




PRODUCTION INFO
Name
Frontios
Serial Code
6N
First Transmitted
26 January 1984
Final Ratings
8.00m
CAST
Regular Cast
Peter Davison (The Doctor), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Mark Strickson (Turlough)
Guest Cast
Peter Gilmore (Brazen), Lesley Dunlop (Norna), William Lucas (Range), Jeff Rawle (Plantagenet), Maurice O’Connell (Cockerill), Richard Ashley (Orderly), John Gillett (Gravis), William Bowen, George Campbell, Hedi Khursandi, Michael Malcolm, Stephen Speed (Tractators), Alison Skilbeck (Deputy), Raymond Murtagh (Retrograde)
CREW
Written by |
Christopher H Bidmead |
Directed by |
Michael Owen Morris |
Produced by |
John Nathan Turner |
SYPNOSIS
As a strange force takes hold of the TARDIS, The Doctor and his friends find themselves grounded in the inhospitable planet of Frontios, where the last survivors of the human race scratch out a desperate existence far away from their long dead homeworld. The colonists are gripped by fear and paranoia as the planet is battered by attacks from space and they watch as the bodies of their dead are sucked into the ground.
But The Doctor only appreciates the true gravity of the situation when he finds that the TARDIS has been destroyed…
NOTES
The conclusion of this story apparently leads into Resurrection of the Daleks.
This story had a working title of The Wanderers.
When Tegan traps Brazen in the medical unit, she puts a bar across the middle of a door handle. By the next scene it has moved to the top of the handle.
The destruction of the Earth is seen from different perspectives in The Ark and The Enemy of the World.
The TARDIS shall have other near-death incidents in Blood Heat, where it’s almost Time Rammed by an alternate version of itself, GodEngine, where it’s nearly permanently ripped apart after being caught in a Vortex rupture, and The Shadows of Avalon, where it’s almost destroyed when caught in the barriers between dimensions.
The Fifth Doctor asks Turlough to get a portable mu-field generator and some argon discharge globes.
Turlough has a two-corpira coin.
The Fifth Doctor is about to explain what a Widmanstätten pattern is, but gets interrupted.
The Fifth Doctor compares the TARDIS to a chicken vol-au-vent.
The Sixth Doctor would encounter the Tractators again in the English village of Hollowdean in the early 1980s, millions of years prior to their activities on Frontios. (The Hollows of Time)
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