203 Fury from the Deep: Episode Six

EPISODE: Fury from the Deep: Episode Six
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 203
STORY NUMBER: 042
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 20 April 1968
WRITER: Victor Pemberton
DIRECTOR: Hugh David
SCRIPT EDITOR: Derrick Sherwin
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant
RATINGS: 6.9 million viewers
FORMAT: CD: Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes Volume 5 (1967-1969)
TELESNAPS: Fury from the Deep: Episode Six

"Doctor, what do you think we can do?"
"We make a noise, Miss Jones. We make an awful lot of noise!"

The Doctor & Jamie rescue Victoria using the helicopter Robson flew in on and some guidance from the pilot that brought them. Quill has completely recovered from his weed possession: The Doctor works out Victoria's screams having affected it and records them, playing them into the pipe system driving the weed back, destroying it and freeing those under it's control. Robson contacts the base to let them know that he, Mrs Harris and Van Lutyens are alive, well and back in their right minds. After considering recent events Victoria decides she will be safer staying on Earth with the Harris family and bids farewell to the Doctor & Jamie.

Ah that's not bad at all. Some mucking about with a helicopter at the start before we really get down to business. Unlike many companions, Victoria gets something to do in her final story and that's not pulled out of thin air either:

HARRIS: No. There's not much hope, is there. What can we do? How can we fight this hideous thing?
DOCTOR: You say there's not much hope. I believe there is.
HARRIS: But even if we succeed in fighting of the weed, what about those people already affected by it?
DOCTOR: Well on our way back here we stopped of at the Medicare Centre. The man that Jamie fought with in the corridor has almost completely recovered.
HARRIS: What?
DOCTOR: Yes, the weed growth on his arm has disappeared and died. He's bemused, he's dazed, but he's alive!
HARRIS: But how? Why? What killed the weed?
DOCTOR: Noise! Sound vibrations.
JONES: How did you find out?
DOCTOR: Victoria discovered it.
VICTORIA: I did?
DOCTOR: Well, yes. You screamed.
VICTORIA: I screamed.
DOCTOR: It's her scream, her particular pattern of sound that does the trick.

Her screams are shown to affect the weed earlier in the story without much attention being drawn to it. Nevertheless Chekhov gun was subtly hung on the wall back in episode 3 in the Tardis lab scene:

DOCTOR: I was right. The weed formations are feeding off the natural gas beneath the North Sea and giving off toxic gas. Come on. We must get back to Harrises' quarters. Come along. Just a minute. That weed went back in its tank very suddenly, didn't it? I wonder why? Never mind.

She has spent a large part of her career as a companion screaming at various alien menaces and being kidnapped by them. She gets held hostage in Evil of the Daleks, Ice Warriors, Web of Fear and this story plus imprisoned in Enemy of the World and possessed in The Abominable Snowmen. She was orphaned on he first appearance, which is what led to her coming under the Doctor's care so to follow that up with all the trauma listed above it's no wonder she's started to have doubts about her travels, also as signposted early on in the story. This isn't an out of the blue departure with a reason suddenly be unveiled as she leaves, like Ben & Polly's was when then discover they're on Earth and in London the very day they departed. There's no reason that couldn't have been mentioned earlier in The Faceless Ones to improve the ending but it wasn't. The Production Team seem to have learnt from that experience and Victoria's departure is better for some foreshadowing.

The confrontation between the weed and the Doctor in the control room as he starts to drive it back is preserved thanks to some film offcuts of recording this scene.

In fact so much footage from the Ealing film studio shoot for this story survives that the Doctor Who - Lost In Time DVD has done a pretty good job of reconstructing the climatic scene with the weed!

We identified the two control room panels shown in the above shot back in episodes 2 and3!

While Doctor Who was recording at Ealing some amateur 8mm footage was shot which gives us an amazing panning view across the entire control room and impeller room set construction:

So how many of these control panels are there on that set? 2 between Pipes ABC, one to the left of the main door, one to the right of the main door and 2 between Pipes DEF, which we can see above, plus two by the door for the impeller room. That makes 8 by my count, not all of which we've seen, plus a number more in the room on the rig!

I've enjoyed this story a lot, it's worked well for me, and would love to able to actually see it. There's mystery surrounding what happened to some of the prints of it that were produced: The ABC in Australia have no record of destroying of returning theirs, but don't have them. The New Zealand censors rejected this story completely and it was never broadcast there and the fate of the prints sent to Gibraltar, like many of their later Troughton serials, is completely unknown!

But we have reached a significant landmark in our journey: Fury from the Deep is the last completely missing story: at least one episode exists of every Doctor Who story from here on. In fact there are only 11 missing episodes to go spread out over 4 episodes of the next story, The Wheel in Space, 2 of the Invasion and 5 of the Space Pirates. Some might say it's a shame that all six parts of the Space Pirates aren't missing.

These then are the stories which have no complete surviving episode.

Season 1

Marco Polo (7 episodes)

Season 3

Mission to the Unknown (1 episode)
The Myth Makers (4 episodes)
The Massacre (4 episodes)
The Savages (4 episodes)

Season 4

The Smugglers (4 episodes)
Power of the Daleks (6 episodes)
The Highlanders (4 episodes)
The Macra Terror (4 episodes)

Season 5

Fury from the Deep (6 episodes)

I'll do a complete list of all the missing episodes when we reach the last one, Space Pirates 6, in 40 episodes time.

Fury from the Deep was released as a Target novel with a larger than usual page count and adapted by it's original author and released in October 1986. The audio of the story was one of those released on tape in October 1993 and then, with new narration, released on CD in November 2005 and has since been re-released as part of Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes Volume 5 (1967-1969)