3 – The Underwater Menace – The TARDIS Project

The Underwater Menace episode 3 discussion:

M: <sarcasm> Little known fact, the actual Underwater Menace started out as a Rick Wakeman (from Yes) concept album. I especially loved the March of the Fishslaves.

Cz: Dat waz aweshome!!

H: So, about “the March of the Fishslaves.” You ever wonder why this episode survived. The telerecording was never wiped. It was held as an example of BBC camera work, specifically for that sequence. It was referred to as an “underwater ballet.”

Cz: It was interesting.

A: I liked it.

P: Well, the synthetic music sure made the ballet.

R: Underwater and overlong.

K: I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be doing. But it looked like a slow motion Cirque du Soleil.

P: They were passing the word of the strike.

H: Exactly.

R: To be fair, even though the scene itself comes off a little bit silly, it was a pretty impressive effect.

H: I’m not so sure it would have been silly at the time, or in the context of the story..

R: You just watched in the context of the story.

H: What I meant was in the context of being able to view full episodes. As I mentioned previously, of the majority of the time since this first aired, the only available episode was this one. So this story was judged as kind of crap. But putting this one together with the previous episode has made people reassess it.

R: I didn’t think the episode overall was bad. It was kinda surreal and a little strange, but it was fun.

A: Definitely.

P: How about that goofy helmet on the executioner?

R: I wanted to mention that, but I couldn’t find anything funnier to say than “check out that helmet.”

P: It made me think that they made special effort for the helmet, but it just got to funny.

A: I loved the fish masks.

P: I loved the fish masks, too. But the helmet was outrageous.

M: It was fabulous.

H: Speaking of which, lets talk about the High Priest.

H: I’ve been listening to a lot of the Goon Show lately. I don’t know who else has listened to the Goon Show, but I was thinking of Neddie Seagoon, High Priest of Atlantis.

K: I know of the Goon Show, but I have no idea what you are talking about.

H: Well then you must listen to some episodes sometime.

A: I would have loved to have seen those costumes done in color.

H: I makes me wonder what color they would be, because the color that we think we see isn’t always the actual one. The TARDIS console, for example, is green, not white. It shows up better as light green on black and white film than white would. In 1970, when they showed the console in the story Inferno, everyone was surprised to see it was light green. And on a completely different note, how about the eyebrows that every Atlantian was showing. They were huge caterpillars.

R: “Because Zaroff forbid all tweezers.”

H: Except for his guards…

P: In the skin tight wet suits.

M: I think that was to make them look menacing in contrast with the Atlantians. Although the black wetsuit looked puffy on Jamie.

R: “Doctor, it’s hard to get this on over me kilt.”

K: We actually get to see Jamie out of his kilt.

M: Ahem… in something other than his kilt.

H: Actually, I think this episode, prior to the disguise, is the only time we get to see him in the full outfit. After this it’s just the kilt with more modern clothing. Something Mr. Mother said made me remember something I was thinking about during the episode. Zaroff’s guards really did seem to be both of a different type than the Atlantians, and they only took orders from him. It made me think that not all of the ship wrecked sailors weren’t turned into fishmen or slaves.

P: I had the same thought, or at least I thought maybe he had brought them with him to Atlantis.

M: This does bring up the guns too. There was quite some violence in this episode. Zaroff and his guards offed four people.

H: For Doctor Who in the 70’s that’s such a low body count, I don’t know.

M: But in this story, it’s been a low body count.

K: But I gotta say, the shooting scene was very silly. “Bang”… beat… falls down.

M: No recoil, no smoke, no muzzle flash. Very advanced weapon Zaroff invented maybe. Sonic perhaps?

H: He didn’t even pull the trigger. There was just a sound effect.

M: I wonder if it was because the gun was pointing at the camera they did it that way. We’ve certainly seen good guns in the past..

P: So I remember a couple of interesting dialog sequences in this episode. One where Jamie is speaking as the voice of…

H: Amdo, and that was Polly.

P: Afterwards the Doctor says “I know that voice.” And I’m thinking “everyone in the room can hear you.”

H: It was soto voce.

P: The next thing he says is “trust me. Follow me” and giving away that they were escaping.

H: Apparently everyone was too in awe and bowing down to notice.

P: They were godstruck?

H: Yes, they were under a god’s spell.

K: Doomdoomdoomdoom… Fearfearfearfear… That’s what the two chants sounded like.

M: It was called “Chants in the Halls of the Seagoddess” by Rick Wakeman.

P: Another interesting one, was “Slaves, like worms, can be turned.” And I wondered if this is an English expression that Americans don’t know…

H: Oh, you don’t know the expression “the worm has turned?” It means someone gets their comeuppance.

M: Shakespeare, I believe. <looks it up> Henry the 6th, part 3. And it was worm in the sense of serpent. Which was about the downtrodden overthrowing tyrants.

P: Which is actually the motivation of both sides of the story. And of course…

H: “NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN STOP ME NOW!” That’s the line I mentioned previously that you’d know it when you heard it.

K: Meh. There were worse more overacted lines. I liked when the king stared into Zaroff’s eyes and started to see the insanity that was brewing.

M: Interesting to me in that scene that the king was like “oh, nothing, nothing.” which showed that the king was actually afraid of Zaroff. And obviously for a good reason.

P: I think that’s the scene where Zaroff says “we shall surprise all of mankind” with dual meaning.

M: Also interesting question, did Zaroff have his gun the whole time?

R: “Of course I did, I cannot sleep properly without it.”

M: But that means he had it and let them capture him anyway.

K: I don’t think he had it earlier. He was off scene enough that he could have picked it up in his lab, or gotten it from one of his guards.

H: Gotten it from one of his guards, yes. But he hadn’t gone back to his lab yet because the Doctor was trying to get to the lab first.

P: I thought that the companions were unusually requiring the Doctor’s approval to continue from the beginning. “what shall we do? Where are we going from here?”

H: They were a lot less resourceful than they were in the previous story.

P: Yeah, we had just been talking about how great Polly was previously…

M: I was not keen on the new whimpy Polly.

A: She was infuriatingly useless.

P: So after they had captured Zaroff, and he had faked his own heart attack, or whatever. He gets away pretty easily.

A: Because Polly is so useless.

P: At first I thought that this was the plan, that they were trying to get him to lead them to the reactor.

H: Which is perfectly reasonable, considering how overly elaborate their plan to capture him was. Was it just me, or did that seem to be five levels harder than it needed to be.

P: And one pair of sunglasses too many.

M: It was very A-Team long before the A-Team. “I love it when a plan comes together.”

K: But we got to see so much awesome slapstick and goofiness with that plan.

H: I actually found the direction of that entire sequence, everything in the marketplace, to be really lack luster. “You have a bit of business, just do something. Kids, play in the water or something.”

M: I liked that they had kids in the scene to give it a sense that there was a real civilization, which you don’t get to see.

Cz: One of the kids was pretending like he had a live fish in his hands and that it was floppin’ around… but it wasn’t.

H: The problem was that it didn’t feel like they were playing. It didn’t feel real. And I think it was the direction more than anything.

M: And a lot of “what are we going to do with Jamie.” Come with us, no guard Zaroff, no wait, go chase after them!” He was clearly an afterthought in the scenes.

A: It bugged me that the two who would have made the best guards for Zaroff were the two who left, Ben and Jamie.

H: It didn’t make any sense.

K: Well, if Zaroff really was having a heart attack.

Cz: What kind of a name is Zaroff.

M: Germarussian.

H: Deutscheslav.

Cz: I like Germarussian better. But thanks for your answers.

P: I really felt that the easy escape was a weak point in the plot of the story.

H: No argument here.

R: Painfully bad sucker play. I… <sigh> the kids in the audience were probably going “oh, come on! At least tie him up!”

P: Okay, apparently we have other fish to fry here. And that quote, even for me <Mr. Puns> was a bit obvious.

H: It was cute.

P: It’s a kids show.

H: I thought maybe that was a Troughton…

P: Trout!

H: He ad libbed a lot. It sometimes upset other actors. It particularly drove Jon Pertwee crazy in The Three Doctors. So, are we at final thoughts?

Cz: Did we talk about the wires yet? Because that was really cute. On the scene where she was like zooming in on them, you could see the shadows of the wires on her. I was like “Come on. Just change the lighting and it will look great.”

K: I thought that was plankton, or something…

H: Suuuuure.

P: Or fishing lines.

Cz: The soundtrack… I felt like I was playing a video game. Like, I’ve been playing those types of video games all day, and that’s what it sounds like.

H: Cutting freaking edge in 1966. Dudley Simpson…

M: Also known as Rick Wakeman.

H: Rick Wakeman wishes he was Dudley Simpson. This is like a 15 year job for this man doing soundtracks for Doctor Who. Think about that.

M: It is true. Many, many people have heard his music and have no idea who he is.

A: I don’t really have any final thoughts.

M: I think my final thought just got covered, with the discussion of the wires and music. But I do have a question. Why is that that some of the fish people had the cellophane pizzas and some didn’t.

H: I was watching closely, and the girls had the cellophane.

R: No, at least one girl had old style scuba mask.

M: But all of the cellophane people were girls. They were probably the dancers and the others were just extras.

H: That pretty much fits.

K: Maybe they grow cellophane on their faces the longer they are fish people. And the new fish people needed masks instead. I was amused by the fish person with the fan like mermaid on a rock.

R: Under the water. “It’s so hot here by the volcanic vents.”

“Under the sea you’ll learn to breathe”
“We’ll graft on fins below your knees”
“Just one bit of blow-back”
“You’ll never go back”
“To your fam-i-ly”

M: Ia, Amdo, F’thagn!

P: Okay, just after the Beatles I’ll go on. Wow. I pretty much said most everything I saw already, except maybe some of these women need a bicycle.

R: So what you’re saying is, fish need men like these women need a bicycle?

P: <ignoring her> I think the technical brilliance of the swimming opera outshines any of the faults in this story for me. Well, most of them.

H: “NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW!”

P: Yes, yes, that’s one of them.

R: Ah, the underwater nuclear madman. A plot echoed decades later in The Abyss. Nitrogen narcosis, the silent killer.

H: Your turn.

R: There’s no social problem that can’t be solved by an insulting Irishman.

H: It’s funny cause it’s true.

K: To quote our mother, “What’s great about the Irish is that they’re so real.” I still really don’t know what that means.

H: But it’s still funny.

R: I guess I better stop before I insult an entire nation…

H: More than you already have.

K: I made a reference to the chanting earlier. Did others hear “Doomdoomdoom” and “Fearfearfear” too?

R: I wasn’t quite sure either. I definitely adding to the whole Wakemanesque vibe.

P: YES, it is.

P: See, it’s a double pun.

H: So this is not the first time I’ve seen this episode. The good news is it doesn’t get sillier with repeated viewing. The bad news is its stays the same amount of silly that it was the first time I saw it, and that is pretty darn silly. There’s some good stuff in there, but there’s an awful lot of silly. I really feel like the script got away from the script writer in this episode.

P: I think there was a fair amount of ad libbing on stage.

H: I think you’re right.

P: A good example is when our impostor guards were saluting.

K: I loved that bit!

P: Yeah.

R: Yeah, you want to talk about some Spike Milligan moments.

H: But I suspect the ad libbing had more to do with lack in the script that it did with making the story hang together a little less well. I think they were trying to add things rather than disrupt things.

P: Yeah but that actors appeared to be having fun… having more fun than they should have and that they got away with more than they should have.

H: It felt to me that they were trying to have fun with something that they didn’t think was working.

K: I liked the slapstick, even if it was ad libbed. The was my favorite part of the episode, assuming we’re talking about running the market scene.

H: That was certainly part of it. I think the “fish to fry” was ad libbed, and some of Jamie and Ben’s bits of business. But again, I agree I think they added more than they subtracted, but then I haven’t read the original script. I can try and look into it.

K: Sure.

H: Until next week then. When we go back to stills and audio.

<sad>

A: Oh, no underwater ballet? 🙁

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3 – The Underwater Menace

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