Part two focuses on the technical aspects of this classic collection!
Video and Audio
Season 20 is about what you’d expect for an early to mid 80’s season in terms of picture quality, and unlike Season 19 there isn’t quite as much surviving film from location shoots, excepting The Five Doctors, which looks exceptional. Some have reported discs having a weird motion blur on Arc of Infinity and Snakedance, which I can’t say I spotted.
The audio restoration by Mark Ayres is great as always, with new 5.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Atmos mixes for The Five Doctors.
The Packaging
Season 20 maintains the fold-out book styled packaging, with a compartment for the booklet and a stack of disc trays. Like Season 20, this is a chunky set, the widest so far.
In contrast to the previous two boxsets, Lee Binding’s artwork here is more immediately superb, encompassing the who’s who of returning foes and providing the best backing artwork to date, thanks to a sinister shot of the Black Guardian. We also get another detailed booklet with retrospective content by Pete McTighe, full of little details and the comprehensive special features list.
Special Features
This boxset provides one of the largest lists of special features to date, collating most of the previous DVD special features from Season 20’s previous individual releases, alongside new documentaries like a making-of for The King’s Demons, a new 40th anniversary edition version of The Five Doctors, a road trip featuring Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton travelling to a German Doctor Who convention, and a feature which sees the trio plus Mark Strickson returning to Amsterdam.
A new In Conversation interview by Matthew Sweet is included here, and for the first time features two interviewees as Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton are asked questions together, with their long-time friendship and chemistry shining throughout, whilst they both provide some behind-the-scenes insights and anecdotes that I hadn’t heard on previous documentaries and commentaries.
For this round of Behind the Sofa segments, Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton and Mark Strickson make up a team, whilst Katy Manning and Sophie Aldred, and Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker make up the other sofas. McCoy and Baker are especially good value, and these were some of the better iterations or the format.
The King’s Demons new making-of takes the cast and crew back to Bodiam Castle where, like with the making of The Time Monster in Season 9, they reminisce on the production and the shortfalls of the story, especially the failure of Kamelion.
We get two road-trip featurettes in Look Who’s Driving and Let’s Go Dutch! The first sees Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton squabbling their way to a Doctor Who event, and the second sees them joined by Mark Strickson as they revisit Amsterdam and locations from Arc of Infinity.
Alongside these new special features are a trove of existing VAM, (some notably with edits made to remove mentions of certain now notorious figures like Rolf Harris), and some great archive content like a 1982 US-made documentary and a heap of Longleat-related content too, showcasing the large scale of the anniversary celebration event.
As of publication, there have been no further sets announced, though Season 6 and another Tom Baker set (13/15/16) have been touted as potential choices to come next. I hope that it’s the former, as it would be nice to finally have a Patrick Troughton season on the shelf, but a Tom set might fit the timeframe better if we’re due to get another set before the end of 2023.
The Stories:
3.5/5
The Packaging:
4/5
The Video:
4/5
The Audio:
5/5
Special Features:
5/5
Overall:
4/5 – Season 20 gets a worthwhile re-evaluation here for me, with stories like Terminus and Snakedance standing out more so than they did on first viewings. With that said, the season has its ups and downs, and ends on a middling note that is thankfully saved by a superb anniversary special.
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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