On a distant, barren planet, Storm Mine 4 trawls across bleak deserts and through fierce duststorms in search of rare and valuable metals. On board the Sandminer is a small skeleton crew, who alternate between indulgent relaxation and skilled mining work. The mundane, day-to-day duties of the mine are attended to by a much larger complement of servile robots.
This is a society that is dependant on robots for all areas of life, the people comforted by the knowledge that the strictest safeguards are built into each and every robot's programming. So when one of the miner crew is murdered, suspicion falls on two new arrivals...
The Doctor and Leela arrive on board, and are immediately accused of being the prime murder suspects. But the Doctor soon realises that perhaps the killer isn't human. More deaths occur - can he persuade the remaining crewmembers that the killer may be a robot?

-- from the DVD release, 2000

As well as providing an early VHS outing for the fourth Doctor, this story was also chosen to open the range of DVDs, following the release of the Five Doctors as a "tester" a year previously.

Episode timings on DVD: 24'06", 24'14", 23'51", 24'06"
Episode timings on PasB: 24'06", 24'15", 23'51", 23'52"

Featurette
Several of the bonuses passed from the Restoration Team to the disc producers (including two intended as Easter Eggs) were accidentally edited together to form a featurette. This was a reconstructed continuity announcement leading into Part One (0'19"), followed by a comparison scene showing the visuals from the sequence in Part One where the Doctor and Leela meet SV7 backed with the audio from an original studio reel, demonstrating the robot's voice before being dubbed. (1'14") There then follows a collection of clips of the original mute model work done for the story in low quality b/w (0'36") before finally a brief, silent, presentation of the original continuity slide used throughout the final three stories of that season (0'21").

Photo Gallery
30 colour and b/w photos.

Studio Plan
Seven static screens (and an eighth showing an overview of four of them) showing the original studio floor plans for the story.

Commentary
Philip Hinchcliffe (producer), Chris Boucher (writer). Recorded at The Voice Studio in Television Centre during 2000.

Howard Da Silva Episode Intros
The American Region One release of this story also features a featurette on Howard Da Silva, the actor who provided introductory narration to the episodes themselves during their initial run in the States. It opens with a scrolling caption reading "Beginning in 1978, Time/Life Television distributed 98 half-hour episodes of 'Doctor Who' to commercial and public television stations in North America. Each episode featured voice-over openings and closings by Howard Da Silva. The opening served to introduce the viewer to what they would be seeing in that particular episode and to 'recap' what had happened in the last episode. The closing served to 'tease' the viewer with a bit of what they would see in the next episode. Though the actual 2" broadcast master tapes have been lost, copies of these voice overs, with the accompanying edited video packages, exist. These are the original openings and closings that Howard Da Silva narrated for the four episodes of 'Robots Of Death'..."