Episode three is when things start going. Once the rocket lands on the moon, the action shifts to avoiding the Ice Warriors in the moon base while trying to stop them. Except that doesn't work too well; the Doctor is spotted and avoids death by proclaiming to the Ice Warriors that "Your leader will be angry if you kill me; I'm a genius." Except he tells them this not self-importantly but with a sense of resignation, which is a wonderful touch from Troughton. And meanwhile the T-Mat link from the Earth to the moon has been temporarily fixed, so Miss Kelly has gone up to make more extensive repairs, not knowing that this is what the Ice Warriors want (or even that they're there at all). It's only when the repairs are completed that the Ice Warriors reveal themselves to Miss Kelly and her team.
Once the Doctor is captured, he's brought to the control room, where he talks with Fewsham, the person who's helping the Ice Warriors because he desperately doesn't want to die. He doesn't convince Fewsham to stop helping the Martians, but he does learn what the seeds of death are, when one of them explodes in his face -- although (probably because of his alien biology) he's only knocked out instead of killed. And now that T-Mat's ready, the Ice Warriors can start sending these seeds around the world.
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An Ice Warrior strides through the seed pod-created foam on
Earth. (The Seeds of Death Episode Four) ©BBC |
Episode four maintains the sense of action, even as things move from being a claustrophobic incursion on the moon to a larger-scale invasion of Earth. Once the seeds arrive, they start propagating quickly, leading to foam-covered exteriors as the planet is attacked by this strange blight. An Ice Warrior T-Mats down to Earth to enact the second part of the Ice Warriors' plan, which means we get sequences of an Ice Warrior striding menacingly across the countryside, looking quite out-of-place. This means that these sequences are quite striking, and because they haven't been repeated as often as the "St. Paul's steps" sequence from
The Invasion, they retain their power of juxtaposing the familiar with the alien.
And back on the moon, Jamie, Zoe, Miss Kelly, and a technician named Phipps, who's been stuck on the moon hiding from the Ice Warriors since the crisis began, devise a plan to turn up the heating in the base, since the Ice Warriors are adapted to a cold climate and heat should be intolerable to them. This leads to a sequence where, after making their way through the ventilation system, Zoe sneaks across the control room to where the heating control is in a most unsneaky fashion -- she doesn't get down on her hands and knees or dodge from cover to cover, but she instead tiptoes across the room, turns the heat up, and then starts to "sneak" back the same way. And when an Ice Warrior finally spots her and trains its weapon on her, she stands there yelling at Fewsham to help her rather than, you know, running for cover or doing something useful. Ah well, I guess you can't win them all.