Saturday 25 January 1969

The Seeds of Death

The Costumes Are in the Cupboard

The Second Coming, Episode 3
Sunday 11 May 2025.

It’s Invaders from Mars this week, as the terrifying monsters we thawed out in 5000 AD last year make an early appearance on the Moon just sixteen years after the visit of the Cybermen. Their goal: to cement their position somewhere on the top ten list of recurring Doctor Who monsters. Jeremy Radick joins us as we try to work out exactly where.

Notes and links

Peter mentions that the 2003 DVD release of The Seeds of Death was the first DVD release to use VidFire, a technology that uses frame interpolation to restore the videotape look to episodes that now only exist as film recordings.

Nathan is thinking of Gary Russell’s 1994 Virgin New Adventures novel Legacy, a sequel to the two Peladon stories that heavily features the Ice Warriors.

Of course, we mention H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) again, particularly the red weed, which is a Martian plant that starts spreading across the countryside after the invasion.

Jeremy suggests that the first transporter-focused Star Trek story might be James Blish’s Spock Must Die! (1970), in which an evil Mr Spock is created when an experiment with the transporter goes horribly wrong.

Inevitably, Nathan mentions El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum essay on The Seeds of Death.

In March 2021, the container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking it completely for six days. The BBC reported that it was holding up USD 9.6 billion worth of goods each day.

Toby Hadoke can be heard praising Ronald Leigh-Hunt’s performance in the Blakes 7 episode Children of Auron in Maximum Power Episode 59: Snogging & Nihilism.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Seeds of Death in Episode 18: Sideburn Trouble.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll break into your house, fiddle with the settings on the air conditioner, and make off with all your woolly jumpers.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be trying to work out what we thought about The Story & the Engine.

Last weekend, Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game released their take on the New Avengers episode Emily, Part 2 of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a bafflingly undercooked Star Trek: The Original Series episode called The Empath.