Season 21, Episode 3 | 4 parts | First broadcast: 26 January – 3 February 1984 | Writer: Christopher H. Bidmead | Director: Ron Jones
Cast
- Peter Davison as the Doctor
- Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka
- Mark Strickson as Vislor Turlough
- Peter Gilmore as Plantagenet
- William Lucas as Range
Summary
The TARDIS arrives on the isolated planet Frontios, home to the last surviving remnant of humanity, whose desperate colony is under relentless bombardment from mysterious meteorites and threatened from within by a mutinous political struggle. As the Doctor uncovers a horrifying secret buried beneath the colony involving the monstrous, burrowing Tractators, he must help the humans survive an enemy far stranger than falling rocks.
Interesting Facts
- The story presents an unusually dire, last-stand scenario for humanity, framed as the survivors of a dying Earth with nowhere left to flee.
- Its underground Tractator creatures, which manipulate gravity to drag victims beneath the surface, offered one of the era’s more unsettling body-horror concepts.
- Writer Christopher H. Bidmead returned for his final regular script contribution to the classic series with this story.
- The Doctor briefly warns his companions that his own people, the Time Lords, have expressly forbidden interference on Frontios, a rare direct acknowledgment of the show’s non-interference rule.
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