Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep

"Baby baby can't you hear my heartbeat..."

Victoria hates it here so much she could just SCREEEEEAM.

Season Five, Story 6 (Story Code RR)

Starring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
with Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Deborah Watling (Victoria)

Written by Victor Pemberton
Directed by Hugh David
Produced by Peter Bryant
Story Editor – Derrick Sherwin

Broadcast Dates, Viewership, Appreciation Figures

• Episode One – 16 Mar 1968 (8.2m, 55%) ** MISSING **
• Episode Two – 23 Mar 1968 (7.9m, 55%) ** MISSING **
• Episode Three – 30 Mar 1968 (7.7m, 56%) ** MISSING **
• Episode Four – 6 Apr 1968 (6.6m, 56%) ** MISSING **
• Episode Five – 13 Apr 1968 (5.9m, 56%) ** MISSING **
• Episode Six – 20 Apr 1968 (6.9m, 57%) ** MISSING **

How To Watch

• Released on BluRay/DVD in 2020-21 with fully animated visuals to accompany the audio. (Surviving video clips are included as bonus features)
• Surviving video clips also included in the 2004 Lost In Time DVD release
• Loose Cannon reconstruction with telesnaps, surviving clips, and audio available here. Please support official BBC releases.
• Not yet available on the BBC's official Classic Doctor Who Youtube channel as of October 2025.

Synopsis

The TARDIS lands in a restricted beach area near a EuroSea Gas refinery, and our heroes frolic in the sea foam. Examining a pipeline, the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria hear what sounds like a heartbeat in the pipe. They are shot with tranquilizer darts and brought to the refinery control center where the director, Robson, accuses them of sabotage, as the pipelines have been obstructed and contact has been lost with some of the offshore rigs. Robson won't hear of his second-in-command Harris's insistence of shutting down the refinery to do a thorough investigation.

Things start to spiral out of control as it becomes clear that there is some kind of sinister entity living in the pipes, living on the gas, and attacking and/or influencing the staff. Technicians start to become possessed, Harris's wife is stung by poison seaweed and is overcome, and workers disappear down the impeller shaft into mysterious foam. Robson becomes increasingly obsessive and it's evident that he too is under the influence of the entity. The creature, some kind of sentient seaweed, is the nucleus of a colony that is taking over the rigs, with the apparent aim of saturating Britain and eventually the world.

When the Doctor discovers that the seaweed is sensitive to noise, he builds an amplifier to turn Victoria's screams into a sonic weapon that destroys the nucleus. Happily, all of the possessed refinery staff are alive and well. However Victoria is emotionally exhausted from being in a state of almost constant peril during her travels with the Doctor, and the Harrises agree to take her in. Jamie is heartbroken, but the Doctor understands her decision and they leave without her.

Blather

There's a lot to elevate this story, even if the Base Under Siege plot is already starting to wear. I appreciate the irony in how the most annoying aspect of the character of Victoria ends up being what saves the day. There's a pretty solid balance of slow-boiling plot that builds effectively to a climax, and iconic moments (Oak & Quill, chief among them).

Your breath knocking people out? Try Listerine!

It's also ironic that the scariest moment in the show (i.e. the Oak & Quill scene) has survived. The Australian Broadcasting Company regularly excised footage from the film copies they received from the BBC when they felt the content was too scary or excessively violent. And those excised bits of film ended up being rediscovered years later, while the rest of the episodes remain lost. Most of the surviving video footage from the missing episodes of the Troughton era, all these years later, come from these censor cuts.

I appreciate the time the story takes to explore the character of Maggie Harris; hers is the most deeply personal storyline of the guest cast. Stung by toxic seaweed in episode one, overcome by the toxic gas being exhaled by Oak & Quill, meeting with Robson on the beach and walking straight into the ocean in episode three, etc., and her husband's desperate response add a human dimension to the somewhat formulaic Base Under Siege plotting.

Maybe the plot is over-familiar, given that we've had variations on the same scenario for the past year or so, down to the leader bellowing "I'M IN CHARGE!" It could also be argued that the Mega-Happy Ending ("Everybody lives!") is a bit of a stretch, particularly upon repeated viewing. Does this include the guard that Robson overpowered in part five? How did Van Lutyjen and Maggie survive? Perhaps the plotting gets thin over the course of six episodes, leading to some padding (particularly the episode six helicopter escape). There are still some ten minutes left in the final episode after the creature is dispatched, which are largely devoted to an extended denouement featuring Victoria's departure.

Deborah Watling had been increasingly dissatisfied with her role; the production team had offered her six further stories but she ultimately declined, so they had to write her out at the end of her current contract, as well as start conceiving and casting a new companion. She apparently shared the same frustration with Victoria that many have, always being in a constant state of peril, having very little agency, existing mainly as a damsel in distress in need of rescuing by Jamie. Indeed, Victoria's exhaustion and burnout was parallel to Watling's, and her emotional departure is actually quite affecting and effective. It is clear that poor Jamie is rather heartbroken; he's still talking about her in the next story.

I can't even get the BBC on this thing!

Tidbits

The debut of the Doctor's signature prop, the sonic screwdriver. Though a prop was made for the story, Troughton kept dropping it (location shooting was Feb 4-6 1968, and it was quite cold) so they made do with the inflation device from Deborah Watling's life vest.

The roots of "Fury" were in a story Pemberton pitched in 1964 called "The Slide," set in a small English village whose residents are taken over by a sentient mud. Although it was rejected as a Doctor Who story, it was later adapted into a seven-part BBC radio drama (listen here) starring Roger Delgado (the original Master), Maurice Denham (Edgeworth/Azmael in "Twin Dilemma"), David Spenser (Thonmi in "Abominable Snowmen," as well as Pemberton's partner) and Miriam Margolyes (the Meep) and broadcast over February and March of 1966. Pemberton re-used elements of "The Slide," setting it at an offshore gas refinery and re-working the enemy as a seaweed creature and successfully resubmitted it, where it was commissioned with the working title "Colony of Devils." Pemberton's 1976 vinyl audiodrama "Doctor Who and the Pescatons" also borrows elements from "Fury."

Elements of the story were toned down in the final drafts in order for the story to have the rare distinction of having no fatalities. A sequence was eliminated where attendees of a nearby conference are killed by the seaweed creatures' toxic gas, as was a moment where Victoria's screams killed Quill. Perhaps to add drama to her final story, the noise that destroyed the seaweed creatures was changed from Jamie's bagpipes to Victoria's scream. (The actual scream in the sound effect, however, was provided by Assistant Floor Manager Margaret Hayhoe.)

Although episode six is lost, clips of outtakes from the recording of the climactic scene survived, and have been incorporated into the Loose Cannon reconstructions to give a (presumably) close approximation of the broadcast version.

Haven't I Seen You Somewhere In The Future?

• Roy Spencer (Frank Harris) also appeared as Manyak in "The Ark"
• Graham Leaman (Price) also appeared as the Controller in "The Macra Terror," and would later appear as the Grand Marshal in "Seeds of Death," and a Time Lord (the same one, presumably) in "Colony in Space" and "Three Doctors"
• June Murphy (Maggie Harris) would return as Officer Blythe in "Sea Devils." She and Brian Cullingford (Perkins) met working on this story and would later marry.
• Hubert Rees (Chief Engineer) would return as Capt. Ransom in "The War Games" and John Stevenson in "Seeds of Doom"
• John Abineri (Van Lutjens) would return as General Carrington in "Ambassadors of Death," Railton in "Death to the Daleks," and Ranquin in "Power of Kroll"
• Bill Burridge (Mr. Quill) appeared in several uncredited roles, lastly as a Draconian in "Frontier In Space," where it is believed that the Draconian makeup gave him blood poisoning that led to a brain seizure that ended his career and put him in a nursing home where he died shortly after.
• Margaret John (Megan Jones) would return 38 years later as Grandma in "Idiot's Lantern"
• Writer Victor Pemberton appeared as Jules Faure in "The Moonbase," one of two of the classic series' writers to have also appeared onscreen.

Does the BIPOC character survive? n/a

Sausage Factor: 83.33% (out of 12 credited guest actors, 2 are female)

Rating: Three out of Four Sonic Screwdrivers
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John Geoffrion is a semi-retired semi-professional thespian, a professional data guy, and a Dad. He usually falls asleep to the Classic Doctor Who channel on Pluto.tv

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