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Episode 18

Sideburn Trouble

In this week’s trippy episode, we say hello to Robert Holmes and goodbye to the BBC foam machine, as we discuss two stories from Patrick Troughton’s final season: The Krotons and The Seeds of Death. Smell that hydrogen telluride. Very bracing.

Buy the stories!

For the first time in a very long while, both of the stories we cover this episode exist in their entirety. And they’re both (kind of) worth watching! So off you go:

The Krotons (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

The Seeds of Death (Amazon US)

In the UK and Australia, The Seeds of Death: Special Edition was released on DVD as part of the Revisitations 2 box set, along with Carnival of Monsters and Resurrection of the Daleks. (Amazon UK)

The Krotons

Prison in Space by Dick Sharples was a truly horrifying script, mercifully dropped by the production team in favour of The Krotons. It was revived, unwisely, as a Big Finish audio drama, and released as part of the Second Doctor Box Set in 2010.

More horrific sexism can be seen in The Worm that Turned, a series of “comedy” sketches from the 1980 season of The Two Ronnies. (Which is otherwise pretty great.)

The Seeds of Death

Let’s get all literary for a moment. Brendan mentions The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster, an English writer perhaps best known for A Room with a View. In this short story, Forster imagines a future where humanity is completely dependent on technology, and the terrible consequences when that technology fails.

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) tells the story of a Martian invasion of Southern England. It was famously adapted into a radio play by Orson Welles in 1938, a film by George Pal in 1953, a film by Steven Spielberg in 2005 (starring Tom Cruise) and a prog rock album by Jeff Wayne in 1978.

Lords of the Red Planet was Brian Hayles’s original script for this part of Season 6. It was dropped by the production team, only to be revived as a Big Finish audio drama in 2013.

We have a competition!

If you would like to win a Target novelisation from our personal collection, just post a comment on our website underneath the post for this episode. We’ll be giving away three books every time we reach the end of a season.

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Episode 18: Sideburn Trouble · Duration 0:54:57 · Download · Open in new window

Season 6The Second Doctor