Part two focuses on the technical aspects of this classic collection…
Video and Audio
Season 22 features some wonderful on-location shoots and was the final season to have location shoots done on film, with the remaining seasons being done on videotape. Though we sadly don’t have elements like the original 16mm content for The Two Doctors the picture quality across Season 22 is generally solid, as is the audio, which is handled wonderfully by Mark Ayres, who provides 5.1 Surround Sound options for Attack of the Cybermen, Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks.
The Packaging
Season 22 maintains the fold-out book styled packaging, with a compartment for the booklet and a stack of disc trays. The exterior artwork by Lee Binding is his best so far, featuring the Sixth Doctor holding his tracking device from Attack of the Cybermen alongside the established collage of monsters. We also get another insightful booklet with retrospective writing by Pete McTighe that happens to mix up Brian Glover with Julian Glover owing to an Empire Strikes Back reference.
Special Features
This boxset collates most of the previous DVD special features from Season 22s individual releases whilst hosting an assortment of new extras, including another round of Behind the sofa segments and a trio of In Conversation interviews with Matthew Sweet.
The Chris Chapman directed Location Location Location sees Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant revisiting locations from the season with a few special guests. We also get a new making-of documentary for The Two Doctors and, for the first time since its VHS release, The Colin Baker Years. There’s also a new version of A Fix with Sontarans, which removes any references to Jim’ll Fix It and the titular Jimmy Saville, complete with a new commentary featuring Gareth Jenkins, the boy whose wish it was to feature in the short.
The new behind the sofa segments are great fun, featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Terry Molloy together who gel very well. Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding provide a familiar feel, now being regulars for the segment and the last pair of Wendy Padbury and Sylvester McCoy also get on well.
Season 22’s trio of In Conversation interviews see Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and former BBC head Michael Grade discuss their lives and careers with differing outcomes. Baker focuses a lot on his personal tragedies and comes off as remarkably resilient and likeable, whilst Bryant gives a frank retrospective look at how controlled she was behind the scenes at times. Grade’s interview will perhaps be the most divisive, needless to say he has no regrets about the hiatus but Sweet does ween some interesting insights out of the discussion.
Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors and Revelation of the Daleks all feature extended episode options (both episodes for Varos and part one only for the others), with Varos’ being the longest, fleshing out the story though also providing content that you can understand the reasoning for its removal.
Some classic DVD highlights include the Robert Holmes tribute documentary, which details most of his stories and his time as script editor on Doctor Who, The Cyber Story which acts as a summary of the Cybermen’s stories throughout the classic era. For completionists, the garish music video for Doctor in Distress, the charity record made to protest the hiatus and which was composed by none other than Hans Zimmer, is included here in its entirety.
The future of The Collection line is to be determined, though rumours of a Season 2 set not being too far off due to comments by Peter Purves about working on the set suggest we could finally see the 60s era materialise on Blu Ray.
The Stories:
4.5/5
The Packaging:
4.5/5
The Video:
4/5
The Audio:
5/5
Special Features:
4.5/5
Overall:
5/5 – Season 22 is one of my personal favourites thanks to a strong line-up of stories that are often darker in tone and sport a fair amount of violence, but also has some great scripts, a Doctor whose actor is on top form and worthy reappearances of some classic monsters and great new ones too.
Look back at Part One of the review for more detail on the stories included.
By HW Reynolds
Images Courtesy of the BBC
Reverbium 
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