Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom
- greatbigquiveringp
- Feb 17, 1977
- 3 min read
The Discontinuity Guide identifies the inspirations for ‘The Seeds of Doom’ as horror films The Thing from Another World, The Trollenberg Terror and The Mutations, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, the BBC’s own Quatermass Experiment and The Avengers episode ‘Man-Eater of Surrey Green’. Only the last of these, however, seems to have been a firm muse, at least according to Mark H Stevens on The Avengers Forever! website:
About ten years after this was made, Robert Banks Stewart (who penned "The Master Minds" and "Quick-Quick Slow Death") wrote a story for Doctor Who called "The Seeds of Doom" which involved a plant from outer space arriving on Earth. Much of the dialogue between the Doctor and his companion at the time, Sarah Jane, is on par with that of Steed and Emma. Plus, the story featured a couple of Avengers-style eccentrics including the main villain, a millionaire named Harrison Chase who thought plants were better than man, and thought he was a plant! Also, a woman who painted flowers for a living was played by Sylvia Coleridge ("The Girl from Auntie"). Stewart may have simply used his old ideas to help out the producer of Doctor Who at the time (Barry Letts was gone by then), as this story was a last-minute replacement for one that failed at the script stage
Now, if you click on the cover bottom right, I'm going to spend quite a bit of time going on about how very wrong making a grim and brutal Avengers episode is (something The Avengers itself demonstrates many times over, so it's not even an interesting experiment), especially one dressed as a horror film, so instead I want to briefly raise the idea that this story is basically the Eric Saward era.
This thought only struck me because the strange fear of tree trunks and bark that Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom seems to assume (I mean, it doesn't even resemble a carnivorous plant) reminded me of 'The Mark of the Rani', but Saward is clearly aiming for visceral and violent, a mix that served the Hinchcliffe era well. The problem is that he thinks it's the point of the stories rather than their dressing.
The point of the Hinchcliffe era is the need to confront anew threats from the often mythical past - oddly enough, the same point that Saward's successor, Andrew Cartmel, often reached for. The visceral and violent style was what made it feel solid and thrilling, yes, but it was also the mechanism to show the Doctor was out of his depth and struggling to survive and win because he hadn't yet come up with a clever enough solution to defeat. In other words, one of the reasons the violence of the Hinchcliffe era worked, when it worked, is because it was never the answer - Morbius is eventually defeated in a brain duel, the Madragora is (admittedly non-sensically) shorted out by Enlightenment-style science, Xoanon gets given therapy, the Doctor even explicitly refuses to just blow up the problem in 'Genesis of the Daleks'.
Meanwhile, the Borad is shot and then shoved into the Timelash by the Doctor, Shockeye's asphyxiated, Chessene's incapacitated with a knife, the Rani and the Master are sidelined by the Doctor disarming them and having Peri hold them at gunpoint and the Cybercontroller just gets shot repeatedly in the face. Violence in the Saward era is about fighting until you successfully overpower the enemy. Similarly, both Krynoids in 'The Seeds of Doom' get exploded to death.
On which note, click on the cover to the right to see the knife twisted another few turns into this much-loved classic...
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