Why did the Doctor blush? Because the sea weed.

The second skirmish in the history of Doctor Who’s long-running coastal conflict saw the Doctor deal with a non-human menace from beneath the waves…

Patrick Troughton’s penultimate season is defined by the solidification and industrialisation of the Doctor Who formula, and Fury From the Deep remains one of the most evocative examples of the “Base Under Siege” era because it bothers to let the characters be terrified. Victor Pemberton’s script, adapted from his own radio play The Slide (which had originally itself been pitched to Doctor Who), trades the metallic clatter of sci-fi horror for something more ecological and pervasive and by relocating the horror to a North Sea gas refinery, the story taps into a very British, post-war anxiety about the machinery of progress being subverted by the organic unknown. Fury From The Deep isn’t just about monsters in the pipes; it’s about the vulnerability of the systems we trust to keep the lights on, something which feels almost more topical right now than it must have at the time.

The TARDIS lands on the water of the North Sea, just offshore from a Euro North Sea Gas refinery. Coming ashore, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton), Jamie (Frazier Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) hear what sounds like a heartbeat coming from a pipeline connecting the offshore rigs to refinery. They quickly learn that the refinery has been plagued by problems: the pipeline pressure keeps dropping, and there is intermittent loss of contact with the rigs and the Doctor starts to suspect there may be something more than technical trouble at work.

Fury From The Deep boasts a rich supporting cast, with the refinery staff led by the high-strung Robson (Victor Maddern) and the increasingly distressed Maggie Harris (June Murphy), who find their authority and control eroded by the encroaching parasitic, sentient seaweed. Unlike many of the interchangeable technicians of the late sixties Doctor Who, the staff of the ENSG refinery feel authentically frayed by the isolation of their environment and the bizarre nature of their predicament. Maddern’s performance is particularly sharp, portraying a man whose grip on reality is slipping as the literal and figurative pressure of keeping the gas flowing increases. When the weed creature begins to infect the personnel, it’s genuinely horrific and intimate and the scene of a possessed Maggie Harris walking into the sea remains a chilling image, even if we are currently forced to view it through the lens of BBC animation.

The Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are at their most cohesive here, even though the story is famously the swan song for Victoria. Accordingly, Fury From The Deep takes care to underscore her growing weariness of living with the constant threat of death, and for once, the show actually provides a payoff for one of the companion’s classic jobs. Victoria’s scream, often used as mere punctuation, becomes a plot device: the literal weapon that repels the creature, turning a tired, gendered trope into a narrative necessity. Victoria’s departure is a bittersweet exit, one that explicitly acknowledges the psychological toll of travelling in the TARDIS – a level of character depth that the programme frequently overlooked in its rush to the next cliffhanger – and a fitting response to this most terrifying of adventures.

But Fury Of The Deep isn’t just notable for its departure; it heralds the arrival of something that would go on to become almost as iconic as the TARDIS itself: the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor’s trusty tool/ MacGuffin/ deus ex instrumentis makes its debut here, modestly using soundwaves to loosen a series of screws – a far cry from its multi-functional future.

The strength of Fury From The Deep is in how it balances the Doctor’s eccentric scientific curiosity with the palpable sense of danger and a sense of action. Troughton is masterful, moving from light-hearted bumbling to a cold, hard authority when he realises the scale of the ecological threat. Fury From the Deep represents the peak of the 1960s “monster” era because it taps in to that most Doctor Who of storytelling philosophies: the effective scares aren’t found in the vacuum of space, but in the familiar hum of everyday infrastructure turning against us.

Of course, the only way to see Fury From The Deep nowadays, thanks to the BBC’s tragically shortsighted archiving policy of the time, is through the animated reconstruction and while it’s perfectly serviceable, there’s no denying the full colour cartoon style blunts some of the horror and removes much of the nuance of the cast’s performances. Even then, you can still see how director Hugh David utilised the claustrophobia of the refinery sets and the starkness of the coastal location to build a genuine sense of dread while the sound design by Brian Hodgson and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – thankfully still preserved – replaces a traditional score with a rhythmic, pulsating heartbeat that mimics the creature’s respiration, an auditory choice transforms the refinery into a living, breathing antagonist. While the physical manifestation of the weed in the final episodes -essentially a mountain of foam and some stagehands shaking plastic tentacles – might lacked something to modern eyes, Fury From The Deep’s psychological build-up ensures that the threat still feels substantial, even if the effects don’t.