202 Fury from the Deep: Episode Five

EPISODE: Fury from the Deep: Episode Five
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 202
STORY NUMBER: 042
TRANSMITTED: 13 April 1968
WRITER: Victor Pemberton
DIRECTOR: Hugh David
SCRIPT EDITOR: Derrick Sherwin
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant
FORMAT: CD: Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep
TELESNAPS: Fury from the Deep: Episode Five

The Doctor works out engineers must have been infected when the weed was first sucked into the system and that it's vulnerable to pure oxygen, but the base's oxygen supplies have been vented by Oak & Quill. Pursuing them Jamie grapples with Quill who is weakened by Victoria's screams and collapses. Robson attacks a guard, kidnaps Victoria and steals a helicopter flying out to the control rig. The weed creature bursts out of the piping in the base. The Doctor and Jamie follow Hobson to the control rig where he is waiting for them.....

The telesnaps for this episode show the BBC's foam machine in full swing, the stuff is everywhere. Once again out friends the Australian censor have arranged the preservation of some material by cutting virtually everything showing the weed covering Robson's hands. The use of the helicopter is nice and adds an extra dimension to the story. Fraser Hines tells a tale, on The Ice Warriors CD of the helicopter's pilot taking him & Patrick Troughton by air to a party at Victor Maddern's (Robson) House in the country!

The Web of Fear, and it's sequel The Invasion, are usually held up a templates for the Pertwee years with the Doctor allied with the army fighting against an alien invasion. But Fury from the Deep is a template for a certain type of Pertwee: Someone, usually scientists somehow connected to the energy business, burrows into the earth and digs something up/unleashes something hidden within the Earth. This plot re-appears several times in the next few years: The Silurians, Inferno, The Daemons, The Sea Devils, The Green Death and Terror of the Zygons. An element of the plot, digging something up accidentally, has already been seen this season in The Ice Warriors but with Fury's near present setting it could almost be a Pertwee story, you could see it being transported wholesale into his isolation on Earth with relatively few changes.

Terrance Dicks credits Malcolm Hulke with saying that there's two types of story for the trapped on Earth Third Doctor: Alien Invasion and Mad Scientist, and then breaking this with The Silurians but really it had already been done!