be the Doctor’s sidekick, and she was replaced with the ditzy Jo Grant (Katy Manning) in the eighth season. As with all the discs under review here, both the main feature and the extras have optional English subtitles, as well as an informative “pro- duction note option” that provides onscreen text during the main program. Additionally, inserting this disc into a PC-ROM drive provides access to the 1971 DR. WHO ANNUAL, 96 pages of Doctor Who stories and scientific articles, as well as 12 pages from THE RADIO TIMES with billings for “Inferno.” Although Pertwee’s run as the Doctor was a return to grace for the show, the most popular of the original Doctors undoubtedly remains Tom Baker. For comparison, the highest num- ber of viewers for Pertwee’s “Inferno” was six million, considered a success at the time, while Baker’s Doctor pulled in almost twice that num- ber during its peak popularity. Baker played the Doctor from 1974 to 1981, longer than any other actor, and, unlike Pertwee’s characterization, Baker’s Doctor faces great danger with a twinkle in his eye. The regime change that accompa- nied the change in actors was committed to


telling more adult and darker stories, although the transition resulted in an uneasy mix of the juvenile and the more mature as Baker and the new team found their legs.


“Genesis of the Daleks” (Story 78) comes from Baker’s first season, originally aired over six nights starting March 8, 1975 and ending April 12. It’s the DOCTOR WHO story most widely known by the general public. Not only has it been rebroadcast by the BBC several times over the years, but an audio version was released as an LP in 1979. One of the advantages of having a time-traveling char- acter is his ability to go to whatever point in time you need him to. In this instance, the Time Lords (and writer Terry Nation) send the Doctor to the planet Skaro in the distant past, when the Daleks are still in development, so that he can stop them from becoming the most dangerous race of be- ings in the galaxy. The Doctor and his two com- panions, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter, who wrote some DOC- TOR WHO novelizations before dying at 42 from a diabetes-related heart attack), arrive near the end of a thousand years of war between the Thals and


Tom Baker (until recently the most popular Doctor in series history), meets his arch-enemies in “Genesis of the Daleks.”


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