Remember that moment in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs in which you find that an intelligent space faring race has staged an entire invasion upon a planet where 2/3 of the surface area is covered by an element that is toxic to them, and upon which the same element just spontaneously falls from the sky on a daily basis, but they decided to launch the attack anyway? Turns out Shyamalan was not the first to have an alien invasion foiled by water.

Let's talk about that.

The Seeds of Death - Episodes 5 & 6

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

In a shocking twist of events, Zoe does not, in fact, die at the beginning of episode five. She is rescued at the last moment by the cowardly T-Mat tech who has been cooperating with the Ice Warriors in order to save his own life. This same tech is then able to send all of the humans on the moon back to Earth via the T-Mat. He later stages a live broadcast to the Earth control center in which the lead Ice Warrior reveals their entire plan on how the Martian fleet is rapidly approaching and needs a homing beacon on the moon in order to safely land. Their fuel levels are dangerously low, and without that beacon they will overshoot the moon and become irreversibly trapped in the Sun's gravity well.

Meanwhile back on Earth the Doctor figures out that the virulent fungus being spread across the Earth by the titular Seeds of Death can be dissolved with simple water. There's a big confrontation at a weather control station, where the sole Ice Warrior on the scene is defeated and the station is able to set up a heavy rainfall to eliminate the fungus. Simultaneously, a satellite is prepared to be sent up into Earth orbit and provide a decoy beacon to draw the Martian attack fleet off course. The Doctor T-Mats back up to the moon and has one last confrontation with Slaar, the lead Ice Warrior. In that scene Slaar is goating over his apparent victory, at which point the Doctor quips, "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip..." Shortly thereafter Slaar discovers that he has been outwitted on every front, the Martian fleet is sent towards a fiery death, the fungus is entirely eliminated, and the good guys win once and for all. Hooray!

It really was a fun and well-written story, with plenty if interesting and varied supporting characters. Although Brian Hayles is credited with writing the story, the truth is that new script editor Terrance Dicks performed extensive rewrites. This was largely due to some unexpected drama behind the scenes in which Frazer Hines almost left the show, before being convinced by Patrick Troughton to stick it out for a few more months and go out together. I joke about how so-and-so spends this episode unconscious due to vacation plans, but it really is remarkable how nimble the writers had to be from week to week. At 40 episodes per year, there just wasn't much in the way of lead time, and things frequently had to be rewritten on the fly. It's no great shock that, with the change to the Third Doctor, they scaled back to only 25 episodes per year.

But I won't get there for another week or so. In the meantime, tomorrow I start watching the very last Loose Canon reconstruction.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Second
Companion(s): Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot
Episode(s): The Seeds of Death - Episodes 5 & 6
Steps Walked: 6,736 today, 808,001 total
Distance Walked: 3.42 miles today, 391.28 miles total
Weight: 272.78 lbs (five day moving average), net change -34.52 lbs