Country of origin United Kingdom No. of episodes 44 (7 missing) | No. of stories 7 Original network BBC One | |
Starring Patrick Troughton
Frazer Hines
Wendy Padbury Original release 10 August 1968 (1968-08-10) – 21 June 1969 (1969-06-21) | ||
The sixth season of British science fiction television series Doctor Who began on 10 August 1968 with the first story of season 6 The Dominators and ended Patrick Troughton's reign as the Doctor with its final story The War Games. Only 37 out of 44 episodes are held in the BBC archives; 7 remain missing. As result 2 serials are incomplete.
Contents
Main cast
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury make their final appearances as the Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot respectively. Troughton and his fellow actors collectively decided that the workload of Doctor Who was exhausting them, and that they would soon depart from the show. From Season 7 onwards the show would never have such a high number of episodes again. The three actors remained with the show until the conclusion of the final season six serial The War Games.
Guest stars
Nicholas Courtney reappears as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in The Invasion, last seen (as a Colonel) in The Web of Fear. He would soon make regular appearances in the program beginning with season 7's Spearhead from Space.
John Levene makes his first appearance as Corporal Benton in The Invasion. He would continue to make regular appearances, with the character promoted to sergeant, from season 7 until season 13.
Alan Bennion makes his first of three appearances in the series playing an Ice Warrior. In this, his first appearance, he portrays Lord Slaar in The Seeds of Death.
Serials
Terrance Dicks took over from Derrick Sherwin as script editor from The Invasion, with Sherwin resuming the role for The Space Pirates. Derrick Sherwin took over as producer from Peter Bryant for The War Games.
Season 6 is the most complete of all the Second Doctor's seasons, with only seven episodes missing (compared with twenty-eight from Season 4 and eighteen from Season 5), none of the season's stories missing in their entirety and only two stories (The Invasion and The Space Pirates) incomplete. This compares to the first two seasons of the Second Doctor from which only two complete serials (The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Enemy of the World) survive. The missing two episodes of The Invasion have since been reconstructed using animation and released on DVD.
The War Games, which was the final serial of the season, and the last of Patrick Troughton's tenure as the Doctor, was also the second longest serial up to that point, spanning 10 episodes - only the 12-part serial The Daleks' Master Plan from Season 3 was longer.
Missing episodes
DVD releases
Lost in Time
All existing episodes from otherwise missing Second Doctor serials from this season have been released on the Lost in Time collection, with the exception of The Invasion which had its missing episodes animated for its DVD release. Lost in Time was released in two formats in Region 1, with individual releases for volumes one and two (which cover First Doctor and Second Doctor episodes respectively), as well as an edition combining both volumes. In Regions 2 and 4, Lost in Time is available only as the combined single volume.