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Many Dr Who fans would say The Robots of Death is a classic from the Tom Baker era. It's one of my favorites along with The Talons of Weng-Chiang (which was aired after this series) and Terror of the Zygons.

The Doctor and (his new assistant) Leela materialise on a sandminer and in the middle of a murder mystery. Onboard the sandminer is a small human crew and a number of servant robots. Since the robots have a number of safeguards built into them prohibiting them from harming humans, the Doctor and Leela are immediately blamed for the recent murders. After some more evidence is found and a few more members of the crew are murdered, it becomes obvious the Doctor and his companion are not responsible.

Although it is obvious from the onset that the robots are responsible for the murders, the Doctor has to convince the crew of this and find who is responsible for programming the robots to ignore their prime directive and instruct them to kill.

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VIDEO
Keeping in mind this series was first shown in early 1977, the 4x3 FULL FRAME transfer is okay. It's a little gritty and at times you may notice some composite dropouts (even if you're on S-Video or better). This may be because of the cameras in use at the time or due to the BBC stoing much of their television archive footage on 1" video tape. The quality of the transfer is noticably better than recent transmissions (by Foxtel) of these episodes indicating that some effort has been put into cleaning it up.

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AUDIO
The audio is plain old Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo but I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me it was originally done in mono and just mixed around a little. Apart from the English audio track, there is also a commentary by the producer Philip Hinchliffe and the writer Chris Boucher.

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EXTRAS
The disc comes with a small selection of extras which won't take too long to get through after watching the feature. As mentioned before, there is

• Audio commentary by the writer and producer.
• Short featurette consisting of various bits of archive footage dug up from the vaults of the BBC.
• Static pictures: sketches of the floorplan and a photo gallery.

As this series was aired nearly 35 years ago, not too much could be expected in the extras department. It's a bit of a shame that Tom Baker couldn't make some kind of brief commentary.

This is one of those great Dr Who series; a classic! The story is a classic Agatha Christie style whodunit involving Asimov type robots. Fans of Dr Who will appreciate the quality of this transfer and recommend this series as one of the cult favorites. If you're new to Dr Who or just occasionally dabble in sci-fi TV series and looking to make a small collection of Dr Who classics, you can't go wrong with The Robots of Death.