Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep

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Fury from the Deep is the sixth serial of Season 5 of the classic Doctor Who series. Originally broadcast in six weekly episodes from 16 March to 20 April 1968. It was written by Victor Pemberton and directed by Hugh David. It stars Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon, and Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield.

The TARDIS lands on the North Sea coast near a gas refinery, where a strange “heartbeat” echoes through the pipelines and a living seaweed spreads foaming spores that possess the workers. The Doctor investigates the signal and tracks the creeping threat through rigs and control rooms.

It is a tale grounded in environmental horror, featuring parasitic seaweed, mind control, and an eerie menace emerging from the deep. All six episodes are missing from the BBC archives but have been reconstructed with surviving telesnaps and animation.

Episode 1

The TARDIS splashes down off the English coast, and the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria paddle ashore in an inflatable boat. Exploring a pipeline outfall, the Doctor uses a little pen-like tool to open a control hatch and listen. There’s a strange, steady heartbeat thudding through the metal. Security men pounce and march them to Euro Sea Gas, a sprawling complex that pumps natural gas from offshore rigs.

Controller Robson barks orders and refuses to shut anything down; his deputy, Frank Harris, is polite but distracted by missing paperwork that could halt a critical valve change. In the laboratory, fouled filters reveal stringy seaweed that shouldn’t be there. A Dutch expert, Van Lutyens, warns that pressure fluctuations point to a blockage in the impeller shaft. Victoria, unsettled by the base’s claustrophobic hum, longs for quieter travels.

Back at the Harrises’ quarters, Mrs. Maggie Harris hears the same heartbeat from a washed-up seaweed clump, and two odd base men (Oak and Quill, polite and smiling) pay a “welfare” visit that ends with a silent, suffocating attack. Foam creeps under doors. Robson snaps at everyone and vetoes shutting the flow. Deep in the network, the heartbeat grows louder, and the Doctor begins to suspect there is something alive inside the pipes.

Episode 2

The Doctor pries into the impeller room and finds wet footprints and a crushed grate. Van Lutyens pleads for a shutdown; Robson’s temper flares. He has kept the gas moving for years without failure and won’t be second-guessed. The missing valve form keeps Harris pinned in bureaucracy while the pressure needles twitch. Jamie and Victoria track a wet, weedy smell through service corridors and glimpse Oak and Quill gliding away without a word.

In sickbay, Maggie stirs, marked by a faint welt on her neck and a faraway look. She hears the sea calling her name. The Doctor jars loose a ropey strand of weed and watches it thicken when exposed to humid air. It reacts to vibration, too, pulsing in time with that deep heartbeat. At the beach, the foam churns and spreads across the shingle like living surf.

Maggie wanders to the water’s edge and walks straight into the waves, serene, as if answering an invitation. Robson’s certainty cracks; a sudden spike hits his rig line, and he staggers, grabbing his head. The heartbeat rolls through the walls. Van Lutyens volunteers to go down the impeller shaft to see what’s blocking it. He lowers into darkness, lamp shaking, as the thud-thud grows into a roar.

Episode 3

Van Lutyens’s lamp winks out below, and the shaft belches foam. The Doctor knows now: a parasitic weed is colonising the pipelines, feeding on gas and damp, controlling minds through sound. He begs Robson to shut down the flow. Robson, sweating and evasive, rejects panic. He then disappears from his office, leaving papers spattered with foam.

Jamie and the Doctor take a dinghy to a nearby rig and find terrified crews talking about “voices in the sea.” A hatch groans; weed bursts through like a tide, and they barely escape ahead of the white surge. Victoria, increasingly frightened, asks the Doctor if they can stop wandering and find somewhere safe to live. He softens, promises to keep her safe, and is called back by alarms. In the Harrises’ home, Maggie is found washed ashore and brought in, pale and smiling, as if a stranger wears her face. She murmurs about the deep and “our master.”

The Doctor runs experiments: at high pitch the weed recoils, at lower pitch it thrives. He needs a powerful, sustained sound to drive it back. The base intercom crackles; Robson’s voice, flat and wrong, announces that shutdowns are forbidden. Somewhere offshore, a helicopter lifts. Robson is going to the control rig.

Episode 4

Maggie rouses fully: sweet, composed, and deceitful. She lures Victoria for “fresh air,” steering her straight to a waiting boat. Robson, wholly possessed, strong-arms them aboard a helicopter and lifts for the control rig, promising the sea will take everything. Oak and Quill move through the base like polite ghosts, opening doors for the foam and silencing anyone in their way.

The Doctor and Jamie chase to the helipad too late, then race to the beach, where the heartbeat is now a drum. On the rig, Victoria sees the weed close up: vast mats swelling and breathing, foam boiling, tendrils guided by that pulse. She screams, and the nearest mass hesitates. In the lab, the Doctor records samples under varying tones, confirming a weakness to high, complex frequencies.

Harris finally unearths the missing valve form (a deliberate theft) and orders lines isolated, but the network responds like a living body, rerouting pressure where it hurts most. The Doctor arranges a flight to the rig with a test set of loudhailers and tape loops. Jamie gathers flare pistols and rope. As night shuts over the sea, the control rig lights glow inside a moving halo of foam. The Doctor gambles everything on sound.

Episode 5

The rescue helicopter claws through salt haze and sets down on a platform furred with weed. The Doctor and Jamie fight their way inside while Victoria hides from Robson’s blank stare. The rig’s crew, dazed and chanting, obey the heartbeat. The Doctor plays a taped tone through a loudhailer; weed recoils and sloughs off railings, but the device sputters. It is too narrow, too weak. He tries a burst of random noise; it buys seconds.

Robson lunges for Victoria, promising she will love the deep, and Jamie tackles him, both of them vanishing into rolling foam. Back at the base, Harris and Van Lutyens’s colleagues isolate sections, but the foam breaks seals and floods into the control room. The Doctor drags Jamie clear and shouts at Victoria to scream again. Her terrified cry is ragged, high, and layered, and the weed physically shrinks from it.

The idea clicks. He needs a louder, longer, more human noise than any machine can make. He radios Harris: record Victoria’s scream and feed it into every line, every speaker, every pipe. Harris hesitates; Victoria recoils at the thought. The Doctor apologises, asks her to trust him, and holds the mic. The base reels. The heartbeat becomes a frantic hammer. The tape reels turn.

Episode 6

Sound floods the system: Victoria’s fear transmuted into power. The scream loops through speakers, pipes, and the impeller shaft, overlaying itself into a shimmering wall of noise. Across the complex and out on the rigs, weed convulses, blackens, and sloughs away like dead kelp. The heartbeat falters, then stops. Possessed workers blink, gasp, and return to themselves.

Robson collapses and wakes, appalled, with no memory of what he’s done. Maggie clutches Frank and sobs. The sea foams only with salt. The Doctor checks gauges, orders a final sweep of heat and sound to scour the lines, and at last lets himself breathe. Harris offers thanks that barely covers the debt. That night, in the quiet after the storm, Victoria admits the truth she has circled for weeks: she is tired of fear and running.

The Harrises, warm and gentle, offer her a home. Jamie pleads, the Doctor smiles sadly, and they both tell her she must choose. She chooses to stay. In the morning, the travellers stand on the beach. Victoria waves from the Harrises’ cottage door as the TARDIS dematerialises. Inside, the Doctor turns away quickly to fiddle with knobs. Jamie stares at the empty third chair. The sea is calm, and the pipeline thrums with ordinary life.

Themes

As maritime horror, Fury from the Deep is a standout. It is less iconic than The Tomb of the Cybermen but every bit as oppressive as The Web of Fear, and more eerily sustained than The Moonbase. Its whispering pipes, choking foam, and the Doctor’s nimble improvisations deliver one of Season 5’s most engulfing sieges.

The story also debuts the sonic screwdriver, a modest tool here that will become a series signature, and it gives Victoria one of the era’s most tender farewells. Quieter than Susan’s in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but no less affecting.

In the tapestry around it, Fury from the Deep follows the Intelligence’s urban nightmare in The Web of Fear and flows directly into The Wheel in Space, where Zoe steps aboard and the Troughton era tilts toward the future UNIT style of The Invasion. Its themes (possession, creeping nature, and coastal peril) reverberate through The Seeds of Doom, The Sea Devils, Warriors of the Deep, and even modern echoes like The Waters of Mars and Praxeus.

The sonic screwdriver’s low-key debut here ripples forward to The War Games and Spearhead from Space, growing into an emblem of the Doctor’s ingenuity. The serial is both a goodbye and a foreshadowing, closing Victoria’s journey while sketching tides the series will ride for decades.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Second Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Second Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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