Trivia

In an amazing coincidence, the three stars of this serial - Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, and Anthony Ainley - all share the same birthday - August 20.

One of the reasons that Rona Munro disapproved of the eventual costumes for the Cheetah People was that the lesbian subtext developing between Ace and Kara was obscured, although many fans still caught on.

This story was Anthony Ainley's final television job. He played the Master one last time in the computer game Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors (1997) before his death in 2004.

This was one of only three Doctor Who serials to be recorded completely on BBC Outside Broadcast video instead of the mix of OB and studio video that was more usual during the late 1980s, and the mix of film and video before them. This was because Ghost Light, the next story in production, was filmed completely in the studio. The other stories to be recorded solely on OB video were The Sontaran Experiment and The Curse of Fenric.

Writer Rona Munro is well-known as a left-wing playwright and this serial features several political elements. The recurrent "survival of the fittest" theme was a reference to the then-dominant political ideology of Thatcherism. Munro also intended to convey a subtle but discernible lesbian subtext between Ace and Kara as a response to Margaret Thatcher's anti-gay policies (her government had recently introduced "Section 28", which banned the promotion of homosexuality to children in schools). Another political reference is Ace's friend Ange collecting money for hunt saboteurs (fox hunting was still legal in the UK at the time).