OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 234
STORY NUMBER: 048
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 08 February 1969
WRITER: Brian Hayles
DIRECTOR: Michael Ferguson
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant
RATINGS: 7.5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who Revisitations Box Set - Volume 2 (Seeds of Death, Carnival of Monsters & Resurrection of the Daleks)
"Your leader will be angry if you kill me, I'm a genius!"
Phipps accidentally makes contact with Doctor's rocket. Once the T-Mat is reactivated, the Ice Warriors reveal themselves. The technicians from earth killed and Miss Kelly taken prisoner. The Doctor & Jamie realise from Phipps description that the invaders are Ice Warriors. Phipps reconnects the transmitter to guide them in to land. The Doctor goes to rescue Phipps while Jamie & Zoe refuel the rocket. The Doctor finds Phipps who tells him what has happened and goes to deactivate the T-Mat. Zoe finds the rocket is damaged and can't take off so she and Jamie search for the Doctor. Phipps & The Doctor free Miss Kelly but the Doctor is captured and pleads for his life
DOCTOR: Stop!
WARRIOR: You must be destroyed.
DOCTOR: You've got no orders to kill me. Your leader will want to speak to me!
WARRIOR: Humans are our enemies!
DOCTOR: But I can be useful to you, like Fewsham. Your leader will be angry if you kill me. I'm a genius.
WARRIOR: Genius? You will come with me.
The Ice Warriors instruct Fewsham to dispatch their cargo to Earth. The Doctor is interrogated by Slaar. The Ice Warriors bring a casket of white seed pods to the T-Mat to be sent to Earth. Jamie & Zoe find Phipps & Miss Kelly. They plan to turn Moonbase's heating up to hinder the Ice Warriors. Fewsham distracts their guard so the Doctor can examine the seed pods. Slaar catches him and gets the Doctor to pick one of the pods up which explodes gassing him. An Ice Warrior find Jamie, Zoe, Miss Kelly & Phipps in the Power Room but they kill it using the solar energy supply. The Martians have the first seed pod T-Mated to T-Mat control in London where it starts to grow...
Ah that's a bit more like it. The Tardis crew are finally in the centre of the action getting to interact with what's left of the moonbase crew and the Martians. We also actually get to see the Seeds in the story's title too!
Poor Michael Ferguson, who previously directed one of my favourite Hartnell's The War Machines, has been trying his best with clever shots and some decent model work but he's not had anything decent to work with until now. However in this episode he does produce a Doctor Who cliche for the first time that we've seen: The Doctor repetitively runs up and down the same corridor set, but filmed from different angles, to make us think he's running down different corridors. This trick may have been used previously but lost: This is the first time I can recall seeing it.
We also get a good look at the Ice Warrior's guns here. The lozenge shaped weapon on the forearm is now replaced by a tube having exactly the same effect. It's these tubes I associate with being the Ice Warriors weapons.
The reason for the difference can be put down to the Ice Warriors in their eponymously titles first story being from an earlier point in time, having been trapped in the glacier from an earlier Ice Age. These Ice Warriors are from the era th story is set and, chronologically speaking, it's the first time we see humanity meeting the Ice Warriors in the original Doctor Who series. However their one new series appearance in Cold War pre dates this with the events of that episode being set in 1983.
Part of the reason my opinion has jumped up this episode might be to do with who actually wrote it. Brian Hayles, the credited writer, has a mixed record for the show in my opinion. We'll ignore the Celestial Toymaker as at least two people rewrote it after he finished it, but the Smugglers is one of my favourite historical stories. The Ice Warriors however was a little variable, but the first two episodes of this story were horribly slow. As of this episode script editor Terrance Dicks steps in and redrafts all the remaining instalments. The story of what happened runs something like this:
Brian Hayles' first go at a second Ice Warriors tale was originally commissioned as The Lords Of The Red Planet in 1967 shortly after The Ice Warriors aired. However the then production team of Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin weren't happy with the story he produced and recommissioned him to write the Seeds of Death. You can find out more about Lords of the Red Planet, by buying the Nothing At The End Of The Lane Prison in Space scriptbook which contains the script for Prison in Space and also looks at the intended story for this slot.
Seeds of Death itself had a somewhat difficult development with the question as to whether Frazer Hines, who played Jamie, was going to leave or not hanging over and affecting it's writing. The idea was a new companion, Nik would have been introduced in a previous and Hayles' version of the story was written to feature him. When Hines decided to stay, causing the loss of at least one previous story, Hayles ran into trouble which led to Dicks stepping in.
These days a TV script goes through myriad revisions by the writer, a lot easier when they're word processed. Terrance Dicks has said his preferred method for working was to give the author one, maybe two, stabs at the script and then if it wasn't working take away the script and sort it out him self which would appear to be exactly what happens here.
Some inspiration for this serial must be drawn from the US Apollo space program which would out a man on the moon during the year that Seeds of Death was transmitted. Lots of elements of the journey to the moon and landing have the hint of a basis in real life. Doctor Who had already been to the Moon in 1967's the Moonbase.
Episode 3 of the Seeds of Death is the only episode of this story that was missing from the BBC Film & Video library in 1978. A copy was recovered from BBC Enterprises, along with duplicate 16mm prints of the rest of the episodes a short while later.
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