The Seeds of Doom - Episode 4

The one thing that I knew was coming when I started to watch this episode was knowing that Tom Baker was going to come crashing through the rooftop window. That is about as energetic as the Doctor gets in this episode. I don’t quite know what the theory was behind this decision but it does seem odd that the lead character should be so inactive at such an important part of the serial.

The sight of the Doctor with a gun is a rare one and we know that the Doctor wont use it but he basically says that the others don’t know that so its clear it won’t be much of a problem. The Doctor’s fortunes take a drastic turn for the worst when he becomes attached to a machine that makes compost. It takes most of the episode to get him to the point and even then nothing happens so Tom Baker is really a bit wasted in this episode and it falls to Elisabeth Sladen to do a lot of the work.

Chase really comes across as a nasty piece of work when he doesn’t seem to concerned with Keeler’s transformation. I think he maybe one of my favourite villains in recent years in Doctor Who. Keeler does suffer a rather grim fate in this episode as he starts off as his normal self and by the end of the episode he has become a krynoid. It’s a shame really because he was a likeable person but he just chose a rather rubbish person to work for.

Miss Ducat’s involvement in the previous episode seems to be more relevant because she gets to distract Chase in a nice scene. It seems at first that its just another random scene with a dear old lady but soon it becomes clear for the reason of her unexpected visit. When she gets into a car we learn that she is sort of working with Thackeray and Dunbar. Dunbar slightly redeems himself when he reveals to Thackeray that he has made a mistake but doesn’t go the full hog and admit what he has done. This happens just moments before he meets a rather grim ending at the tentacles of a krynoid. It’s definelty a trait of the Hinchcliffle/Holmes era of the show that people who die in this show don’t exactly have a nice ending.

The cliffhanger does come across as slightly comedic because it’s the Krynoid staggering towards the camera. I know that they were intending some quite dramatic to end the episode but sadly it doesn’t quite work out that way. It’s another episode which seems to have a bit of padding but not as much as there was in the second episode. I think that this story is going to be just as I have thought of it in the past. It’s neither terrible nor is it great. I think that on reflection that they could have done a four episode and two episode split just like they did in the previous season.