Doctor Who serial 96 was the Underworld. It's a 4 parter that first aired January 7 to 28 1978 during the 15th season. Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are the Doctor and Leela. It was written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin and directed by Norman Stewart. Bob Baker wrote 9 serials for Doctor Who, most with Dave Martin, and would go on to write the 4 Wallace and Gromit films. Underworld is loosely based on the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts. Bob Baker talks a bit about it on the making of featurette and the commentary. They were always looking for ideas from history or fiction they could adapt into the story and occasionally it works out pretty well.
As the first episode opens Leela is operating the Tardis. They run into a distortion in space and find a small planet in the middle of it. The Tardis materializes inside a space ship of some ancient space travellers. The ship lands on the planet and we find that they have been travelling for 100,000 years. Thanks to regeneration machines the crew are still alive. The Doctor figures out they are the Minyans whom the Time Lords had a disastrous meeting with 100,000 years ago. The Minyans first felt the Time Lords were Gods but soon learned differently. The Minyans took the Time Lords technology and fought a war that destroyed their planet. Two ships left looking for a place to start over. One of them is the ship the Tardis is on and the other is buried in the planet in the distortion.
On the planet, in tunnels, they find some miners who are oppressed by some robe wearing twats. The miners are kept in their place by torture and murder. The Doc digs in and starts investigating the problem. He'll fix things before the end of the story, never fear. I thought the story was ok but not as engaging as some of the better ones. The spaceship effects and costumes are pretty good. The green screen tunnels are adequate. There's a pretty good ship bridge set but the rest of them are pretty ordinary.
Tom Baker, Louise Jameson and Bob Baker chat while watching the serial. They tell some stories and Tom professes his desire for Imogen Bickford-Smith. She played Tala, one of the ship's crew, and she's a looker. Most of the commentaries with Tom have him expressing his love for many of the young ladies in his past, both on DW and other projects. I have to admit I like listening to his stories. There's a making of short, a bit of the rehearsal footage, the unread info track, the Radio Times listings and a photo gallery. A lot of the conversations are about how they had started to run out of money in the last half of the season and needed to cut costs by shooting the episode in the studio. They used a lot of blue screen for the tunnels. There's an interesting bit about the BBC taking a lot of cast and crew to see Star Wars when it opened.
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