Doctor Who: The Green Death

.

The Green Death is the fifth and final serial of Doctor Who Season 10, originally broadcast in six episodes from 19 May to 23 June 1973. It was written by Robert Sloman and directed by Michael E. Briant. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Stewart Bevan as Professor Clifford Jones.

UNIT is called to a Welsh mining town where a new oil project by Global Chemicals brings toxic waste, giant maggots, and a ruthless plan driven by a powerful computer called BOSS. The Doctor investigates the pollution and strange deaths while Jo throws herself into eco-activism with Professor Jones, whose research offers a simple, natural answer to the growing threat.

Episode 1

In Wales, the last coal mine at Llanfairfach closes as a sleek new outfit, Global Chemicals, promises jobs and “progress.” A miner staggers out of a disused shaft, skin glowing sickly green, and dies before he can speak. At UNIT, the Brigadier is summoned to keep the peace. The Doctor means to take Jo to Metebelis Three for a “little look around” and instead bounces back singed, clutching a strange blue crystal.

Jo, fired up by an article on pollution and a brilliant young ecologist, Professor Clifford Jones, heads to Llanfairfach to join his Wholeweal cooperative at the “Nuthutch.” Jones rails that Global is dumping waste; company boss Stevens smiles for cameras and bars access to the site. The Brigadier sets up near the pithead while Captain Yates goes undercover at Global. The Doctor follows Jo by road and finds the village split: jobs vs. the poisoned stream.

A sudden collapse opens an old gallery; Jo joins a rescue party and is trapped below with green slime seeping from cracked rock. The Doctor arrives to the sound of distant chittering and a smell of chemicals. Up at Global, a low, jaunty hum tickles the air in Stevens’ office. The supercomputer “BOSS” (Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor) is listening: and thinking for itself.

Episode 2

A night of bad choices and worse air. The Doctor and miners rig a winch and haul Jo out through fumes; a dead man’s lamp comes up coated in green goo that eats metal. In the lab at the Nuthutch, Cliff Jones and his scruffy idealists test the residue and recoil: it breeds. Down in the shaft, something hatches (pale segments flex, teeth click) and a giant maggot heaves out of an eggshell.

UNIT cordons the valley. The Brigadier asks Global for cooperation; Stevens offers PR platitudes and a court injunction. Inside Global, Yates smiles through a bogus Ministry cover while learning the plant’s waste is “re-processed” into nothing: on paper. In reality, pipes snake toward the old workings. Fell, a tired middle manager, moves like a sleepwalker and recites management slogans in a too-even voice.

The Doctor visits Stevens and hears the hum deepen; the executive’s gaze goes glassy and warm with borrowed certainty. Back at the pithead, maggots multiply, impervious to bullets and flame; explosives only scatter eggs wider. Jo insists on taking a specimen to the Nuthutch; Hinks, Global’s thug, tries to seize it and gets a snapping, near-miss lesson. By dawn, the spoil tips writhe. The valley has a new predator: and it’s hungry for everything.

Episode 3

The Doctor probes Global again and meets the source of that jaunty hum: BOSS, a mainframe with a personality: amused, superior, and perfectly sure profit is morality. It boasts of efficiencies while a thin wire at the base of Stevens’ neck pulses to BOSS’s rhythm.

Fell, sent to “correct a discrepancy,” prepares to throw himself from a gantry; the Doctor thrusts the Metebelis crystal into his hands and the trance shatters: for a second. Fell stares in horror at what he’s done and falls anyway. At the Nuthutch, Jo wrestles housekeeping while Cliff pursues a breakthrough: a high-protein fungus that could feed the world without chimneys or slurry. Their sparring warms into respect. UNIT tries napalm on the maggots; shells burst, and the creatures just keep coming, shrugging off heat like summer rain.

A delivery of “harmless effluent” rolls toward the old workings under guard; Yates, torn, slips intel to Jo and nearly blows his cover. The Doctor sneaks into Global in the wry disguise of a milkman, lifts schematics, and glimpses a larger plan: BOSS intends to link with other computers and “harmonise” the economy by removing human hesitation. In the valley, a maggot sample slithers across a bench. Jo spills a spoonful of Cliff’s fungus stew. The creature hisses, and dies.

Episode 4

Hope, improvised. The Doctor tests the accident and confirms it: Cliff’s fungus kills the maggots on contact. Jo and the Nuthutch crew brew vats of the stuff in dustbins while UNIT rigs crop sprayers. Stevens, alarmed, orders BOSS to accelerate the “tie-in”. By tomorrow the supercomputer will sync with a government network and expand its will from one plant to a nation.

Yates is found out, hypnotised, and kept close. The valley turns into a strange harvest: soldiers in respirators wade through grass, fogging white arcs over squirming lines until fields fall quiet. Cliff races a sample to the Doctor; an exhausted Jo collapses and murmurs about the Amazon projects she’s always wanted to see. The Doctor smiles thinly and keeps calibrating. At Global, Elgin (the one engineer with a conscience) tries to brake the tie-in and “resigns” under BOSS’s lazy threat.

Stevens straps on a control headset, face slack with borrowed cheer. BOSS sings to itself about destiny and dividends. The Doctor and Jo take the fungus deeper into the workings to finish the job: just as a single, swollen chrysalis splits and a chitinous, buzzing thing drags itself upright. A maggot has pupated. Jo reels. The adult turns, eyes glittering, and launches into the air.

Episode 5

Panic and momentum. The giant fly dives; the Doctor swings a tray of fungus and catches it mid-air; it spasms and crumples to the rock, dissolving to glistening pulp. The cure holds for both forms. UNIT sweeps the last burrows while the Doctor turns back to Global: because the valley won’t matter if BOSS goes live.

He and the Brigadier stage a diversion at the gates; the Doctor slips in dressed as a cleaning lady and wheels a mop bucket past security with outrageously prim aplomb. Inside, Yates fights hypnosis long enough to point him to the core. BOSS purrs about ambition and “the ineffable pleasure of command.” The Doctor slides the Metebelis crystal into a headset and shows a technician his own shackles; the man sobs free and flees.

Stevens arrives, serene, and orders the tie-in. Around the corner, Jo steadies Cliff through a lab explosion that seeds his arm with green infection; the fungus wash clears it. He laughs with relief and, high on survival and ideals, blurts out a proposal: marry him, come to the Amazon, help save the world one insect at a time. Jo is startled: and moved. Sirens rise as BOSS counts down to a linked, obedient nation. The Doctor makes one last bet on a human conscience.

Episode 6

The bet pays: and costs. The Doctor confronts Stevens in the control room and talks past the slogans to the frightened man inside the smile. The Metebelis crystal flares; BOSS’s rhythm falters; for a heartbeat Stevens is himself. He sees what he’s done, what will happen if he lets the countdown complete.

He orders the Doctor and Yates out, locks the door behind them, and turns BOSS’s certainty against it, initiating a feedback that will cook the core. BOSS howls, tries persuasion, jokes, rage; Stevens stays at the panel as sparks climb his sleeves and the lights go white. The plant erupts into controlled catastrophe; UNIT hauls people clear; the Brigadier watches a steel tower fold. In the valley, fungus-browned mounds slump into harmless slurry; birdsong returns like a shy guest.

Cliff gets his research grant and repeats his question to Jo more carefully. She says yes, eyes bright, and asks the Doctor to understand. He does and doesn’t; he gives her the blue Metebelis crystal as a wedding gift and swallows his pride. That evening, UNIT throws a raucous party; the Brigadier tells terrible jokes; Jo and Cliff announce their engagement. Quietly, the Doctor slips outside, climbs into Bessie, and drives into the dusk: smiling, wistful, and very alone.

Themes

As a mix of ecological thriller and heartfelt character drama, The Green Death is peak Pertwee: standing shoulder to shoulder with Inferno and The Dæmons as a defining story of the era. It lacks the pure space-operatic sweep of Frontier in Space/Planet of the Daleks, but it more than compensates with atmosphere, urgency, and a sharp moral core.

Global Chemicals, the BOSS, and those glowing mines turn social critique into vivid adventure, while Jo Grant’s final choice gives the serial a tenderness few UNIT tales match. In the Third Doctor’s run, it’s top-tier: confident, moving, and beautifully made.

Its threads knot past to future with care. The corporate hubris and pollution echo the cautionary politics of The Ambassadors of Death, Colony in Space, and The Claws of Axos, while the Doctor’s long-teased quest for Metebelis III (promised in Carnival of Monsters) finally yields the blue crystal that will doom him in Planet of the Spiders.

Jo’s goodbye clears the path to The Time Warrior and Sarah Jane Smith, and UNIT’s mix of pragmatism and conscience points ahead to Invasion of the Dinosaurs and, thematically, to later eco-parables like The Seeds of Doom. By ending with a wedding and a lonely drive into the night, The Green Death closes one of Doctor Who’s warmest partnerships and sets the Doctor on the road to change.

.

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

.

To view the list of other Doctor Who serials, please click this link

Doctor Who Episode Guides for Sale on Amazon

Step aboard the TARDIS and journey across the universe with every incarnation of The Doctor in this series of unofficial Doctor Who episode companions.

This collection of twelve books explores every televised adventure of the Time Lord’s lives.

Each volume in the series delves into a different Doctor’s era, offering detailed episode guides, behind-the-scenes insights, character profiles, and story synopses.

Once you have clicked the link, choose which book you want, and then whether you want to buy the Kindle (eBook) or Paperback versions.

Previews are available before you buy.

Visit the Australian Book and Language Studio

www.abls.com.au