Revisit The Fifth Through Eighth Doctors On Blu-Ray: Today In Science & Science Fiction

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

DoctorsDOCTOR WHO: THE DOCTORS REVISITED 5 – 8 (DVD)
This DVD collection gathers the second batch of retrospective specials celebrating Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary. The specials first aired earlier this year on BBC America, and the set features interviews and clips that will take you back through the adventures of the Fifth (Peter Davison), Sixth (Colin Baker), Seventh (Sylvester McCoy), and Eighth (Paul McGann) Doctors. That’s 15 years of the time lord’s adventures, stretching from 1981 – 1996. Even cooler, this DVD collection follows each Doctor’s special with an adventure from their run: Earthshock, Vengeance on Varos, Remembrance of the Daleks, and the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie that aired on Fox. This collection finally wraps up the years of the “classic” Doctors, with the next moving into the modern era.

If the set leaves you craving more of these incarnations of the Doctor, you can find many of their adventures on Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. The classic Doctors covered here are also joining Fourth Doctor Tom Baker for a new audio adventure called The Light at the End, set to release in November.

ALSO ON DVD
This Is the End (Blu-Ray, DVD & Digital Download)
The apocalypse in This Is the End proved to be Biblical rather than science fiction-y, but it was still pretty funny. It hits shelves today, so check it out.

ON TV
Face Off (Syfy, 9/8c) — “Cosmic Circus”
The remaining contestants are divided into teams and challenged to create “dark and sexy alien-circus characters.” Something wicked sexy this way comes…

Person of Interest (CBS, 10/9c) — “Nothing to Hide”
“A number comes up for an online entrepreneur who routinely invades other people’s privacy but then finds his own being attacked. Meanwhile, Carter is paired with a new rookie partner.”

THE FIRST CT SCAN – OCTOBER 1, 1971
The very first patient brain scan using “computed tomography” — a CT scan, for short — was performed on this day in 1971. It happened at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, England, and the subject was a middle-aged female with a suspected frontal lobe tumour. Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield and Allan McLeod Cormack won the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for “developing the diagnostic technique of X-ray computed tomography (CT).”

I’ve had this before, first time is always lucky and then everything else goes wrong after that. So I thought, the next ones are not going to be any good, but they did another ten more patients and every one of them came out as being obvious diseases of the brain showing up in various forms. Dr Ambrose found that, by injecting iodine-based contrast agent that would localize the particular spot where the tumour was and it showed up even better.

CT

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DECKER!
Stephen Collins, who played Commander Willard Decker from Star Trek: The Motion Picture born on this day in 1947. More recently, he played President Hathaway in TNT’s Falling Skies, and has joined the second season of NBC’s Revolution as Dr. Gene Porter — the father of Rachel Matheson (Elizabeth Mitchell).

Decker