Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Huzzah! It's another Doctor Two release, the first six part episode of the range, and the first two disc set. The BBC is really taking their 40th anniversary releases seriously!

For those of you just catching up - from 1963 to 1989 (and a couple of false starts thereafter) the BBC ran an immensely popular family program called Doctor Who. The main character is called The Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He travels the universe in the TARDIS, a wondrous spaceship that can go anywhere in time and space - provided that the Doctor can steer it correctly. During his adventures, he and his companion (usually a young human female with weak ankles and good lungs) combat evil and injustice wherever they find it. Key to the longevity of the series - Doctor Who can do what the James Bond movies have done several times. When fatally injured, Time Lords have the ability to regenerate, totally changing their faces and personalities, allowing the ability to swap out the lead roll when the actor wants to leave the series. So there have been several Doctors with different faces (ten, so far), but all of them the same character.

Oh, and the name of the show is Doctor Who. The main character is simply called The Doctor.

The Seeds of Death opens with the TARDIS landing on Earth in the late 21st Century. Civilization has become reliant on the T-Mat system, a matter transmitting device has replaced traditional forms of transport, allowing people and freight to travel instantly anywhere around the globe. The system, as these things tend to do, is currently malfunctioning and the human race is grinding to a halt! The Doctor (the one with the Moe haircut) agrees to pilot an obsolete rocket to the Moon relay station to investigate.

The Doctor arrives to find the moon base crawling with Ice Warriors! The Ice Warriors are preparing to invade earth - just as soon as they send seeds through to terraform the biosphere, making it more like mars like and less habitable for humans.

Now it's up to the Doctor to escape from the clutches of the Ice Warriors, return to Earth, reverse the terraforming and stop the Martian invasion!

You know, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Doctor Two. I think it's mostly because the poor guy had his episode count devastated by the BBC's stupid policy back in the late sixties to throw out the original Broadcast Masters. Sure there are chunks of Doctor One missing, but it's mostly a 4 or 5 story span in season three. Patrick, on the other hand is completely missing season four, most of season five and a handful of stories from season six. So I'll treat even the completely crap stories as pure gold because there's just so little of his left to like.

That said - it's not a great story. Not bad, mind you - just overly long and padded, with a sharp drop in the action around the fourth episode. Still, there's plenty of good stuff to offset the bad: Pat is just fun to watch, playing the Doctor with a giddy goofiness yet with the underlying intelligence that a Time Lord should have. The Ice Warriors look great too. The make-up and prosthetics look exceptionally effective and creepy.

And I do like the theme that we would eventually become bored with space travel and exploration and visits to the moon. Unfortunately that's a theme that's become all real in the last 20 years. I remember when I was a kid, how a simple space shuttle launch was front page material, how the teacher would hold up class for a rocket launch. Nowadays, when was the last time you saw a launch on Television that wasn’t on The NASA Channel? Sadly it takes a Challenger or Columbia to draw America's attention to which fat apprentice loses the most weight and will be voted off the island.

While I would never accuse the Seeds of Death of being a deep, multi-layered story, the one layer we do get is well done. Michael Ferguson's direction is very slick and effective. Ok, the pace does drop in episode four (Not accidentally the same time that Patrick Troughton took a week off and wasn’t in the episode), but he does manage to make Aliens Stomping Around Corridors interesting and threatening.

THE DVD -
Now I've been known to sing the praises of the Restoration Team from the highest mountain and as loudly as I can, but honestly in this instance I cant say enough good about them. The original, unrestored VHS release of Seeds of Death was downright diabolical. Washed out, no detail to the picture - words fail me for how mind-bogglingly dreadful this thing looked. No really, whatever you're imagining, it was at least twice as bad as that.

The DVD? Night and day, friends, night and day. Clean, pristine, gorgeous looking. Typical Restoration Team standards, but this time they really do make a silk purse from lemons (or whatever)

THE EXTRAS -
For commentary this time out we get long time Who alumni Terrance Dicks, director Michael Ferguson and companions Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury. Frazer is always a blast, and doesn't hide the fact that he had a great time on the show. Uncle Terrance is a fountain of behind the scenes trivia and anecdotes. Next up is a well done documentary, a short bit of cecovered footages from Evil of the Daleks originally slated for the Tomb of the Cybermen release, a handful of New Zealand Censor Clips from various missing episodes (proving that God indeed has a sense of humor - the only surviving footage from these shows are clips that were deemed too scary and censored out of the original New Zealand run). We also get another TARDIS-cam, photo gallery and the subtitle trivia track.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
A pretty far clip from some of the show's best episodes, but it's solid enough to be entertaining - even if it is padded in places.

OTHER DOCTOR WHO EPISODES ON DVD:

DOCTOR ONE -
* The Beginning * Doctor Who and the Daleks * The Aztecs * The Dalek Invasion of Earth * The Web Planet * The Lost in Time Collection *
DOCTOR TWO -
* Tomb of the Cybermen* The Seeds of Death *
DOCTOR THREE -
* Spearhead From Space * The Three Doctors * Carnival of Monsters*
DOCTOR FOUR -
* The Ark in Space * Genesis of the Daleks * The Pyramids of Mars * The Robots of Death * The Talons of Weng-Chiang *
DOCTOR FIVE -
* Earthshock * The Five Doctors * Resurrection of the Daleks * The Caves of Androzani*
DOCTOR SIX -
* Vengeance on Varos * Revelation of the Daleks*
DOCTOR SEVEN -
* Rememberance of the Daleks * The Television Movie*
THE NEW SERIES -
* Doctor Who - Series One * Doctor Who - Series Two * Torchwood - Series One * Doctor Who - Series Three * The Infinite Quest*


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12