Episode 2

With the Master wreaking havoc, the Doctor trapped in the past and her friends on the run, our heroes face a desperate race against time to save humanity from extinction.

PAUL KIRKLEY

The role of science in Doctor Who has long been a subject of controversy. Even before the series launched, its creators stipulated it should be classi fied as “neither fantasy nor space travel nor science fiction,” with Sydney Newman insisting the new serial should “as rooted in reality as possible.”

The Daleks put paid to that idea within weeks, of course, setting up a tension between scienti fic fact and speculative fiction that has never really been resolved. In the early 1980s, for example, incoming script editor Christopher H Bidmead made a great play of injecting a dose of ‘hard’ science into a series he thought had become too silly and whimsical.