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Doctor Who: The Seeds Of Death
01/10/2006 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
DVD Region 2: pub: BBC BBCDVD 1151. 145 minutes. 6 episodes with loads of extras. Price: £19.99 (UK)) stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury and assorted guest stars. Buy Doctor Who The Seeds Of Death in the USA - or Buy Doctor Who The Seeds Of Death in the UK  check out website: www.bbcshop.com
I'm beginning to show my age again. Well, all right. Just every time I pick up a story that I saw live the first time back in the 60s. If you can't remember anything else from that time, we did have some marvellous and wide-ranging television programmes. In this case, this time it's also the second Ice Warriors story. I thought, initially, that some of the episodes were likely to be missing but that must apply to their first story. With the hint that there is likely to be a new Ice Warriors story with the new Who tenancy, its about time you new Who fans out there acquainted yourself with the early appearances and there's only three of them. As this is a complete story with nothing missing, the second one is a good place to start. If memory serves, the first story only featured one Ice Warrior. Here, you're supposed to have an entire brigade, even if only three and a leader is on show on the screen but hey, that's no worse than a Dalek army. In those days, an absence of CGI and you had to make do with what was available. With Ice Warriors looking pretty much the same, three or four actually became a lot more in the course of these six episodes even if they most met their end under the rather melting effect of a human generated heat beam.
It is the 21st century and mankind has foregone its use of rocketry for Transfer-Matter or T-Mat, a revolutionary teleportation device. The bridging station, for some not really explained reason, is on the Moon. None of this is really known to the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe as the TARDIS materialises on a museum on Earth. Still unbeknown to them, the Ice Warriors have appeared and taken over the moonbase but not before one of the senior technicians sabotages and breaks down the system. Unable to contact the Moon, officials from T-Mat look up an old professor who's speciality is rockets but now with a private museum where the Doctor and crew are. The Doctor assists in getting a rocket ready for launch and they use it to go to the Moon. In the meantime, an emergency T-Mat is repaired by the surviving technicians on the Moon to allow the chief technician to come up to complete repairs before meeting the Ice Warriors. With the Doctor on the Moon as well it becomes a matter of stopping the Ice Warriors completing their mission of bombarding the Earth via T-Mat with eggs that drain the atmosphere of oxygen.
This story holds up remarkably well today. Looking at the foam used as the oxygen is sucked away, I often wondered if that was the reason for its use in the now lost but superbly scary story 'Fury From The Deep'. If anything, the foam, because it looked like an ordinary object, was a lot more worrying than the Ice Warriors. Quite how a species can get so far with only pincers for hands always concerned me and if they are brought back in the new Who, I can definitely see a re-design in that area.
The extras are first class by the way, with audio commentaries with every episode as well as background featurettes including showing special effects from 'Evil Of The Daleks'. Good value for money.
GF Willmetts
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