Watched more Doctor Who
Friday the 11th of December 2009
The last four complete Hartnell stories that I needed to watch:
Next year I will watch the final complete story that I’ve never seen, the Troughton story The Seeds of Death.
And deep down inside I have a hankering to watch (in reconstruction) from Mission to the Unknown through to Destruction of Time—seventeen episodes of ambition or exhaustion?
By Thorne Lawler, 3 weeks, 1 day after the fact
Largely irrelevant snippet: The Seeds of Death was (until I was strangely touched by Age of Steel) my canonical Doctor Who nightmare-story.
Without going into how it correlates with the plot, I had my right arm in a fingers-to-elbow cast for several months at the time I saw these episodes, and consequently became beset by the tactile hallucination that something… else… was growing through and into my arm under the cast, where I couldn’t see it. I later realised that this was just the bizarre sensation of six inches of stitches clutching at an incision I had never seen, as I was unconscious when they applied the cast.
That nightmare image of something growing inside my skin remained unsurpassed for many years, until I watched Aliens.
By David Golding, 3 weeks, 3 days after the fact
It’s not impossible you mean the black and white story The Seeds of Death, but it seems more likely you were scared by The Seeds of Doom, a Tom Baker story featuring aggressive plant life.
What scared you about The Age of Steel, if you don’t mind me asking?
As an adult I find few entertainments really scare me but the new series managed it with The Empty Child. That insistent boy, gas masks, “physical injuries as plague”, brrr. As a child, the old series filled me with primal fear with every other episode from Terror of the Autons through to The Twin Dilemma (the Doctor’s erratic behaviour genuinely unsettling this nine-year-old; at ten I guess I was beyond that kind of thing, because Season 22, full of horrors, never horrified me).
By Thorne Lawler, 4 weeks after the fact
You’re right about Seeds of Doom. Honestly, how could I confuse two such different titles?
Age of steel, in hindsight, didn’t do anything too unusual to win my shock and disconcertment: it used parallels-driven slight-of-hand to seemingly kill a major character (Jackie), and its sheer body-count of personal, introduced characters was quite high.
The things which really bit though, were the same things which grated faintly and seemed ham-fisted manipulation on a second viewing: the dying bride-to-be-cyberman, the whole resolution “because it hurts”.
Things which sum up horror in a sound-bite like this always seem to get me. The Bab-5 scene which stuck in my mind for years is a great example: the doomed man sits in his martian pod-car and says to the camera “…but they always grow back” before he presses the detonator.
Fabulously distressing.
By David Golding, 1 month, 1 week after the fact
I thought the “because it hurts” sequence was a bit glib on first viewing. It seemed like Graeme Harper, having seen his innovative direction of the 80s become old hat, was going back to Tomb of the Cybermen to draw on Morris Barry for credibility. Meanwhile, in an age where cyborgisms proliferate, the fears of an English medical scientist just too young for World War II seemed at worst (when directed at the disabled) offensive, and at best irrelevant—doesn’t every modern pop starlet tell us that it’s sexy to submit to the machine?
Watching a second time, I did find the story a bit chilling. I paid attention to the initial targets of Cybernisation, and who (in his corporate rather than corporeal capacity) was doing the targeting. Really Tom MacRae is cutting to the chase: why do we “upgrade” from Human v0.1 to v0.2, why do we adopt this rhetoric at all, why do we deaden our emotions: “because [capitalism] hurts”. (It helped that I was more relaxed about the story in general: I realised that the possibility of being stranded was a motif of Series 2; and that this particular parallel world was the land of the dead.)