Fury from the Deep episode 5 discussion:
N (Nireena): So, did somebody put too much soap in the washer again?
R: Evil soap.
H: From the sea.
K: Who has a “Sea Entrance” to leave the base? Wouldn’t it be a sea or sea-side EXIT?
H: Sea based bases I could understand having some kind of sea based entrance / exit so you could drive a boat up to it.
K: I get that, but it should have been called an exit, since you were leaving the base.
R: I blame it on the writer being behind. “the sea, you know, where the boats come in. The sea entrance.”
H: Something I haven’t mentioned, by the way, about the writer of this story, is he hold a very big distinction. He’s either the only, or one of the only people to be involved in the show in three separate capacities – as a script editor, a writer, and an actor.
K: So like what Mark Gatiss is likely to be soon?
H: Potentially. I don’t think he’s the next up, but potentially. But yeah, Victor Pemberton was in the series as an actor in I believe the Mission to the Unknown. And he was a script editor for a brief period of time. And here he is, writing this story. As a matter of trivia, he wrote one other story for Doctor Who – the record from the 70’s Doctor Who and the Pescatons.
K: Did they only eat fish?
H: I have a copy. I can lend it to you.
K: But it was not an aired story.
H: No. Not a TV story. But anyway, that’s a little trivia about the writer.
R: I made this joke before, but man the Aussie censors chooses some weird stuff to take out. The “Robson flies a helicopter menacingly” scene.
H: I have a theory as to why that scene and the knocking the guard out scene was cut.
K: For time?
H: No. Potentially because of the seaweed you see growing all over his body – the body horror. It was on his face, growing out of the collar, and the outside of his hand in the guard scene and when he was flying the helicopter. That’s my theory. I’d have to look it up to see if I was right.
<some discussion of the Swamp Thing and The Heap>
R: Oh and the one time Victoria doesn’t scream.
K: I have a theory. They’re vulnerable to sonics or something and they will defeat the monsters with Victoria’s screams. They do run away whenever she screams.
N: Like the Black Canary.
R: Or some horrible shrieking Lynn Minmei.
Sp: <Doctor voice> “Now Jamie, I don’t want you to think. I don’t want you to argue. I just need you to face Victoria, and when I give the signal, flash her.”
<laughter>
Sp: “I’ll explain later.”
N: Am I the only one who thinks that this particular Doctor looks like Moe from the three stooges?
K: <indignantly> Yes! You are.
H: I have read other people making that observation. I do not agree, but I have seen it before – he said, defending the guest. It’s a Beatle cut. At least that was the intent.
P: Okay, so at the end here, while we’ve been running from the foam forever, now we’re going to go wading into it? That doesn’t make sense to me.
R: They’ve been wading in it before. It’s fine.
MS: Yeah, well to be exact, the Doctor actually threw it into Jamie’s eyes.
P: I do recall a scene escaping through the roof to get away from the foam, but now they’re just jumping into it.
H: I believe it was foam and weed in that scene.
R: They need “no more tears” formula of giant weed.
N: Well, they already had the dub-step heart beat. Now they just need the “one of us, one of us” set to it.
H: “Gabba gabba hey! Gabba gabba hey!”
P: Also I think this is one of the first helicopter chase on the Doctor Who.
K: There was a helicopter in Enemy of the World.
H: But there wasn’t a chase. Although this wasn’t much of a chase either – it was less of a chase but more one of a helicopter taking off and then one absolutely identical helicopter also taking off.
N: Yay, stock footage!
R: Speaking of slow motion chases, Robson escapes to the helicopter in a milk float? It looked like a golf cart.
N: That’s plausible. A lot of industrial complexes have vehicles like that. Gators and golf carts look silly too.
R: Yeah. Not the most menacingly way to make your escape.
Sp: The main villain for this story is a bit of left over on your sushi plate. I’m not too hung up on the vehicle chase quality.
P: It’s “Reefer Madness”
R: “Someone here is under control of the weed!”
H: We managed to resist making a marijuana joke so far this week. It was only a matter of time.
R: Well, on the bright side, Miss Jones seems rather competent.
H: Last week I promised you a discussion of why this story is interesting and different from the standard base under siege.
P: It’s just missing the “ge”. Base under Sea.
<groans. Consider how many of his puns I don’t type.>
H: Anyway. So, in the previous base under siege stories there is a general formula. So there’s the guy in charge, who tends to be very rigid and ends up losing it. He tends to have a subordinate who is a rebel, but is the one who is actually competent and can get things done and steps into the vacuum. In this story, though, although we have the rigid boss, we don’t really have a good subordinate character. We have two possibilities, one of whom spends a great deal of the story being less than competent and not being able to take charge – both out of concern for his wife and general wishy-washiness.
Sp: Of course he’s wishy-washy. There’s lot of foam for him to work with.
H: And the other guy disappears midway through episode four without being able to accomplish anything.
K: So they replace both of them with a competent woman.
H: I’m getting to her. The interesting about Megan Jones is her inclusion sort of presages / foreshadows a Pertwee style plot with government officials stepping in. So the interesting thing about this story is it really feels like a very transitional kind of piece as far as the story goes. That might only be interesting to me, but I thought I’d point it out.
Sp: Another way to think of it, they had the uptight guy in charge, who slowly cracks under pressure, only to change things up a bit, they had him hurry up and crack right away at the start of the story, instead of having his decent of madness as the central part of the story.
H: It only took 3 episodes.
K: Some of my favorite classic Doctor Who stories involve someone descending into madness.
Sp: I do like how much they thought through possible responses to the threat once they realized the scale of it. i.e. you can’t just blow up the station from above – it will just spread. They got it pretty contained as it is right now, so might as well deal with it as it is.
<we wander off topic a bit>
P: Remember when Oak and Quill wander off to sabotage the oxygen? I think that really showed that a saboteur in the right place, even without being in a place of power, can do considerable damage.
Sp: Which, yet again, reminds me, of the remarkable field of trust that the Doctor generates.
K: It gets questioned a lot in this story, when it does they push back and it doesn’t take.
Sp: Because “he’s the only one who can save us.”
H: Because he’s the only one who seems to know what the hell’s going on.
R: That did kind of annoy me a bit. “Oh, we should probably put someone on duty guarding the oxygen cylinders.” Too bad you messed around until it was too late.
H: Yeah. It’s a point well taken. That’s what I was thinking at the time as well.
K: Final thoughts?
H: Okay.
N: There was the bit where Jamie punched the guy out, and then the Doctor was like “that’s not what did it” and we didn’t find out what did it.
H: We will next week.
K: So, final thoughts?
E: Well, this got terrifying unexpectedly quickly. But that was quite enjoyable. I look forward to seeing more, and maybe more effects of subliminal messages through Dub-Step seaweed. I knew there was subliminal messages in Dub-Step!
P: I said most stuff already. I actually enjoyed the alarms going off portion. It was nice to see the rope ladder being used, and when I saw it I was like “wow, he did his own stunts.”
H: For the most part.
P: And I don’t know if in England they call helicopter driver’s pilots, or it was Jamie not knowing any better. But he said “will the driver wait for us.”
H: Pilot, to him, would mean someone steering a boat.
P: Into the lions den – and keeping out of its mouth. That was a worthwhile line. Awesome. I can’t wait until next week.
Cz: Untz untz untz untz untz untz.
N: Cheesy monster special effects. Melodramatic acting. And 60’s science. Yep. That’s Doctor Who.
K: Hee.
Sp: Oh, it’s to me is it? I… already commented on the coordination and the good tactics of the Doctor and the rig crew. And we know that Victoria is the super weapon.
K: Well, we suspect it. We don’t know for sure.
Sp: I will be disappointed next week if they are not squeezing her like an accordion at the monster.
H: Did you like it?
Sp: Oh, it was fine. And fun. I missed last week, and then I watched this week. And I realized I didn’t miss last week. I think one of my beefs about the third installment was that this was not feeling like a six part story, so I’m glad to have fast forwarded a bit and feel like I was right.
H: I would say that last week is actually when things started moving.
M: Did the writers at the BBC do that on purpose? So if you missed an episode you could catch up?
H: That’s pretty much the way a lot of serial fiction gets written. Ah… Ronelyn?
R: “We’re in the lion’s den, but we must make sure we avoid his rumpus room.”
Sp: We’ve certainly seen plenty of the laundry.
H: Is that it?
R: You better hope so.
K: Oh my. I am, for the most part, enjoying this story. There have been some frustrating bits. I think, honestly, I’m getting burnt out on recons. Only one more story and we’re out of “recon hell.”
<discussion of how many recons we have left to get through.>
K: I think everyone else covered anything else I’d say.
H: Well, continuing on from last week, I’m really feeling like this story has gone from neutral, well into drive. It just is barreling along at a great pace. And it’s reminding me why I enjoyed this story the first time, which I couldn’t quite remember during the first few episodes. I’m really looking forward to next week.
