After the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Harry Sullivan returned to Earth and dealt with the Zygons and the legendary Loch Ness Monster in their previous adventure, Terror of the Zygons, the Doctor convinces Sarah to take off with him in the TARDIS and return to UNIT HQ instead of taking the Earthly way back like the Brigadier and Harry. However, the Doctor winds up cleverly taking them away from Earth and on to another mind-spinning adventure.
The planet in question where the Doctor takes Sarah is called Zeta Minor, the last planet on the edge of the universe. There happens to be a distress call coming from the planet, so the Doctor and Sarah investigate, hoping to come to the rescue. They realise that they are months too late when they land on the planet and walk into an abandoned scientific lab and stumble over a couple of odd-looking corpses. But they aren’t the only ones to have received the distress signal...
The other arriving party is a military space ship sent out to rescue the scientists on Zeta Minor. The Doctor, Sarah, and the military crew discover the whole story of the events on the swampy, unforgiving planet. One scientist in particular, Sorenson, went out on an expedition to Zeta Minor looking for any source that could “repower” the dying sun in his race’s solar system. Upon discovering minerals on the planet that could theoretically do so, he excavates several pounds of the minerals and is ready to leave the planet. Throughout his expedition, however, his team of seven other scientists are being killed off one by one by some mysterious creature. Sorenson is left alone, waiting for anyone to pick up the distress signal and take him off the planet. When the military ship and the Doctor and Sarah arrive, he is ready to do just that. But there is something more about these minerals that Sorenson doesn’t know about that the Doctor soon discovers.
The minerals found on the planet happen to be particles of antimatter, and any attempt to take the minerals off the planet would end up with catastrophic results. But why mustn’t the antimatter be removed? The Doctor discovers a strange pit on the planet, and to fall into this pit is not simply to fall to bottom of it; the pit is actually a void between two universes, the one we live in and one composed of antimatter, and Zeta Minor connects these two universes. But hold on, it gets even weirder than this.
There is a sort of guardian on the planet, which the Doctor and Sarah dub “the Anti-man”, and if any of the antimatter on the planet is attempted to be removed, it will do whatever it takes to make sure the particles never leave.
Still unmoved by the Doctor’s demands to leave the antimatter and find a new source to repower the dying sun, Sorenson keeps a stash of antimatter to himself, which alters his very person. It is up to the Doctor and Sarah to return all of the stolen antimatter to Zeta Minor before permanent harm is done to the military space ship and its crew.
After watching Terror of the Zygons, I knew the Doctor and Sarah wouldn’t really wind up back in UNIT. One could tell by the look in the Doctor’s eyes that that wasn’t his original intention. It’s really easy to tell when the Fourth Doctor is just itching to embark on another time-travelling experience, simply just by looking at the way his eyes widen, his broad smile, his giddiness to keep going.
By the way, when did Sarah have time to change outfits between stories?
From this:
To this:
I love how the element of science used in this story is focused on antimatter. It was a great deal in the mid-‘70’s and it still is to most scientists today, and to see it play a big role in the future, where this story takes place, is relatable to us watching the show.
The antimatter as the villain in this episode is a brilliant creation. It seems so much more scary and frightening when it doesn’t have a particular solid shape, as we usually perceive villains to be. We want our fears to take a solid shape, because having this mould to look at and to have sketched in our minds makes it a fear that we can grasp. However, when there is no definite shape to our fears, like if we fear a ghost or spirit or this “energy in physical form” in this story, we have no perfect image of it to relate to, so our fear is much less tangible and even more frightening. To have no definite shape makes it so much more difficult to figure out what it actually is.
Zeta Minor kind of reminds me of the planet Dagobah from Star Wars. For those out of the loop, Dagobah is the planet Yoda inhabits, exiling himself to it after the rise of the Galactic Empire (gee thanks, Darth Vader). The swamps, low-hanging branches, odd plants, foggy atmosphere, and rough terrain on Zeta Minor are so similar to that of Dagobah that I sometimes couldn’t help thinking that Yoda himself would pop up out of nowhere in Planet of Evil.
While I witnessed the physical change of Sorenson, I was also reminded of another classic theatrical figure. The way Sorenson is slowly becoming overpowered by antimatter and is transforming from himself into some horrible beast, back and forth until he is a permanent monster reminds me of Jekyll and Hyde. Only after watching the special feature documentary of this story were my assumptions confirmed; the producer of this story based Sorenson’s chemical alteration on The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. Called it!
So, will the Doctor and Sarah return to UNIT, as the Doctor promised in the previous episode? Chances are the TARDIS will throw them off course yet again...
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