What's Wrong With... Fury From The Deep

 

Well, there's Maggie Harris's wallpaper for a start...

Not so much something that's wrong - more of an oddity - is the TARDIS' decision to materialise in mid-air, then lower itself down to land out at sea. The only time it ever does this again is Part Ten of The War Games - but that's only because they reuse the clip from this story.

Ever since there were Base-Under-Siege stories, there were totally unsuitable bosses of Bases-Under-Siege. Refinery Chief Robson, in Fury From The Deep, is one of the most obvious examples. How this sociopath ever got a job with ESGO, let alone been put in charge of a vital refinery complex, we'll never know. (Unsuitable bosses of Bases-Under-Siege will eventually be replaced by Unsuitable Civil Servants, who shouldn't be put in charge of the paper clips, let alone placed in charge of global peace conferences or alien first contact scenarios).

Robson claims to have not left a gas production platform for four years. To him this is some sort of badge of professionalism. but to anyone else it must surely smack of a serious emotional health issue. Unhealthily obsessive at the very least.

Robson is determined to keep gas production going - by preventing everyone from investigating things that might prevent the gas production.

He ultimately has some sort of mental breakdown in front of his boss - yet is allowed to retain his post once the seaweed creatures have been defeated, as if nothing had happened with him.

What sort of a society is this where an industrial complex (government run, rather than privately operated) can shoot people who wander onto its land? Okay, they're using tranquiliser darts, but why can't their security personnel simply stop and challenge people, who may have wandered on site purely by accident.

Once they've escaped, the Doctor and his companions are allowed to wander all over the refinery. No-one's in any hurry to lock them back up again - even the paranoid Robson.

Bizarrely, writer Victor Pemberton seriously thought that the creepy characters Oak and Quill might be special enough to warrant a spin-off serial of their own. One hardly says a word, and the other doesn't speak at all. They simply lurk in the background apart from a bare couple of scenes where they're more up front. A big problem with this story is their obvious complicity in events, and yet no-one twigs. The Doctor even points out that the engineers who last fixed the impeller must have come into contact with the weed - but no-one looks to see who this was and check up on them. At the very least they're worth talking to in case they might have witnessed something that might be of help.

Why does the weed want to come to the surface at all, when it is repelled by oxygen?

Famously, this story introduced the Sonic Screwdriver. However, as the prop had been mislaid on location, Troughton had to improvise with the whistle off his lifejacket for its first scene.

This is the last story to be entirely missing from the archives. Only a handful of clips survive, which is very wrong indeed.