351 The Green Death Episode Two

EPISODE: The Green Death: Episode Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 351
STORY NUMBER: 069
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 26 May 1973
WRITER: Robert Sloman (and Barry Letts uncredited)
DIRECTOR: Michael Briant
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 7.2 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who: The Green Death (Special Edition)
EPISODE FORMAT: 625 video

"Who was that?"
"Our BOSS. Yours and mine."

The lift plummets down the shaft but the Doctor manages to stop it just before it reaches the bottom. Needing cutting gear to rescue Jo & Bert the Doctor goes to Global Chemicals. Jo & Bert find Dai, now glowing green. Stevens' employee Fell is instructed to tell the Doctor that there's no cutting gear and when he objects a computer voice, the BOSS orders him processed. When the Doctor & Brigadier arrive he denies having any. Elgin is suspicious of Fell who is behaving strangely. The Doctor finds evidence of sabotage at the mine and meets Professor Jones who has arrived to help. Dave confirms Global leant them equipment and while he & the Brigadier go to Newport, the nearest town to fetch some from there, Professor Jones stages a demonstration as a distraction allowing the Doctor to break in to Global Chemicals using a cherry picker to cross the barbed wire fence. He follows the map drawn for him to the storage centre but is detected and reported to Stevens & BOSS. BOSS orders him apprehended and he is trapped. Stevens once again denies having the cutting equipment and shows him the empty shed before releasing him. Jo & Bert look for an escape shaft as the Brigadier & Dave return quickly having found cutting equipment at a garage. Once the adjustments have been made Dave, The Doctor and some miners descend in the second lift. Jo & Bert find themselves in a chamber glowing green filled with a rotting smell. Bert touches some liquid seeping from the wall which stings his hand. The Doctor's party find the dead Dai glowing green and set off in search of Jo & Bert. Bert's hand has started to glow green and he orders Jo to leave him. The Doctor & Dave find Bert, with Dave taking him back to the surface while the Doctor pursues Jo. He finds her in a chamber filled with the glowing green substance and giant maggots as a cave in traps them there....

In later years any scene that needs to be dimly lit will result in the all out glare of the lighting rig. So applause here please for the superb sequences in the mine tunnels which are fabulously dark apart from the wonderful green glow producing an atmospheric feel for the sequences bellow ground while above ground the realistic location settings and decent sets give a real world feel to the episode. Against that three things stand out: The BOSS, with it's wonderful voice, the eerie green glow in the tunnels and the giant maggots, for which this story is famed. Ask almost anyone coming up for their sixtieth birthday which Doctor Who story they remember and the chances are they'll say "The one with the Maggots"!

There's something about seeing The Third Doctor in an industrial landscape as it was such a regular feature of his earlier stories!

Jerome Willis, Jocelyn Stevens, has a long television career to his name. He has a rare double on his CV appearing in both Out of This World, as John Irvine in The Dark Star, and Out of the Unknown, where he was Ryman in the surviving first season episode Time in Advance which can be found on the Out of the Unknown DVD Set. He played several roles in An Age of Kings, the BBC's series of William Shakespeare's history plays and appears in the 1972 Doomwatch film as Lt. Commander Tavener.

Tony Adams, playing Elgin, is famous for playing Adam Chance in Crossroads.

Fell is played by John Rolfe on his third Doctor Who appearance after appearing as the Captain in The War Machines and Sam Becket in The Moonbase. He too was in Out of the Unknown appearing as Rawlinson in This Body Is Mine, which also survives and is on the aforementioned DVD set. He appears Rentaghost as Mr. Green in the first episode of the second series, The Sweeney as Det. Chief Supt. Brookford in Drag Act and in Blake's 7 as Terloc in Project Avalon.

Ben Howard plays Chauffeur/Henchman Hinks. He was in The Sweeney as Ronnie in Queen's Pawn, The Professionals as Spelman in Kickback and Blake's 7 as Mori in Volcano.

Pretty certain that's Stuntman Terry Walsh as the Guard in the gate: there's no acting credit for him but he's down as fight arranger on the end titles.

Oddly he doesn't appear to be one of the guards with Hinks mixing it up with The Doctor later in the episode, though his fellow stunt regular Alan Chuntz is very visible there. I'm having trouble identifying the other guard in the fight scene but, looking at the guards mentioned in the DWAS production file, the name Leslie Bates spring out at me: Previously he cast the shadow that falls across the Tardis at the end of the first episode, An Unearthly Child and then played a Tribesman in the second, The Cave of Skulls. He's a Man at Lop, Mongol Warrior and Mongol Bandit in Marco Polo, a Guard in The Massacre, a Villager at Inn / Pirate in The Smugglers, an English Soldier in The Highlanders, an IE Guard in The Invasion, an 1862 soldier, Confederate Soldier, foot soldier in The War Games, a Waxworks Visitor/Auton in Spearhead from Space, a BBC3 TV Crewmember in The Dæmons, a UNIT soldier in The Three Doctors and a Guard & Draconian in Frontier in Space. He returns as an Army Corporal & UNIT soldier in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, an Exxilon in Death to the Daleks, a Guard in Planet of the Spiders, a Time Lord in Deadly Assassin and a Bi-Al Member in Invisible Enemy. In the The Andromeda Breakthrough he was a British Soldier in Gale Warning, in Doomwatch he was a man in Hear No Evil, The Islanders & Flood and in Moonbase 3 he's a Technician in Castor and Pollux. He's also in our favourite Adam Adamant Lives! episode D for Destruction as a TA Soldier.

John Dearth is the Voice of BOSS, and very good he is too. He'll be back as Lupton in Planet of the Spiders. You can see him in The Day the Earth Caught Fire as Dick.

We like the word Death in our Doctor who story titles. It was used a lot in the early days for the individual episodes:

The Keys of Marinus 1: The Sea of Death
The Keys of Marinus 5: Sentence of Death
The Aztecs 2: The Warriors of Death
The Sensorites 4: A Race Against Death
The Chase 2: The Death of Time
The Chase 5: The Death of Doctor Who
The Myth Makers 3: Death of a Spy
The Daleks' Master Plan 9: Golden Death
The Massacre 3: Priest of Death

Four entries for Terry Nation there, using it twice in two stories.

It crops up again quite frequently as a whole story title too:

The Seeds of Death
The Ambassadors of Death
The Green Death
Death to the Daleks
The Robots of Death
City of Death

Generally the word Death in the title is an indication that the story might be quite good....

There's an odd error in the end titles for this and the final two episodes of this story: they're played upside down & in reverse.