I have to say the criticisms of this episode that I've read seem silly to me. Bad special effects? When were the effects in this series ever good? In my view it has only two flaws -- it's too long to watch comfortably in one sitting and there are way too many escapes and recaptures, the Doctor & Sarah spend half the episode getting tied up and the other half escaping, and there is a ridiculous Dr. Evil moment where the villain, Chase, devises an elaborate and horrible death for the Doc and then leaves the room, allowing him to escape, instead of just shooting him....sigh...don't these crazy bad guys ever learn?) -- but they are pretty minor in compared to what works.
"Seeds" begins at a lonely scientific research station in the Antarctic, a la "The Thing." And just like "The Thing" the bumbling scientists unearth something from the ice that would better have been left alone. In this case, a large seed pod. They send pics back to London, where the Doctor identifies the pod as a sentient alien plant called the Krynoid, which has unlimited growth potential and a big appetite for human flesh. He and Sarah make tracks for the South Pole to make sure the ticking green bomb stays frozen and harmless. Unfortunately, the bumbling scientists put the thing under a lamp, and before you can say "Good god, what is that thing?" one of them is infected.
More unfortunately, a flora-crazed English millionaire named Harrison Chase (beautiful performance by the late Tony Beckley) has also learned of the pod's existence and sends a sneering mercenary named Scorby (another terrific turn by big John Challis) and a biologist named Keeler to collect it by force.
"Who" always excelled at loosing multiple plot elements at each other like bumper cars, and the crash-bang of the first two episodes of "Seeds" is great, creepy fun, as the good and bad guys square off while the infected scientist, now essentially a large angry yucca plant, wanders around strangling people and not caring whether they are good or bad. And just when you think it's over -- bingo, another pod appears. D'oh!
Eventually the action shifts back to England, where Scorby has delivered the second pod to the crazy Chase. He orders Keeler to feed it, and poor Keeler ends up doing just that, in a nasty case of "being consumed by your work." Meanwhile, the Doctor and Sarah blunder around the huge mansion and grounds, getting captured and escaping so many times, you wonder why Scorby doesn't just shoot them. Eventually, however, the Krynoid (nee Keeler) gets loose, grows to gigantic proportions, and starts eating Chase's employees en route to germinating hundreds of pods which will destroy the world (or at least everything not made of salad materials). The climax comes with the Doc, Sarah & Scorby trapped inside the crumbling mansion being hunted by the completely loco Chase, while UNIT soldiers fight the Krynoid outside. One small drawback is that while this is another UNIT episode, once again, there's no Brigadier and no Benton -- that's kind of like a peanut butter sandwich with no jelly. You can do it, but why?
"Seeds" is a great episode with some tremendously wonderful dialogue ("Don't be silly, Sarah -- of course he has to kill us, we keep interfering!") that also brings up nostalgia/horror for 1970s fashion -- c'mon, where else can you see a bad guy in zippered platform boots, a turtleneck shirt and a jacket with a butterfly collar....without a time machine, that is?
A mysterious pod found by a research team in the Antarctic draws two parties. One is the Doctor and Sarah Jane, sent there by Richard Dunbar of the World Ecology Bureau. He feels sure he recognizes the pod, and says "it might still be ticking." The other is Scorby and Keeler, respectively a ruthless and armed thug and squeamish botanist. However, an accident has happened. Winlett, one of the base personnel has been attacked by a shoot from the pod and transformed into a monster, half man/half plant. Actually, Winlett was halfway towards turning into a Krynoid, an alien plant. And that's bad, because as the Doctor says, "On most planets, the animals eat the vegetation. On planets where the Krynoid gets established, the vegetation eats the animals."
After a narrow escape, the Doctor and Sarah trace another pod back to England and to the estate of millionaire Harrison Chase, someone's who boasts the finest collection of plants in the world. He's such a plant-lover he calls bonsai "mutilation and torture" and calls it "the hideous, grotesque Japanese practice of miniaturizing shrubs and trees," and his mission is to protect the plant life of Mother Earth. Not only does he play some hideous music to his plants, but he has a composting machine that pumps all organic matter into the garden. As Sarah says, "I've heard of flower power but this is ridiculous."
The process starts all over again when Keeler gets attacked by the pod, and here, Chase's fanaticism to his plants is evident, as instead of taking Keeler to the hospital, keeps him under observation, feeding him raw meat so he can evolve into a full-grown Krynoid. And how large do those things get? About the size of St. Paul's Cathedral, according to the Doctor, and when that happens, the Krynoid will germinate, and it's up to the Doctor to prevent that.
There is one unforgivable goof at the end of the story. Sarah mentions the Doctor forgetting to reset the TARDIS coordinates, but they arrived in Antarctica by helicopter, not by TARDIS.
The giant-sized Krynoid and the humanoid variation are well-realized design effects. The latter kind, where the human features are totally gone and tentacles sprout, is actually one of the costumes of the Axon monsters from Claws Of Axos painted green.
Of the guest stars, Tony Beckley comes out on top as Harrison Chase, a totally ruthless plant-lover who puts the survival of Krynoid above his fellow man. "Yes, the plants must win. It will be a new world, silent and beautiful" he says, which is topical to the 70's with its smog, traffic jams, and noise. His trance-like communication to the plants shows him totally gone.
Chase's mansion was actually Athelhampton House in Dorset and was also the same place used in Sleuth starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, and the on-location shooting on the grounds made a good change.
This is one of the more violent stories, with guns fired, brandished, or pointed in threatening positions, mostly by Scorby, and even the Doctor carries a gun (though he doesn't use it). And the Doctor gets embroiled in some action and fisticuffs. In one scene, he crashes through a glass skylight to prevent Sarah from being tortured, punches Scorby, and rescues his friend. Chase wryly asks, "What do you do for an encore, Doctor?" The Doctor answers, "I win." Which he does, of course. Still, a great story with good location and the end of a season that consolidated Tom Baker as the Doctor.
Sadly, the lead here goes to Tom Baker. Though widely regarded as the top actor to play the Doctor, Baker is essentially "The Other," an observer of whatever it is he gets involved in, not a participant. Being a secret agent-type hero involves getting in and getting one's hands dirty, and seeing Baker do so breaks the reality of the character.
The plot? The seeds of an alien plant that eats everything it can are uncovered in Antarctica and brought back to England. The seeds germinate and, whoops, eat everything they can. The Doctor is called in by UNIT (hey, wasn't that John Pertwee's supporting cast?) to sort out the hash yet again, and does so. There you go. It's more complex than that, but that's the frame everything else hangs on.
The plot elements are more efficient and unified than in most six-part serials, but the two episodes focusing on Antarctica still seem tacked on to a separate four-part serial. The character of the Doctor seems like a support role through a couple of episodes, and the ultimate resolution is unsatisfying. We're accustomed to seeing the Doctor sort out something like this with a neat scientific trick, like dry ice, or scooping the monster up in the TARDIS and dropping it off on Mars, or dousing it in liquid nitrogen. The solution here seems like a cop-out rather than a success.
Baker acquits himself well in the derring-do department, but seeing him trying to outwit a gun-toting gangster still seems like a transplant from another series. Sarah Jane demonstrates the gumption with which her character was created and which was later written out. The camera work is well done, as are the location shots in England, though the studio shots meant to look like Antarctica are horrible. The sound work is good, but not groundbreaking.
Fans of the series may enjoy this outing, especially fans of the John Pertwee years. Newcomers to Tom Baker as the Doctor should start out with the Key to Time episodes or "City of Death."
