Exploration Earth: The Time Machine

Chapter the 338th, a tiny bit more of Tom.

Plot:

The Doctor and Sarah Jane hover the TARDIS in space, and use a two-person capsule to float outside the ship and watch the formation of the planet Earth, taking many time jumps forward to see the progress of the planet, oxygen forming, life starting. Occasionally during this, the Doctor is harangued by Megron, lord of chaos. Megron believes that what is being witnessed is chaos, but the Doctor insists that on the contrary it is order. Eventually, the Doctor and Megron have a mental battle; the Doctor wins, and Megron is banished from planet Earth.

Context:

I wanted to link a blog post to the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event tying in with the Blu-Ray release of classic Doctor Who season 13 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). I chose the only story that I hadn't previously covered (and as we shall see, describing it as a story is a stretch) featuring the season 13 team of Tom Baker and Lis Sladen. But would it pass the test questions I use to validate spin-off worthiness? Let's see... Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes, there's a villain and a confrontation, albeit in scaled-down form. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes; like the last few curios blogged, the Shada webcast and Search Out Space, it did end up as an extra on another story's disc eventually, but that wasn't how it was first pitched. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. I covered the similar Tom and Lis audio story The Pescatons in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post, but have not done the same for Exploration Earth: The Time Machine. That was a full house of correct answers, so I watched it from the Blu-ray disc featuring it (see First Time Round below) one day in mid-September 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. Aside from niche items like Exploration Earth's Doctor Who episode, the tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 10 now remain.

First Time Round:

I wasn't yet a fan of Doctor Who in October 1976 when this story was broadcast. Even if I had been, though, it was unlikely I would have heard it. I was only four years old; at that age, I might just have been in front of a TV at teatime on a Saturday, but would not have been played a schools' radio programme on BBC Radio 4 VHF. I first heard the story when it came out on CD. From 1999, a Doctor Who audio range on shiny disc started up, mostly releasing the soundtracks of missing stories with linking narration. Amidst these, a soundtrack for a wholly un-missing story was released in July 2001. This was a Genesis of the Daleks audio based on an abridged version of the story with linking narration released on record in the late 1970s. Added as an extra to this CD release was Exploration Earth, as it was labelled on the disc's packaging. Technically, Exploration Earth was the name of the educational series in which Doctor Who happened to be featuring just the once, and the episode in which that happened was called The Time Machine. As Doctor Who has endured in public consciousness and Exploration Earth has not, by 2001 it wasn't felt necessary to be so exact. I am using the complete title here, but it makes me realise that I should have labelled the similar curio blogged a few posts back as Search out Science: Search Out Space, and that will bug me now, possibly forever. At least that means Exploration Earth: The Time Machine has a chance of sticking in my memory. I couldn't recall anything of that first listen in 2001, nor of when I listened to it again as a Blu-ray extra in 2020 (when the Season 14 box set came out, it was included on The Hand of Fear disc as a special feature).

Reaction:

Given that I'd blogged another 20-minute long educational programme starring Doctor Who characters in Search Out Space, it would have been unfair to skip this one, which is essentially the same concept from a decade and a half earlier, but on the radio. The 1976 story is extremely slight, though, so there might not be that much to talk about: the Doctor describes some astro-phenomena relating to the formation of the planet Earth to Sarah. Sarah's job is only to listen, and occasionally offer some descriptive dialogue to aid the listener. She doesn't get to ask any intelligent questions. Given that asking questions is a big part of her role, and would mean she was representing the schoolkids listening in, it seems like a missed opportunity. Then, a Doctor Who villain turns up, but doesn't do very much, just booms a lot at the Doctor. They ultimately have a mental battle, pitting their strengths by "telepathic will deployment" - this might mean that the writer of the radio show Bernard Venables had seen recently aired story The Brain of Morbius, which ends with a mind-bending contest, and it stuck in his mind when he came to write this episode of Exploration Earth. It is a generic enough idea to be just a random coincidence, of course; this is a shame as there is no other evidence that Venables has ever seen an episode of Doctor Who, and it would be nice to pin that down.

The story has the opposite problem to Search Out Space. That programme had the recognisable characters of the Doctor and companion in an uncharacteristic setting. Exploration Earth's production team at least make it worthwhile sampling the format by having the TARDIS team go to space and confront a baddie (even if they possibly got there more by luck than judgement). The characters of the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, though, are not as recognisable as were the seventh Doctor and Ace. The Doctor tells his friend to "Stop wittering" at one point, and later snaps "Not now, Sarah, I'm busy" at her. Sarah's first line is the very out of character "Oh, the great Doctor in travail, hmm?". Nobody talks like that, certainly not Sarah Jane Smith. One wonders why the actors didn't push for dialogue changes. I'd hazard a guess that the time and money allocated to a kids' educational radio show didn't afford the scope for such niceties. Tom Baker would get much better later in his career at challenging poor material he'd been given to perform in a sound recording booth - google "Tom Baker distilled whippet shit" for more details (NSFW). 

Connectivity:

In both Exploration Earth: The Time Machine and The Interstellar Song Contest, the Doctor floats in space outside his usual craft, the TARDIS, with meagre protection provided by something else (a capsule or a bubble).

Deeper Thoughts:

The South Bank Shows. I couldn't attend the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event, but as there are very few stories left to blog, see Milestone Watch above, this felt like it could be the last time I get to write in the Deeper Thoughts section about the Doctor Who BFI events. They have become a regular treat and source of content during the years I've been keeping this blog (see the final three paragraphs for a summary). I chose Exploration Earth: The Time Machine to tie loosely in to the event, and hoped I could relay information passed to me by the group of fan friends with whom I often attend these events, as they were planning to go. Unfortunately, they couldn't get tickets. I adore everything about the BFI apart from its website: the functionality of this site when queueing for tickets that have just become available, selecting those tickets, putting those tickets in the site's shopping basket. and finally paying for those tickets - in other words, every step of the journey - is sub-optimal, and having to engage with the functionality is a stressful ordeal. This time it fell to Trevor, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on the blog, but it defeated him (as it has all of us at some point in the past) - the seats appeared in the basket, but had disappeared again before he could pay for them. By the time he tried again, the remaining tickets had all sold out. I'd been slightly more successful in getting a single ticket to a different September event at the BFI, so I will write about that instead. It wasn't a Doctor Who event, but it will be interesting to compare and contrast (plus there are no photos available related to Doctor Who's Exploration Earth episode, so at least I can include some visual material and not just have a big block of text here).

The event was a double bill of films featuring Pet Shop Boys music held on Friday 5th September 2025; first shown was It Couldn't Happen Here, the feature film they made in the late 1980s with writer-director Jack Bond; second, silent classic Battleship Potemkin with the score they wrote for it in 2004 (the score was performed live at a screening in Trafalgar Square that year). In between, there was a Q&A with singer Neil Tennant. The first thing that contrasted with a Doctor Who event was the very fact that I was able to get a ticket. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't ever been a Pet Shop Boys BFI event before (there was one planned in April 2020, but that had to be cancelled because of Covid); Doctor Who events happen several times a year, but of the two it was the Doctor Who event that sold out faster. Maybe Doctor Who is just a bigger draw (there is no monthly publication in newsagents called Pet Shop Boys Magazine after all); the band can still fill arenas around the world, though, so I think it's probably just that - because they have been happening with some regularity - the Doctor Who events have built up a reputation and a following. As soon as the event began on that Friday, another difference was immediately apparent: there was no Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The host introducing proceedings was John Ramchandani, the BFI's Head of Video Publishing & Online Programming (the event was tying in to the release of Potemkin on Blu-ray). Though Ramchandani gave a heartfelt tribute to Bond (who died late in 2024) and wished "All the West End Girls and East End Boys" in the audience an enjoyable evening, he couldn't match Johnson and Fiddy for repartee. There was also no quiz (the BFI presumably not having the budget to give any copies of their Blu-rays away as prizes).

John Ramchandani

PSB fans can certainly match Doctor Who fans regarding how critical they can be. It Couldn't Happen Here is not generally well regarded (I love it), and in the gap between the two films waiting for Tennant to take the stage, I heard a plummy voiced old gent say to a friend "Wasn't that tedious ... I think the phrase is: what have I done to deserve this?", then a middle-aged woman nearby said to her neighbour "It was like Christmas, there was so much turkey". Neil Tennant settled into his seat on stage addressing the audience with "Well, you all survived" (it's not uncommon for those on stage to take affectionate pot shots at the Doctor Who stories that they were involved in either). Tennant was interviewed by Paul Tickell, a filmmaker and friend of both Tennant and Bond; it was an informative, if short, interview, but wasn't quite as witty and irreverent as Doctor Who audiences have come to expect. During the chat, which was recorded and can be seen at this link, Tennant revealed an exclusive: he and bandmate Chris Lowe are finally recording A Man from the Future for commercial release. A Man from the Future is a piece inspired by the life of Alan Turing that was performed at the Proms in 2014, so fans have been waiting over a decade to get a copy for their collections. News like that about Doctor Who would have been up online within minutes on fan and entertainment news sites. At the time of writing, more than two weeks after the event, it hasn't been published anywhere that I can find. In other ways, the fans were less restrained: Tennant got a standing ovation when he left the stage, which I've not seen for any Doctor Who guest. Audience questions tended to be prefaced with almost tearful paeans to everything the band had meant to the questioner; in one case, the questioner ended just by asking for an autograph, getting a slightly irritable reply from Tennant that they were supposed to be talking about the films.

Neil Tennant takes to the stage

All in all, it was an enjoyable event, but it did demonstrate that those arranging the Doctor Who events do put in a little bit extra. There have been screenings at the BFI (or National Film Theatre in old money) going back a long time, but the current versions emerged out of some special screenings that took place for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary in 2013. Fan friends David and Trevor attended a few of those (the website was terrible even in those days, but they managed to bag tickets to some of them). It went quiet for a bit, but then in 2016 there was an event to showcase The Power of the Daleks animation; about a year later, there was a similar event for the partly-animated Shada. Not long after that in January 2018, there was a screening of The Day of the Doctor accompanied by a panel including Steven Moffat. There's usually a product release to justify the sessions, but The Day of the Doctor was an exception; it formed part of a John Hurt retrospective season. The launch of the Blu-ray collections meant more product, which meant more events. A screening of Earthshock tied in with the season 19 box set launch (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post for details). There was a showing of Logopolis in February 2019 ahead of the season 18 set, but I managed to miss it being advertised - there's at least one write-up online if you google. Though they never gave away expensive limited edition box sets, the animation events included the story's DVD as part of the BFI ticket price up to and including The Macra Terror, which was showcased at the BFI in March 2019; thereafter, they stopped that.

(L to R) Neil Tennant, Paul Tickell

2019 was a busy year, with a Planet of the Daleks screening following in June (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post), Mindwarp in September, and The Curse of Fenric in June (see Deeper Thoughts section here)  - these were linked to the collection sets for seasons 10, 23 and 26 respectively. Alongside The Curse of Fenric was also for the first time a separate screening of a feature-length documentary from the same set (this was Showman, about producer John Nathan-Turner). There were two screenings in the first quarter of 2020, The Faceless Ones animation in February (see Deeper Thoughts here) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang in March for the launch of the season 14 box set (which also included Exploration Earth: The Time Machine as mentioned above). The pandemic then meant a hiatus. Things resumed with a Covid-friendly screening of Dragonfire from the season 24 box set in June 2021. Two animation events followed later in that year, The Evil of the Daleks in September, and Galaxy 4 in November (see Deeper Thoughts here). There was also a City of Death screening in December to tie in with the season 17 set; I had a ticket, but had to give it up as I had finally succumbed to a variant of the aforementioned coronavirus. Friends went and guest Julian Glover was reportedly very good value. Season 22 set taster Revelation of the Daleks (see Deeper Thoughts here) followed in March 2022, and The Abominable Snowmen animation in September.

I couldn't attend season 2 set tie-in The Time Meddler in October of 2022, and this ushered in a short period where I always seemed to have a clash. I missed the Sea Devils / season 9 set and The Five Doctors / season 20 set events in March and September 2023. I might not have got a ticket to the latter even if I'd been able to go, though - it was much sought after, and sold out within minutes. Later in the year, I was able to see the animation of The Underwater Menace (see Deeper Thoughts here) in October, and an event about the TARDIS (see Deeper Thoughts here) in November. In February 2024, there was a screening of Horror of Fang Rock as well as a Graham Williams documentary (both from the season 15 box set, and both covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of this post). A month later, there was a showing of animated The Celestial Toymaker (see here). Later in the year, The Happiness Patrol infamously got two screenings - the as transmitted version in August (see here) and a new special edition version in September (see here). February 2025 saw both Spearhead from Space (see here) and The Savages animation (see here) showcased at the BFI. As an unfortunate impact of avoiding all social media I missed that there was a screening of new series story Father's Day in May 2025 to mark the 20th anniversary of Christopher Eccleston's season launching the new series era, only finding out about it after it had been and gone. That brings things up to the Terror of the Zygons screening. I'm sure there will be more events at the BFI (there are still eight seasons to release as Blu-ray box sets, and many stories left to animate), so I will no doubt be wrestling with that website for years to come, even if I probably won't be writing about it here.

In Summary:

Not quite distilled whippet shit, but not a very effective encapsulation of Tom Baker's Doctor and Lis Sladen's Sarah Jane. Well, except, I suppose, if one is pedantic, there's the part of the narrative where the characters are in a capsule - they're encapsulated quite well (and very literally) during that bit.

The Interstellar Song Contest

Chapter the 337th, where Graham Norton finally appears in a Doctor Who story (after a couple of previous attempts to gatecrash).

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Bel materialise in Harmony Arena, a space station in a protective transparent bubble, in the year 2925. The arena is playing host to the interstellar song contest, presented by Rylan Clark (who's been revied from cryogenic freeze). The TARDIS team stay to watch the show, but soon the Doctor suspects something is wrong. Behind the scenes, one of the broadcasting crew Wynn from the planet Hellia is in cahoots with a terrorist from the same planet, Kid, and they have taken over. The audience in the arena including the Doctor are all ejected into space. They are still contained in the bubble, but frozen. The Doctor almost succumbs to freezing, but at the last second a vision of his granddaughter Susan inspires him to propel himself back. He meets up with Mike and Gary Gabbastone who help him hack into the arena's systems. Kid plans to use a delta wave to kill all the trillions of people watching as revenge against the corporation that sponsors the contest, who ravaged the planet Hellia for crops to make their product. The Doctor defeats Kid using a hard light hologram of himself. He is uncharacteristically rough with Kid, using the hologram to repeatedly hurt him. Kid and Wynn are arrested and taken away, and the Doctor, Mike and Gary work together to bring back and revive all the ladies and gentlemen floating in space. In a historic exhibit about the contest, a hologram of Graham Norton tells the Doctor and Bel that the Earth was destroyed on May 24th 2025. They have all the vindicator readings they need to travel back to that date; when they arrive, the TARDIS doors open and there is an explosion. Meanwhile, one of the last people to be revived is Mrs. Flood. She turns out to be an old enemy of the Doctor's, the Rani, and has been in the cold of space too long. She bi-generates, becoming two Ranis.

Context:

The Blu-ray box set of the ever-so slightly misnamed Doctor Who Season Two was delivered through my letterbox in late August 2025. This was not the William Hartnell nor even the David Tennant season two, but instead the second - and presumably final - series of Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor that was broadcast earlier in 2025. Since the blog started in 2015, whenever a new box set of recently-aired episodes arrived I would take the opportunity to use a random factor in deciding whether I would blog a story from the set, and which one if so. As this may be my last chance to do such a thing (for a while at least), I couldn't pass it up. There remained three stories from 2025 left un-blogged, The Well, the Interstellar Song Contest and two-part finale Wish World / The Reality War. I therefore rolled a d4, the first three numbered sides representing each of those three stories in turn, the fourth meaning no story would be blogged at this time. It came up as a two. I therefore skipped the earlier episodes and watched the sixth story on the set first, on my own one evening in late August.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. Beyond the six stories now completed from the 2025 series, the tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 10 now remain.

First Time Round:

Through the previous five Saturdays of the 2025 run, my viewing was generally getting earlier and earlier. Episodes became available at 8am in the UK, but I like to sleep in a bit at weekends, so I never watched one quite that early. The Interstellar Song Contest was probably the one I watched soonest after it landed. At approximately 9.15am on the day it became available on the BBC iplayer (the 17th May 2025), Scott - fan friend mentioned a few times before on the blog - commented to our fan WhatsApp group warning the rest of us that we shouldn't go online until we'd watched the story as there would be spoilers everywhere. I viewed it as soon as I could get the middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time, and the biggest Doctor Who fan in the house after me) settled in front of the living room TV with me.

Reaction:

Just as in his first term as showrunner, Russell T Davies seems to have a structure for each season of his second era. Each corresponding one of the eight episodes of 2024 and 2025 have similar shapes: the first two stories of both are relatively lightweight introductory tales, the first set out in space, the second in Earth's past. Those second episodes both feature a new villain from the Big Bad band that is the Pantheon of Discord, a taster for the two-part finales that will feature a returning villain from Doctor Who's history that has become a member of said group of titanic nasties. Third is a futuristic actioner with lots of hardware; the fourth stories are Doctor-lite, contemporary Earth stories centred around Ruby Sunday and featuring UNIT (teeing that organisation up for a return appearance in the two-part finale too). The fifth story is the thoughtful one, leaving the sixth - the last before that big finale - to be the camp one. Rogue filled this space in 2024, and in 2025 The Interstellar Song Contest manages to out-camp Rogue (no mean feat). The Doctor even uses the word to describe one moment during the action (using a confetti cannon to fly through space back to safety) - one of a few moments where the story comes as close as it can to a wink at the camera. In a way, though, this is misdirection. In the same way as long ago in 2005 episode Bad Wolf, the audience is presented with a high-concept idea (extreme futuristic versions of contemporary game shows in that instance) to disguise a twist involving the return of a classic Who enemy.

The 2025 high-concept idea ("Die Hard meets Eurovision" was the brief according to writer Juno Dawson) has us looking one way, when from another direction we're suddenly surprised by the return not just of a classic Who enemy, but a classic Who ally as well. Unlike in 2005, the surprises were not blown in the Coming Soon trailer the previous week either. These significant revelations from the season's arc plot (see Deeper Thoughts section for more on them) don't come at the expense of the story of the week. As well as being camp, The Interstellar Song Contest is pacey and fun. After several stories fumbling the motivations of their 'toxic' male villains, Kid is given a solid, straightforward rationale for his actions, and Freddie Fox brings the character to life excellently. Unlike with Alan Budd and Conrad Clark, the audience can legitimately feel sympathy for Kid's cause even though they don't agree with the murderous plans he makes in its name. The scene near the end of the Doctor ('ice' put in his heart by his time in the cold of space) torturing Kid shows the Doctor as the more toxic of the two males involved. It's a nice counterpoint tonally to the rest of the piece, a bit of grit in the oyster. The only issue is that it doesn't feel resolved; the Doctor doesn't face any consequences and barely even reflects. This is one of a few loose ends. The company that destroyed Hellia presumably faces no comeuppance, and the planet's unfair reputation remains in place. With the antagonists still alive at the end and all that unfinished business, there is potential for Kid and accomplice Wynn to return (if Doctor Who starts up again sometime soon).

Another good aspect of the season-wide plot shown here is Bel's character arc; this story sees her fully embrace the companion role, with her "Oh, we're so staying" at the start when she realises where she is, and the early scenes of her enjoying the contest. Again, this feels unresolved by the end of this story and the season: the trajectory feels like it's leading to a choice of whether to stay home once she gets there, or continue travelling with the Doctor; that's not what transpires (although it may have been part of the original plan before Ncuti decided to leave). All these loose ends are forgotten as the end blows everything away (somewhat literally) and moves on to the next thing. Does it make any sense, though? With the vindicator readings, the TARDIS is finally able to travel back to the 24th of May 2025, but when it reaches there, there's an explosion. This is the destruction of the planet caused by the Rani, evidence of which has been scattered through previous episodes. In the finale, though, we find that the Doctor is a part of the Rani's plans; his doubt contributes to the gradual destruction of the planet seen in the following episodes. So, how could it have happened before the TARDIS took him to Earth? This is more an issue arising from Wish World and The Reality War than the story that preceded them, though, so it might just need to be chalked up to 'timey-wimey' and put to the back of our minds when looking at The Interstellar Song Contest.

Even though it briefly features and leads in to Time Lord friends and foes and their universe-scale machinations, The Interstellar Song Contest's strength is in showcasing ordinary people / aliens. The story isn't really like Die Hard; in that movie the hero is operating alone, trapped in the enclosed area where the action's taking place. Here it's a slightly different trope: the plucky band of misfits who seem totally out-gunned, but who come together to win the day. Each one of these is written and performed well: the married couple having a realistic row, Mike and Gary (played by Kadiff Kirwan and Charlie Condou) turn out to have the tech skills and nursing skills to help the Doctor; the singer harbouring a secret and her manager (Miriam-Teak Lee and Akemnji Ndifornyen); the director behind the scenes (Kiruna Stamell). Then there are a couple of people gamely playing themselves, Rylan Clark and Graham Norton. Production values are consistently good: design, CGI and physical effects and prosthetics combine to make an expansive and diverse set of aliens in a consistent, believable world. Composer Murray Gold rises to the challenge of creating some Eurovision-like songs as well as his usual incidental music. There are some great lines in the script ("You'd need to be some sort of insane genius." "Hello. I'm the Doctor."). It all adds up to a very enjoyable experience.

Connectivity:

Both The Interstellar Song Contest and The Two Doctors include an appearance from a 1960s companion, appearing in the series again for the first time since The Five Doctors in 1983 (Susan, Jamie). Both feature female villains that first appeared in the Colin Baker era of Doctor Who (the Rani, Chessene).

Deeper Thoughts:

Never overlook the obvious. Unless you're busy. Sometime in 2005 before the first run of the new, returned Doctor Who was complete, there was an article or maybe a released synopsis that described eleventh episode of that year Boom Town. It said that it would involve the Doctor running into a woman from his past, or words to that effect. Immediately, a lot of the fan community speculated that it was the Rani, or Susan, or Romana (in that order of perceived likelihood). Needless to say, everyone that speculated wildly was then equally wildly disappointed when it turned out to be Annette Badland returning as Margaret Blaine, a character seen a few weeks earlier in Aliens of London / World War Three. Thereafter, various hints or non-hints caused similar bouts of speculation to occasionally break out. The trailer running ahead of Peter Capladi's second season finished with a brief clip from The Woman Who Lived: Maisie Williams's character unmasks, an astonished Doctor says "You!", and she replies "What took you so long, old man?". There was a short period of fevered imaginings about who Williams could be playing. The perceived order of likelihood this time was Susan, Romana, the Rani, mainly based on the actor's age. The disappointment was the same, and for the same reason: it turned out just to be a recurring character from that particular season, not the return of some longer-term character from the show's history. Over the years, it wasn't even necessary for any particular event to spur on the speculation, Every year from 2005, someone somewhere - probably multiple someones in many places - were fervently expecting the return of the Rani, or Susan, or Romana.

For every fan speculating there was a least another folding their arms and telling that first fan that they were mistaken. The Rani, to pick one example, was never coming back according to this second group. I have to admit I leant more towards their way of thinking. One reason for this was the Rani as a character doesn't have much definition beyond 'villainous female Time Lord'. Any individuality came from the performance Kate O' Mara gave in the two stories she appeared in as the Rani in the late 1980s. The creators of the character Pip and Jane Baker had put down on the page that she was amoral rather than evil. She was only interested in science and saw humans as experimental fodder, but she wouldn't harm a human if it didn't advance her studies. O' Mara didn't play her like that, though, she played her (impeccably) as a hissable panto villain. It didn't seem worth bringing the character back unless you could bring the actor back too. O' Mara, though, wasn't really doing television acting once the show was back (she only has two imdb credits post-2005). She then passed away in 2014. The same year, the Master was returned to Doctor Who regenerated into a woman. So, the female Time Lord panto villain gap was filled. What would be the point after that in bringing back the Rani? Of course, the fun of the character's return in Ncuti Gatwa's era is that there is no real point. The speculators had been assuming every female villain in the show was going to turn out to be the Rani for nearly 20 years, it would be far too obvious for the mysterious Mrs. Flood to turn out to be the Rani. The arms-folded naysayers like myself, though, had been so consistently proved right about the character's non-return, over and again for nearly twenty years, that it flipped things and the most obvious reveal turned out to be the most surprising.

Susan then returns in the self-same episode. Russell T Davies had put a reference to Susan in The Devil's Chord in Gatwa's first season. The Doctor telling Ruby that he has a granddaughter was the most explicit reference to the character in decades. Later in the year, there were hints and speculations by the characters that the mysterious woman whose face the Doctor and Ruby keep seeing across the universe was Susan. That character's name was Susan, and she was even played by an actor called Susan. It was far too obvious that she would turn out to be the real, actual Susan. And she wasn't; it was too soon for everybody's guard to be down such that the obvious return would still be surprising. Davies waited until the next season when everyone had forgotten, and then brought her back. Not in a big finale, just in the middle of the penultimate story of the year that everyone might have assumed was all about Space Eurovision. The series has pulled similar switcheroos before. For example, in 1980s story Remembrance of the Daleks, there is a character that looks and sounds a lot like Davros who turns out not to be Davros. Davros then returns anyway, but not where a viewer might have expected. Writer of that story Ben Aaronovitch originally only had the first twist; he realised during rewriting that the audience would feel shortchanged, and included Davros after all. Davies has done the same, but over the course of a season rather than a story. Where can the show go from here (assuming it comes back)? There's still Romana, of course, but I can't see any particular reason to bring her back (time travelling companion whom the Doctor fancies has been done with River Song). I was wrong about the Rani, though, so what do I know? 

In Summary:

Camp and fun, just like Eurovision, but pacier and with added Doctor Who continuity: what's not to like?

The Two Doctors

Chapter the 336th, is a Doctor Who two for the price of one offer, a BOGOF with Bug-Eyed Monsters.

Plot:

The Doctor takes Peri fishing on an alien planet, then collapses in the TARDIS. He's somehow been linked across time to his second self. That Doctor, accompanied by Jamie, is on a mission for the Time Lords, just like he always wasn't. He is visiting Professor Dastari, who runs a research centre space station, trying to persuade him to stop some of his team doing time travel experiments that could endanger the universe. Dastari's own research is in genetic manipulation; he has augmented an Androgum (aggressive, food-obsessed aliens) called Chessene - she is planning an attack on the station, having allied herself with the Sontarans. The attack happens, Jamie escapes and the Doctor is apparently killed. Really, he's been taken to Earth by Chessene, with another Androgum called Shockeye plus Dastari (who's in on the conspiracy). They are joined by two Sontarans. The other Doctor and Peri arrive on the abandoned station to investigate, and find Jamie living wild in the ducts. The Doctor recreates the mental link with his former self and works out that he is being held in Seville. The three of them travel there in the TARDIS, and run into Oscar and Anita, who have just witnessed the Sontaran ship land. Oscar has been setting up moth-catching equipment for later that evening, but he and Anita need to go back to their jobs at a nearby restaurant.

The Doctor, Jamie and Peri attempt to sneak in to the hacienda where the other Doctor is being held. Chessene, Dastari and the Sontarans are trying to get that Doctor's help to get the experimental time capsule to work. He refuses. Chessene betrays the Sontarans, killing them with acid. Dastari operates on the Doctor turning him into a hybrid Androgum to make him more amenable, but he and Shockeye escape and go to the centre of Seville to have a meal at Oscar's restaurant. When he won't accept alien currency for the meal, Oscar is stabbed to death by Shockeye. Shockeye escapes; the second Doctor is left behind, and returns to normal. The sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie arrive just in time to get him out of the restaurant before the policía arrive. Chessene captures them all and takes them back to the hacienda. The sixth Doctor pretends that he has made the capsule operational. Shockeye is going to cook a human (Jamie) for himself and Chessene to eat before they leave. When the sixth Doctor tries to free Jamie, Shockeye wounds him; the Doctor flees outside, with Shockeye pursuing him, following the blood trail. The Doctor stumbles across Oscar's cyanide jar and uses it to kill Shockeye. Chessene sees some of the Doctor's blood and licks it up, much to Dastari's disgust. He turns against her, so she kills him, and tries to escape in the capsule. It blows up, killing her. The second Doctor summons his TARDIS by remote control, and he and Jamie say goodbye. The sixth Doctor decides that he and Peri should become vegetarians.

Context:

It has become an annual tradition that I download a Doctor Who story to watch when I'm away on holiday. It's not always possible, but often the selected story is vaguely appropriate because it includes scenes filmed in my holiday destination, or just scenes filmed in a country other than the UK. Sometimes, the characters in the story themselves go on holiday. The Two Doctors has not been selected for any trips before; I was holding it back thinking the day would probably come when the family visited Seville. We came very close in 2025; a nice Airbnb was very nearly selected, but we decided instead that the kids would prefer somewhere with a beach. So, to Menorca we went and - with very few stories left to blog - The Two Doctors had to finally accompany us (well, me, anyway, I didn't try to get any of the rest of the family to watch with me). Menorca is at least Spanish territory, so there is something of a link. I downloaded the three episodes from the BBC iplayer and watched them on my phone over the course of the break. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor. The tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 11 now remain.

First Time Round:

I have a clear memory of watching the first episode on its initial UK broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday 16th February 1985. My Mum had made me a 'boil in the bag' prawn curry (definitely not a Vesta, probably Birds Eye or Tesco's own brand) for my tea. I watched Doctor Who in the living room, with the plate of food on my lap. I remember seeing the scene where the Doctor lands a weird alien fish on screen, and this momentarily putting me off my food. It didn't last long, and the plateful was scarfed down soon afterwards. An underlying message of the story is a promotion of vegetarianism but this didn't take with me. I've no strong memories of the rest of that episode nor my first watch of the others on the following two Saturdays, but I do remember a general feeling - in my serious fan manner - that it was too early in Colin's era for him to be sharing the spotlight with a returning Doctor. Now a lot of time (more than 40 years) has gone by, would I feel the same way?

Reaction:

Robert Holmes, who penned The Two Doctors, was one of the writers most instrumental in the success of 20th Century Who. There's a run of stories through the 1970s that he was involved with, directly or indirectly, that is seen by a majority of fans as a golden period, a template for Doctor Who excellence. As I mentioned in the blog post for one of his two 1960s stories The Space Pirates, though, that golden period doesn't quite extend to everything he wrote for the show. His first two stories are not generally liked, and neither are his last two. The final one was The Trial of a Timelord, co-written with many other people, and with so much negative stuff happening behind the scenes (including Holmes' failing health and death before his scripts were realised) that it would be churlish to criticise him or any single contributor. What, though, of his penultimate story? The Two Doctors was commissioned and produced before the BBC had threatened Doctor Who with cancellation in 1985; the series was ostensibly in rude health. The story Holmes had written immediately before was The Caves of Androzani, one that forever after would be in the top tens of all-time Doctor Who story polls. He was on a hell of a high. Immediately before Caves, though, Robert Holmes had been the first writer commissioned to write 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, and he could not manage it. He tried but failed to weave the excessive set of 'shopping list' demands of returning actors and plot elements into a coherent narrative. The Two Doctors is a similar challenge: it requires the inclusion of a returning Doctor, companion and monster, and the arbitrary locating of some sequences in a foreign country (originally planned to be New Orleans, but when filming there fell through changed to Seville).

Maybe Holmes wanted to prove that he could achieve a 'shopping list' story after all. Or, perhaps, he was chosen because the story slot was the equivalent length of an old six-parter. There hadn't been a story of such length broadcast since the late 1970s when Holmes was last regularly writing the show. Even then, though, he didn't often write those longer ones. Usually in the 1970s, Holmes would work with writers to shape such stories to have a "dogleg", a sharp turn of the plot to a new focus after the two or four episode mark, to feel like a new but linked story was starting, keeping audience interest from sagging. He eschews that approach for The Two Doctors. There's a more gradual move from the action set on the space station to the action in Seville. It might have worked better to confine the space station stuff to part one and concentrate on Seville for parts two and three, or maybe vice versa. Probably, Holmes thought he had enough elements to keep things interesting without such a structure, and to be fair he does almost pull it off. The sixth Doctor doesn't appear early enough at the beginning, and the Sontarans are dealt with too early before the end; with a couple of tweaks to resolve both those points, the story would flow pretty perfectly. The second point is more forgivable as his new creations the Androgums are conceptually strong and nasty enough to carry the climactic villainy on their own. The first point, though, is much more of a problem. Aside from his face in the beginning credits, Colin Baker doesn't appear for the first 10 minutes of his own show.

The story starts with Patrick Troughton (seen in black and white at first, and using an older TARDIS console prop, both nice touches), and that is okay; it's an intriguing hook. It then stays on him, and the minutes stretch out. At several moments, I was inwardly screaming "Cut away!" and not just because it would be polite to the leading man. I was right in my feeling in 1985 as mentioned in the First Time Round section above; it's too soon for Colin's Doctor to be sharing the spotlight, and being pushed so far out of it delegitimises him - it feels like Troughton is conferring official status on him, rather than the other way round. Cutting away, and then intercutting between the parallel action of Colin and Pat's exploits would additionally have given the story a boost to its dynamism. A restless intercutting approach, a combination of script and direction decisions, was one of the things that enlivened The Caves of Androzani, after all. That, though, was directed by one of the most dynamic Who directors of the time, Graeme Harper; The Two Doctors, on the other hand, is directed by Peter Moffat. He is a safe pair of hands, and known for getting all the needed material in the can efficiently, even sometimes ahead of schedule (almost unprecedented for Doctor Who with its complexities far exceeding its budgets); the material that ends up in the can, though, isn't usually energetically paced. There's a couple of major issues with how key story beats are revealed; these may have stemmed from the script rather than having been introduced by the director, but one can't help but believe that a different director would have seen the issues ahead of time, and nudged the more than competent writer or script editor to fix them. Alternatively, of course, they could very well have been introduced by the director.

The first reveal of a Sontaran, and the moment where it becomes clear that Dastari is a traitor who is allied to the bad guys, are both handled in the same way: the reveal is held back for a long time, then finally achieved in a pedestrian long shot that might usually be used just for establishing a location. In both instances, the long shot is from no character's POV, so the moments are robbed of any drama. It should be a big deal for the Doctor (either of them) to discover that his old enemies are involved in the plot, and his old friend allied with them. As it is, the moments are underwhelming, and the impression is given that there was no need to hold the revelations back at all. Moffat achieves better things in the quieter moments. Though not perfect, the interactions between the sixth Doctor and Peri are much warmer and wittier than elsewhere in the season, with the squabbling dialled down. The sixth Doctor's haunted monologue as he worries about the fate of the universe is one of Colin Baker's standout moments in the role. Troughton and Frazer Hines effortlessly recreate the second Doctor and Jamie, with many funny lines and bits of business. Moffat gets two compatible but interestingly different takes on villainy from the two actors playing Androgums, building on the script's efficient world-building, establishing the race's culture and attitudes. John Stratton gets the showier Androgum role, drooling over the prospect of eating many different members of the cast, the hissable panto baddie. Jacqueline Pearce gives a masterclass performance throughout of savagery suppressed and hidden behind a veneer of elegance. The shocking moment where she cannot control her animal impulses and licks up spilled blood from the ground is magnificent, even though it is again mostly filmed in a long shot. At least there's a cut to a reaction from Dastari watching in disgust (a medium shot).

This era of Doctor Who comes in for some flak for excessive violence; but, as shocking as Shockeye's actions are, I don't think anything here is gratuitous. The underlying theme of the piece is about the ethics of how we treat creatures we perceive as lesser than ourselves; Shockeye's sadism is therefore very much in keeping. His callously offhand murder of bumbling comic foil Oscar fits with character and theme, and ups the ante when he has the Doctor cornered towards the climax of the story. The Doctor's use of Oscar's abandoned cyanide jar on Shockeye comes in for a lot of criticism. Again, though, I think it's the direction that's the problem. It needs to be urgent: the Doctor is about to be killed, and stumbles across the only thing he can find with which to defend himself when his adversary is almost on him. Because what made it to screen is instead done at a much more leisurely pace, it makes the action seem too premeditated. People don't like the Doctor's quip afterwards "Your just desserts", but I think it's rather funny. The tone is consistently of a dark comedy. Given the theme, all the subplots about genetic manipulation also integrate rather well. As such, I'm not sure it needs the prototype time travel machine as the MacGuffin. The Sontarans could just want to weaponise the genetic augmentation process somehow, and Chessene could just be planning to upgrade her whole planet en masse. This would mean no need to feature machinations by the offscreen Time Lords - a plot idea already overused in the series at this point - and would also mean that the second Doctor doesn't need to be working on his people's behalf (which breaks the established continuity to such an extent that a lot of complicated backstory has needed to be reverse-engineered by fan writers over the decades since the story's broadcast).

Other points to note: there's very good lighting in the scenes of the sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie in the space stations ducting; Colin's lighter, more summery version of his costume works much better than the usual version; Peter Howell's score is one of his best. Although there is no reason at all why the action has to take place in Seville, it's still interesting to get away from the usual visual textures on occasion. The story can't resist the insertion of some touristy moments in the chase scene, which does slow things down when they should be speeding up as the denouement approaches. The only truly heinous moment is when Dastari has a flower thrown to him from a woman on a balcony. The characterisation, costumes and masks for the Sontarans are different from what went before, but work well. All in all, it is not as bad as its reputation; Holmes script is pretty close to the quality of his 'golden period' work; with more dynamic direction, and a few tweaks, this could have been another classic.

Connectivity:

Both The Two Doctors and Search Out Space feature the current Doctor unexpectedly teaming up with at least one character from the show's past (Colin working with the second Doctor and Jamie, Sylv with K9).

Deeper Thoughts:

The joy between the land and the sea. Perhaps a summer holiday is not a conducive time for too much original thought; I'm undoubtedly not the first to notice it, but it struck me in a contemplative moment in the sun of Cala'n Forcat that travel is all about dwelling in liminal spaces. The hotel we stayed in appears in photos like it's sitting atop a rocky outcrop in the middle of the ocean. In fact, it's on a high cliff edge, and behind the hotel are paths and steps down to multiple small coves. This is Cala'n Forcat; though there weren't the huge expanses of sand that you might except on a Spanish beach, there were clear blue waters to swim in at the base of ravines, with tall rock walls either side. It was a dramatic landscape, similar to (but a lot warmer than) the Welsh cliffs featured in 2024 story 73 Yards. In the script for that story, its writer Russell T Davies highlights such areas at the edges of things as places of magic, but also of conflict. I half suspect he just introduced the line about the war between the land and the sea to be a reference to the planned spin-off series, but there is a truth there nonetheless. The Balearics have been of strategic importance in many wars, annexed and occupied multiple times. The nearest town to where we were staying was Ciutadella (literally, the Citadel), which has been a fortification since the times of Ancient Carthage. Obviously resorts don't tend to be warzones these days, but liminal spaces come with risks as well as potential; this is possibly why we are drawn to them. Even if one doesn't go for beaches, the act of travelling takes one to the liminal spaces that are airports and train stations. Even if one never leaves home, taking a break puts us in the liminal mental space of being between work and play.

Cala'n Forcat

Looking back at the first holiday trip I covered for the blog in 2016, we again stayed in a place on the boundary between one area and another, outside a castle on the edge of woods. I started the blog the previous year, but had fit my posts around holiday breaks in the summer of 2015. As this time we were staying at Leeds Castle, somewhere that was the location of a Tom Baker story, and said story could be brought with us to watch in the cottage, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste. This started an annual tradition. I took The Leisure Hive (a story where the Doctor goes on holiday) to Shanklin in 2017 (between land and sea again), but ended up watching the story when back home, much closer to the liminal space of the Brighton beach on which some of it was filmed. The following year was the first foreign trip for the blog, to Tenerife, and I took along a story that involved the production team taking a foreign trip (Vincent and the Doctor). In 2019, I visited a European location with It Takes You Away (in which the TARDIS fam visit a European location). After a couple of years' suspension of holidays away because of Covid and lockdowns, I took Hell Bent to watch on the island where it had been filmed, Fuerteventura, in 2022 (and stayed in a resort at the edge of sand dunes). The year after, I listened to Marco Polo (The Doctor and friends on a long trip) while on a short trip to Kos. In 2024, I revisited Fuerteventura, this time with The Ice Warriors (completely thematically divorced from the surroundings, but I did at least experience the Troughton era mainstay of a foam machine during that break). That brings things up to this year and The Two Doctors.

Ciutadella

Holmes's Sontaran story itself comes from a liminal space in Doctor Who's span. It was a watershed between celebration (the hoopla of 20th anniversary) and chaos (the hiatus and the aforementioned crises in the making of the subsequent Trial of a Time Lord season), between when the series was seen as an unassailable institution able to film abroad, and when it had to struggle to endure. The production team were adjusting to a new format of 50 minute episodes before circumstances dictated they revert back again to half that length. Given another year, someone might have realised that they could have had a one-part self contained story (or even more than one) rather than three part stories like The Two Doctors. Would that have made a difference to the programme's longer term survival? At the time of writing, Doctor Who is in another such uncertain space. Will it endure? As said above, liminal spaces contain risk, but they also contain potential. Recent announcements up to August 2025 have been of a new multimedia event for 2026 in the mould of previous years' Time Lord Victorious and Doom's Day, and a new fan show on the official Youtube channel. Neither are things that tend to happen for shows that have been cancelled. Even more positively, news reports on the 21st August 2025 quoted an interview with Kate Phillips, chief content officer at the BBC, at the Edinburgh TV Festival. She said that the series will remain on the BBC "with or without Disney". Comments from the Beeb in 1985 were nowhere near as friendly to the show. Amusingly, she summarised the position as "The TARDIS is going nowhere" which perfectly summarises both the potential and the risk of this liminal space. Anyway, I'm almost out of stories to blog, and they'll have to get their fingers out to have new ones before summer 2026, so I might have to vacation without a Doctor Who story next year. What a thought!

In Summary:

Not too bad, and quite a dark comedy for something filmed in such bright sunshine.

Search Out Space

Chapter the 335th, is - if one's honest - not that ultimate a challenge (it's barely 20 minutes long).

Plot:

The Doctor presents the Ultimate Challenge, an intergalactic game show (presumably beamed out to millions of viewers picking up the signal on their Time-Space Visualisers). The challengers on the show are Ace, K9 and an alien called Cedric (from the planet Quirk according to the ever-reliable internet, but the subtitles on my DVD - erm, I mean Time Space Visualiser, of course - say it's the planet Glurk). Various questions are posed about planetary motion and other aspects of astronomy. Occasionally, the programme is interrupted by commercial breaks. At one point K9 can't answer a question and ends up transported into deep space, where the Doctor rescues him. The final question from the Doctor challenges people to find the key to the universe in 30 seconds. K9 tells him this can't be done, and that's the correct answer. The Doctor has an ice cream, and the programme concludes.

Context:

As you can see in the Milestone Watch below, there are very few Doctor Who stories left for me to cover. I'm also running short on curios like Search Out Space to intersperse with those stories, but there are still a few left that meet my set criteria for spin-off inclusion. To whit... Does it star the Doctor? In the case of this story, that's a definite yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? It's not just a skit and there is a small element of jeopardy (ish). Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Like the recently blogged Shada webcast, Search Out Space did end up as an extra on a DVD eventually, but when it first came out, it was the main attraction. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. That was good enough for me, so I watched it - from the Survival DVD disc upon which it eventually ended up - on my own one evening in late July 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: aside from sideways trips into spin-offs like this, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 14 now remain.

First Time Round:

Search Out Space was shown on UK TV channel BBC2 on 21st November 1990, almost a year after the last Doctor Who story proper was shown on BBC1. Circumstances when the 1989 season came to an end were similar to the time of writing this in 2025: without a commission for a future run, there was uncertainty about the programme's future. To get a tiny little bit of new in-character material from Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace (not to mention an appearance from K9) was an early Christmas gift for fans, even though it was just an edition of an educational programme called Search Out Science. For some reason, though, I didn't watch it. I must have known it was going to be on (I was regularly buying and reading Doctor Who Magazine in late 1990). Perhaps, as a serious 18-year old, I thought watching a kids' programme (as opposed to the proper, hard-hitting drama that was Doctor Who) was beneath me. The first time I saw it would therefore have been when the aforementioned Survival DVD came out in April 2007.

Reaction:

Of all the Doctor Who curios I've covered on the blog, this might be the most curious. Search Out Space is very odd for an educational programme: all the questions posed in the course of the narrative, such as it is, aren't answered. What shape is the Earth? What makes day and night? What causes the seasons of the year? They aren't necessarily hard to answer, but the programme was aimed at a primary school audience, so you'd expect there to be some confirmation of hard facts included. Instead, the characters drop hints and give clues, but leave it up to the audience to decide. Perhaps the intention was that it would prompt discussion after viewing with a parent or a teacher. There are meta questions without an answer too. For example: if one wants to engage a young audience, why use characters from a TV show that had been cancelled a year earlier? Twelve months is a long time in a primary school playground. Did any of the kids watching remember as Sylv did his 'standing on a wobbly platform' acting against a green-screen (which he does fantastically well, of course) that he was once a hero who battled monsters? Aside from the very beginning credits (Search Out Science was a strand that presumably searched out lots of different topics in other episodes less memorable to Doctor Who fans), it's all Doctor Who; the Who theme is played immediately after those credits and also accompanies the end credits, and there's no explanation or introduction to explain that these are characters from another series. It's an odd approach to give over an episode on one show wholly to another, and would be odd even if the incoming show was a raging success rather than yesterday's news.

Another meta question without an answer: why get actors in to play specific characters only for those characters to present a fictional in-universe programme? Why not cut out a step and just have Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred present a quiz about space? Instead, nobody breaks character, even though they're not doing things those characters normally do (adventures, monster defeating), but are doing things that the actors who play them have done often (presenting children's television). It saves the programme makers having to write and make a Doctor Who style of story, of course, but it's something of a wasted opportunity: an exciting adventure narrative, even with the low budget that the programme had, would probably have been more engaging than disconnected scenes such as K9 whizzing around London trying to decipher what parts of a star's life cycle various coloured sweets represent, while the others cheer him on in a chaotic and noisy fashion. That bit ends with K9 transported into outer space, so at least the Doctor gets to be Doctorish when he goes to rescue him. Though they don't leave any unanswered questions, apart from maybe 'Uh?', the commercial breaks in between the action - actually a succession of comedic sketches - are uninspired. The programme then ends with another question with no answer. The final challenge is about the "key to the universe". I assumed this was some kind of metaphor, and the answer was going to be 'We don't know the key to the universe, but we keep searching and learning new things' or something similar. Instead, K9 just says that it is "hopeless" and the Doctor grins and agrees. It's a bit of a bum note to end an educational programme with a comment about the hopelessness of trying to discover difficult truths.

This wasn't the very last gasp of the classic era (there was still the extended Children in Need skit Dimensions in Time and the Paul McGann TV movie to follow later in the 1990s) but it's close to the end. Despite Search Out Space's oddness, it is fitting that Doctor Who had come full circle, regaining the educational remit it had when the show started in 1963. Just as Sydney Newman wanted, it is again highlighting scientific concepts to young viewers. 

 

Connectivity:

Both Search Out Space and The Robot Revolution feature at least one robot, and see the Doctor rescuing someone who's been transported off Earth. In both, the TARDIS hovers in space at one point. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Past Masters, Ranis, Sontarans, Yeti, Autons, etc. Search Out Space, as mentioned above, was an extra with season 26 story Survival on its DVD release (Survival being the most recently broadcast Doctor Who story before Search Out Space was shown). Intriguingly, though, it wasn't included on the Blu-ray box set of the season that included Survival, nor either of the other two Sylvester McCoy seasons. (An aside: isn't it nice that Sylv is the first 20th century Doctor to have his entire oeuvre released in an HD format? He was so often associated with being the last of something; it's good that he gets to be first in that particular race.) What could be going on with this missing extra? It might be something prosaic like a lack of space on discs, or an issue with rights. Fandom has a different theory, though. The Blu-rays (with umbrella title Doctor Who: The Collection) are season by season releases that started in 2018; the intention is to create the definitive library of Doctor Who TV stories from the classic era. As well as stories, the collection aims to be definitive in accompanying documentaries and featurettes too: one thing that the makers of the discs have been sticking to is ensuring pretty much everything that was included on the DVDs in the way of extras carries over to their HD disc versions, along with even more value added material. At the time of writing this in summer 2025, they're well past half way done. There are 26 seasons of classic Who, and - as with this blog - the collection has been releasing season box sets in random order. There are nine unreleased seasons (five out of the six black and white runs, a Pertwee season, two Tom Baker seasons and a mainly Peter Davison season that includes one Colin Baker story at the end).

One of the remaining Tom Baker seasons (season 13) was announced in July 2025 to be coming out later in the year; so, there will be a maximum of eight sets left going in to 2026. Or will there? Sylvester McCoy may be associated with Doctor Who endings, but he wasn't the last Doctor of the 20th century; that was Paul McGann in the TV movie mentioned in the Reaction section above. In addition, as well as Search Out Space, there was Dimensions in Time, and the Shada webcast (all also mentioned above). Plus, there were three other webcasts made between 1990 and 2004, the years where Doctor Who wasn't being made as an ongoing series (sometimes referred to as the wilderness years). None of these have been included on any Collection Blu-ray set. The fan rumour is that all these and more are being held back for a 27th Doctor Who Collection set, to cover The Wilderness Years. Could it be true? There's been no official word, but most fans online seem to believe it. There are many mock-ups of box set art and proposed contents lists out there, should you care to look for them. I can understand the desire on behalf of fandom to will such a thing into existence. Looking at an analogous collecting space - the official recorded tracks of The Beatles - one sees a precedent for this 'cleaning up the offcuts' idea. The Wilderness Years box set, should it happen, will be the equivalent of the Beatles Past Masters albums.

The Beatles were in many ways a collector's dream with regards to neatness. Depending on how you judge it, they only had 12 or 13 studio albums. A side of material was paired with the songs from an EP to make Magical Mystery Tour, and another side of material was paired with some orchestral music by George Martin for the soundtrack of a movie on Yellow Submarine. Beyond that, though, there were only enough non-album singles and B-sides, and other odds and sods, to make two volumes of Past Masters collecting up the stuff that wasn't on any other album. These two volumes were first released under that title in the late 1980s (just before Sylvester McCoy bowed out of Who as an ongoing series). Later, to satiate a hungry market, there were a few collections of studio outtakes, alternates and experiments, but the Beatles output when they were a going concern is limited to a maximum of 15 discs. Doctor Who, though, has a tendency to sprawl by comparison. The Beatles as a recording group were limited to four people. Doctor Who, on the other hand, belongs to everyone. If William Hartnell isn't involved, it still counts. It's far from an ordered democracy too, more like a billion spores from many many dandelions being blown into the wind. It was only after about a year from the start of Doctor Who in 1963 that comic strip adventures and books featuring the good Doctor started, and they haven't stopped since. There's then been audios and spin-offs and fan made videos and more besides. So, it's very likely that there could be a 27th box set of Doctor Who: The Collection, there's certainly enough material for it; just don't expect it to be definitive, complete, final or neat. Doctor Who can't be contained like that.

In Summary:

Raises questions that it`doesn't answer, the biggest being Why? (Unless the answer is "To give a tiny little extra something to Who-starved fans".)