July 31: The Seeds of Doom Parts One & Two

It starts with some really poor superimposed blowing "snow" over stock footage before settling down into a tale of horror in the Antarctic (which is apparently having record precipitation, given the amount of blowing snow we see).  And it's clear from the outset -- at least for these two episodes -- that this is intended to be closer to the horrific end of the SF spectrum.  Yes, six years before John Carpenter did it, Doctor Who sets out to do its own version of The Thing from Another World.

The first episode is mainly set-up for the terror that will later be unleashed, with the discovery of the seed pod in the permafrost, the Doctor and Sarah making their way to Antarctica, the pod's germination and infection of Winlett... all pieces that are being put into play.  The  cliffhanger to part one is the discovery that the plant-infected thing that was once Winlett is now moving around and killing people -- everything before that is just ratcheting up the tension.  And part of the reason this episode is so successful at raising that tension is because of how seriously the Doctor is treating things.  He clearly has his suspicions about this seed pod, and seeing what's left of it and the effects on Winlett only confirm his fears: this is an alien plant that will destroy everything.  "On planets where the Krynoid gets established," the Doctor tells Sarah, "the vegetation eats the animals."

Once part two starts, the horror part kicks in, as the Krynoid is wandering around looking for food.  Yet that's not the main concern for the main characters -- no, that's the arrival of two men determined to find the strange pod for a plant collector named Harrison Chase (who found out about the pod last episode via the same person who informed the Doctor), and who are willing to kill everyone else to cover their tracks.  So while the Krynoid roams free, the Doctor and Sarah are tied up in the living quarters of the base and held at gunpoint.  One of Chase's men, Keeler, is uneasy with the violence, but the other, Scorby, has no such compunctions; when he learns that they found a second seed pod (which the Doctor went out of his way to find for some reason), Scorby takes it and decides to wire a bomb to the base's power plant -- tying Sarah up next to the bomb for added measure.

Despite the ever-present threat of the Krynoid, it doesn't actually make a direct attack on anyone until the end, when it kills Stevenson in the main camp and then moves to attack the Doctor and Sarah inside the power plant.  They manage to lock it inside and then run away as the clock on Scorby's bomb reaches zero, and the episode ends with a tremendous explosion as the power plant is ripped apart...