Planet of Evil

081 – Planet of Evil
Doctor Who serial
The Anti-Man manifests himself.
Cast
Doctor Tom Baker (Fourth Doctor)
Companion Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith)
Others Frederick Jaeger — Sorenson Ewen Solon — Vishinsky Prentis Hancock — Salamar Graham Weston — De Haan Louis Mahoney — Ponti Michael Wisher — Morelli Terence Brook — Braun Tony McEwan — Baldwin Haydn Wood — O'Hara Melvyn Bedford — Reig
Production
Directed by	David Maloney
Written by	Louis Marks
Script editor	Robert Holmes
Produced by	Philip Hinchcliffe
Executive producer(s)	None
Incidental music composer	Dudley Simpson
Production code	4H
Series	Season 13
Length	4 episodes, 25 minutes each
Originally broadcast	27 September – 18 October 1975
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → Terror of the Zygons Pyramids of Mars

Doctor Who and The Planet of Evil

Author	Terrance Dicks
Cover artist	Mike Little
Series	Doctor Who book: Target novelisations
Release number	47
Publisher	Target Books
Publication date	18 August 1977
ISBN

Planet of Evil is the second serial of the 13th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 27 September to 18 October 1975.

The TARDIS picks up a distress call and the Doctor and Sarah arrive on the planet Zeta Minor. There they discover that a Morestran geological expedition has fallen prey to an unseen killer and only the leader, Professor Sorenson, remains alive.

A military mission from Morestra has also arrived to investigate. At first they suspect the Doctor and Sarah of responsibility for the deaths of the expedition members, but the culprit is eventually revealed to be a creature from a universe of antimatter, retaliating for the removal by Sorenson of some antimatter samples from around the pit that acts as an interface between the two universes.

The Morestrans take off in their ship, but it is slowly dragged back towards the planet due to the antimatter on board. Sorenson himself becomes infected by antimatter and gradually transforms into antiman, a monster capable of draining the life from others.

The Morestran commander, the increasingly unhinged Salamar, attacks Sorenson with a radiation source, but this only causes him to produce multiple anti-matter versions of Sorenson which soon overrun the ship. The Doctor finds the original Sorenson, takes him back to the planet in the TARDIS and throws both him and his samples into the pit, fulfilling a bargain he earlier made with the anti-matter creature. Sorenson reappears unharmed, and the Doctor returns him to the Morestran ship, which is now freed of the planet's influence.

The spin-off novel Zeta Major by Simon Messingham, part of the Past Doctor Adventures line, is a sequel to this story.

In a rare moment, the Doctor uses a blaster against an opponent, contradicting his position made during the next serial Pyramids of Mars that he never carries firearms.

The plot was deliberately conceived by Philip Hinchcliffe, Robert Holmes and Louis Marks as a mixture of the film Forbidden Planet and the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In addition, Marks had been reading science magazine articles about antimatter, and decided to write a story incorporating the subject. Hinchcliffe, in the first season in which he could commission new material, planned to move away from the "rubber-suited alien" theme, which he felt was clichéd. For this story he proposed having three separate monstrous elements: Sorenson's transformation, the anti-matter monster and finally the planet itself, claimed by Sorenson in episode 1 to be conscious of his group's motives.