Category: Classic Season 07

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Classic Season 07 Doctor Who

Spearhead From Space

Doctor WhoDr. Liz Shaw is uprooted from her research at Cambridge to serve as the scientific advisor for the recently formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, headed by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. The Brigadier seeks Liz’s help in the investigation of two mysteriously precise meteor showers which could be signs of alien interference with Earth. But the Brigadier’s luck improves with the arrival of a police box in the midst of the most recent meteor shower, though its sole occupant is a man he’s never seen before. The Doctor, however, does recognize the Brigadier despite recovering from the trauma of his forced regeneration at the hands of the Time Lords, and the two join forces – with a somewhat bewildered Dr. Shaw in tow – to fight an alien menace which can inhabit and control one of the most common substances manufactured on Earth…plastic.

Download this episodewritten by Robert Holmes
directed by Derek Martinus
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: Hugh Burden (Channing), Neil Wilson (Seeley), John Breslin (Captain Munro), Antony Webb (Dr. Henderson), Helen Dorward (Nurse), Talfryn Thomas (Mullins), George Lee (Corporal Forbes), Iain Smith, Tessa Shaw, Ellis Jones (UNIT personnel), Allan Mitchell (Wagstaffe), Prentis Hancock (Reporter), Derek Smee (Ransome), John Woodnutt (Hibbert), Betty Bowden (Meg Seeley), Hamilton Dyce (Scobie), Henry McCarthy (Dr. Beavis), Clifford Cox (Soldier), Edmund Bailey (Waxworks Attendant)

Broadcast from January 3 through 24, 1970

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Categories
Classic Season 07 Doctor Who

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Doctor WhoUNIT and the Doctor are summoned to a nuclear power research center located near a complex of caves; something has been slowly driving members of the center’s staff mad, one by one, and at least one spelunker has been killed in the caves. The Doctor investigates the caves for himself, uninterested in what initially seem like personnel problems at the center, and finds a living dinosaur inside them; he also discovers evidence of a bipedal reptile species, both in the caves and outside. The center’s director doesn’t believe the story he’s being told, but the Brigadier prepares UNIT to defend against a possible invasion. The Doctor is convinced that the reptile humanoids are Silurians, the original inhabitants of the Earth before a mass extinction wiped out most of the large reptile species and allowed humans to evolve and thrive. The few survivors of the event went into underground shelters, and the energy released by the research center is slowly awakening them. The Doctor is determined to contact them and try to talk them into coexisting peacefully with humans on the surface, only to find that warlike factions exist among the Silurians as well – and some of them will be satisfied with nothing less than wiping out humanity.

written by Malcolm Hulke
directed by Timothy Combe
music by Carey Blyton

Guest Cast: John Newman (Spencer), Bill Matthews (Davis), Peter Miles (Dr. Lawrence), Norman Jones (Baker), Thomasine Heiner (Miss Dawson), Fulton Mackay (Dr. Quinn), Roy Branigan (Roberts), Ian Cunningham (Dr. Meredith), Paul Darrow (Hawkins), Pat Gorman (Silurian Scientist), Dave Carter (Old Silurian), Nigel Johns (Young Silurian), Paul Barton, Simon Cain, John Churchill (Silurians), Peter Halliday (Silurian voice), Nancie Jackson (Doris Squire), Gordon Richardson (Squire), Richard Steele (Hart), Ian Talbot (Travis), Geoffrey Palmer (Masters), Harry Swift (Robins), Brendan Barry (Doctor), Derek Pollitt (Wright), Alan Mason (Corporal Nutting)

Broadcast from January 31 through March 14, 1970

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Categories
Classic Season 07 Doctor Who

The Ambassadors of Death

Doctor WhoA British manned Mars mission has fallen silent, its crew incommunicado for months. A second manned space vehicle is launched to recover the first, but it too loses contact with Earth. Strange, piercing signals are heard in Space Command on Earth, and the Doctor quickly realizes that they may be messages from whoever took the astronauts – only to hear a similar coded reply being sent from somewhere on Earth moments later. The Brigadier is able to trace the source of the reply and finds that the people who transmitted it are better organized and better armed than anyone suspected, and they even have allies within Space Command who try to sabotage the Doctor’s analysis of the original message. The recovery mission returns to Earth, but when the hatch is opened, the crew is nowhere to be found. Three astronauts did, in fact, arrive safely, but they aren’t from Earth. When Liz is kidnapped and forced to experiment on the alien visitors, and the military suddenly becomes reluctant to aid the Brigadier, the Doctor finds himself racing against time to avert an interplanetary war sparked by one paranoid man.

written by David Whitaker
directed by Michael Ferguson
music by Dudley Simpson

Guest Cast: John Levene (Sergeant Benton), Robert Crawdon (Taltalian), Ric Felgate (Van Lyden), Ronald Allen (Ralph Cornish), Michael Wisher (John Wakefield), Cheryl Molineaux (Miss Rutherford), John Abineri (Carrington), Ray Armstrong (Grey), Robert Robertson (Collinson), Juan Moreno (Dobson), James Haswell (Champion), Bernard Martin (Control Room Assistant), Dallas Cavell (Quinlan), Steve Peters, Neville Simons (Astronauts), Gordon Sterne (Heldorf), William Dysart (Reegan), Cyril Shaps (Lennox), John Lord (Masters), Max Faulkner (Soldier), Joanna Ross (First Assistant), Carl Conway (Second Assistant), Ric Felgate (Astronaut), James Clayton (Parker), Peter Noel Cook (Alien), Peter Halliday (Alien voice), Neville Simons (Michaels), Steve Peters (Lefee), Geoffrey Beevers (Johnson), Roy Scammell (Peterson), Tony Harwood (Flynn)

Broadcast from March 21 through May 2, 1970

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Categories
Classic Season 07 Doctor Who

Inferno

Doctor WhoJoining the Brigadier’s team at a hazardous research site where Dr. Stahlman plans to drill through the Earth’s crust to tap its core as a new source of energy, the Doctor is annoyed when Stahlman rejects most of his expert scientific advice. But this isn’t enough to prevent to Doctor from availing himself of power from Stahlman’s nuclear reactor for his own experiments – yet another attempt to restore the TARDIS to full function. But during one such experiment, the TARDIS console shoots the Doctor sideways in time, depositing him in another dimension where Britain is a fascist state. In this alternate Earth, the Doctor can only watch in horror as Stahlman’s experiment progresses to the point where it destroys the world. The Doctor barely escapes, only to find that he may be too late from saving the Earth he knows from the same fate.

written by Don Houghton
directed by Douglas Camfield & Barry Letts
music by Delia Derbyshire

Guest Cast: John Levene (Sergeant Benton), Olaf Pooley (Stahlman), Christopher Benjamin (Sir Gold), Ian Fairburn (Bromley), Walter Randall (Slocum), Sheila Dunn (Petra Williams), Derek Newark (Greg Sutton), David Simeon (Latimer), Derek Ware (Wyatt), Roy Scammell (Sentry), Keith James (Patterson), Dave Carter, Pat Gorman, Philip Ryan, Peter Thompson, Walter Henry (Primords)

Broadcast from May 9 through June 20, 1970

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green