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Planet of Evil is the second serial of Season 13 of Doctor Who, first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 27 September to 18 October 1975. It was written by Louis Marks and directed by David Maloney. It stars Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and Frederick Jaeger as Professor Sorenson.
The Doctor and Sarah land on the jungle planet Zeta Minor, where a human expedition is being picked off by an unseen force from the realm of anti-matter. Suspicion falls on the newcomers while Sorenson’s experiments unleash a dangerous change within him, and the Morestran crew grows desperate to escape with their prize. The Doctor must calm panicked soldiers, face the anti-matter creature, and restore balance between two universes before the whole mission is consumed.
Combining horror and science fiction, the serial is heavily inspired by The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Forbidden Planet, and features a deadly confrontation between scientific hubris and the forces of nature, set on the edge of the universe.
Episode 1
Answering a faint distress call, the TARDIS sets down on Zeta Minor: a jungle world at the edge of the universe, where daylight is weak and shadows feel alive. The Doctor and Sarah find a deserted camp and bodies drained of life, as if something has leeched them dry. A single scientist, Professor Sorenson of Morestran Expedition 2, staggers out clutching canisters of a glittering “ore” that promises limitless energy.
Before the Doctor can examine it, a Morestran rescue ship lands under Commander Salamar and his steadier deputy, Vishinsky. Suspicious of strangers at a murder scene, they arrest the Doctor and Sarah. The Doctor notes a black, lightless pool beyond a rock boundary: a place where readings flip into impossibility. At night, a crimson silhouette rises from the darkness and scythes through a patrol; instruments spike as if matter itself is being cancelled.
Sorenson raves that the ore is the key to saving his world; the Doctor counters that it is antimatter in disguise and that removing it may be tearing a hole between universes. The jungle throbs. The Morestrans ready for lift-off with the ore aboard. In the clearing, the red, man-shaped energy looms over Sarah, and the Doctor turns, too late, as it strikes.
Episode 2
The creature recoils from the boundary but leaves another soldier husked and brittle. The Doctor explains his theory: Zeta Minor is the border where matter meets antimatter, and Sorenson’s samples have unbalanced a native intelligence tied to the planet. Salamar tightens security and orders the ore crated for immediate transport, dismissing the Doctor’s warnings as sabotage.
Sarah, probing the strange rock line, slips and tumbles into the black pool; she sinks through luminous darkness, skin freezing, until the Doctor hauls her back with a cable. She wakes weak but alive, whispering that “something” was looking at her. In the camp, Sorenson gulps a serum to control headaches and hides his canisters. The red outline prowls the trees and darts like a shadow across doorframes, killing at a touch.
The Doctor demonstrates with a small sample: remove it from Zeta Minor, and violent forces try to reclaim it. Vishinsky begins to believe him; Salamar does not. A sweep of the jungle ends with more dead and the ore ready to load. Determined to return the material, the Doctor crosses the boundary, lifts a canister: and the ground liquefies. Hands of darkness clutch his legs and drag him down. Sarah screams as the Doctor vanishes into the pool.
Episode 3
In the void, the Doctor meets the antimatter intelligence (not in words, but in pressure and balance) and is cast back, drenched and shaken. He insists the ore must be returned and the ship kept grounded, but Salamar orders lift-off at once. The red creature surges after the departing craft, and power drains as if siphoned through the hull.
Meanwhile, Sorenson’s symptoms worsen: pupils flare gold, skin mottles, and he moves with feral speed. The serum fails. He becomes something glassy-eyed and hungry, an “antiman” that feeds on life and leaves powder where people stood. Bodies fall in service corridors; Sorenson stalks away, duplicating into shimmering after-images that peel off and hunt. The Doctor rigs detectors and tries to track the source back to Sorenson’s canisters, warning Vishinsky that they have smuggled the problem aboard.
Salamar arms a high-energy projector, convinced he can burn the creature out of existence. He corners an antiman in a junction, fires: and the backlash vaporises him in a brilliant flare. On the bridge, alarms wail: the ship cannot escape Zeta Minor’s grip. The Doctor gathers chemicals from Sorenson’s notes and improvises a counter-agent that might reset the infection to its human baseline. He finds Sorenson at last: fully transformed and not alone.
Episode 4
Antimen swarm the companionways, multiplying with every kill. The Doctor lures the pack into a maintenance loop and floods the passage with light, buying seconds to dose the original Sorenson with his improvised antidote. The creature fights the injection, convulses: and a man blinks through, dazed, horrified by what he has done.
The Doctor seizes the moment: the only way to free the ship is to restore the balance. He and Vishinsky force the weakened Sorenson into a landing pod, return to Zeta Minor, and haul the canisters to the black pool. One by one they slide back into nothingness; the jungle exhales. The red intelligence rises, vast and impassive. The Doctor steps to the boundary and offers Sorenson himself, guilt and all. The presence “weighs” him, then accepts the canisters as restitution and lets the man live.
A tremor rolls through the ground. On the ship, power surges; Zeta Minor releases its hold. The Doctor returns with a sedated Sorenson, who wakes shaken and vows to abandon antimatter research. Vishinsky sets a cautious course home. In the ruins below, the pool dims to stillness. Back in the TARDIS, Sarah studies the dying jungle and shivers. The Doctor murmurs that the universe survives on balance: and they slip away into time.
Themes
As a slice of science-gothic, Planet of Evil is all atmosphere and anxiety: humid jungle shadows, whispering corridors, and a Doctor who treats antimatter like an old adversary. It doesn’t quite scale the mythic heights of Genesis of the Daleks or the immaculate clockwork of Pyramids of Mars, but it sits above many mid-season romps: more focused than Revenge of the Cybermen, more dreamlike than The Sontaran Experiment, and every bit as assured as Terror of the Zygons.
Tom Baker’s cool authority and Sarah Jane’s clear-eyed bravery anchor the dread, while the production design turns BBC Television Centre into a fever dream. In the reckoning of the era, it’s a strong upper-mid-tier entry: memorable for mood, ideas, and the sense that the dark is looking back.
The story also threads continuity with quiet precision. Its antimatter mythology nods to the Omega saga of The Three Doctors and looks ahead to later occult-science tales like Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius, and Image of the Fendahl. Structurally, it distils the Troughton-era “base under siege” grammar of The Moonbase and The Ice Warriors into the Hinchcliffe–Holmes idiom.
All the while it carries Baker and Sarah Jane cleanly from the Earthbound farewell of Terror of the Zygons toward the grander, stranger canvases to come. By the final fade, Planet of Evil has done more than scare us; it has tightened the season’s through-line: proof that the show can make a haunted jungle feel as vast, and as perilous, as deep space.
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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Fourth Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Fourth Doctor. It is available on Amazon.
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