Synopsis:
Watched by Robson, Maggie Harris - infected by the seaweed creature - walks into the sea until she disappears beneath the waves...
In the control room, Price informs Van Lutyens that they have now lost contact with a third rig - Rig A. As a technical adviser only, the Dutchman informs the Doctor that only Harris can send someone out to the rigs to find out what is happening there.
The Chief Engineer and his technicians continue to hear the heartbeat sound emanating from the impeller shaft.
As Jamie sleeps in a crew cabin, Victoria speaks with the Doctor about her unhappiness at their hazardous lifestyle - recalling some of the monsters they have faced together.
Harris is searching everywhere for his missing wife and finds Robson on the beach. Asking him if he has seen her, he merely replies that Harris will see her again very soon before walking away.
Van Lutyens informs the Doctor that he is going to go down into the impeller shaft alone to see what is blocking it - much against the Doctor's advice. He dons an oxygen mask and mounts a moving platform which will take him down the shaft. It is operated by Oak and Quill.
At the base of the shaft is a hatch leading to a pipe, which Van Lutyens opens. Below, he sees a mass of foam which begins to surge upwards towards him. He lets out a cry as he is swallowed up by it, tendrils of weed dragging him down into the pipe.
The lift platform comes up empty. The Doctor realises that he must go down himself to find Van Lutyens and confront whatever is down there - and the reluctant Jamie will accompany him.
Price informs Harris that Megan Jones has arrived at reception. She is the Director of ESGO in the UK and Robson's boss - as well as being an old friend of his. With her is her personal assistant Perkins.
The Chief is appalled to learn from Victoria that the Doctor and Jamie have followed Van Lutyens down into the shaft. Harris arrives and orders the platform be raised - but Oak claims that it is too late to stop it.
Jones and Perkins discuss the reasons for their being called here, and she is sure it is simply a clash of personalities between Robson and Harris.
When Harris and the Chief inform her of the seaweed creatures she is dismissive. She doesn't wish to take the word of the strangers who recently arrived and thinks Harris is simply upset about his wife's illness. When he tells her about the loss of communications with the rigs, she authorises a helicopter to go out and check on them.
Oak and Quill were ordered to bring the platform up as soon as the Doctor signalled, but have left the room unattended. The Doctor and Jamie find no trace of Van Lutyens and see the foam and weed rise towards them, but the alarm bell goes unheeded. They are forced to clamber up the maintenance ladder as the weed reaches out for them.
They are alarmed to find the room above empty as they emerge from the shaft, with no sign of Victoria.
They split up to look for her.
The helicopter pilot reports that the rigs are covered in foam and weed. Harris insists that they be destroyed but Jones and Perkins won't hear of such drastic measures. Robson suddenly appears and demands that the rigs are his and must be left alone. It is clear that he is mentally unbalanced. He runs off again.
The Doctor arrives and tells everyone of Van Lutyens' disappearance, and he suspects that Robson is now under the control of the weed creature.
Harris points out to Jones that the Doctor has been right about things so far, and she agrees to listen to him.
He explains that the weed is a parasite which gets its intelligence from the human brain - from the people it possesses - and they have no idea how many others are affected. The weed is forming a colony, using the rigs as a base.
Price then reports contact with Baxter on the Control Rig, and they hear him call for help as they are being invaded by the weed.
Jamie finds Victoria lying unconscious in the pipeline room, locked in by Oak and Quill.
Worried that she is dead, he finds the key and enters. She wakes in time to hear his concern for her. She tells him about the two technicians.
They then hear the heartbeat sound and look to the transparent section of pipe, seeing it full of foam and weed.
The Doctor is warning the others that the weed might spread out to consume the entire country when Jamie arrives to tell them about the pipe.
They go to the pipeline room to see for themselves.
"It's begun", states the Doctor. "The battle of the giants...".
Written by Victor Pemberton
Recorded: Saturday 16th March 1968 - Lime Grove Studio D
First broadcast: 5.15pm, Saturday 6th April 1968
Ratings: 6.6 million / AI 56
VFX: Peter Day
Designer: Peter Kindred
Director: Hugh David
Additional cast: Margaret John (Megan Jones), Brian Cullingford (Perkins)
As previously mentioned, Victor Pemberton was not happy at some of the changes which Derrick Sherwin made to his story. He disliked the way in which Oak and Quill were made less sinister, but he was especially annoyed at the changes made to this and the fifth episode, for the Story Editor got rid of an entire subplot which bridged the two instalments.
The Doctor's warning about the weed creatures' objectives included the concern that they now had control over the pumps, and so their toxic gas could be pumped through the natural gas pipelines into any home in the country. An emergency conference was staged near the refinery, to work out how to defeat the threat, and the fourth episode cliff-hanger was to have been a race against time by the Doctor and his companions to prevent the weed attacking this, by attempting to cut off the pipeline. (We'll look at the intended resolution to this next time).
Sherwin's argument was that the conference scenes went on too long and brought the story to a crawl - another example of Pemberton's reliance on dialogue over visual action due to his background in radio drama presumably.
Pemberton was so unhappy that he actually asked for his name to be taken off the production for a time.
He was placated by being asked to become more involved in the rewrites.
We earlier said that Pemberton had a fear of earthquakes and a bit of a phobia about seaweed. He wrote the sequence of Van Lutyens being sucked down into the pipe because of another personal fear - that of being caught in quicksand. He had included similar scenes in his radio drama The Slide.
One addition to this script by Sherwin was an extra scene of Megan Jones and Perkins discussing what might be going on, when they first arrive at the compound.
In the broadcast episode, Jamie simply spots the key to the pipeline room to rescue Victoria, but in the original script he first tries to break down the door, before piling up boxes to climb up and break in through a ventilation hatch.
Tuesday 6th February saw scenes on the beach filmed, including the shots of Maggie walking out into the sea which formed the cliff-hanger into this instalment. Also filmed that day was the scene in which Harris encountered Robson soon afterwards.
Once again, scenes involving extensive use of the BBC foam machine were filmed under more controllable conditions at Ealing, for three days from Wednesday 7th February.
For this episode they were primarily the two sequences at the base of the impeller shaft - first with John Abineri as Van Lutyens, and then with Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines as the Doctor and Jamie come looking for him. Abineri later stated in an interview that there was a small platform around four feet below the level of the foam on which he had to kneel and then crouch down on so as to disappear under the foam blanket. However, there was a significant drop to the side of this platform and had he missed his mark he would have had a nasty fall. The foam would have obscured him so that the studio crew would not have noticed he had fallen until too late.
Joining rehearsals for Episode 4 was the Welsh actress Margaret John, playing the no-nonsense Megan Jones. She had performed alongside Hugh David on a number of productions before he stepped back from acting - including a BBC TV adaptation of How Green Was My Valley and several radio dramas.
A late addition to the script was the extended scene in the crew cabin between Victoria and the Doctor, which was included as part of the process of paving the way for the companion's departure. At one point they mention some of the enemies they have encountered - including Daleks, Cybermen and Yeti.
The scene showing Van Lutyens preparing to descend the impeller shaft was condensed.
Troughton signed a new contract for a further 24 episodes the day before recording this episode.
The opening credits rolled over a filmed reprise of Maggie walking into the sea.
One recording break allowed Hines to move from the impeller room to the pipeline room where he found the unconscious Victoria.
The end credits ran over a shot of the weed and foam seen through the transparent pipe section. In the end, some of the new dialogue between Jones and Perkins was actually cut prior to recording.
David was unhappy with some of the material and so arranged for additional recording time the following week for a remount.
Victoria's departure is further sign-posted by the scene in the crew cabin where she talks with the Doctor about their dangerous lifestyle whilst Jamie dozes on a bunk.
It's a quiet, reflective scene, which mirrors in many ways the scene in Tomb of the Cybermen between Watling and Troughton, helping to top and tail her involvement with the series.
There is a definite feeling of the action beginning to ramp up now, after the very slow build-up and mood setting of the first half of the story.
Robson is now possessed by the weed, and Van Lutyens has been abducted by it, so no more scenes of the pair arguing about what is causing the blockages in the pipeline. The authorities, represented by Jones, have witnessed first hand the nature of the threat - so we won't have the Doctor spending time trying to convince people either.
It was one of the problems of the classic series that the Doctor always spent at least two episodes just trying to convince people that there was a threat, often locked up as well - one of the reasons why RTD introduced the psychic paper for the brisker 45 minute-long stories, simply to get the Doctor into the action quicker.
As mentioned above there are many similarities between Pemberton's The Slide and its adaptation back into a Doctor Who story. The role of the Doctor was taken up by the scientist Gomez, and in the radio drama he uses that same "Battle of the giants" line.
- The ratings have now fallen by more than a million and a half since the opening instalment, though the appreciation figure remains stable. The ratings may be due in part to the arrival of the better weather, with people going out at weekends more. (This wasn't the first episode to be broadcast after the UK's clocks went forward - the last weekend in March these days. In 1968 they changed in mid-February).
- Owing to a production error, the original 1963 arrangement of the theme tune was used on this and the subsequent episode.
- Peter Day retained one of the prop oxygen masks from this story, adapted from a pair of skiing goggles.
- Ironically, the last time we see John Abineri in Doctor Who, in The Power of Kroll, he is being grabbed by a tentacle in a gas refinery...
- Margaret John will return to the series to play Tommy's grandmother in The Idiot's Lantern. She found renewed fame late in life as Doris in Gavin and Stacey.
- Megan Jones' counterpart in The Slide is Margaret Griffiths, also Welsh, who is from the Home Office.
- June Murphy and Brian Cullingford met during the making of this story. Reader, he married her, as Charlotte Bronte would have said. The pair wed in August 1968.
- The sea fort used in the series as the offshore gas drilling rig complex was once home to a pirate radio station - and Brian Cullingford had been station manager at this very location in 1966 - Red Sands Fort. More on this location next time when it features prominently.
- The Highlanders had also featured an unctuous secretary named Perkins - the other story directed by Hugh David.
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