202 Fury from the Deep: Episode Five

EPISODE: Fury from the Deep: Episode Five
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 202
STORY NUMBER: 042
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 13 April 1968
WRITER: Victor Pemberton
DIRECTOR: Hugh David
SCRIPT EDITOR: Derrick Sherwin
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant
RATINGS: 5.9 million viewers
FORMAT: CD: Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes Volume 5 (1967-1969)
TELESNAPS: Fury from the Deep: Episode Five

"I have the girl. She is my prisoner. She is my hostage. Do you understand? If you want her to live, come over to us. Come over to us!"

The Doctor works out engineers must have been infected when the weed was first sucked into the system and that it's vulnerable to pure oxygen, but the base's oxygen supplies have been vented by Oak & Quill. Pursuing them Jamie grapples with Quill who is weakened by Victoria's screams and collapses. Robson attacks a guard, kidnaps Victoria and steals a helicopter flying out to the control rig. The weed creature bursts out of the piping in the base. The Doctor and Jamie follow Robson to the control rig where he is waiting for them.....

Oh that's really what Victoria, who's fretting anyway about her dangerous life with the Doctor, needs right now: taken hostage again for the third time in four stories!

The telesnaps for this episode show the BBC's foam machine in full swing, the stuff is everywhere as you can see from that shot of Robson on the control rig above!

Once again out friends the Australian censor have arranged the preservation of some material by cutting virtually everything showing the weed covering Robson's hands!

The use of the helicopter is nice and adds an extra dimension to the story. Fraser Hines tells a tale, on The Ice Warriors CD of the helicopter's pilot taking him & Patrick Troughton by air to a party at Victor Maddern's (Robson) House in the country!

Shots of the helicopter launching were taken at Denham Aerodrome while Red Sands Sea Fort, not that far from the Botany Bay beach location seen in this and other episodes, serves as the rig complex.

Control Panels: The picture of Robson above on the rig contains a notable development. It's the first time black versions of these control panels have been seen in Doctor Who! There's two of the more normal ones there as well and we've seen those in The War Machines and the Faceless Ones as well as to the left of the main door in the control room set earlier in the story near Pipeline 1 and the ABC tubes.

This episode also gives us our first proper look at the panels to the right of the door, Pipeline 2 and the DEF tubes:

Both control panels seen there could well also be panels from the Faceless Ones shot above.

We do have very clear pictures of the same areas of the set in episode 6 ..... but they're on film there and, confusingly, the panels used are in slightly different locations! Another reason to want this story back is to get a clear look at these things!

Following his appearance on screen in The Moonbase, Victor Pemberton becomes the first person to appear in and write for Doctor Who. He'd submitted a story idea to David Whitaker, the first Doctor Who script editor, for The Slide where a village is taken over by a sentient form of mud. He rejected it, but Peter Bryant, then a BBC radio script editor, had it made for radio where it was broadcast during February and March 1966. When Bryant took charge of Doctor Who he got Pemberton, having recently departed the assistant script editor role, to adapt The Slide for the program. It would be Pemberton's only Doctor Who television credit, but he would go on to write The Pescatons, a story recorded on record featuring the Tom Baker Doctor with Sarah-Jane Smith. In later life he would turn his hand to writing historical romantic fiction and at one stage I caught my mother reading one of his books! He was the partner of David Spenser, who played Thomni in The Abominable Snowmen earlier this season.

The Web of Fear, and it's sequel The Invasion, are usually held up a templates for the Pertwee years with the Doctor allied with the army fighting against an alien invasion. But Fury from the Deep is a template for a certain type of Pertwee: Someone, usually scientists somehow connected to the energy business, burrows into the earth and digs something up/unleashes something hidden within the Earth. This plot re-appears several times in the next few years: The Silurians, Inferno, The Daemons, The Sea Devils, The Green Death and Terror of the Zygons. An element of the plot, digging something up accidentally, has already been seen this season in The Ice Warriors but with Fury's near present setting it could almost be a Pertwee story, you could see it being transported wholesale into his isolation on Earth with relatively few changes.

Terrance Dicks credits Malcolm Hulke with saying that there's two types of story for the trapped on Earth Third Doctor: Alien Invasion and Mad Scientist, and then breaking this with The Silurians, digging something up out the ground, but really it had already been done with this story!