By Jessica Holmes

There’s nothing…wrong with this latest serial of Doctor Who, per se. The acting’s pretty standard, nothing terribly stupid or offensive has happened, but it’s committed just about the worst sin a piece of media can do. It’s DULL.

But I’ll try to wring a moderately diverting review out of it anyway.

Let’s take a look at Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep, a serial by Victor Pemberton.

EPISODE ONE

The TARDIS arrives (yet again) in England, and it’s not long before the crew find themselves in the custody of the staff of a gas refinery. The boss around here is a man called Robson (Victor Maddern), and his blood pressure is constantly so high I think his head might actually explode.

His second in command, a nice bloke called Frank Harris (Roy Spencer), is apologetic for Robson’s terseness. The refinery controls a number of offshore natural gas rigs, and they’ve just lost contact with one of them. What’s more, there’s a funny noise coming from inside the gas pipe, but Robson won’t let them turn off the gas flow to check inside.

The base briefly regains contact with the rig, who assure them that all is well, but there’s something about their reassurances that doesn’t feel right.

Harris tries to raise his concerns about the pipeline to Robson, but finds that his research files seem to have gone walkabout. Thinking that he left them at home, he asks his wife, Maggie (June Murphy), to check in his office. She finds a bit more than she bargained for. The folder is there all right, but so is a stash of weed.

Seaweed, that is.

The seaweed pricks her hand, so she throws it away. However, there is more to this seaweed than it seems at first glance. It’s starting to glow, and she’s starting to feel quite peculiar…

Meanwhile, Robson throws the travellers into a prison cell, from which they promptly escape. Jamie exits through a ventilation grille with some difficulty, and Victoria takes the more pragmatic option of picking the lock with her hairpin.

I see London, I see France…

And guess which of them the Doctor is reluctant to take with him as he goes to the impeller room (where they pump the gas) to investigate the pipe problem?

I’m just saying, Victoria would be perfectly capable of looking at pipes. She’s from the industrial revolution. They were obsessed with gas and pipes and the like. Just look at the hats everyone was wearing.

Robson’s general bullishness hasn’t gone unnoticed, earning him a bit of a telling off from an overseer, the Dutch Van Lutyens (John Abineri). From his perspective, the problem with the gas is rather Robson-shaped.

Having been left behind while the boys go and look at some tubes, Victoria ends up in the right place at the right time to spot a shady figure opening some gas canisters in a storage room. Unfortunately for her, she then gets locked inside, and seafoam begins to pour in through the vent.

So now not only was she excluded from the investigation of the impeller room, she has been relegated to damsel in distress.

Again.

EPISODE TWO

Luckily for Victoria, the men come to her rescue in the nick of time, finding the room flooded with poisonous gas. She babbles something about seeing a creature in the foam, but there’s no sign of it now.

The other resident damsel, Maggie Harris, takes a turn for the worse, so her husband puts her to bed and goes to find her a doctor. I will say they are actually very sweet together, it’s clear they adore one another.

While he’s gone, a pair of maintenance workers arrive at the house, Mr Oak and Mr Quill (John Gill and Bill Burridge), who remind me of Abbott and Costello but rather less funny. Maggie allows them inside, not noticing their uncanny behaviour or the seaweed growing from their skin.

Other than the seaweed, they’re perfectly normal looking human beings. And that’s why it is quite impressive to me that they are perhaps the most viscerally unnerving characters ever to appear in Doctor Who.

Prosthetics and death rays are all well and good, but this is something else. With their mouths open wider than seems physically possible, eyes unblinking and bulging, the pair are absolutely grotesque as they begin to emit noxious gas, choking her into unconsciousness. It made my skin crawl. They’re straddling the line between human and inhuman, and there’s something about that that is scarier than any alien monster.

Even if I didn’t care much for the rest of the story, this one scene is excellent.

Harris arrives back with the Doctor and company in tow, discovering Maggie passed out on the floor and the house swimming in gas. There is no sign of the maintenance workers. They let the gas out through the window, and Harris explains to the Doctor about the seaweed incident. The Doctor theorises that whoever put the seaweed in the file meant for Harris to touch it and suffer the ill effects. And it looks like they’ve tried again, as Victoria finds some seaweed lying in the middle of the floor. Warning everyone not to touch it, the Doctor collects it for further testing.

Meanwhile, Robson continues to be stubborn about refusing to stop the gas flow, to the ever increasing frustration of Van Lutyens.

Taking matters into his own hands, Van Lutyens comes up with his own theory of where the blockage in the pipes must be, and asks the Chief Engineer (Hubert Rees) to go with him to sort it. However, though Robson is not an easy bloke to like, he is regarded as being genuinely good at his job, and the Chief Engineer is reluctant to take any action without getting Robson’s approval.

So that’s what they go to get, and Robson continues to be frustratingly stubborn, even though by this point the impeller has broken down and they’ve lost contact with another rig. And yet, the thudding from inside the pipes seems to be getting louder…

EPISODE THREE

Before departing the Harris’ house, the Doctor tells Harris that he should get his wife to the medical centre for supervision. She’ll probably be all right, but just in case.

The Doctor runs various tests on the seaweed, finding that it appears to feed on natural gas and excrete a toxic gas. And it’s very much alive. Well, yes. It’s a living organism. What you mean is that it is conscious and also mobile.

They find an illustration in an old book of a sea monster that bears a strong resemblance to the creature Victoria saw in the vent. Hoping to find out more, they venture back to the Harris’ quarters, breaking in when it appears that there is nobody home. To their shock, they find the house full to the brim of seafoam and tendrils, from which they have a difficult escape through the skylight.

Harris reports back to Robson, who has remembered that the Doctor and company are meant to be prisoners, and isn’t very happy that Harris has let them out of his sight. The impeller starts up again and almost immediately breaks down, putting an end to their argument, and sparking a bit of a tantrum from Robson. Increasingly concerned about Robson’s erratic behaviour, Van Lutyens urges Harris to take over.

They decide to confront Robson together, and he does not take it well. He has a right little strop and storms off to his room, where Mr Oak locks him inside. The room starts to flood with gas, and Robson bursts out just as Harris comes to check on him, yelling something about a creature as he runs off. Harris spots a seaweed-ish creature in the vent, but it’s gone by the time he tries to show Van Lutyens.

The Doctor reports his findings about the seaweed to Harris, who is very concerned to think that his wife might have been exposed to some unknown parasitic organism. He’s even more disturbed when he learns that despite having arranged for a medic to bring his wife to the medical centre, nobody has come to collect her yet. She’s still at home. The home which is now completely consumed in seafoam.

So where is Maggie?

She’s gone to the seaside, as one does when one feels under the weather. And who should be with her but Robson? Something has come over them both, and they don’t seem to be in their right minds. After all, wouldn’t you be at least a little concerned if you saw a woman walk into the sea?

Final Thoughts

So, we’re halfway through Fury From The Deep, and so far my reaction is a resounding ‘eh’. Like I said, there’s not really anything wrong with it. I like the characters well enough, they’re decent, I’m even picking up a little bit of a Lovecraft influence which is usually fun. And yet it’s just not doing anything for me. Why?

Perhaps ‘seaweed’ just doesn’t really work as a villain. Maybe it’s that the slowly building plot of something being wrong with the gas pipeline is just TOO slow to build. Perhaps it is that the conflict between Robson and Van Lutyens is just going around in circles until the third episode, where the status quo finally changes.

There’s not that much to look at thematically. The theme of ‘the leader is too arrogant for his own good and will doom everyone else because of that’ turns up in half the stories in Doctor Who, so there’s not much new territory being explored in that regard. We might be heading towards some environmental message, but no hint of it has popped up so far. That’s just speculation on my part. Ultimately, I just don’t find the story very interesting.

Let’s hope that things start to pick up from here.

---

---