Season 9 sits at the very heart of the Jon Pertwee era - third of his five seasons. It is also the mid-point for Katy Manning's three seasons as companion Jo Grant. You would expect this set to be full of UNIT adventures - yet they only feature in the first and last stories, and even then are absent from some whole episodes.
After two seasons very much restricted to contemporary Earth, with just one off-planet mission for the Time Lords, Season 9 coincided with frustration on the part of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks to get the Doctor back into Time and Space again. As such, we have two missions for the Time Lords - out of just five stories. The middle story - neither UNIT nor Time Lord mission - is The Sea Devils. This acted as a means to reintroduce the Master, last seen being captured at the conclusion of The Daemons.
This season saw a major production change - one we take for granted these days. The stories were broadcast out of order. Due to the heavy amount of filming at sea, The Sea Devils was brought forward so that better weather was more likely in the Solent, whilst the all studio The Curse of Peladon could be made in any weather. Barry Letts also wanted to split the two Time Lord mission stories to vary the shape of the season overall.
We open with Day of the Daleks, which began life as a non-Dalek story about time-travelling assassins caught up in a temporal paradox. Deemed not strong enough for a season launch, the Daleks were brought forward from Robert Sloman's closing story. It's probably the weakest of all the classic Dalek stories, hampered by the obvious fact that the director only has three Daleks to play with, and making one of them a unique gold version severely limits their impact in the final battle. The voices are terrible as well.
You get three different versions of this story for your money - the original broadcast one, the souped-up Special Edition, and the omnibus. The latter is a bit of a cheat as it no longer exists, so it is simply the broadcast version newly re-edited.
When it comes to improved picture quality then The Curse of Peladon is the perfect example. The improvements are stunning. I know many people refuse to buy these sets as they are just upscaled SD, but the picture and sound quality is way over and above that seen and heard on the DVDs.
The first colour appearance of the Ice Warriors, accompanied by Alpha Centauri and Arcturus, the story was inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles but Peladon's entry into the Galactic Federation also mirrored the entry of the UK into the EEC.
The third story is The Sea Devils, which began life as a sequel to The Silurians. Malcolm Hulke opted to feature their marine cousins instead. The Master returned, escaping from prison, whilst ex-Royal Navy men Barry Letts and Jon Pertwee got to play with a lot of military hardware.
This story really should have featured UNIT, and it is very odd that it doesn't, but the production team wanted to keep the RN happy and feature one of their own as the surrogate Brigadier character.
The Mutants is a story inspired by colonialism and racism, from Bob Baker & Dave Martin. It's the second mission for the Time Lords. Some very good location filming in Kentish chalk caves, and the Mutants themselves are a wonderful design (courtesy of future Oscar winner James Acheson).
Bringing up the rear, in more ways than one, is The Time Monster. Like the previous season finale, it's a collaboration between Letts and Robert Sloman, combining mythology with science fiction. Unlike The Daemons, it really fails to work. The Season 8 story had continuity of location and linear narrative, but this story wanders all over the place - a mish-mash of half-baked ideas.
Losing the Daleks, Sloman retained the mixed-up history from his original scripts and inherited the Master as the main villain. It's a rare trip into history for Pertwee's Doctor - even if it is a mythological history.
That's the stories, what of the Extras?
As well as those extra two versions of the Dalek story we also get the omnibus for The Sea Devils - but that's also a modern reconstruction. There are also a few miscellaneous PAL episodes converted from US or Canadian 525-line NTSC episodes, which were used to add colour to the BBC's B&W film copies. These allow you to compare the picture quality between DVD and Blu-ray versions.
On the sofa we have Katy Manning with director Michael E Briant. She is able to talk about her personal role in the season, whilst he can talk more generally about working on the series during this time period, before dealing specifically with his Sea Devil story. Then we have the usual Fifth Doctor panel - Davison, Sutton and Fielding. I've said enough about the latter's negativity previously, so won't say any more. Much more enjoyable is watching Sophie Aldred and Wendy Padbury. The former states that she was 10 when this season went out, so Pertwee was very much her Doctor, whilst Padbury shows loyalty to her Doctor by intimating she stopped watching after she left - but of course actors in the early 1970's were never at home on a Saturday evening in those pre-video recorder days anyway. Davison confirms this - he was too busy working in theatre to watch the series when Pertwee was Doctor.
The Time Monster never got a making-of on its DVD release, and they make up for that now.
Annoyingly they haven't re-edited the Peladon documentary. The two Peladon stories were released on DVD as a double-pack and the documentaries looked at both of them mixed together. Here we are getting interviews about Monster of Peladon mixed in with stuff about Curse.
Another annoyance is the presentation of convention footage, which I've mentioned before. I really don't understand why they can't give us subtitles when it comes to audience questions, which we simply cannot hear. No care at all is taken over these features. On this set, we get Nicholas Courtney and Richard Franklin interviewed at a con in 1986. Both are quite critical of the Trial season, which was being broadcast at the time. A second convention feature has Ingrid Pitt and Terrance Dicks as the panelists.
The main new documentary feature is a locations one. Katy Manning tours Southern England to visit some of the season's locations, meeting up with Anna Barry (Anat) near Bull's Bridge (the tunnel in the Dalek story), Briant on the Isle of Wight, and Ky actor Garrick Hagon at Chislehurst and Stone farm Caves, Kent, which once doubled for the planet Solos. Manning also gets to have a go on one of the trikes seen in Day of the Daleks. It ends with Katy remembering Pertwee and Delgado and becoming quite emotional.
No Matthew Sweet interview on this set, but we do get a couple of new interviews on the second Sea Devil disc - one with Briant (50 mins), which looks at his entire career and goes sailing with him, and another with stunt performer Stuart Fell, again looking at his work both in and beyond Doctor Who (26 mins).
Audio-wise we get Jon Pertwee reading an abridged version of Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon, as well as a couple of period radio interviews. Other items include a comedy item with Pertwee and Cybermen, and a Nationwide piece on the Science Museum's BBC VFX Exhibition - precursor to the permanent Blackpool and Longleat exhibitions.
All in all - it's another fantastic box-set, which takes us to the half-way point in these releases (13 of 26). The first set came out in 2018, which means we have roughly five more years to see the completion of 'The Collection'. I suspect that Season 20 will be coming later this year - an anniversary season for an anniversary year, and would obviously hope to see a Troughton set added very soon (probably the mostly complete Season 6), though I suspect we will get another Tom Baker release before then. Season 16 - the Key to Time one - marks another anniversary after all: the 15th (and the 100th story).
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