The underwater menace (1967)

Review
More about Doctor Who
More about this serial

Review

This was a four-part serial that was first broadcast between 14th January - 4th February 1967. A brief and somewhat spoiler-ish summary of the plot: the Doctor and his companions find themselves in Atlantis, where mad scientist Zaroff has promised the locals that he will raise their city to the surface. What the Atlanteans don't know is that Zaroff is deceiving them: in fact, he wants to go down in history as the maddest of all mad scientists by destroying the world. There's a lot of other stuff going on - humans being surgically altered so that they can breathe under water and supply food for the Atlanteans, human prisoners who are being forced to work in the Atlanteans' mines, an impending food shortage because the plankton that is the Atlanteans' main source of nourishment goes bad after one or two days - but you may as well forget about all that, since none of it seems vital to the plot.

What I've seen:

Part three. The other three episodes are missing.

This is one serial that might actually benefit from there only being one episode left. Some good bits:

the Atlanteans' make-up, costumes, music and religious customs, which are all marvellously silly and over the top
Zaroff's performance, the actor playing the B-movie 'mad scientist' with considerable gusto
the scene where we see the surgically altered Fish People swimming and going about their business. It's pretty long and doesn't seem to have much relevance to the rest of the story, but it's nicely done

The not so good bits:

the story doesn't seem to make much sense - though in this case, this may be a feature rather than a bug
there are three companions in this story, and they're joined by a couple of miners who've been held prisoner by the Atlanteans. As a result there seem to be companions all over the place, mostly travelling in packs since there's not enough story to keep them all occupied on an individual basis

My verdict:

Quite good, actually.

Twentyfive pretty entertaining minutes.

More about Doctor Who

An introduction:
Doctor Who reviews: introduction

More "quite good, actually" Doctor Who:
Doctor Who reviews: quite good, actually

More from the Patrick Troughton years:
Doctor Who reviews: 1966 - 1969

Similar stories:
Doctor Who reviews: fantasy

Original version of this review:
06/10/31

More about this serial

Episode guides:
BBC Cult

Serial reviews:
Outpost Gallifrey

DVD reviews (of the 'Lost in time' boxed set):
Outpost Gallifrey

With the exceptions listed here, all content © 2006 D9D1E2.COM. Please read the disclaimer, copyright information and terms of use. On this page Transitional HTML 4.01 and CSS 1 are used. If you're seeing this text you either have CSS switched off in your browser, or you're using a browser that can't handle CSS. If you're using an older browser version, you might want to consider upgrading.