DISCLAIMER: I’m one of those people who finds the violence in ‘The Seeds of Doom’ problematic and, as the book goes further on that front than the TV episodes, a lot of my reaction to the novelisation is reflective of that. Should you be one of the many many who is perfectly comfortable with that aspect of the story, a lot of what I pick on can just as easily be read as Hinchcliffe improving on the tone of the story. Substitute positivity as you see fit.

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Trying to tease out Hinchcliffe’s specific contribution to the Hinchcliffe/Holmes partnership, El Sandifer turns to the Big Finish audio ‘The Valley of Death’ (3) for answers. Her verdict is that the producer brings ‘a reliance on standard tropes’ and is responsible for the tendency towards ‘skillful imitation’ as a starting point for the era’s scripts (4). Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom offers a different answer.

    Discussing ‘The Seeds of Doom’, Sandifer observes ‘a genuinely shocking level of brutality’ (5) and Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood feel it makes ‘Everything […] more brutal than usual’ (6). This is grim stuff, a story which sees the Doctor merrily declare, when told the odds are against him, that it’s alright because ‘I’ve got a gun’ (7). And Hinchcliffe’s main concern adapting it seems to be to ensure this brutality really comes to the fore.

    Part of this, at first glance, is just a result of the prose style. This is bare bones stuff. Short sentences, lots of speech, very focused on telling the tale – in many ways, Hinchcliffe is outDicksing Dicks. That economy of words, though, always seems to result in a harsher world. When Sarah is recaptured in the woods around Harrison Chase’s house, for example, the guard on TV warns her: ‘One word out of you and you’re a dead little girl, understand? So near yet so far’ (8). In the book, this becomes the rather more abrupt: ‘Make a sound, little girl, and you’re dead’ (9). I’d argue the former is a lot less sinister than the latter – the warning against uttering a word is rather less absolute than demanding no sound, the guard checks her understanding, putting the emphasis on his desire she follow his instructions over the threat of death, and his little gloat at the end makes him more cartoonish. Even the detail on TV that he has a fellow guard with him feels less threatening than a solitary man grabbing and threatening a ‘little girl’ in the woods.

    And it’s not just the villains who get a harder edge. Take, for example, the moment when Stevenson, a sympathetic character, shoots ‘point blank at Scorby’s chest’ (10). On TV, Stevenson does it from across the room and after delivering a warning (11); in the book, it’s a ‘lightning’ reaction to a ‘lowered’ pistol.

    But the increased grimness goes beyond prose style. Like many a Target author, Hinchcliffe has to cut material in order to make a short book out of six TV episodes. The most notorious example of this, it seems, is the loss of much of Amelia Ducat’s involvement (12) but more telling, I think, is how he handles events in the Antarctic. Winlett’s transformation into a Krynoid is raced over in favour of making space for the incidents that follow his transformation, namely Scorby being a thug and there being a generic monster on the prowl. Hinchcliffe is skipping the horror bits to make space for the thriller bits.

    The result is something quite unusual for a Doctor Who novelisation – lots of fight scenes. This doesn’t always go terribly well. For example, one of the Doctor and Sarah’s many escapes has Sarah pounce ‘like a tigress’ – she grabs Scorby’s arm – and allocates the Doctor a ‘mule-like kick’ – he precisely kicks a gun out of Scorby’s hand (13). Now, I’m no animal expert, but I associate a tigress with dominance and savagery rather than using all your strength to slightly change the angle at which a gun is aimed, and I don’t associate a mule with skill and precision of purpose. I suppose the latter does at least convey a sense of muscular power.

    Of course, fight scenes don’t necessarily have to be grim, and there’s a hint of something more fantastical when the Doctor employs a ‘Venusian neck lock’ to incapacitate Scorby. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by the plainer brutality of ‘a short, sharp twist’ to Scorby’s neck that results in ‘a nasty click’. Toby Hadoke, expressing surprise at his own acceptance of the violence in the TV episodes, asks whether ‘a thump delivered by Baker [is] any different to Pertwee hurling Terry Walsh about’ (14) – I’d argue that that’s the difference right there, the detail of separating someone’s vertebrae.

    It’s not, to be clear, that Hinchcliffe’s especially concerned about being grim or gritty or even especially lurid, otherwise why would he include cartoonish Venusian fight moves, it’s not even that he has a predisposition to the lurid, otherwise he’d never have vetoed moments like the envisaged bone-crunching and blood at the climax of this very story on TV (15), it’s just that he has a fascination with the physical experience of adventure stories, of giving the audience sensation where Letts would have gone for spectacle. El Sandifer explains this combination of the tangible and the fantastic better than I’m going to here, and finds herself continually circling back to the word ‘visceral’ (16), but she attributes it to the Hinchcliffe era, and so to the collaboration between Hinchcliffe, Holmes, Tom Baker and, in this case, Elisabeth Sladen – I think Hinchcliffe’s prose points to the ‘visceral’ as the ingredient he specifically brought to the table.

    Hinchcliffe’s descriptions rely not on images but on feeling and movement. Moberly’s death, for instance, doesn’t just see him strangled but dwells on the ‘pressure’ on his neck, his ‘Gasping’ for breath and his vision first spinning, then blurring and finally going dark (17). Sarah gets several similar, if less severe, examples – when Scorby threatens her with a gun, she feels ‘her stomach turn over’ (18); when Chase throttles her, ‘The blood pounded in her temples, her muscles began to tire’ (19); and even when she’s rendered a ‘defenceless body’ tied up and headed for the composter, Hinchcliffe pens her passivity, not only ‘powerless to move’ but unable to ‘even scream’, in a way that focuses on the actions she’s prevented from taking (20).

    This embrace of the visceral gets too indiscriminate now Hinchcliffe is isolated from his collaborators. Look at that thump Toby Hadoke talked about – the novelisation may cut the punch itself, the Doctor’s dive on to the chauffeur proving enough to knock him out, but the prose style still makes the moment more brutal. Nice as it is to learn Tom Baker weighed ‘fifteen and a half stones’, it’s less nice to read how he ‘slammed’ that weight into someone and made them crumple ‘like a rag doll’ (21). The danger comes when Hinchcliffe’s embrace of the physical translates into the Doctor seeming to relish it – his intention to ‘administer a straight left’ suggesting both practiced skill at boxing and the belief that he’s somehow teaching the chauffeur a lesson.

    This was a danger Tom Baker and Douglas Camfield had seen coming. They decided, according to El Sandifer, that the Doctor should be clearly ‘genuinely afraid of the Krynoids’. That would explain the ‘violence’ with which he tackled them (22) and avoid any hint that the Doctor might normally behave this way. Nothing in Hinchcliffe’s prose suggests he felt such extraordinary justification was required.

   There is, however, a more cynical possibility for Hinchcliffe’s tone. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood recount the same conversation, but they reckon Camfield and Baker were worried about the Krynoids appearing ‘comical’ and heightened the Doctor’s response to them in the hope of drowning this possibility out (23). While the novelisation doesn’t have to deal with a repainted costume from 1971 (24), it does reveal the concept to be not quite the perfect fit for gothic body horror the story assumes. Try as it might to present the plants as an ‘unearthly terror […] never to be forgotten’ (25), the reliance on distinctly animal traits like ‘clawing tentacles’ rather gives the game away – plants, whether becoming one or being attacked by one, just aren’t a source of disquiet or disgust of a league with getting injected with insect larvae, infiltrated by shape-changing sucker-covered foetuses or used as parts to bring the dead back to life. ‘Where once a face had existed there was now a gnarled and twisted mass of bark’ (26) is a frankly anticlimactic phrase in a horror story and ‘a solid mass of giant bamboo’ hardly constitutes a ‘nightmare’ (27).

    The gap between apparent and stated threat is even more pronounced with Harrison Chase. This is, let’s not forget, a man who’s just a bit uncomfortable around others, likes plants and goes a bit nuts. Okay, it’s a bit stronger than that – he’s ‘physically repelled by people’ to the extent of wearing gloves whose ‘love of plant life’ extends to wishing to ‘commune with his beloved plants’ (28) – but basically he’s a rich, reclusive nutter who achieves his dream when the Krynoid’s ‘Prodding suckers [explore] his body and face’ (29) and he begins ‘acting as a plant’ (30). None of that quite justifies the sense of ‘danger and evil’ the Doctor apparently picks up from him (31) nor Sarah’s harsh verdict that he ‘undoubtedly deserved to die’ (32).

    As with the Krynoids, there’s an odd reliance on feline imagery to make Chase sinister, with his ‘cat-like eyes’ (33) and ‘cat-like features’ (34). Even the room that houses Chase’s collection features a prominent and oft-mentioned ‘cat-walk’ (35). There’s nothing technically wrong with all this, but it does rub in how little use the world of plants is for the tone Hinchcliffe wants (36). Where it absolutely doesn’t work is in moments like when Chase leers at the ‘beautifully intact’ Sarah (37), the hinted lustiness a bad fit for a man who craves the prod of suckers and finds people physically repellent.

    This is where my opening disclaimer breaks down.

    Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom can be effective and glorious. At the end of chapter four, when the Antarctic base blows up, for example, there’s a wonderful confluence of frenetic activity – the Doctor’s shouting at Sarah to get to safety and racing off back to the Base to rescue the already-dead Stevenson, Sarah’s crying out that he’s too late and sprinting for cover, the Krynoid’s pounding on the door of the Power Unit, desperate to get at the meat outside as the bomb ticks away behind it. Hinchcliffe throws the point of view around, first with Sarah, who is glancing in panic between the Doctor, who she knows is running towards an imminent explosion, the Power Unit right near her, which is rigged to explode any moment, and the ridge that offers the only chance of safety, and then to the Krynoid trapped inside the Unit, which is just starting to escape, back to Sarah still out in the open, and finally to the Doctor, who just has time to see his target before all his efforts become pointless, making the confusion even more frenetic. He doesn’t let the Doctor even finish saying Stevenson’s name, just to rub in his failure (38).

    However, all Hinchcliffe is doing is compounding the error hewn into the very premise of the story, one he commissioned. Were he seeking to fix it, surely, at some point, even just once, he’d have reached for imagery evoking carnivorous plants. Instead, the plants just all become animals with chloroplasts. The fact that this makes less sense than The Screaming Jungle in ‘The Keys of Marinus’ isn’t even the problem, it’s the fact that the plants could just as well be anything so long as they ‘move […] and kill’ and, perhaps most importantly, ‘crush’ (39). As long as he can inject that Hinchcliffe feel, Hinchcliffe doesn’t seem to really mind what the story’s about.