The Mutants

"Doctor Who and the Munts", "Ky Don't You?", "Solos and Thanks For All the Fish"

"The One Where The Doctor Couldn't Do It Even If He Wanted To" (USA), "The Timelords Should've Used DHL" (DHL Magazine)

Doctor Who is given a box to take to a planet and give to someone. He isn't told anything else but still manages to get it done.

*** - As a satire on the 1970s music industry it works like a charm

"U.N. people, U.N. doing U.N. things U. N. together." (Pertwee overestimates the amount of international political satire in the script)

"These pants as they stand are no longer of any use unless we can make the atmosphere breathable again."

The myth of this story being some kind of racial allegory probably stems from an interview Rick James gave to Knitting Circle magazine. He was asked about his forthcoming projects and he described the Mutants as "A part I'd very much like to explore". The journalist, assuming James was as bad at speaking off screen as he was on screen, wrote "He said he'd very much like to explore Apartheid"

It has been proven that this story is scientifically accurate provided one ignores physics, chemistry and biology.

Rick James shares a name with both Rick James and Rick James. Sadly he has neither man's talent.

With positive racial and ecological messages, Barry Letts was told by the BBC at knife point that the story mustn't contain any women with important jobs or "the very fabric of society would fold like a soufflé"

A Dalek can be seen in the background of some of the Skybase scenes. It was left in studio after shooting Day of the Daleks because the Dalek movers were on strike and none of the regular scenery movers wanted to be scabs.

The planet was named Solos as a joke because it is a palindrome. The script is also a palindrome as it can be read in either direction with no loss of quality.

...is fairly bloody obvious

Si Hunt

I Nothing Like I Better To Do

"I was once interviewing Terrance Dicks about the making of Story NNN for a fascinating technical article I was writing about Paul Witsun Jones. I asked why the mutants had been changed from 'munts' to 'mutts'. He smiled the smile of a man who is getting the chance to tell a convention calibre anecdote and I readied my pencil. "It's because we felt that 'munts' sounded rather rude!" he said. I looked at him blankly. "I don't understand" I said wittily. "What does 'munt' sound like?" He considered this sensible point for a moment and said "You know." I told him I didn't and we went back and forth for a few moments. "It sounds like ****" he said at last. I told him I'd never heard that word before. He said it again and still it didn't register. Then inspiration struck him and he explained he'd heard a fair bit about me over the years and that he had just the thing to explain what he meant. He walked over to the other side of the tea room and shouted at me. "BRENT - YOU ARE A ****" he bellowed. The penny dropped and I recalled the word he was referring to. When he got back to his seat I congratulated him on making the right decision all those years ago and I bought him another vanilla slice just to show I was sincere."

Richard Flute (writing in "Rassilon's Harpy" in 1983) said this story was "crap". Gerry Ziggazigga (writing in "Flavia's Funnel" in 1987) concluded that in his opinion this story was "crap". "The Mighty Neil" (writing in "Ergon Babes" in 1991) believed this story to be "crap" while his colleague "The Amazing Wayne" agreed that it was "crap". The "Doctor Who Journal" conducted a survey of its readership and their considered opinion was that it was "crap". The website josknickers.com did a scientific analysis of what they regarded as the hundred most important factors in a Doctor Who story, giving each of the 160 serials marks out of seven in each category. Sadly someone deleted the spreadsheet before publication and they had no alternative but to simply label the Mutants as "crap".