Doctor Who-Survival (1989)

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General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Main Menu Audio & Animation Audio Commentary-Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and Andrew Cartmel Audio Commentary-By Doctor Who Fans Featurette-Cat Flap Featurette-Endgame Featurette-Search Out Science Featurette-Little Girl Lost Featurette-Destiny of the Doctors Featurette-Continuities Outtakes Deleted Scenes DVD-ROM Extras-Radio Times Listings Informational Subtitles Isolated Musical Score Gallery-Photo
Rating
Year Of Production	1989
Running Time	72:59 (Case: 264)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (48:35) Dual Disc Set	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Alan Wareing
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Sylvester McCoy Sophie Aldred Anthony Ainley Julian Holloway Lisa Bowerman Norman Pace Gareth Hale Will Barton Sakuntala Ramanee David John Sean Oliver Kate Eaton Kathleen Bidmead
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Dual
RPI	?	Music	Dominic Glynn Nick Somerville Ken Trew

    The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace (Sophie Aldred) arrive in present day (assuming you can accept 1989 as the present day!) Perivale, Ace's home town. The trip was made at Ace's request as she was hoping to catch up with some of the old gang. Unfortunately for Ace, none of them seem to be around. After searching high and low, Ace stumbles across one loopy old friend who confirms the obvious - all her friends, indeed virtually all the young folk around Perivale, have disappeared without a peep. The remaining handful of youths have little to do except attending Sergeant Patterson's overly violent self defence classes. All this seems oblivious to the Doctor, however, as he is rather pre-occupied with trying to catch a black cat that is wandering the neighbourhood.

    That black cat is in fact a scout for the Cheetah People, a race of feline humanoids from another planet that like to ride around on horseback and hunt things. Once it has found suitable prey, the scout teleports back to its own planet and a Cheetah Person teleports to Earth and teleports back home again with the new prey. Once on the planet of the Cheetah People, the only way to escape is to have one of the felines teleport you back. Ace manages to learn this the hard way.

    On the Cheetah People planet, Ace meets some of the old chums she was looking for in the first place and attempts to lead a minor rebellion among the prey. It's not long before the Doctor and the pesky tag-along Sergeant join them. The group soon find out that the Master has also managed to trap himself on the planet and has begun to bond with the Cheetah People, so much so that he is turning into one. The Doctor and gang find that they have to both find a way off the planet and prevent the Cheetah People and their new Master returning to Earth, without unleashing the beast within themselves.

    Survival was literally the end of an era for Doctor Who. Rather unexpectedly to many fans, it was the last Doctor Who story to air before the show went on indefinite hiatus in 1989. It was also one of the show's better latter day stories.

    While the central story is rather good, the characterisations of the supporting cast are pretty poor (I won't even start on the ludicrous guest starring roles given to comedic duo Hale & Pace in the first episode). Similarly, the effects and costumes (particularly the excellent Cheetah People prosthetics) are some of the best the show had seen, but the story's direction is frustratingly below-par. Such mixed bags were unfortunately all too common with latter day Doctor Who.

    Survival was not the fitting send off that Doctor Who deserved after 26 seasons, but at least it was a reasonable story that rounded the 26th season out fairly well. Doctor Who will certainly find the extras contained on this 2 disc set more worthwhile than the 3 part story itself, though that's not to say the story itself is too bad. Like many of the seventh Doctor's adventures, it is just a bit of a jumble.

Video

    The show is presented in its original 1.29:1 aspect ratio and is not 16x9 enhanced (though many of the extras are widescreen and 16x9 enhanced).

    The video looks very good for Doctor Who. The story was shot entirely on outdoor broadcast video and appears to have been well preserved. For the most part the image is reasonably sharp, although there are a number of shots that are poorly focused. There is good colour depth and dark colours have come across rather well. There aren't any issues with low-level noise or grain, which frequently diminishes the quality of video in Doctor Who episodes.

    There are no MPEG compression-related artefacts visible at any point or any artefacts arising from tape damage. A modest degree of edge enhancement is detectable in a number of scenes, but only if you are specifically looking for it and not enough to detract from the viewing experience.

    The subtitles are white and slightly thin, but reasonably easy to read. Based on the portion of the show I watched with subtitles, they appear to be accurate and well timed.

    This is an RSDL disc. The layer break occurs between episodes 2 and 3 at 48:35, a minor break is noticeable but not distracting as it is between the credits of one episode and the into of the next.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
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Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The original English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192 Kb/s) audio is available as well as a brand new Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 Kb/s) soundtrack and a Dolby Digital 2.0 (192 Kb/s) isolated score track.

    Both English audio tracks feature well synchronised and clearly audible dialogue.

    The music in Survival is a bit of a departure from the cheesy synth madness of many Doctor Who adventures, particularly on the planet of the Cheetah People. It is a departure that works well in building a far more dramatic atmosphere (as opposed to a melodramatic atmosphere) than many Doctor Who scores. The most distinguishing feature of the score is a lone distorted electric guitar that wails over the empty space in the sequences on the barren Cheetah People village area (another Doctor Who quarry).

    The original audio track is very well preserved and sounds exactly as you would expect of Doctor Who. There's not much picked up by the surrounds through pro-logic or that reaches the subwoofer, but the audio is clear and serves its purpose well.

    The 5.1 mix is a very aggressive surround-heavy mix that builds a powerful atmosphere to the story, particularly on the Cheetah People planet. The subwoofer gets a great workout all the way through the 5.1 mix, although it is perhaps occasionally a bit too bass-heavy. Whilst it is a great mix, the 5.1 mix is actually a little bit too much and seems a tad out of place with the relatively crude look of the video. Many fans may have a hard time getting used to it!

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Like many of the later series Doctor Who DVDs, most fans will want the Survival DVD set for its extras rather than the episodes themselves. This two-disc set is packed with worthwhile featurettes that look at latter day Doctor Who as a whole and examine the death of the series.

Main Menu Audio & Animation

    Animated menus with a random sound bites from the story, designed to the same format as every other Doctor Who DVD release.

Cat Flap Featurettes (28:06 and 34:01)

    This 'Making Of' has been split into two featurettes (cleverly entitled Cat Flap I and Cat Flap II, each running around the half hour mark. There isn't really a clear division between the content of either.

    Cat Flap is an incredibly in-depth 'Making Of', even by usual standards for Doctor Who 'Making Of' featurettes. It begins by examining the development of the character Ace throughout the course of the 26th season of Doctor Who and how Survival fits in that story arc. This is rather interesting stuff, but is basically a double-up of the Little Girl Lost featurette that is found on the second disc of extras (although it is a little more concise). The featurettes also cover the usual script development, production, effects, music and general pop-culture relevance angles that you would expect from a serious 'Making Of' featurette (as opposes to a fluffy Electronic Press Kit style featurette).

Endgame Featurette (44:23)

    This featurette is, for my money, the centrepiece of this set. It examines the shock cancellation of the show, the underhanded manner in which the cancellation was managed by the BBC and what was planned for the future of the show if it had continued into a 27th season. Each of these facets are quite fascinating. The featurette covers both sides to the story of the cancellation quite well and features a candid interview with the man who was BBC Head of Drama Series at the time, Peter Cregeen. The future of the show is also rather interesting as season 27 would have continued with a new script editor and a new producer, as the stalwarts that held those positions were already moving on to other projects regardless of the future of Doctor Who.

Search Out Science Featurette (19:21)

    A painfully funny series of clips from a quiz-style show for children. Rather than actually having contestants, the Doctor (while awkwardly balancing on a poorly effected wobbly box in space) asks some rather simple science themed questions to whoever is watching while Ace, K-9 and a rather crap "alien" (he's really just a "theatrey" guy in a suit made of tin-foil) rationalise possible answers.

Little Girl Lost Featurette (16:34)

    A featurette on the development of the character Ace. This featurette looks into the origins of Ace, the producers goals for her, how her character was developed, where she was headed if the show had continued, and how she inspired the female companions (particularly Rose, who is basically a better developed and slightly older version of the same character) in the new Doctor Who series. This featurette is pretty interesting, but doubles up on content found in the first Cat Flap featurette (although the interviews themselves are different, the interviewees rattle off the same rhetoric almost line-for-line).

Destiny of the Doctors Clips (13:51)

    Anthony Ainley's last appearance as the Master was for the 1997 computer game Destiny of the Doctors (and what a clunker it was). The game featured quite a number of studio-recorded clips of the Master guiding players through the game and cursing the various incarnations of the Doctor. All the clips Ainley recorded are dumped here in one long sequence. The clips are grouped together according to what backdrop they were shot against and roughly in the order you would encounter them in the game within each backdrop grouping.

Continuities Featurette (3:05)

    A series of clips of BBC continuity announcements and adverts from when the show first aired. This stuff is painfully 1980s in style, which makes for a fun watch!

Deleted Scenes (9:19)

    There are considerable number of deleted and extended scenes here. Some are presented with textual introductions to provide a bit of context, but many aren't and those that aren't are frequently hard to really put in context or figure out what the point of inclusion was (which I fear was frequently, "because it was there"). There are some good comparisons between effected and non-effected footage in the middle of this lot, however.

Outtakes (16:27)

    A considerable number of outtakes, many of which aren't terribly interesting. This could have been a good featurette if it had been pared back to the handful of entertaining outtakes, but as it stands it seems more of a dumping ground than anything worthwhile.

Photo Gallery (8:39)

    A series of production stills, both behind the scenes and of the finished product, presented as a slideshow style video with audio from the show in the background.

Isolated Score

    A standard isolated score track. Some of the music in Survival is quite different to the usual 1980s cheesy synth, so it makes for a more interesting score. Of particular note, there is plenty of subdued, squealy distorted electric guitar soloing that accompanies the bleak planet of the Cheetah People scenes.

Audio Commentary By Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and script editor Andrew Cartmel

    A fairly interesting and reasonably chatty commentary from the shows two main stars and its script editor. There aren't really any surprises here, but its a reasonably interesting commentary.

Audio Commentary (episode three only) By Doctor Who Fans

    A commentary from three winners of a recent Doctor Who Magazine competition and the magazine's editor. The mob pretty much tear the episode to shreds in a humourous manner. It's a surprisingly enjoyable listen because it is a lot like sitting around with your own friends and picking apart the show. That said, it is good that it only runs for an episode as the shtick would have worn out had it run much longer.

Informational Subtitles

    A set of subtitles with production notes and other trivia about the episodes. These notes are often more interesting than the commentary (and it's not a bad commentary on this one)

Radio Times Listings DVD ROM

    A 4 page PDF file containing listings for the original airing of the show in Britain's Radio Times TV magazine, including an amusing cartoon and reader feedback letters.

    An identical version of Survival is available in Region 2. The Region 1 disc is also identical, but features different artwork. This one is a draw.

    A mixed bag of a Doctor Who adventure, featuring some very slick feline characters amidst some shonky direction, that rounds out the show's original run.

    The extras are a real treat. They examine both the episodes Survival and the general demise of the franchise.

    The video is of a high standard for original series Doctor Who. The sound is available in the original mix, which is very well preserved, or a rather over the top new 5.1 mix.

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Audio
Extras
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Overall