (Sylvia Coleridge) wanting lost payment for a painting as a cover. It doesn’t work though, and they’re soon captured, with Sarah being used as a guineapig for the Krynoid Pod but being saved just in time by The Doctor jumping through the skylight. They escape but poor old Keeler is infected by the Krynoid Pod instead and gets zero sympathy from Chase, who soon locks him up and intentionally feeds him out of sheer curiosity. This is where the story loses a little bit of momentum as The Doctor and Sarah escape, return to and get recaptured at Harrison Chase’s estate a few times, including The Doctor being put into a giant wood chipper and needing rescuing from Sarah in a nice twist on the usual set up. Eventually though Keeler’s transformation goes into overdrive, becoming a Krynoid that towers over the manor itself, while Harrison Chase becomes more and more unhinged and is soon mentally enslaved to the creature along with all the plants in the local area…

Harrison holds up Sarah and the Doctor… and Scorby? Wait, no… he’s just standing behind them… Looking annoyed.

It really is a great story. The first two parts in snowy Antarctica are good claustrophobic horror stuff while the next four parts have some great sci-fi / Doctor Who run-around stuff with a great human villain pairing of Chase and Scorby and an equally fun monster in the Krynoid. While some of the run-around in the middle is a little cliché and the ending falls a little flat due to the unavailability of the classic UNIT gang, I can’t really fault it as a great time in front of the telly.

The Continuity:

The classic Krynoid monster… which is actually an Axon Monster from the Third Doctor era painted green. That’s called recycling, rather appropriately!

The Krynoids took a little time to return (I believe they’re one of the creatures owned by their writer rather than the BBC outright) skipping both sets of official novel lines and a good number of Big Finish years but they did finally appear in the Eighth Doctor audio “Hothouse”, which was actually a disappointing rehash of this story condensed into a single hour, but hey-ho. They also appeared many years after that in the Second Doctor audio “The Green Man”, and that’s about it, beyond Big Finish’s attempted stand-alone Krynoid spin off that didn’t take…

Overall Thoughts:

“I don’t normally do this Sarah, but I’m fed up now. I’m just going to shoot everybody.” “Um…?”

“The Seeds of Doom” is one of those things where if I’m feeling down and want to put on something familiar and always enjoyable it’s one of the Who stories I reach for. Perfectly paced, great villains both human and monster and the always-winning combination of The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane. What else is there to say?

As The Doctor, Sarah and a “left with no other choice” Scorby work together to survive the killer plants the former manages to get through to UNIT, who soon arrive with a type of pesticide that at least keeps the plants at bay but they only have a limited amount of it. They also brought with them an experimental laser mounted on a jeep to try and destroy the house-sized creature but it doesn’t work. In the confusion Sarah is captured by Chase who tries to feed Sarah in the wood chipper but The Doctor not only saves her but accidentally feeds Chase into the machine instead (off camera with a scream, naturally!) while Scorby makes a break for it only to be dragged under the lake by killer vines.

The fully formed Krynoid towers over the Chase estate.

With no other choice The Doctor agrees to the faceless new UNIT team to obliterate the Krynoid and surrounding area with an airstrike, only just getting himself and Sarah out of harms way before it’s carried out and the Krynoid destroyed. The Doctor soon agrees to actually take Sarah to a tropical climate this time, only to once again end up in a snowy environment for a last second pre-credits gag.