Has the Doctor ever drunk Baileys from a shoe?
Long before the conflict broke out into the open, The Doctor was no stranger to The War Between The Land And The Sea. His first intervention, as it were, was to deal with The Underwater Menace.
Like much of the Troughton era, the original master tapes of The Underwater Menace were victims of the BBC’s 1970s purging policy, leaving the serial effectively lost for decades with only Episode 3 remaining in the archives as a solitary 16mm film telerecording that, at least, preserved the infamous “Fish People” ballet. But even the sea occasionally gives up its secrets and in 2011, a telerecording of Episode 2 was discovered in the private collection of a former TV engineer, making both episodes the earliest surviving episode to feature both Troughton as the Second Doctor and Frazier Hines as Jamie. Although episodes 1 and 4 remain missing, in 2023 the story was fully restored in animated form, giving this early Second Doctor adventure a new – – and colourful – lease of life.
Because of the scarcity of footage, The Underwater Menace is often unfairly reduced to blurry snapshots of the Old Gregg-esque Fish People or Joseph Furst’s manic, wide-eyed performance, but looking back at the whole story (this review is based on watching a hybrid of the original episodes and the animated missing ones) in retrospect reveals a story caught in the transitional tug-of-war between the show’s educational past and its monster-led future. Coming early in Patrick Troughton’s tenure, this four-part serial finds the series experimenting with the Second Doctor’s identity, oscillating between a cosmic hobo and a traditional hero while navigating a script that feels like a recycled 1930s adventure serial or a homage to 1956’s The Mole People.
The concept is as irresistible – the Doctor and his companions discovering the lost city of Atlantis – as it is pulpy, so irresistible in fact that it’s the first of several visits to the legendary sunken city, all of which – this being Doctor Who – are contradictory and impossible to reconcile. But if you can throw those contradictions onto the ever-expanding pile of Whovian canon bugbears that continues to torture the likes of Chris Chibnall to this day and embrace the guidance of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 theme song, there’s a lot to enjoy – ironically and unironically – in this silly, soggy adventure.
This incarnation of Atlantis is a hidden, ritualistic society beneath the Azores that has survived into the 20th century where Professor Zaroff (Joseph Furst), a quintessential “mad scientist”, is driven by a motivation that remains one of the most extreme in the programme’s history: he doesn’t want to rule the world; he wants to blow it up, just to see if his theories are correct, an objective he keeps from the Atlanteans who believe he is intending instead to raise Atlantis from the depths and restore its former glory.
Furst’s performance is legendary for its lack of restraint, particularly his infamous declaration, “Nothing in the world can stop me now!” and while Doctor Who has always leaned into theatricality, it rarely indulged in this degree of broad pantomime. There’s an air of the bizarre to the whole serial, suggesting the production team were still recalibrating the show to their new lead. Having launched him with an audience-reassuring face-off against the Daleks (in The Power Of…) and followed it up with a BBC-mollifying historical adventure, The Underwater Menace seems, by pairing the Doctor with a villain so theatrical, to be gauging whether it could sustain a more flamboyant, comic-book energy.
The ambitious production design – presciently better suited to animation than to 1967’s Lime Grove Studios offers a fascinating idea of a sub-terranean society. The “Fish People” – slaves of Atlantis who undergo surgical modification to harvest plankton – represent a fascinating attempt at body horror that prefigures the more sophisticated understanding of biological threats and mutations although their underwater ballet sequences, preserved in the surviving Episode 3, are a surreal, experimental diversion that feels more like a deleted scene from The Mighty Boosh and while the costumes are a soft target for mockery in an episode rife with risibility, the dark conceptual undercurrent of forced evolution and labour relations are a reminder that even at its cheapest and silliest, Doctor Who always has more going on under the surface than it was frequently given credit for.
For the TARDIS crew, the story is something of a developmental milestone. Jamie (Hines) is a brand-new addition – retained after The Highlanders thanks to the winning rapport with Troughton’s Doctor and there are early signs of overcrowding, Polly (Anneke Wills), Ben (Michael Craze), Jamie that will be resolved at the end of the season when Polly and Ben depart. Because Jamie was a late addition to the script, his role remains somewhat peripheral, and as he’s effectively borrowing Ben’s screen time, Ben is likewise underused. Troughton, still “finding” his Doctor at this stage, uses his disguises and recorder-playing to mask the sharp, calculating mind that eventually outmanoeuvres Zaroff’s mania and the elements that will come to define the second Doctor are all present, just a little more fungible than we’re used to nowadays.
Where The Underwater Menace succeeds is in its unapologetic commitment to its weirdness. It has no interest in trying to be a grounded piece of science fiction; it is a flamboyant, theatrical experiment in what the show could get away with. While the logic of draining the Atlantic Ocean into the Earth’s core is questionable at best, the sheer energy of the conflict makes it at worst a compelling curiosity in the Second Doctor’s canon, reminding us that before the era settled on the “Base Under Siege” formula that would become a well-oiled machine, Doctor Who was occasionally a space or time where anything – no matter how garish – could happen.
