By Roy Mathur, on 2026-09-14, at 23:54:39 to 01:18:56 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
This episode will be slightly longer than usual because this story is the end of the TV series portion of the classic DW revisit, though we haven't finished until we cover the three films and Scream of the Shalka.
After after the revisit is completely finished in a few weeks, stick around because there will, of course, always be a lot of Old and New Who and other British SFFH.
It is strange that the beginning of the Classic Doctor Who Wilderness Years in my revisit, roughly coincide with the New Who Wilderness Years (let's hope only months). There's something highly discomforting about this. Am I psychically/magically the herald of disaster?! The Medusa Touch, black thumb, Pandora! Sorry, Whovians.
Notable Cast: Seventh Doctor: Sylvester McCoy, Companion: Ace: Sophie Aldred, The Master: Anthony Ainley, Harvey and Len: Gareth Hale and Norman Pace; 80s TV comedy double-act, Karra: Lisa Bowerman; Bernice Summerfield and director for Big Finish, VO in DW Dreamland (2009) ani.
Director: Alan Wareing; assistant floor manager Survivors, production assistant The Keeper of Traken, director The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Ghost Light
Writer: Rona Munro; New Who The Eaters of Light
Producer: John Nathan-Turner; longest Doctor Who producer (9 years!) overseeing the last seasons (Doctors 4, 5, 6, 7) until it's demise, authored Doctor Who: The TARDIS Inside Out, Doctor Who: The Companions
Location: Mostly Perivale, London and Warmwell Quarry, Dorset, 1989
Broadcast: Story 155, serial 4 (finale), season 26, following The Curse of Fenric (pod 613), 3 x c. 25 min, 22 Nov--6 Dec 1989
Media: Target novelization by Rona Munro in 1990, VHS 1995, DVD 2007, 2010, Blu-ray 2020, BBC iPlayer since 1 Nov 2023, Tubi until about 6 months ago, BritBox, AMC recently.. I think.
The UK no. 1 single is You Got It (The Right Stuff) by New Kids on the Block.
I remember watching both The Curse of Fenric and Survival the first time around. I must have been at university at the time, so I'm not sure how I managed to see it, as it wasn't easy to access to a TV, and even if one was available, zero people I knew were into Who. Zero. I know I wasn't enjoying my time at Uni, so perhaps I was home for the weekend? Actually, while we're at it, given this is the age of geek and we're all apparently geeks since New Who, the same goes for B7, Star Cops, etc. In fact, in my admittedly very small social bubble in the late 80s, not one person was into British SciFi.
In Perivale, a suspicious black cat (Kitling) hisses at something unseen and terrifying as Dave, washing his car, runs from it then vanishes in a flash of light.
The Doctor and Ace arrive nearby because Ace wants to connect with old friends. They visit old haunts; a green area (Horsenden Hill), and a youth club where they find a TA sergeant over-enthusiastically teaching teenagers self-defence. He talks of "survival of the fittest". He seems to know about Ace's dodgy past. He tells them her friends have moved on. The Doc asks him if they are problems with stray cats like the one that keeps turning up.
The town is strangely quiet, a poster declares a missing woman, and the Doctor goes into a shop run by two men. Like the Sergeant, they also mention "survival of the fittest". The Kitling lurks nearby, the shopkeepers find their own pet cat dead, and the Doctor stocks up on cat food to bait the Kitling.
Elsewhere, the Master with cat eyes, tracks new victims through the Kitling.
Ace finally finds a friend, Ange, collectiing hunt sab donations. She says all their other friends have gone. The Doctor baits the Kitling with the cat food, but only attracts a dog. Nearby, Ace sees the Kitling in a playground, a portal opens and a humanoid feline on horseback attacks and suddenly she finds herself elsewhere. The Doctor swears to rescue her. The seargent stops the Doctor catching the Kitling and is rendered unconscious by the Doctor's finger to his forehead.
Ace finds her old friends, amongst others transported to the alien planet, hunted by the Cheetah People for food.
The Doctor, chasing the Kitling, is tackled again by the sergeant and both are also transported away to the alien planet in a flash of light, much to the Master's delight.
Hunted, the Doctor and Ace meet the Master (Ace's first meeting). The Master's survival depends on his continued supply of humans to feed the Cheetah People. He says, "If we stay here, we'll be like the people who built these. They thought they could control the planet, the wilderness. They were the ones that bred the kitlings. Creatures with minds they could talk to, eyes they could see through the way I do. It only led to their corruption. We shall become like them... We shall become animals."
The Doctor and Ace become separated and, as Ace changes, she helps and then befriends wounded Cheetah person Karra. Later, Karra is stabbed to death by the Master and reverts to a human-like form. The Doctor convinces Ace to leave, or become a Cheetah person permanently. The survivors hold hands and flash back to Earth, using Ace's new power.
One of the transforming survivors, Midge, and the Master, flash back to Earth and the Master sets him on the trail of the Doctor.
Midge on a new stolen motorbike returns to the Youth Club and kills the sergeant. The Doctor and Ace arrive too late. He says, "So much for the SAS survival course."
At Horsenden Hill, the Doctor and Midge jump on motorcycles and rush each other. They jump off mid-air and the bikes collide and explode in a fireball. Midge dies. The Master engages in hand-to-hand combat with the Doctor and both are transported back to the planet. Resisting the violence that is destroying the planet, the Doctor escapes, leaving the Master behind.
Ace morns Karra's death and reminisces her recent feline transformation. The Doctor comforts her, with, "The planet's gone, but lives on inside you. It always will." They head back "Home", which is what Ace now calls the Tardis and he says, "There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do!"
As usual, Ace and her teen friends are played by much older actors. I've complained often enough about this before and, even though I'm a fan of Ace, Sophie Aldred is 27 in this. At least in The Sarah Jane Adventures, the actors are only a few of years older than their characters, not a decade.
Hale and Pace are uselessly stunt-casted as a pair of miserable shopkeepers. They are supposed to be sinister, but just come off as drab and terribly unfunny. They are, at least, not offensively bad as Richard Briers's Architect in Paradise Towers
It's fun to see macho Sergeant Toxic Masculinity hoisted by his own petard when dropped into a real survival situation. The Doctor defeating him with a finger is stolen from Sean Connery duffing up a guy with his thumb in The Presidio (1988). The quip about the "SAS survival course" is funny, if a little callous.
There is little mystery. Halfway into episode one, we see the Master with cat eyes and we learn that this is another of his fiendish plans gone Wiley Coyote wrong.
Writer, Rona Munro, blaming the cheetah people heads, says, "Particularly Karra and Ace, there were whole amazing scenes between them and for me, that was supposed to be my lesbian subtext---and you can't see it!" (Interviewed by David Darlington in 2007). I wholly disagree, and not just because I like the cheetah people design. You can see some chemistry between them, but it is Munro's own overly coy writing that buries the subtext. Kara says, "I'm not a cat. I'm Karra. I'm your sister." In fact, she addresses Ace as her sister six times in the script.
Cheetah People creature design, particularly the heads are very good. The suit actors do a fine job of portraying humanoid big cats, even lapping water like cats. I'm reminded of Planet of the Apes, but with big cats, in that the cheetah people hunt humans from horses and wear nomadic cavalry outfits. The design of the small Kitling cat is as awful as Salem in Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996).
In summation, what should be an action-packed and topical (Tory self-sufficiency gone made---"survival of the fittest"---and an hint of LGBTQ) rank as the season's worst. It somewhat salvages its reputation by being very much about Ace, which makes it something I'm still interested in. After Ghost Light, The Curse of Fenric, and now Survival, Ace is no longer the homeless ASBO Earth-girl with mummy issues, but an adult who knows her place in the universe. Finally, the classic TV series ends, heralding the beginning of the dreaded Wilderness Years, with some lovely poetic lines of dialogue from the Doctor.
In Howe, Walker, and Stammer's Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who, on p. 714, Sylvester McCoy says, "Its was over 100 degrees in the heatwave...and all these girls had to be dressed up in catsuits and all this fun fur stuff...it was just too hot for them...one suddenly freaked out and ripped all her clothes offand was last seen running for the train. It was a lovely sight though...".
The Doctor's motorcycle stunt double is ex-Royal Marine, SAS reservist, actor and stunt man Tip Tipping, but Midge's stunt double is legendary biker Eddie Kidd!
Doctor Who, hanging on by the skin of it's teeth thanks to tenacious fans since season 22, was finally axed, due to plummeting viewing figures, by out-going BBC One Controller Michael Grade (who famously thought the classic series trash) and in-coming Jonathan Powell, and Peter Cregeen, Head of Series. On-going animosity to JNT by the cast, crew, and the BBC in the final years couldn't have helped. The last script editor Andrew Cartmel said that Doctor Who was, "held universally in contempt by the powers-that-be" (Morgan Jeffery, Radio Times, 2019). The excellent and moving closing lines are, in fact, by Cartmel on JNT's instruction because he knew this would be the last episode.
When the series ended, McCoy and Aldred went on to varied media careers. Ainley revelled in the role of the Master, regularly attended cons afterwards, and is said to have even answered his home telephone and laughed manically in character. JNT stayed on at the BBC to write and produce numerous Doctor Who documentaries, did the convention circuit, and was wrote about in an unflattering biography; JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson, which the Guardian's 2013 review subtitled as, "A frank new book about Doctor Who is full of shocking claims".
Following on from the last brief mention of sources, and the many other times over many years I have credited people, here's a slightly more detailed summation. I don't often do this, but because we're so near the end of these Classic DW revisits, here we go again, lest you think me going all JK Rowling and not acknowledging or citing anyone.
Additional sources: BBC including the DW website archive (though decreasing as the Beeb deletes them), Chrissie's Transcripts Site, doctorwholocations.net, the goodly pirates who bravely sail the seven seas, the oft quoted from in the last few years aforesaid Handbook: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who, IMDB, officialcharts.com, various fan sites, history sites, magazines and zines, online encyclopaedias, regional film offices, telesnaps, VHSs and DVDs, etc., and, no doubt, many other places.
The rest, particularly the actual "Thoughts" section of these revisits originate exclusively from my warped brain, both as an ageing nerd and, of course, an aficionado of the Doc and his friends.