Doctor Who: Series 13, Episodes 21-26 – “The Seeds of Doom” (1976)

 

I have a lot of love for this one.  Sure, it has some of the old classic Who cheesiness (Elisabeth Sladen struggling not to be strangled by fake vines, anyone?), but I enjoy the story and the characters, and the monsters in this one are pretty freaky by classic Who standards.  Thumbs up all around.

 The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane head to Antarctica when a scientific team there stumbles across a strange alien pod.  The pod infects a member of the team and starts rewriting his DNA, slowly transforming him into a plant-based Krynoid whose sole desire is to propogate.  It’s a dangerous alien parasite that has to be stopped at all costs, but the Doctor and Sarah Jane run into trouble when a millionaire with a passion for rare plant life gets wind of a walking, talking alien plant.

 Ah, the old chestnut, a rich human who thinks they can get an alien to bend to their will rather than the other way around.  It’s a story we’ve seen plenty of times (it seems the Cybermen in particular get this a lot.)  What sets this story apart a little is that Harrison Chase isn’t really interested in the Krynoid for profit or power – he doesn’t have some grand scheme that the Krynoid pretends to play along with before turning on him and revealing its own plans for world domination.  Instead, he’s a ravenous collector who, having heard about the Krynoid, is hellbent on having it at all costs.  In this way, it’s still about greed, but Chase wants the Krynoid for the sake of having it, not for anything it would do for him.  In fact, he kind of reminds me of Van Statten in the Ninth Doctor story “Dalek.”

 So that makes Chase stand out a little from the more usual trope in these kinds of stories, and a lot of the other one-shot characters are interesting too.  I like Chase’s goons and his conflicted scientist, and there’s an eccentric, headstrong painter who winds up lending the Doctor and Sarah Jane an important hand – love her.  What’s more, the Krynoid itself is both creepy and cool.  Anything that infects someone and then hijacks their brain so they want to infect everything else automatically makes my skin crawl; zombies are the iconic example (and my issues with zombies are well-documented,) but any monster of that nature freaks me out.  The Krynoid has a really neat, alien look, and the show handles the slow transformation from human to Krynoid nicely.  The ramped-up powers toward the tail-end of the story get a little ridiculous, but on the whole, it works for me.

 And then, of course, there are our heroes.  Four and Sarah Jane are one of my favorite companion teams – one of my top five classic teams, and one of my overall top ten.  They’re so fun, the way they alternately bicker with each other and present a united front against the bad guys.  Here, I especially love the bit early one when they’re captured by Chase’s goons.  Any story featuring these two instantly goes up in my estimation, and this is a pretty great one to start with.