This month’s Doctor Who DVD offerings, from a storytelling standpoint, have virtually nothing in common. One is a contemporary earthbound tale about an invader from space, while the other takes place far in the future, on a ship taking a vast voyage across the stars. One is a nice looking color production from the 70s, and the other is a creaky black and white yarn from the 60s. One of them is very, very good, and the other is, well, not. Aside from being Doctor Who, the two do have one other thing in common, and that’s that their titles are similar to some other Who stories, both of which have been previously released on DVD. Seven years before Tom Baker battled the Krynoid in “The Seeds of Doom,” Patrick Troughton squared off against the Ice Warriors in “The Seeds of Death,” and nine years after William Hartnell defeated the Monoids in “The Ark,” Tom Baker fought the Wirrn on a different ark (albeit one on a similar journey) in “The Ark in Space.” Hopefully nobody will get either of those arks confused with “Arc of Infinity,” but it is a possibility. If you’re confused, I apologize, because that wasn’t the intention.Having previously praised two other stories (“Planet of Evil” and “The Brain of Morbius”) from Season Thirteen, it’s nice to have the opportunity to gush about its season finale, “The Seeds of Doom.” Yet another entry from the superb Philip Hinchcliffe produced era, “Seeds” sees the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) coming into contact with a nasty form of alien life called the Krynoid. As the Doctor so succinctly puts it, “On most planets, the animals eat the vegetation. On planets where the Krynoid gets established, the vegetation eats the animals.”
Read the rest of these DVD reviews by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.
