Spearhead from Space

**Spearhead from Space** was the first serial of season 7 of Doctor Who. Continuing from the final episode of The War Games, it marked a significant change in the format of Doctor Who. The Doctor was from now on serving his Time Lord-imposed sentence of exile on Earth. It also continued some elements from The Web of Fearand The Invasion in depicting a renewal of the Doctor's association with UNIT and re-introducing Nicholas Courtney's Brigadier as head of its British branch. Both would be regular features of this era of the programme.

The story also introduced the Doctor's binary cardio-vascular system, which became an oft-repeated feature of Time Lordphysiology thereafter. Moreover, it introduced both the Nestenes and the Autons, who reappeared in future stories. Russell T Davies used this story as a template as he wrote the first episode of the 2005 series. It also had some common features with both Steven Moffat's and Chris Chibnall's first stories as producers, in that both this story, The Eleventh Hour, and The Woman Who Fell to Earthintroduced a new Doctor and new companions after the departure of all those from the previous story, effectively making a "clean break" from the previous era of the show.

It was also the first Doctor Who serial in colour. Behind the scenes, it was the last contribution of producer Derrick Sherwin, after he was convinced by his Doctor Whopredecessor Peter Bryant to join him on the BBC's crisis-hit detective drama, Paul Temple, in the middle of principal photography. All the BBC's studio cameramen walked out on strike between the time of location filming and the first studio recording date, demanding more money for operating the technically more sophisticated new electronic colour cameras. This required Sherwin to commit the story to 16mmfilm, since the film cameramen were in a different union, and therefore not on strike. Spearhead from Space thus became not only the first colour Doctor Who story, but also the onlystory to ever be shot entirely on film. Over forty years later, Sherwin's decision to switch to film made it possible for Spearhead to easily adapt to new media: it is the first Doctor Who story of the classic era (discounting the 1996 telemovie) to be released in the Blu-ray format, and the first Classic story to receive an HD remaster specifically for the format.

## **Synopsis**

Forbidden to continue travelling the universe by his own people, the Time Lords, and exiled to Earth in the late 20th century, the newly regenerated Doctor arrives in Oxley Woodsaccompanied by a shower of mysterious meteorites. Investigating the occurrence is the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT for short), an organisation which had previously been associated with the Doctor during the Cybermen's invasion.

Led as before by Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, UNIT is soon in action when people and meteorites start going missing. Most puzzling is the attempted kidnapping of a strange hospital patient: a man with two hearts, who insists that he knows the Brigadier.

The new Doctor soon joins forces with his old friend, with UNIT, and with the recently recruited Dr Elizabeth Shaw, but time is running out. Irregular things are happening at a nearby plastics factory, while faceless creatures lurk in the woods. The Nestenes have landed a spearhead force and plan to conquer the country by substituting plastic Auton replicas for men and women in key government and military posts.