Category: Classic Season 15

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Classic Season 15 Doctor Who

The Horror Of Fang Rock

Doctor WhoLeela is unimpressed when the TARDIS once again arrives on Earth, and on another foggy night to boot. But this time, she and the Doctor have landed near a lighthouse on a particularly treacherous rocky shoreline at the turn of the 20th century. The lighthouse’s three-man crew is having trouble keeping their beacon lit, which leads to a ship running aground shortly after the Doctor and Leela make their presence known. But something else has made its presence known to at least one of the men – by killing him and assuming his shape. The survivors of the shipwreck make their way to the lighthouse, each with their own agenda blinding them to what could be the beachhead of an alien invasion. By the time the Doctor reveals the true nature of the threat to them, the alien visitor has claimed more victims.

Season 15 Regular Cast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), John Leeson (voice of K9)

Order the DVDDownload this episodewritten by Terrance Dicks
directed by Paddy Russell
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: Colin Douglas (Reuben / voice of the Rutan), John Abbott (Vince), Ralph Watson (Ben), Alan Rowe (Colonel Skinsale), Sean Caffrey (Lord Palmerdale), Annette Woollett (Adelaide), Rio Fanning (Harker)

Broadcast from September 3 through 24, 1977

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

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Classic Season 15 Doctor Who

The Invisible Enemy

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS encounters a huge, fibrous mass in space, and as it attempts to pass through the obstruction, a violent discharge from the central console knocks the Doctor out. He manages to set a course for a medical outpost, the Bi-Al Foundation. Barely able to explain the Doctor’s predicament, Leela leaves the Time Lord in the capable hands of Dr. Marius, a brilliant but eccentric pathologist (he has fashioned his portable computer in the shape of a dog and christened it K-9). But whatever affected the Doctor soon spreads to others at Bi-Al, and the Doctor is now clearly the center of a hive mind directing the actions of the infected. The fight to save the doctors and nurses at Bi-Al is a losing battle; the Doctor and Leela must take the fight to the source of the problem: inside the Doctor’s own body!

Order the DVDDownload this episodewritten by Bob Baker & Dave Martin
directed by Derrick Goodwin
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: Michael Sheard (Lowe), Frederick Jaeger (Professor Marius), Brian Grellis (Safran), Jay Neill (Silvey), Edmund Pegge (Meeker), Anthony Rowlands (Crewman), John Leeson (Nucleus voice), John Scott Martin (Nucleus operator), Neil Curran (Nurse), Jim McManus (Opthalmologist), Roderick Smith (Cruikshank), Kenneth Waller (Hedges), Elizabeth Norman (Marius’s Nurse), Roy Herrick (Parsons), Pat Gorman (Medic)

Broadcast from October 1 through 22, 1977

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

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Classic Season 15 Doctor Who

Image Of The Fendahl

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS is sidetracked by a time anomaly, depositing the Doctor and Leela near a secluded priory which has been serving as the laboratory of Dr. Fendelman and his colleagues. The object of the scientists’ study is what appears to be a human skull…which, according to dating, originated over eight million years before homo sapiens existed on Earth. But Fendelman isn’t sharing the whole story with his fellow scientists – in fact, one of them has unknowningly become a channel through which something sinister is emerging. The Doctor tries to intervene as the body count mounts in the countryside, but Fendelman has his well-armed security guards lock the Doctor away. The Doctor recognizes the threat as one from Gallifreyan folklore: the Fendahl, a gestalt entity, was exiled by the Time Lords, its world time-looped for twelve million years. Fendelman knows that the skull is alien, and hopes that studying it will reveal new insights into the origins of man. But Fendelman’s trusted assistant has other designs on the alien artifact, plans which involve black magic. And somewhere between science and black magic, the Fendahl will gain the power it needs to strike.

Download this episodewritten by Chris Boucher
directed by George Spenton-Foster
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: Wanda Ventham (Thea Ransome), Denis Lill (Dr. Fendelman), Edward Arthur (Colby), Scott Fredericks (Max Stael), Edward Evans (Moss), Derek Martin (Mitchell), Daphne Heard (Martha Tyler), Graham Simpson (Hiker), Geoffrey Hinsliff (Jack Tyler), David Elliott, Roy Pearce (Security Guards)

Broadcast from October 29 through November 19, 1977

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

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Classic Season 15 Doctor Who

The Sun Makers

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS comes to an unexpected stop on a world that the Doctor hasn’t explored before, but moments after he and Leela step out of the TARDIS and onto the top of an immense building, Leela spots a man moments away from committing suicide. The time travelers stop him from jumping off the building and try to learn what has brought him to the brink. They learn that they’re actually on Pluto, which is now surrounded by artificial suns and colonized by the Company – which also employs virtually everyone who lives on Pluto, and and which also taxes them into poverty. Cordo, stuck with a debt he’ll never be able to afford to repay after failing to pay in full the tax on his father’s death, sees only despair, until he remembers stories of the Others, a group of underground rebels who fight against the Company’s taxes and bureaucracy. With the help of the Doctor, Leela and K-9, Cordo finds the Others and pledges to join them, only to discover that sticking it to the man could make him a dead man.

Download this episodewritten by Robert Holmes
directed by Pennant Roberts
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: Roy Macready (Cordo), Richard Leech (Gatherer Hade), Jonina Scott (Marn), Michael Keating (Goudry), William Simons (Mandrel), Adrienne Burgess (Veet), Henry Woolf (Collector), David Rowlands (Bisham), Colin McCormack (Commander), Derek Crewe (Synge), Carole Hopkin (Nurse), Tom Kelly (Guard)

Broadcast from November 26 through December 17, 1977

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

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Classic Season 15 Doctor Who

Underworld

Doctor WhoThe Doctor and Leela find themselves at the edge of a galaxy, near an enormous nebula that could wreak untold damage on the TARDIS. To avoid this, the Doctor forces his ship to materialize on a nearby spacecraft. When he announces himself to the ship’s crew, they regard Leela as a threat (and harmlessly quell her bloodlust with their pacification beam), but they regard the Doctor as a god. He has come aboard a starship crewed by the last of the Minyans, a race who the Time Lords aided and augmented – and who then destroyed themselves with the aid of their new technology, the incident that caused the Time Lords to withdraw into their non-intervention policy. Unlike Time Lords, the Minyans can regenerate thousands of times, with enough control over the process that they seem to simply become younger again when their bodies wear out, and they’ve been on this flight for thousands of years. Their quest is to find the P7E, a lost Minyan sister ship whose cargo of genetic material could revitalize the species. Their obstacle is that they can’t seem to find the P7E, until the Doctor discovers that the missing ship is now the core of a forming planetoid – and that the descendants of its crew have taken on a new form entirely, a society that the Minyan searchers can’t even recognize – a society that could kill them all before they reach their goal.

Download this episodewritten by Bob Baker & Dave Martin
directed by Norman Stewart
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: James Maxwell (Jackson), Alan Lake (Herrick), Imogen Bickford-Smith (Tala), Jonathan Newth (Orfe), Jimmy Gardner (Idmon), Norman Tipton (Idas), Godfrey James (Tarn), James Marcus (Rask), Jay Neill (Klimt), Frank Jarvis (Ankh), Richard Shaw (Lakh), Stacey Tendeter (Naia), Christine Pollon (voice of the Oracle)

Broadcast from January 7 through 28, 1978

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Categories
Classic Season 15 Doctor Who

The Invasion Of Time

Doctor WhoThe Doctor returns, unbidden, to Gallifrey, claiming the Presidency of the High Council. Leela knows something is wrong, as she has witnessed his meetings with a shadowy group of aliens prior to returning to his homeworld. The Time Lords are aghast at the Doctor’s breach of their power structure, to say nothing of him bringing an alien among them. But when the aliens Leela saw earlier materialize in Gallifrey’s Capitol, all hell breaks loose – the Doctor orders many Time Lords, including his old mentor Borusa, expelled to the harsh surface of Gallifrey beyond the city domes. Leela is also thrown out, though she finds herself quite at home with the primitive nomadic tribes of homeless non-Time Lords known as the Shobogans. Leela rallies both Shobogans and exiled Time Lords to mount a resistance against the Doctor and his shady Vardan allies, but when the invasion is put down, everyone discovers that it was a ruse to allow a far more powerful enemy to slip into the heart of Gallifrey.

Order the DVDDownload this episodewritten by Anthony Read and Graham Williams
directed by Gerald Blake
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: Milton Johns (Kelner), John Arnatt (Borusa), Stan McGowan (Vardan Leader), Chris Tranchell (Andred), Dennis Edwards (Gomer), Tom Kelly (Vardan), Reginald Jessup (Savar), Charles Morgan (Gold Usher), Hilary Ryan (Rodan), Max Faulkner (Nesbin), Christopher Christou (Chancellery Guard), Michael Harley (Bodyguard), Ray Callaghan (Ablif), Gai Smith (Presta), Michael Mundell (Jasko), Eric Danot (Guard), Derek Deadman (Stor), Stuart Fell (Sontaran)

Broadcast from February 4 through March 11, 1978

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green