Fury from the Deep - Episode 6

The final episode for Victoria and it comes at the end of a story that hasn’t been helped by being just being on CD. The episode starts off with a nice little bit of continuity introducing the episode and then the episode begins and it was always going to be interesting to see how they were going to finish the story and write out Victoria in just 25 minutes.

The action starts with a lot of Victoria screaming and it turns out that her scream has an effect on the foam/seaweed. In fact it’s quite surprising that its dealt with quite quickly. It seems like they have spent so long talking and things that it seems that no sooner have they realised what can be done to stop it than they get Victoria to scream and then they play it until it stops.  It seems that the thing that Victoria has been doing for 11 months is the thing that saves the day so its nice that she departs the show on a high note. The final part of the episode dealt with Victoria’s departure and its dealt with quite nicely. Whereas in previous episodes there have been random moments where she has voiced her desire to leave and now there is a sense that some thought has been given to her deciding to stay. The Doctor and Jamie even stay an extra day to give her the opportunity to change her mind if she wished. This is the only time that I recall this happening and it allows for the sort of scene that Russell T Davies would have been proud of. We get a lovely little scene between Deborah Watling and Frazer Hines which is heartfelt and sincere. I thought that this was the nicest performance from Frazer Hines as he’s normally the joker or the action man and it was a nice scene for him to do.

So Deborah Watling departs after 39 episodes and I must say that she’s not as bad as I had thought. I think that sometimes she’s been badly written for and a few times she gets to do some good stuff but sadly those moments were few and far between. The Victorian girl did the best that she could and to be honest you cant blame Deborah Watling for wanting to leave at the first opportunity, I doubt anyone would want to put up with another year of inconsistent writing.

Whilst its not the best story of the fifth season, its certainly not the worst. I think that there are things to like about the previous six episodes and this one in particular but I think that it just doesn’t quite stand up to other stories such as The Tomb of the Cybermen or even Enemy of the World. The performances have been perfectly fine and I think that had this one existed to some degree on DVD then I would probably enjoy this more but sadly at the moment this isn’t the case and my abiding memory of this story is of the heart beating noise. Now we are about to see another Cyberman story and also the introduction of Zoe.