Sunday 2 September 2018

F is for... Fishworkers


Surgically altered people, many of them shipwrecked mariners, who gathered food from the surrounding ocean to feed the city of Atlantis. This was the remnant of the once great civilisation, which existed in a subterranean city built deep beneath a volcanic island. The Atlanteans came to depend on the Fishworkers to feed them, as the food they gathered could not be stored for long and quickly rotted. When the Doctor and his companions were captured on the island, Polly was sent to be turned into a Fishworker, but electrical power shortages delayed the operation, and an Atlantean girl named Ara helped her to escape. In order to hamper the plans of Professor Zaroff to raise the city from the sea floor - in a process that would destroy the entire planet - the Doctor realised that he could use this dependency on the Fishworkers to his advantage. He sent a pair of shipwrecked sailors - Sean and Jacko - to convince them that they were being treated as slaves, and they should rebel by going on strike. With the food supply cut off, the society rapidly began to break down, and under cover of the ensuing panic, the Doctor was able to stop the crazed professor from carrying out his scheme. The surgeon responsible for the operations - Damon - vowed that no more Fishworkers would be created, and the existing ones would be asked to help the Atlanteans willingly.
The Doctor once invited Clara Oswald to come and meet some Fish People, but she had a date with Danny Pink. These may have been the same beings.

Appearances: The Underwater Menace (1967).

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