TV Club: Doctor Who, The Seeds Of Death
The Seeds Of Death (season 6, episodes 23-28. Originally aired Jan. 25-March 1, 1969)
As much as I like The Seeds Of Death as pure entertainment, Im not sure theres all that much to say about the story on a deeper level, because thats really its biggest flaw: Its kind of a low-budget late-60s British TV version of a Michael Bay movie, geared to deliver thrills and spectacle but not particularly interested in whether the story being told actually means anything beyond bad guys threaten good guys, who defeat bad guys.
That was kind of a problem with the Second Doctor era in general, which was far less wide-ranging in the kinds of stories it told than First Doctor-era Doctor Who, coming to rely on alien-invasion plots to the point where theres a widely used shorthand phrase in Who fandom to cover this periods signature subgenre: the base under siege story, in which an isolated outpost of humans is menaced by some monster or monster from beyond. Its a classic format not unique to this show by any meansits also the driver of Alien, Night Of The Living Dead, and Assault On Precinct 13, to give three of my favorite examplesbut the Troughton era came to rely on it as its bread-and-butter, overusing it to the point of exhaustion. And while The Seeds Of Death is intriguingly forward-thinking in a couple of respects, ultimately it feels like it settled for less than it could have achieved. The series as a whole wasnt quite so unambitiousweve already looked at two other stories from season six, The Mind Robber and The War Games, both of which were more complex and rewarding than this one. But I think that the superficial emphasis on thrills and chills in Seeds Of Death was, unfortunately, more typical of this era, and maybe indicative of why the series came close to cancellation during this season, before the drastic overhaul in season seven that brought in the Third Doctor.
Originally published March 18, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.
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