I've Been Watching...

[Well, not the missing episodes, only clips available of those...]

Several years ago I was in Australia for a conference, and on TV at the time they were showing episodes of Doctor Who. I caught the end of The Sea Devils, and the first episode of The Mutants. Which meant I never found out what happened to Ky and Varan... until now! [I had seen it many, many, many years ago, but like I remember that!]

So at last I get to find out that... pretty much everyone dies. Certainly most of the Solonians do. Consider that most of them mutate, and most of those end up in the cave and gassed to death. Those that are on the Sky Base are all shot. Ky only survives by becoming Super Ky. Presumably there are whole tribes of them on the planet, but you wouldn't think so. Not to mention the number of Sky Base personnel that die (one at the hands of the Doctor himself!). [Notably, amid all the race focus of this episode [it was focus enough for one of the extra disc items to be about it] the black guy survives!]

Although it is six episode, it doesn't feel padded. There's enough change of scene and progressing of information that nothing immediately feels like it should have been cut out. (No doubt you could trim the episodes down, but you could do that for any story.) Looking back on it now, it's amazing how the whole planet was subjugated by a fat guy and a handful of guards. And yet, it all works out nicely. [I'm glad they got rid of the clone plot, no idea what that would have been about.]

We've got the usual commentary (seven people mixing it up this time, this is how you fill out a six part story, not just miss episodes), and production subtitles, with the overlap of information as usual. [Yes, Paul, I know it's entirely accidental.] The second disc has extra stuff on it... but I'm hard pressed to be excited about it to consider it worthy of needing a second disc. There's the usual behind the scenes talking heads bit, but the rest of it could easily have been missed or allocated to a four-parter needing more filling out. (And that Blue Peter segment was amazingly irrelevant, short and containing no episode specific creatures!)

You don't need to be seeing the colonial angle to be enjoying this story!

[END]