The 3rd Doctor in a Welsh coal mine! Dom Bettinelli and Jimmy Akin discuss this story of AI run amok, environmental disaster, and corporate corruption, plus a Companion leaves and we get the first female Doctor?
Jimmy Akin Podcast
WHO389: The Green Death
the secrets of doctor who is brought to you by the star quest production network and is made possible by our many generous patrons if you'd like to support the podcast please visit sqpn dot com slash give you're listening to the secrets of doctor who we discuss everything about the hit BBC series doctor who and today we're discussing the third doctor story the green death I'm Dom Betanelli and joining me today is Jimmy Aiken. Hey Jimmy. Howdy Dom. Folks be sure to follow the secrets of doctor who in Apple podcast spotify tune in your favorite podcast app or on the star quest youtube channel where you just hit the bell to get notifications stick around to the end of the show we do have more of your fine listener feedback and I want to tell you about another show on the star quest network you're sure to enjoy where you can see Jimmy and I talk about Star Trek on the secrets of Star Trek you can find that wherever fine podcasts are found or at sqpn.com/Star Trek and on that one we're joined by Father Jason Tyler so you can enjoy our discussions there so we are talking about the green death which is a six episode third doctor story and Jimmy can you give us a recap of this one this week the third doctor Joe Grant and unit investigate strange goings on at a coal mine in Wales so we've got Welsh accents galore it's also Joe Grant's last story because in the tradition of previous companions like Susan and Vicki she falls in love with the local the local in this case is Professor Cliff Jones a Nobel prize winning hippie eco do gooder he's running a commune that is trying to develop an amazing new fungus as a food source for the world and Joe goes off to get married and explore the Amazon with him first though they've got to deal with the mysterious goings on at the Welsh mine it turns out that the mines owner Stevens has developed a new process to get more energy out of oil with less pollution except there really is pollution and they've been pumping it into the ground where it's mutated insects into giant cat-sized maggots and if the giant cat-sized maggots bite you you get infected with the disease that causes you to glow green and then kills you the green death it also turns out that Stevens is under the control of his computer whose name is boss boss who has a very amused relaxed personality for a megalomaniacal computer thinks it's grown beyond its programming by ape and human inefficiency but it's really just an AI paperclip maker that is it's stuck on its program and to maximize efficiency productivity and profits for Stevens company and it will do anything including unleashing giant cat-sized maggots on the world to achieve that goal it's also preparing to expand its reach globally and mentally enslave large numbers of people fortunately it turns out that the fungus the hippies are growing is deadly to the maggots and the doctor uses a large sapphire he got from the planet Metabillus 3 to free Stevens from boss's domination Stevens then sets the industrial plant to blow itself up and turns boss off he urges the doctor to escape which he does and there's a celebratory party for Jo and her new fiancé the end your take on this one Jimmy your overall impression well it's like a lot of six partners the beginning and the end or the most interesting and it kind of drags a little bit I would I think it would have been better as a four-parter but it's six it's it's okay you know um I it's decent it has a lot of john perky tropes in it you know running around an industrial plant instead of a rock quarry um drive in various vehicles things like that it has some bright points like where he um he he gets to dress up as first a Welsh milkman and then a Welsh cleaning woman and so yeah we have our first female doctor here or female presented doctor here um it's uh it's it's got some nice fun in it but and one thing I was particularly struck by how in part one they're really trying to pump the humor um which we can talk about more so it's it's basically an okay story I liked it yeah I mean it was there was you right six parts was too long four would have been tighter and better uh but they were nice moments the doctor had had some good dialogue some good lines and um you know the the good action in it so and the the brigadier as well you know get the brigadier and betting both get their moments in this as well so uh those were fun um Mike Yates really just gets abused throughout it but uh yeah we'll talk about that as we go uh so this the the um what the well what do I say okay so the setting uh a closed Welsh coal mine and a nearby chemical plant which is developing it's it's not a it's not an oil refinery per se or is it they keep calling in a chemical plant but it's really they're refining oil well it's some kind of I mean it's called global chemicals and so it deals with chemicals included those that come from coal and those that come from oil and the coal we're told is a dying industry and oil is the way of the future so that's part of why the coal mine is closing closing down um of course it's now you know 40-50 years later and they're still both going strong and in fact we're fracking oil out of coal mines but yeah I just love the the the uh 70s optimism of or the early 70s autism oil is the future I mean this was as the whole like oil crisis was yeah yeah but there was this oh the oil quiet crisis out of the Middle East and all that sort of stuff the oil shortages gas shortages were uh around this time what was the year this was came out uh 73 this was actually probably just before the oil crisis yeah so I found that amusing the that line uh it's kind of fun but um one one thing that's worth pointing out is this episode is the one that people point to or this story is the one that people point to when they talk about doctor who has always been political you know because that's one of the big complaints about modern who is it's too political and they'll point to this one the green death as see it's always been political yeah but there's a couple of differences one of the differences is they're not near as preachy in this as they are in modern who and number two is they make a point of of of trying for some balance in this you know the uh it's it's not that the oil people are all just evil you know uh Stevens is evil but even and he's under mental domination of his computer but people who work for him have consciences at least until they fall under the mental domination of the computer and um and even Stevens is allowed to make valid points in the discussion so they're trying for some balance this is not nearly as political as modern who has been and a big difference is the doctor himself is not spouting political yeah you know agendas here it's left to other characters so you're right it's not the same thing at all uh in Jo is right off the bat she comes across as a bit fanatical actually about her opposition to global chemical and she's ready to resign right right right in the beginning like if they don't let her go take leave and go protest we kind of comes out of nowhere like suddenly Jo is this environmental activist like okay she's infatuated with cliff jones and that's what's i mean that's both the diegetic and non-diegetic reason for for that she's in the beginning before she even leaves oh yeah she's she's she's so this gets back to some of the humor that i was mentioning there's a great scene early on where you've got doctor in the Jo and a lab and the doctor is working on the tardis's control circuit which he's now programmed to take him to metabillis three um and Jo is eating an apple and reading a newspaper and there's a lot of humor in this scene at first it's played because of the apple because she keeps mumbling her words because she's got apple in her mouth and and that's played for humor and then it shifts to where the doctor is talking about going to metabillis three and she's talking about what she's reading in the paper and neither one is listening to the other and they're just talking over they're both absorbed in their own worlds talking over each other and and that's played for laughs but one of the things that emerges out of that is how impressed she is with professor cliff jones and she wants to go down and join his side in this protests in the series of protests that are going on and there's kind of an irony there i mean part of it coming out of nowhere but is is because she's being moved off the show and so they're set and and john perter we apparently was very upset when he learned that katie manon was leaving the role um which i gather was her choice but uh but he he was very upset about it and so she needs they're trying to set it up better than what they would later do with leela where leela falls in love with this guy who's a background character as a guard on gallifrey and just leaves at the end of the episode or what mel does with sabbelon glitz which is even worse here at here at least we have uh she's she's clearly interested in and attracted to professor jones from episode one before she even meets him in person she's she she doesn't even know what he looks like at this point but she's impressed with him from the very beginning and wants to go join up his movement um so and and also so i mentioned both diegetic and non-diegetic the actor who plays professor jones is katie manon's real boyfriend at the time which they almost didn't cast him because they were afraid of how upset john perter we would be but um but they he was the best for the part that they auditioned and so they gave him the role anyway that's funny um that it is funny how dismiss of the doctor and the brigadier are of jones and the protesters um they call jones the nut cake professor and they know he's the nobel winner yeah and his his commune is called the whole wheel community the or whole wheel community which means the common good but everybody in wales refers to the whole wheel community as the nut hutch and what i what i like is that even the whole wheel community commune members embrace that and they refer to where they live as the nut hutch yeah this sort of uh if we're going to be weird let's just acknowledge we're weird we'd stand out and it's it is an interesting it's not like a typical what you think of as a hippie commune and people hanging around you know smoking weed and yeah i mean nothing all day they are scientists yeah they're trying to it's like we want to change the world and that means we've got to do stuff that helps the world so we're growing this super special fungus that one day people will make you know turkey out of and you can buy it in your health food store at least it's not i mean but i have bought that turkey like today yeah it's true yeah like today they they want the the the the uh you know the people who are trying to save the world are trying to get us to eat bugs i'm not on board with that no i'll take at least it was i'll take fungus over bugs yeah i love mushrooms i'll i'll take them all you know twice a week uh every day uh well so is it twice a week every day yes and so uh i know so um Joe goes to the commune and then we get this weird montage just sort of back and forth between Joe at the commune and the doctor on the table Metabelis III oh yeah running for his life yeah i thought it was an odd thing it is this is also more of the um of the comedy because the doctor has sold going to Metabelis III as this great relax and getaway to Joe and he wants her to go with met with him to Metabelis III and then when he goes it's nothing but attack attack attack attack attack he is attacked by everything possible on Metabelis III he does eventually come back with a with a big blue prism that they say is a Metabelis III sapphire one of the things about Metabelis III is it's dominated by the color blue and so it's like everything for Metabelis III is blue the light is blue and so forth and Metabelis III is actually going to be coming back next season in doctor who um because it's it's i think they go to it at it's at least once they may go to it twice but it features prominently in john perky's regeneration story oh okay yeah that's why it seems familiar because we've we've already done that story yeah and the the name does it does come up in that yeah that's right and even even much later in the eleventh doctor's time there's an episode that's a haunted house story with the eleventh doctor where they have a crystal from Metabelis III that's meant to be the same kind of crystal they use in this one oh fun so uh we we get we get to see global chemicals uh they're so what they're big claim to fame is is that they're going to they have this new process that that will produce 25% more from raw crude more gas more you know gasoline or petrol more natural gas that sort of stuff whatever products that they refine from crude oil and so they're going to get 25% more and have negligible pollution except that's the part that's a lie and who knows if the first part is even true well i assume the first part is true because they never challenge it but apparently when you burn this stuff in your internal combustion engine it doesn't generate pollution but that's because they've extracted the pollution before it got to the gas pump right right and so because because of it this apparently within the the universe it's this is the most important thing in all of the british economy right up to the british prime minister back in them you know like the that everything is this is the most important company right now in britain um in maybe in the world uh so that that's that's how they phrase it the way that comes in is you so you know the brigadier is trying to take charge of this situation and he's because someone has died we didn't say yeah yeah um he because because green death um yes and so he's trying to take charge of the situation and he's in a meeting with stevens the head of the of the plant and the company owner and he's like i work for Geneva i have international authority blah blah blah blah and the the the guy is saying well the unit has to work at the permission of the country that it's in and i've got very high friends too and so he phones up the like minister for ecology or whatever it is and who's in a cabinet meeting at the moment and he or whatever they call those in england and he just turns to the prime minister and said and we don't see the prime minister's face but he says prime minister and he refers to the prime minister is jeremy and this isn't and and the word comes back that uh that the brigadier is too deferr to stevens so he can help but only in the ways that stevens wants him to help and so he he's effectively outmaneuvered the brigadier in terms of politics but there's an in-joke here which is the you know because unit is set or the unit era is supposed to be a few years in the future from time of broadcast um the prime minister at the time was not named jeremy jeremy is a reference to jeremy Thorpe of the liberal party who the some of the writers thought might be elected as the next prime minister he really wouldn't he never became prime minister but that's the joke is it's like this is the next guy we're thinking might be prime minister that's funny a little bit of uh a little more politics in it yeah and and also it's it it's more cutting against the grain because jeremy Thorpe was of the liberal party and yet it's the liberal party here who's given the defer to the gas guy message true right um and what it's interesting this basic story is we have another corporate flunky secretly in league with a power with aliens or in this case an ai um which is kind of like what we just recently had with the second doctor in what was that one called was that invasion or no i forget what that one was but it was the second doctor story set in contemporary times where they you know big corporation in this era of dr who this it's a fairly common story we get which is you know bad bad corporations one of the things that i thought was really interesting about this is it's so different than other evil computer plots on doctor who i mean this fundamental structure is the same this thing is a paperclip maker it is obsessed with making paper clips it that's a metaphor from the philosopher nick boston but it's like an ai can go out of control if it's just fulfilling its primary function i'm going to make paperclip so i'm going to turn everything in the world into a paper clip you know well boss's job is to maximize profits for this company so that's what he's going to do even though it means override in human society um and unleash in terrible numbers of giant cat-sized maggots um that bite you and give you the green death so but what's interesting here is how non computer ask the computer is uh if you look at other evil computers from this period like there's one story we haven't done yet um where the first doctor goes up against another 1960s computer called wotan wotan is just a typical robotic you will do this and that and everyone who falls under wotans control becomes you know completely emotionless and robotic none of that happens here um you know stevens is kind of the cybermen too huh yeah or like that yeah but none of that happens here stevens who is under the control of the of the computer um apparently due to a computer accident uh because apparently they built this computer and deliberately linked it with a human brain and it it absorbed human characteristics from that but then it kind of took over and so stevens you know has apparently it was linked up to stevens maybe and it kind of it kind of then asserted control over him um you know if you're if my job is to run your company and i know best then what better the way than to run the boss of the company right um so but stevens isn't robotic and the other people who fall under its control are not robotic they're swavely evil and and um boss the computer himself is totally not computer-esque he if if you didn't know any better you'd think this was the master talking because you know the roger del gato master because he's swab and relaxed and not taking things too seriously and he he he jokes at stevens own expense talking to him as oh my little superman you're such a Nietzschean and stuff like that um he um he also when they're when he's getting ready to hook himself up to like seven more centers in the world um and he's having stevens operate in the control stevens is the one who is concerned about the plan and and boss is having this fantasy about we should play classical music to celebrate our triumph and he starts talking about the even though stevens is worried about our plan we have to focus on this boss is all about oh we could play this or we could play that and he starts humming um he starts humming classical music in fact at one point he's humming the third brand in bird concerto and he's stevens is stevens is talking about how we need to connect and boss boss starts going konak konak konak konak konak konak konak zimboom yeah he's out of control yeah this is just not what you would expect from a 1960s 1970s evil computer i love it i think it's great it's like that episode of deep space nine where keiko o'brien gets possessed by a paw wraith and she's totally relaxed about it and it's like miles you're not going to let me eat this whole box of chocolates are you yeah i will kill your wife if you don't do what i say yeah it's it is definitely different i like that i think that that they that they change it up there so the it reminds me of agimus from lower decks yes yes in the megalome and maniacal computer storage at the destrum institute yeah um so the i like to coal miners in this too they they although they all kind of fall like they all kind of fall to their own hubris at times they you know i'm going down in the mine to see what's going on i'm going alone don't worry i'm a coal miner i can go down there and each one dies a horrible death until joe goes down there with bert and they they go down and of course bert's one of the coal miners one of the chrome miners and they go through the kit they're going through the tunnels because the elevator gets sabotaged so that they go find an emergency shaft out and as they're going through they come upon this green glowing green goo dripping down the wall and what does he do he immediately touches it with his bare hand i'm like who does that and in fact later on the doctor has to prevent a different coal miner from doing the exact same thing it in fairness to them they don't they're not thinking this is a biological hazard they're normally you can touch stuff that comes out in a coal mine if you know some oil oozes out or something you can totally touch it i guess so man but every single coal miner who sees it touches it yeah that's probably a genre lack of genre awareness they don't know what genre they've stumbled into that's true later on as the doctor has found joe bert is now dying or dead um he's found joe and they need they're trying to get out uh because the cave falls and uh blocks them in and they have to go through this space that's filled with the maggots in this green goo and they're in a rail car like a you know a classic mining rail car and they hunt and i i think of the princess bride punting through eel infested waters it was it was a little bit like that uh so they they have to go through there and they come up through the the tube into you know the waste tube that's coming out of the factory that's how they actually get out um and they're rescued by but one of the the one chemical plant worker who has not fallen under the sway of boss uh and is you know suspecting something weird is going on uh so now we we do get to see um there's a dinner party at whole wheel uh and obviously that and the brigadier managed to bring his tucks on this visit he's wearing a tuxedo i thought that that was fun and i noticed that is the dr jealous of joe and jones like he he acts kind of jealous well maybe in some scenes but he's also very respectful of jones he he's very impressed um like in fact when he first meets him he said oh i read your paper on blah blah blah it was very advanced for your age and and jones is a young guy and he said oh meaning because i'm so young he said no for your time period yes being the time traveler and they also deliberately modeled jones on the doctor they wanted him to be kind of a younger version of the doctor because that was the only kind of man that they thought joe could fall for right right yeah because it's sort of the you know maria guy who's like your father and the doctor is a father finger to her so yeah i could see that um but i just felt like that there was at several points where it's not that the dr was like jealous of him as a romantic rival but more of you you're taking away joe my my companion and friend yeah um and and he recognized that and eventually like the dr always does he's that it's time for the companion to move on from him so yeah the way they play that out though there is this you can tell the doctor's not entirely on board with her leaving because at the at the party at the end you know so everything's been saved um the uh the joe breaks the news to the doctor that she's going to be going on a on a tour of the amazon to find this other kind of amazing new fungus with with professor jones i don't know that we ever learn where he's professor at but yeah presumably some university in wales maybe university of carda for something but um but he's going to go on this on this amazon expedition to find this other kind of fungus and she's going to go with him and and he says yeah we're going to go to uh go into go into carda if and get married and go on this tour and she's like what get married and you didn't mention that and he's like oh well and the doctor excuses himself at that point and to let them sort that out between themselves and he's he's like well will you know will you marry me and she's like you will have won't you and she's like yes of course and then jones literally yelled yeehaw god life's good i just love this welch british guy yelling yeehaw god life's good um and uh and so then they announce their weden and there's this celebratory party and the doctor gives joe the metabill is three crystal as a weden present but he you know there's there's some hesitancy between joe and the doctor where she's like kind of feeling him out are you okay with me leaving and he's putting on a brave face that yes he's okay but neither one of them is really buying it and then as the party continues the doctor quietly steps out the door and drives off and joe sees him go so yeah and we get this concluding shot of the doctor just driving across the countryside by himself so it's clear sunset yeah so it's clear that he's not sad this is a sad moment for him he's lonely yeah well it's i mean it's like a dad marrying off his daughter you know just like my little girl is all grown up and heading out into the world now i mean there's a there's a little i think there's a bit of that but also a bit of sadness that i think the doctor always is always gets sad when he sends one of his companions off he he genuinely misses them yeah she does though tell him you know you've got the tardis so come visit us sometimes which he he never actually does um not in this era of doctor who anyway um although joe will show up later she shows that she returns in the in the serajane adventures and then she returns again in um in like one of the box set sketches and entails of the tardis most recently in in her appearance in the serajane adventures she meets up with serajane and learns about amy and rory who were the companions at the time and she is a little upset to learn about amy and rory because the doctor has a married couple on the tardis and she was like well if i had known i could take cliff with me i would never have left i would have just brought cliff on the tardis if she'd known about uh een and barbara i mean they weren't yeah they weren't married at the time yeah but there was two of them yeah um so i i was going back earlier i wasn't used by the scene of the the welsh milkman at the colpit so that the the brigadier is about to blow it up the the original welsh milkman because there is a there is a real one and then later the doctor impersonates him yes and so the brigadier wants to blow up the coal mine because the maggots did you know to to bury them in there and uh the milkman stopped at a at a checkpoint by unit soldiers and he's got this funny dialogue he's uh what's going on here orders what do you mean orders i suppose if your officer gave you orders to kick the prince of wales old carlo up his royal britches you do it i suppose would you what about miss carte writes ginger cat at a death dory is poor devil not to mention tom the sea captain and i'm like what in the world is this guy talking about it's just going on and on i just thought it was i thought it was a funny interaction and maybe they're kind of setting him up for okay remember this guy because the doctor's going to impersonate him later yeah i guess he'll play his father actually yeah right right play his father who who also rambles enough that the guards just immediately wave him past rather than listen to him ramble anymore right one of the things i noticed about that exchange is so the milkman actually kind of gives the brigadier his props you know he's showing him respect but he keeps doing it in this way that i'm sure was annoying to the brigadier because he's a brigadier he's a one star general and and the milkman keeps referring to him as captain yes that that is true yeah uh it's respectful but he keeps calling him captain i wonder if it's the more generic sort of like you know leader of the band leader of the of the group captain um but yeah that would be that would the the brigadier was clearly chagrin and chagrinned that the milkman knew he was going to blow up the mind i'm not sure why he cared he's how did you know that well i have eyes don't i well i guess you do yeah i mean i guess i guess that brigadier thought he was going to be able to blow up this mind in secret yeah i'm not sure that's that's a likely day divisions yes um i did i do note i want to note that there are several points in the story where the doctor's access to it to a time travel machine who would have made some plot elements academic like he's got this deadline like that he gets from the brigadier like you've got exactly 16 and a half minutes to or 32 and a half minutes to convince stevens to change something whatever it was exactly and and i'm like well all the doctor has to do is you know time travel he can go back in time of course the chartis isn't there in whales with him and all that sort of stuff but i just it's interesting to me in this at least in this era of dr who they're still not thinking of him you know there is no time travel in this story there is no time travel which is which is the way it normally is in classic who with very few exceptions the tartish shows up and then you stay there in that time for the whole story yeah yeah that's true that's true yeah pretty much throughout classic there is no time travel within the story in order to manipulate events you know that although wait did we you know there are exceptions there are exceptions but normally it's you you land and you stay there until the story is over right right i was i had a recollection it was the top of the tree big finish story where the doctor went off to and that's new hoo uh so they're going to blow up the minehead to bury the mine to keep the maggots inside except what about the waste pipe that goes directly into the like nobody seems to think of that that's a bit of a immediately crawl up yeah it's weird that like the doctor doesn't even mention that like you know that you're not actually closing up the mine there are these there's other exit and maybe more so that was kind of weird um we do get mike mike aids showing up as an undercover government officials secretly and gives the doctor what for which the doctor um doesn't doesn't love you tell um and then uh you know we have the the doctor being the the milk band which was good but then the that's exposed so they have to find him and so then we get him undercover as the washer woman and um that was so much fun especially when he's trying to signal Yates like it's me like you know and then he's he's polishing a window and he's got wind to polish on it and he with his finger he's written get rid of him for into the guard that's with Yates and so Yates gets into the elevator with the guard and then says oh I forgot my attach a case and steps out right before the doors close right right and uh does he tell Yates like don't don't say a word about this to anyone although he he kind of laughs about it a little bit too it's he's being you know sort of a no don't give me a hard time about this there's also a nice bit where they go to Yates's office so they can talk and and then Stevens and the guard burst in on him and and Stevens is like I you know you came down here to get your attach a case and and Yates holds it up and says yes I've just I've just found it so everything is covered but the doctor's keeping his back to the to Yates to Stevens and the guard and so Yates and Stevens and the guard turn to leave and they're ignoring the doctor is the washer woman and the the the guard stops as he's about to exit the door and turns to the doctor and I forget the name it's Henry or something that says yeah hey Gladys how's Henry the doctor just mumbles incoherently yes yeah so that was the caption even on it the the meanwhile Joe is back at the nut hutch with Jones and he's setting up slides to he's looking for a cure for the green death and she she's trying to be helpful and she knocks over the jar of the fungus that he's been working on under the slides she she repeatedly knocks stuff over in this episode they're really emphasizing how clumsy how clumsy Joe is um Jones is a jerk to her yeah I know this is not you clumsy goat he calls her yeah tv romances worked weird back then yeah but uh I I found it amusing because even though they're deliberately having katie man and knock stuff over which she would do because in real life because she was almost blind and didn't didn't wear glasses that's why if you ever notice when she's running on doctor who there's always someone leading her by the hand because she can't see where she's going so most of the time it's john pertwee is holding on to her hand and they're running together in this when they're out on the flag heap the slag heap where the maggots are it's Jones is running and holding her by the hand so that katie man and can see where she's going can't can navigate because she can't see where she's going but in the lab she repeatedly knocks over you know like he's got models of molecules and stuff and she knocks them off the table and stuff like that and all that setting us up for she's eventually going to knock over the fungus onto the slides he's got of the green slime and it's going to kill the green slime and that's how they're going to learn that it's deadly to the to the maggots but in watching these scenes there are additional places where katie man and accidentally knock stuff over and it's clearly not meant to happen they don't make anything out of it and so it's just yeah katie man is just clumsy in this without her glasses and but man um uh jones is idiocy in this is being a jerk to her sends her out to to go find a maggot for him it's like sort of to make it up from by go getting one of these deadly maggots yeah he didn't he didn't ping attention he didn't want her to go get a maggot but she decides that's what she's going to do yeah and she she leaves without him even noticing really and she goes to the slag heap and meanwhile the the brigadiers they've seen the maggots emerge from underground they've dug their way out uh and uh the the they're they're going to bomb the thing in previous unit stories where they've had to bomb things like that like for instance back when they did the um silarians uh they blew they blew them up they had actual fighter bombers you know have four phantoms with with bombs on them to you know as part of the story and this all they could afford was a helicopter and a guy tossing out toilet parts yeah just toilet parts that were supposed to be grenades like how are you how would you ever have enough coverage of the area to adequately bomb the whole thing like you need a big boom to fire would fire and whatever like i'm not sure you could kill real maggots that way never mind the mutant maggots it was so silly by the way we should probably say a word about these maggots because they add so they add a squick factor to this uh that you know it's meant to be icky and the maggots are pretty i mean okay they're giant and their their size varies on screen but in general they're about the size of cats um like when joe goes to get a maggot she brings a cat carrier to put it in but they also in in addition to just being you know pale like it's tubular worms they they have mouths with sharp teeth and they open them in hiss so they're kind of like cats in that way too but um and they eventually mutate into apparently giant dragonflies uh but we only get to see one of them because they find the cure for how to kill the maggots they're immune to weapons and stuff which is yeah frankly ridiculous i mean they shoot them with armor piercing weapons and they still are and no if that's a bug it's gonna die i mean yeah maybe you can say its nervous system is so decentralized that a bullet's not gonna kill it but you you the bullets are bouncing off yeah armor piercing weaponry and bombs are definitely gonna kill these things right and so joe of course has snuck into the slag heap area you know when it's about to be bombed without you know past battens surveillance and that sort of thing and then joe's follows her in and that's why they're in peril there but meanwhile the doctor's back at global chemical and he's trying to get to the top floor where the boss is and at this point i think they think it's just a boss like someone who's really where anything's not steven stevens and so we do see the doctor there's one elevator that goes up there and the doctor uses his sonic yeah one it's a rare appearance it's a key elevator and we're told only like stevens has the key to this elevator so the doctor just uses his sonic yes uh and so he gets up there and it turns out it's a rogue check gpt um on top of alexa about to take over the world uh the biomorphic organizational systems supervisor yeah and you know boss is trying to i mean he's talking to the doctor and he's cluing him in about what he is you know because the doctor gets up there and he says he hears boss's voice and he says where are you and and boss says oh doctor i thought you would have guessed actually i'm all around you and there's a a oscilloscope there that has his i guess his voice print on it and the doctor sees the voice print move and and boss says exactly i'm the computer and the doctor didn't really respond and the boss says nothing to say and the doctor says why would i want to talk to a machine and i'm like dude because it's the machine that's running stuff and you probably need to get more information out of it in order to figure out this situation yeah we we and we get this little debate about you know of a man versus machine you know the the weather uh a machine could be sentient or self-aware or that sort of thing and it's it's an interesting very early computer era approach to to the to this question which we're all dealing with at a much different level now in our society uh that AGI artificial general intelligence is sort of this a lot of people believe where that's the hole right on the corner yeah we'll see i think it's like fusion power it's always 25 years away yeah that's probably um in in this case boss thinks it's it's an asserts that it's grown beyond its programming because unlike other computers it has been linked to a human brain presumably stevens yes and it and it tells us that it learned that the reason that humans are so efficient is because they're so inefficient that inefficiency is a key part of finding solutions to things and and i wouldn't put it in exactly those terms but i would agree you know there's a randomness that human reasoning incorporates that machine logic typically classically does not and that's that random element is part of what lets us find solutions and so um so boss has incorporated that into itself and it thinks it's grown beyond its programming but really it hasn't it's just gotten better at fulfilling its programming which is to maximize profits and the doctor sort of illustrates this with the classic kirk logic problem or the spark logic problem which which is the you know you say to tell you that the next thing i say will be true but that the last thing i said was a lie would you believe me and and boss could just yeah go ahead well so you know uh that generates a logical paradox there is no solution and boss starts down that path and he realizes its paradox but he he insists he will eventually solve it but then they just kind of drop it um and so unlike kirk computers that captain kirk has talked to boss does not get jammed up by that yeah and i think that's realistic because you can program a computer to recognize that um there's no end to this process i mean you have to build a special subroutine to let it detect that but then once you've built that subroutine it's not going to get it's not going to fall into an endless logic loop like that right if you spend more than so many cycles in the logic loop uh break from the loop i mean you they do that in i get alerts from uh software today you know i've i've been doing this loop for so often um something's gone wrong should i stop it yeah it's like so yeah you could program that in um stevens has the usual time rinse mantra oh go ahead oh i i like um there's one line where so the doctor is insolent you know to uh boss is he's as boss is trying to brainwash the doctor and the doctor says he's running mental calculations and stuff like that and he's really that was but but he's he's totally insolent to boss about this just very dismissive and in fact he boss can't brainwash him but he's talking to boss about um is his mission you know to maximize profits for global chemicals and he appeals to the wider world and the effects this is going to have on the wider world and boss says what's best for global it's either boss or stevens says what's best for global chemicals is best for the world and that is a callback that's a variation to an actual line that was used here in america which was what's good for general motors is good for america the idea is you you invest in this company and if it succeeds that means the nation is doing well and so boss has the same idea for the world with global chemicals although i can't help remembering uh there's a line from the 1959 version of little abner which was a broadway musical that they made a movie out of and it's an oh wow it's it's it's it's it's an amazing musical um but uh one of the characters from the al cap comic strip little abner is general bull moose who is an industrialist and um and they actually have uh a sort of a mantra at one part in the movie i can't remember the whole thing but basically what's good for general bull moose is good for the u_s_a_ and so i can't help thinking of that when uh when when they're saying what's good for global chemicals is good for the world you know at the round this point stevens has the uh i was going to say the the usual tyrants mantra of the uh that um you know we're going to brainwash everyone in the world put them under control and that'll provide freedom from fear and pain and and the doctor points out and from freedom like they'll be freedom freedom from freedom so any uh the it also seems that there's kind of a tiered system in the mind control they plan to do uh because there's an elite group which is like the the guards are going to be more mind controlled than ordinary people and then so it seems like everyone's going to be under some level of mind control but then there's this elite guard that i guess what keeps track or you know ensures compliance of the people who are under lesser mind control and then at the top is stevens himself who by the end of this um boss is is just taken total control of stevens and even says stevens doesn't exist anymore and then the doctor whips out the meta bill is three crystal to deprogram him and there's more separation between the between boss and stevens than there had been a few seconds earlier so it seems like there's kind of a pyramid of different degrees of mind control boss wants to put people under yeah at that point the the literally the boss's words were coming out of stevens' mouth like he was mouth was moving at the scene although the actor wasn't doing a great job of matching it or well i'm sure they they didn't have bosses dialogue on set or something maybe maybe that's was the but the problem uh but they had difficulty there um yeah so uh stevens i think they probably had boss the actor playing boss just offset you know because he was talking into the oscilloscope and stuff but the problem is getting one live actor to match another live actor perfectly when you're doing live filming as opposed to overdubbin is much harder that's what you need to do is lay down the visual track first and then have that matched to the the sound in overdubbin and that's not what they were doing here they didn't have the budget for that right right so uh before he ran off to find joe uh professor jones had realized that the um the the fungus was was what kills the green slime and kills the maggots uh but he unfortunately or fortunate for the plot in drama succumbed to the the green slime himself and was unconscious at uh you know for most of the rest of the plot and um but only gets wakes at one point to just say serendipity which is a little bit like rosebud and uh they have to figure out what does serendipity mean and and the eventually you know it's happy happy accident basically happy accident right um and the eventually discover that it's the cure they finally cured due to joe's blunder like her you're knocking over the fungus was what seemed that was a happy accident yeah by the way the green slime effect itself is or the green death effect itself is nice i keep thinking the purple death or flash gordon in the purple death that 1930 serial um which was black and white so you couldn't actually see the purpleness of the purple death but here you get to see the green um they like they like paint something on the actor's skin that is reflective and then they shine and throb a green light on it so it looks green and glowing and pulsating yeah yep so they they need more much more of the fungus and uh they ask uh the hippie uh doctor lady i forget her name uh nancy i think it is house monitor yeah yeah um you get more of it she says we have a whole pit of it in the outhouse and i'm wondering does outhouse mean the same thing and it it originally the term outhouse just meant outbuild it yeah it didn't didn't have the meaning of outdoor out outdoor toilet that it does in america okay or outdoor water closet or outdoor whatever you'd call it in britain good because i was like thinking if they're growing that for food i've suddenly lost my appetite so uh so we have this great scene of the doctor driving uh his his car bessie through through the flag heap among all of the maggots with bent hanging off the side feeding the fungus throwing the fungus to the maggots like these feeding cats and the doctor actually has to scold them at one point bentons cut it out it's like oh okay you know he's having fun feeding the cats it was kitty yeah it was very funny i have to say that uh there um so in the end so they kill all the maggots but they still get to stop the the global chemical and the take over the world at four p.m and so the doctor goes back and in the that's the scene where he's has to separate stevens from boss and steven gets substance redemption here he ends up sacrificing himself uh you know to to blow up the building and boss with it with him inside after the doctor escapes yeah i think it's i mean it's it's a it's a redemptive death but it's an unnecessary death um in the first place he what he does is he sets some kind of reactor in the in the plant to blow and he tells the doctor to run and get out and take everyone else out that he can and so the doctor like has a security guard that he helps get out and stuff but then steven stays and starts switching off other equipment that turns off boss and it's a little reminiscent of when in 2001 when Dave Bowman turns off how you know yeah and and boss is like who would have thought it would have come to this and stuff like that um but um but okay so if you can turn just turn boss off you didn't need to blow up the plant and if you do really want to destroy boss well but you can he's a machine you just turn him off and take him apart and nobody nobody's plant has to be blown up and you don't have to die and your your company doesn't i mean there it's it would be better if you if you didn't die and if you didn't destroy all this you know equipment um if you just you turned boss off and took him apart even if you're going to blow up the plant why stay to turn boss off why not run with the doctor so they wanted him to die a redemptive death and so he did but i just think the reason inside the show for that is shaky yeah yeah i i mean i almost felt like it like it wasn't going to explode until the last switch or something like the last switch and then it blows up i i get to me it's the time you've got seemed like you said that was the last thing that had like you had to flick that switch manually to make the explosion happen or something but i i get what you're saying like they could have it they could have had it away where he didn't die he didn't have to die you know you set a timer and run out they wanted him to die in a redemptive self-sacrifice yeah um so that even he didn't have to be the bad guy or they could have made it clearer on the dialogue level why he has to die in order in why he needs to be there for the explosion so uh any other notes on this one jimmy another thing i thought i'd mention is the um the effects in this they do a lot of super imposition what at the time they referred to as cso or color separation overlay and it happens in quite a number of scenes where you wouldn't think they would need to like when benson is tossing the fungus to the maggots to feed them um you know they they're driving against a cso background there and you wouldn't think that they would need to use cso in this scene but as always it's it's pretty visible um in uh one of sycorax rocks's uh songs for the john perth we era he notes the dubious cso they have in a lot of episodes and they certainly had it here there's also one other thing that i thought was interesting so um this is the third doctor now they didn't originally have the idea of regeneration when uh they started with the first doctor and when they switched over to patrick troughton they said well um they said uh you're that i've been the doctor said i've been renewed but they didn't have the concept of regeneration fully fleshed out and then when they were going to switch over to the third doctor the time alerts told him well your appearance has changed before it can change again and so they didn't have it down yet that this was a regular thing and there's a moment in this episode in this story where the doctor is going into the plant confront stevens and he tells the brigadier if i'm not out by like three minutes to four um you know go ahead and you know do what you need to do and the brigadier says come rescue you and he says oh no i'll be dead and so i think that reflects that this was not a they didn't yet fully have the concept of regeneration that this is just going to go on forever and so there was i think meant to be on the script level more of a threat to the doctor's life i mean the doctor could die in early hoo so i mean like without regeneration even after we had regeneration i mean there was the idea that the doctor could die there are ways that you can kill the doctor they've established but they're normally regeneration is what's going to happen unless you put them in a really special circumstance all right so that's it for our discussion of the green death with the second doctor we'd like to take a moment now to thank our patrons who make it possible for us to create the secrets of dr hoo including paul o david m michael v and jellica g and kersten r their generous donations at sqpn.com/give make it possible for us to continue the secrets of dr hoo and all the shows at stark west and you can join them by visiting sqpn.com/give so what did you think of the green death you can let us know by commenting on the show at sqpn.com or the secrets of dr hoo facebook page send an email to dr hoo at sqpn.com visit the stark west discord community at sqpn.com/discord or watch the secrets of dr hoo on our podcast on our youtube channel at youtube.com/starkwestmedia where you can leave a comment we'll be back next time we'll be just when we'll be discussing the fourth doctor story city of death until then jimmy yakin thank you for joining me in sharing the secrets of dr hoo thanks gah and once again i'm dumb betanelli thank you for listening to the secrets of dr hoo on stark west and remember i am the boss i'm all around you i am the computer