The second season of Terry Nation's sci-fi series is now available on Blu-ray, and once again it will be of great interest to Doctor Who fans of the 1970's / 80's.
For starters we have a host of Doctor Who guest actors making appearances across the entire season. Bruce Purchase plays an alien monarch and gives almost exactly the same performance as he gave as the Captain of Zanak, for instance, and you get to see William Squire without his Shadow mask.
Other guests include Gareth Armstrong (The Masque of Mandragora), Paul Shelley (Four to Doomsday), John Abineri (Ambassadors of Death and others), Sheila Ruskin (Keeper of Traken), John Bennett (Invasion of the Dinosaurs / Talons of Weng-Chiang) and many, many more.
The episode Gambit alone features John (K-9) Leeson, Aubrey Woods (Day of the Daleks), Paul Grist (Claws of Axos), Denis Carey (Shada / Keeper of Traken / Timelash), Sylvia Coleridge (Seeds of Doom) and Deep Roy (Mr Sin) - and it's written by Robert Holmes.
Director Morris Barry, responsible for the best two Cyberman stories ever, even pops up as a medic in the episode Killer.
Of course, this series was the one which almost had the Daleks feature as the invading aliens in the final episode, Star One, but on hearing of this plan Graham Williams decided to get them back into Doctor Who and we got Destiny of the Daleks.
As with Series 1, every episode can be enjoyed with new VFX and these are to be recommended as I was always disappointed with many of the original shots - such as an overuse of flat cut-outs, for instance.
As with the Doctor Who Collection box sets, we have a plethora of extras to enjoy, made by the same teams.
Both of the Matthew Sweet interviews have Doctor Who connections. The first is with Brian Croucher who took on the role of Travis for the second season, and who had appeared in Robots of Death.
The second interview is with designer Roger Murray-Leach, who speaks just as much about his work on Doctor Who as on Blake's 7.
There are two new biographical pieces on actors who are no longer with us. This is the series in which Gan dies, and so we have a lovely documentary about David Jackson who played him. This is hosted by Toby Hadoke, who interviews his son and widow as they look through his theatrical scrapbooks. The vast majority of Jackson's work was on stage and is therefore ephemeral, so it was nice to learn more about him.
The other biography is of Supreme Commander Servalan herself, Jacqueline Pearce. She played Chessene in The Two Doctors, and Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are amongst the contributors to this. It was a fascinating, eccentric life she lead, as you'll quickly find out.
Mat Irvine appears in a couple of featurettes on model work, and we also get some archive convention footage.
There are two wider-ranging documentaries - part two of an older one, and the second part of the new one filmed for these box sets, which looks specifically at this second year. There is a certain amount of overlap as the new doc uses excerpts from the older one, but that older one is still welcome as it includes contributions from a number of people no longer with us. The first parts of both documentaries appear on the Series 1 set.
Definitely recommended in its own right, and as a companion piece to classic Doctor Who.
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