Four to Doomsday
Doctor Who serial
Four to Doomsday is the second serial of the 19th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four twice-weekly parts on BBC1 from 18 to 26 January 1982.
The serial is set almost entirely on the spaceship of the alien Urbankan Monarch (Stratford Johns). In the serial, Monarch plots to invade Earth for its minerals using a deadly toxin to wipe out humanity so he can continue to make improvements to his ship.
Plot
The TARDIS materialises on board a spacecraft. The commander introduces himself as Monarch, ruler of Urbanka, and his associates are the Ministers of Enlightenment and Persuasion. Monarch is intrigued by talk of current Earth civilization and reveals their ship is bound for Earth. Enlightenment and Persuasion assume human forms, dressed in garments Tegan designed to demonstrate contemporary Earth fashions.
There are four distinct human cultures represented on the vessel by a small group of humans: Ancient Greeks and their leader philosopher Bigon, Chinese Mandarins, the Maya peoples, and an Australian Aboriginal culture. Each from a previous time the Urbankans have visited the Earth. This time they left their homeworld with three billion of their species aboard their craft to settle on Earth.
“Four to Doomsday” enters the record as doctor Who serial. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Four, Doomsday and Doctor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5568730. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Four to Doomsday” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.