The Green Death - Episode 6

I forgot to mention that episode four was the 100^th episode for Jon Pertwee as the Doctor and now joins the century club with Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell. This is the final episode for Katy Manning as Jo Grant in her 77^th episode and is tied in second place with William Russell as longest serving companions though is still 35 episodes short of Frazer Hines’ record of 112. I commented that it didn’t feel like this episode was the final one. So it has to effectively rush things into a 25 minute episode.

Jo doesn’t do much for the first 10 minutes until she reveals that she had the happy accident which the Professor was saying serendipity about. She doesn’t really have much to contribute until the final half of the episode but when she’s involved she’s really good and gives the sort of performance that we come to expect from Katy Manning. Jon Pertwee is on fine form as usual and actually doesn’t deliver the fatal blow but almost inspires Stevens to do the job for him.

If I were the Professor I would be slightly miffed that I had been bumped down the list of priorities when they decide that killing the maggots was a greater priority once they knew that Nancy’s food had an effect on the maggots. The scene where Benton is treating the maggots like cats and this annoys the Doctor was a funny moment.

This episode does feature the unfortunate flying insect which does undermine all the good work of the maggots and I had always thought that this featured earlier in the story not in the final episode. I suppose one of the benefits of watching an episode a day is that it breaks up the monotony that a six part story can have if watched in one sitting. The flying insect was a brief part of this story and I liked that the Doctor just did a simple thing of flinging his coat over it to kill it.

The relationship (if you can call it that) between Stevens and BOSS is a curious one because by this episode, BOSS seems overly confident his plan will work and Stevens is panicking that things wont work out. The build up to this episode comes when the Doctor is trying to convince Stevens about trying to put an end to BOSS. The end is the best pay-off that we could have had because it’s the pupil that puts and end to the teachers plan and the last shot of Stevens with a tear running down his face is the icing on the cake.

The moment when the Professor seems to be out of the woods is when it seems like Jo has left Team Doctor and gone over to Team Professor. The build up to Jo Grant’s departure has been well handled over the six episodes and she gets the exit that she deserves. Unlike Caroline John’s exit (which wasn’t really an exit), Katy Manning’s final scene is as emotional as when Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury left in ‘The War Games’. What makes the departure even more emotional is the reaction of the Doctor who leaves quietly without saying goodbye to Jo. Even I found myself getting a bit emotional which isn’t something that I normally do. It’s a very downbeat ending which isn’t something that classic Who tended to do. Even when a companion left it always had a more upbeat ending but I suppose that considering Katy Manning was such a good companion that there was no way to put a positive spin on it.

Despite being concerned that this episode wasn’t going to end the story in a good way, I thought that it was a very solid episode which was a episode of two halves with the Global Chemicals/BOSS stuff dealt with at just the right time and there was just the right amount of time to write Jo out of the show. This was a great way to end the anniversary year and I think that on the whole, this season has been the strongest since Pertwee’s first season. Only ‘Carnival of Monsters’ let the side down and even that wasn’t the worst story ever.