Fury from the Deep vs. Once, Upon Time
Could these be the two most dissimilar stories in Doctor Who? Finding the connections this week, between Spring 1968’s Fury from the Deep, by Victor Pemberton, and Autumn 2021’s Once, Upon Time by Chris Chibnall, was a greater struggle than usual, but both stories gave me a lot to think about.
Fury from the Deep
Here’s the first of the ‘missing’ stories presented by the Randomiser. I didn’t really have a plan for watching these, but thought I’d just do what seemed best with each one as it comes up. Fortunately, Fury from the Deep is one of the stories most recently released by the BBC in animated form. I bought it when it was first released in 2020 but hadn’t yet got round to putting it on, so this turned out to be the first time I have watched FFTD in any form. I chose to mix the episodes up, watching some of them in (colour) animated form, and some of them on the blu-ray’s telesnap/audio presentation to give me a proper idea the original look of the sets, locations, characters and effects. Alongside all of this, I read the Target novelisation of FFTD by Victor Pemberton.
I was impressed with it. FFTD has often been cited as a good story, and one of those missing ones that those who saw it first time round would most like to see recovered. It’s a tense, serious thriller, with a cast of several well-rounded characters. While the principle storyline is about sentient killer seaweed that breeds in mountains of soapy foam and is destroyed by the amplified sound of Victoria’s screams, there are subplots involving industrial politics, stresses and personal rivalries, plus Victoria’s questioning of whether she wants to continue travelling with Jamie and the Doctor.
I’m aware that I have held rather snobby views about the Patrick Troughton era. I’ve thought of it as the period in which Doctor Who was presented at its most childish level – monsters, clowning around and simplistic adventures; perhaps this is because I have seen less of it than of other Doctors’ runs of stories, and so my impressions have been influenced by Troughton’s generally comedic turns in The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors, and probably also comic strips of the 1960s, which aren’t really that deep. But those Second Doctor stories with which I have been most familiar – The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Mind Robber, The War Games – all do have depth, so my prejudices haven’t really stacked up. Still, it was nice to feel pleasantly surprised by what an enjoyable story FFTD is.
It seems almost too mature for a Saturday evening teatime slot. The workplace tensions between Robson, Harris and Van Lutyens might have gone over the head of some youngsters, perhaps, and the programme really does seem very scary indeed. The sense of escalating horror is conveyed effectively throughout the first few episodes, even before we see much of the dreaded seaweed monsters. Credit to director Hugh David for this. The workers at the isolated gas refinery base and North Sea rigs are being haunted by a thumping heartbeat sound coming from inside their pipes, and a constantly failing impeller rotor. The bleak wintery setting of a deserted stretch of East Anglian coastline is used to great effect, especially – as far as I can tell from the telesnaps – in the scene at the end of episode three when the possessed Robson and Maggie Harris meet at the water’s edge before the latter walks into the sea. All really chilling.
Two of the sequences of surviving film from this story are both astonishingly frightening: Mr Oak and Mr Quill exhaling poison gas at Maggie in episode two, and Van Lutyens being dragged by the seaweed into the foam-filled pipe at the foot of the impeller shaft in episode four. I would say that either of these two scenes are potentially more scarring for impressionable young minds than the Fourth Doctor drowning scene from The Deadly Assassin, which incurred the wrath of Mary Whitehouse more than eight years later.
The controller of the Euro Sea Gas refinery is Robson, played by Victor Maddern. He’s a charismatic character, a powerful presence in every scene he’s in, and provides an interesting study of a lonely life undergoing a gradual breakdown. Robson seems utterly committed to his job and to the continued running of the refinery pumps. He claims to have spent four interrupted years on one of the rigs, and resents the intrusions into his work practices of Dutch external observer Van Lutyens and young, university-educated engineer Harris. There’s a strong blue collar v. white collar tone to his stubborn shouting down of these boffins and experts who urge him to shut down the impeller so the mysterious presences in the pipes can be investigated.
When he storms off to his room after another showdown with Van Lutyens in episode three, Robson’s mental health is clearly in a fragile state (and this is before he succumbs to the seaweed’s gas). In his 1986 novel of FFTD, Pemberton suggests a significant contributing factor to the immense pressures on Robson’s state of mind: in his room he stares painfully at a framed photograph of his wife, Angie, who had died twenty-two years’ earlier in a car crash in which he was the driver. While the book doesn’t expand on this, the implication would seem to be that his work consumed Robson’s life following his wife’s death, and perhaps that he has never fully grieved. When his job appears to collapse, with him once again at the wheel, the psychological wounds are re-opened.
I think there is also a suggestion in the book (and possibly in the televised story, although it’s hard to tell without being able to watch it properly), that Robson may have had a relationship at some point with Megan Jones, the Chair of Euro Sea Gas who appointed him to the top job at the refinery. There is a scene in which she visits him in his room to try to help him recover from his troubled state, and there seems to be a particular intimacy between them – a shared history – as they use each other’s first names and John Robson is able to be vulnerable with her.
This Target book has been an interesting read. I read it only once before, when it was published and I was 15 years old. I remembered nothing of it, other than I thought it was pretty good by the standards of the Target range. (I still have a fanboy list in which I rated and ranked every book, and that backs up my memories as I have it listed at number 6) This time round, I’ve found it helpful for additional little insights about Robson’s love life, and felt it captured the environment of the story quite effectively. (It opens: ‘The sky had never looked more menacing. Huge clusters of dark grey clouds had overwhelmed the early morning sunshine, threatening the approach of a gathering winter storm. And beneath it all: the sea; the cruel, unyielding sea, crammed with dark secrets that Man on planet Earth has never fully understood.’)
However, it does suffer from some terrible descriptions of women. All of the women mentioned in the story (with the exception of Victoria, whom, along with Jamie and the Doctor, Pemberton assumes his readers already know) are introduced in terms of the male gaze: ‘Harris’s wife, Maggie, was a beautiful woman, in a very English way. But her peach-like complexion, dark brunette hair, and strongly defined features, disguised a firm and determined nature. Maggie was the kind of woman Harris needed for a wife.’; ‘[The photograph] was of an attractive young woman, Angie, Robson’s wife, who had been killed in a car crash twenty-two years ago.’; ‘The woman on the central monitor screen [Megan Jones] was a redhead, in her late forties, and attractive in a hard sort of way.’; Megan gets a second male review when she first arrives at the refinery in person: ‘Megan Jones was an attractive middle-aged woman.’ It’s a particularly feeble way of introducing a character who, by 1968, was one of the strongest female supporting characters to have appeared in Doctor Who.
FFTD gives us some interesting new insights into the TARDIS and its travels. We see it land and take-off in vertical directions, rather than materialise and dematerialise. It lands on top of the sea, which is kind of mind-blowing. Victoria and Jamie give voice to the rarely spoken observation that the TARDIS lands in England, Earth, far more than is statistically feasible, given it has all of time and space to choose from, but frustratingly the Doctor makes no comment on this.
In slight contradiction of the above, Jamie says to Victoria: ‘We never know where we’re going to land one place to the next. It’s half the fun, isn’t it?’ Which says a lot about his character, and his motivation for travelling with the Doctor. It’s all great fun until it’s not any more, and that seems to be the case for Victoria. Throughout FFTD she makes several pointed complaints about how fed up she is with all the scares, the danger and the uncertainty of her time-travelling life (rather like Tegan at the end of Resurrection of the Daleks). One senses that Jamie and the Doctor are picking up the signals that she is going to want to move on very soon, but are reluctant to accept them. She stands her ground though, and says her goodbyes at the end of this story.
Quite a lot of time is given over to Victoria’s departure, including a moving scene with Jamie set the morning after she announced her decision, and then a tearful goodbye on the beach. It’s more sensitively done than the final scenes of any character since Susan, I think, and probably until Jo in The Green Death. It’s another sign of this story’s maturity, and a future echo of the more emotionally-intelligent scripts that we are used to in the modern-day series of Doctor Who.
Finally, and also more in keeping with New Who than the Classic series, it was quite a surprise when FFTD turned out to be an ‘Everybody lives!’ story, with Robson, Maggie and even Van Lutyens (somehow) revealed to be alive when the seaweed was finally defeated. A feelgood end to a deep and furious story.
Once, Upon Time
So, last week I watched Village of the Angels, the fourth instalment of 2021’s Flux season, and I observed that I may be making a mistake in watching this six-part season arc out of order. It’s hard enough to follow in broadcast order, so how would this work out? I haven’t had long to find out, as the Randomiser kindly directed me next to watch Once, Upon Time, so I’m following part four of Flux with part three. With COVID (I tested positive this morning).
What the hell. This is a story (I think) about Time itself breaking down. Everything is out of order. What could be more appropriate? O,UT opens with the Doctor taking a jump of faith, quoting the nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs: ‘Leap, and the net will appear.’ Let’s go.
O,UT, it seems to me, is a collection of short stories. That’s the meaning of the episode’s title. We are approaching the halfway point of this complex season, there are a lot of people involved already, so this is an attempt to draw breath and get to know our principal characters and what they’re up to a bit better. In that, it succeeds, although I confess it was easier to follow this time round than when Shaz and I first watched it on Sunday, 14 November 2021. I think I’m going to approach this review by summarising each of the stories told within the episode. At least that will make it a useful reference point for me when I’m watching further episodes of Flux in the future. If anyone reading this thinks I’ve got any of it wrong, please let me know!
Let’s start with the Doctor. She kick-starts the events of the episode by pulling Dan, Yaz, Vinder and herself into the heart of a time storm that was caused by the Ravagers (the attractive Swarm and Azure) destroying two of the Mouri priests in the Temple of Atropos on the planet called Time. She did this to rescue her friends, as the time storm would enable them to hide from the Ravagers by distributing them into the past and future of their own time streams.
Her own distribution takes the Doctor back to the Dark Times – the ‘lost’ times in which she lived countless lives before becoming who we all think of the First Doctor. Wearing (to our eyes) a groovy dark blue version of her usual coat, she is actually inhabiting the body of her former self as played by Jo Martin – commonly referred to as the Fugitive Doctor (as we first met her as a fugitive of the Judoon), but it might make more sense now to call her the Division Doctor, as she is on a mission on behalf of the mysterious Time Lord enforcers known as Division. That mission, with a team of three soldiers who include Karvanista, is to track down and arrest the Ravagers – younger, healthier-looking (if that’s possible) versions of Swarm and Azure. We learn as part of the Doctor’s stand-off with the Ravagers that this is all part of the Founding Conflict, a battle between Space and Time itself. I don’t really understand how that works; I think I remember correctly that Time takes on some sort of sentient physical form later in the Flux season.
This is the first that our Doctor has ever seen of her pre-William Hartnell self, so obviously she is desperate to know more. Before returning to her proper place in her time stream she begs the Mouri to give her an extra peek at her own lost history. She is given a conversation with a mysterious woman called Awsok (who, we will learn later in the series, is Tecteun, the Gallifreyan who discovered the ‘timeless child’ Doctor). Awsok tells the Doctor that she (the Doctor) is responsible for the Flux phenomenon that is destroying all of Space.
Yaz’s story tells us little that we didn’t already know. The time storm transports her into her own recent past, serving on patrol as a Sheffield police officer, and playing a computer game at home with her sister. She does manage to find herself stalked by a Weeping Angel, however, which materialises inside the TARDIS at the end of the episode, as the cliffhanger that leads into Village of the Angels. Yaz is clearly more worried about the Doctor than herself throughout all of this, but is basically told to shut up (a familiar Doctorish trait, throughout all their incarnations), because ‘You don’t understand anything!’. Harsh, but we’re all trying here.
Dan is taken back to several low-key dates he has had in the past with Diane. Through their conversations we learn a sad part of his own story: about fifteen years ago he loved and was engaged to a woman, but she called off the wedding with just two days to go. Shortly after this conversation, Diane is captured by one of the Ravagers’ Passenger creatures – a living, dimensionally transcendental prison cell.
We also see Dan transported to one of the tunnels dug by the time-sensitive Victorian tunnel-digging philanthropist Joseph Williamson, but little of much sense is revealed in this brief encounter.
Vinder’s back story tells us that he was a future space pilot in the service of the Grand Serpent. Hailed as a hero after saving two fellow pilots from an explosion, he is promoted to the role of the Serpent’s personal guard, but finds himself morally compromised in this role, and is sent into exile after whistle-blowing the Serpent’s corruption. His banishment sends him far, far away from his lover (and mother of their unborn child), Bel, and they are now on quests to find each other somewhere in a Flux-ravaged universe.
Finally, Bel’s story. Bel was not cast adrift back and forth in her own time stream, so her story – her ongoing search for Vinder, through Dalek and Cybermen-occupied sectors of space – is told as a reasonably straightforward lateral narrative, which is something of a relief. And I think this is the story that matters most in O,UT, because it’s the one that speaks directly to the viewers about the world we are living in today.
There’s a striking monologue from Bel, as we see her travel through war-torn galaxies and battke-scarred planets: ‘There are bodies and wreckage everywhere. It feels like the last days of the universe. Who would have thought that one thing could do so much damage? And any time I think we’ve found a brief sanctuary, life proves me wrong. In the dark moments, I think: the bad guys have won. But I know what you’d say. Challenges are temporary, life is constant. Don’t overthink it, just move forward.’
That, presumably, was written by Chris Chibnall in the midst of pandemic lockdown in the UK, as we all saw the world around us collapse and transform into something unfamiliar and terrifying. People died, loved ones were separated from each other, the planet continued to burn, and we felt ourselves slipping ever more helplessly under the control of a nasty, corrupt government that most of us didn’t trust to look after society’s best interests. We’re still there, only things seem to be even worse now. So these words really hit home for me. Sometimes it really does seem like the last days of the universe. But what can we do? Just keep moving forward. And if you can’t move forward, just take some time to stand still. Don’t let the tides drag you back.
The only other thing I would like to say about O,UT is that, while it is difficult to follow, and I do think that that is a fault for a primetime Sunday evening family drama, it does look absolutely beautiful. There are some jaw-droppingly beautiful scenes, spacescapes, planetary backdrops, special effects, and I don’t think this era of Doctor Who gets praised enough for that. I hope that rewatching the stories as I have done with O,UT today will help me get a better appreciation of the big concepts and crazy storylines of Flux. It’s complicated, and there’s beauty in that too, but for now I can at least appreciate the visuals.
Connections
For making connections between the two stories, this pairing has been the toughest one yet. One of the reasons that I like to look for connections between Classic stories and New is to try to prove (to myself – I’m sure this isn’t the sort of evidence that would convince anyone else) the genealogy of the show. I mean, clearly the Doctor Who of the sixties, seventies and eighties and the Doctor Who of the twenty-first century are not the same programme. To an outside view there are no recognisable similarities (apart from that Police Box, and arguably the theme tune). But dig deeper and I think it should always be possible to find links or echoes between any two stories – family resemblances across the decades. Fury from the Deep and Once, Upon Time are almost the exception that proves the rule … almost, but not quite …
‘It is I, don’t be afraid,’ said Jesus as he walked across the surface of the Sea of Galilee to help his disciples on stormy waters. This messianic imagery is borrowed by both FFTD, as the TARDIS lands on the surface of the North Sea, so the Doctor, Victoria and Jamie can bring salvation to the workers at the gas refinery, and by O,UT, as the Doctor appears hovering over Liverpool Docks with a message of reassurance for Dan.
The Doctor is shot in the shoulder in both stories – with a tranquilising dart by the refinery’s defence systems in FFTD, and by Yaz (or, rather, one of the Division Doctor’s companions, who we see as Yaz) with some sort of hypodermic device to combat the effects of temporal hazing.
‘Love is the only mission,’ says Bel, to the dying Cyberman in the Lupari spaceship she steals. Her mission, and Vinder’s, is to find each other, to reconnect – and that is more important to them than all the horrors going on around them. This is Harris’s mission too, in FFTD; he has an important job to do at the refinery, but to Robson’s outrage he makes this secondary to the health of his wife Maggie, and then to find her when she goes missing from the base. There’s also a counterpoint to each of these love quests in both stories. Dan in O,UT, and Robson in FFTD (in the novel, at least), are both lamenting love lost, many years before.
Comments