Trivia / Doctor Who S4 E5 "The Underwater Menace"

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• Creator Backlash: Several cast and crew members, including producer Innes Lloyd and Anneke Wills, were disappointed in how the story turned out. Ben’s actor Michael Craze called the story “a dodo” and “badly conceived”.
• Hostility on the Set: Michael Craze and Anneke Wills don’t have much nice to say about Julia Smith. As the latter said in a commentary:
  We would mess around, and she would get more and more like a schoolteacher, so we got naughtier and naughtier. Pat would call her a "miserable old bitch", but that's what we were like. We had power, we were the main actors. Otherwise, most of the directors we got on really well with. Only Julia had a bad time with us. We made her life a misery.
• Missing Episode: Episodes 1 and 4 are both missing. Episode 3 was found still in the BBC's possession in 1977, while Episode 2 was located in 2011.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: The surviving material didn’t make clear what Zaroff was talking to in episode 2 beyond a pet in a tank, so many fans decided it was the pet octopus he references in Episode 1. Later, episode 2 was recovered and the pet was revealed to actually be a regular fish. Notably, the animated version substitutes an octopus in that scene.
• Troubled Production:
  • This story was apparently dropped altogether due to budgetary concerns in favour of another story called "The Imps". However, the writer fell too ill to finish it, so "The Underwater Menace" was reinstated. With only a few weeks to go, popular guest character Jamie McCrimmon's fate was changed from "one-off" to TARDIS team, which needed a new rewrite. Eventually, the episodes were filmed a week before screening, the tightest turnaround period the show ever had.
  • Apparently, both Troughton and producer Innes Lloyd disliked this story due to the ridiculous costuming used by almost the entirety of the supporting cast, as well as the makeup used by the fish people. Despite that, Troughton didn't let his personal dislike of the serial affect his performance in the serial and the Doctor ends up looking like he's enjoying trolling the rest of the cast.
  • The original DVD release of the story was also a troubled production. Once Episode 2 was discovered in 2011, the two missing episodes were originally slated to be animated, but the production companies responsible for the previous animated reconstructions had either gone out of business or made too big a loss on the previous animations for it to be viable. After the whole release was temporarily cancelled, BBC Studios eventually decided to produce a tele-snap reconstruction instead. When the Restoration Team said they'd be happy to provide a new, high-quality reconstruction for the same cost, their offer was refused. The final product was a poor tele-snap reconstruction, noticeably inferior to both previous official efforts and popular fan-made ones. To wit, surviving clips and the opening titles were reconstructed using snaps (because the BBC were insistent that the recon consisted of nothing but the telesnaps, in the order they were taken, with no visuals from other sources), and images could stay up for about minute at the time while audio played in the background that could have represented anything (since they also lack explanatory captions or narration). The experience has been compared to watching La Jetée.
  • The 2023 release corrected these issues, including an animation of all four episodes and a much more elaborate telesnap reconstruction.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Because the decision to make Jamie a companion was made late into the previous story's production, this one was written on the assumption that he'd be a one-off, and thus only featured the Doctor, Ben, and Polly. After Frazer Hines was brought on as a regular, the script had to be rewritten to accommodate him, namely by transferring many of Ben's lines to Jamie (including the infamous scene where he slaps Polly).
  • In Geoffrey Orme’s original script, Zaroff had been driven insane by the death of his family in a car crash.
  • Animations for Episodes 1 & 4 were initially planned for 2013, but ended up being scrapped in favour of a standard telesnap reconstruction when the appointed animation studio raised their commission prices outside of the BBC's budget for the release. The story was eventually animated in 2023, from a completely different production team.
• Working Title: Under the Sea, Atlanta (!) and The Fish People.
• You Look Familiar: Peter Stephens (Lolem) had previously appeared in "The Celestial Toymaker".

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