Day 112 — April 22nd 2021
The Invasion Episodes One and Two
The Invasion — Episode One
Ohh, this is more like it! I honestly think there’s more action, incident and excitement in these 25 minutes than there was in the entirety of The Mind Robber. It suddenly feels like we’re watching proper Doctor Who again. One of the strangest parts of that is that it felt right that we were back on Earth. Our trips to the Wheel, Dulkis and the Land of Fiction are the longest we’ve been away from Earth in the entire Troughton era — 16 consecutive epsiodes. Somehow it feels right to be a little more grounded.
The Invasion feels like a special ‘Missing’ story for me, because it was one of the first I ever listened to. I picked up the Cybermen CD tin, which included the soundtracks to this and The Tenth Planet, and listened through the episodes one or two a night over the course of a couple of weeks. It was so exciting to be hearing the ‘lost’ moments of this opening episode, and although I can’t remember exactly what I thought, I’m fairly sure I was surprised by how much was stuffed into this one even then. It certainly feels very different in tone to any of the episodes we’ve had before.
You’ve got the missile attack on the TARDIS, some larking about with cows in a field, the escape from the IE compound, meeting Isobel and spending some time with her, heading off to visit the IE headquarters, and then all the stuff with Tobias Vaughn. When you write it all out like that it doesn’t sound like so much, but they’re all very distinct bits of narrative, and I’d been expecting at least some of them to be held back for Episode Two. In my head I’d got it down that this first episode was all the escape from the compound.
It’s a sequence which works incredibly well on audio, even though it’s made up almost entirely of dialogue-free sequences where presumably our heroes sit in the back of a lorry and pull worried faces at each other. There’s a fair amount of tension to the entire escape, and it’s helped massively by the music which might be some of the best we’ve ever had in the series. This is Don Harper’s only Doctor Who story, by by god he does it well.
I’d completely forgotten that the driver of the lorry gets shot dead almost as soon as Doctor Who and his friends get away, and it’s surprisingly shocking. It’s certainly darker than we usually see in the programme, and sells the idea that we’re dealing with something dangerous here. It’s also effective that it’s all done with real guns, after we’ve had the space-age guns of the Karkus and the Dulcians lately. It’s another example of how grounding the show in reality can have such an impact.
What works well is that — as with all the best episodes — this manages to balance the action and drama with the right level of comedy. I love Doctor Who’s summation of where they’ve landed (‘England in summertime, I should say. See the rain clouds?’) and the idea of the TARDIS turning invisible because he’s removed two of the circuits is brilliant. More is made of that in the script, with Jamie trying to find the doors and crashing into something in the darkness.
Something I specifically wanted to check in the script was what it said happened in the final moments. By 2021 I think everyone knows that the Cybermen are in The Invasion — it’s possibly their most iconic 60s story thanks to the St Paul’s sequence in Episode Six — but they don’t show up until half way through the story. I’m wondering just how much of a surprise they would have been to the audience on original transmission.
We’re only a few stories on from their last appearance in The Wheel in Space, although there was the six-week repeat of The Evil of the Daleks added between them on original broadcast. We had a Cyberplanner in that story, but it was of a different design to the creature seen here. The narration on the soundtrack plays it coy;
‘Still looking at the circuits, Vaughn reaches a decision. He crosses to a blank wall of the office, and presses a control switch. A section of the wall begins to slide back, revealing a hidden compartment beyond. Concealed therein is an apparatus of no Earthly origin; a towering metal and glass construction of circuits and filaments. At the glowing corner of which seems to pulsate a fluid metal heart…’
And while the words used there are largely inspired by the camera script, the stage directions in that are far more blunt about what we’re seeing — ‘a mysterious shape behind an opaque, fluorescent wall, patterned into panes of typical Cybermen hexagonal shapes’.
It also notes that the creature Vaughn is conferring with is a ‘Cyber Director’, and I’ll be interested to know if that’s how they describe it in the narration when we get to later episodes, as I’ve only ever heard it referred to as another Cyber Planner.
I think it’s pretty likely that the audience would have twigged quite early on, given that the Radio Times billing for this opening episode is printed alongside a photograph of a Cyberman outside St Pauls, and text telling us that they’re coming back. So much for keeping things a surprise!
Indeed, the whole write up for this episode is oddly full of spoilers. It cheerfully announces that Doctor Who Jamie and Zoe ‘manage to hitch a lift from a lorry driver who is terrified of something, but the Doctor can’t make out what. The man’s fear is justified for after he has dropped Dr. Who and the others, some guards shoot him.’
How on Earth were they allowed to print that?! That’s one of the most shocking and exciting parts of the episode, and it somewhat spoils the fun when you know it’s coming!
It goes on to let viewers know that we won’t be seeing a return for Professor Travers, either; ‘Travers has gone abroad, but they meet here Isobel Watkins, a photographer. Her father, who is a computer scientist, has disappeared; last heard of at the International Electromatics building!’
Perhaps the most controversial part of the preview, however, is the opening line; ‘The TARDIS brings Dr. Who, Jamie and Zoe back to England, but England in about 1975’. It’s our old friend the dating conundrum again! I’ll drop a spoiler of my own when I say that in the next episode the Brigadier says the events of The Web of Fear ‘must be four years ago now’. I said during that story that my stance is these episodes happen roughly when they’re broadcast, although that’s admittedly a little trickier in this instance, given both Web and this story were broadcast in the same year — 1968.
The About Time books suggest that The Web of Fear might take place in early 1968, with The Invasion taking place around autumn of 1970. That would make it about two and a half years between them, meaning that the Brig’s simply made a slip up with his dates. It’s easily enough done, and works well enough for me.
A strong first episode, which gives me hope for the rest of the story. I was heading for an 8, but I think I’m going to go even higher and give this one a 9/10.
The Invasion — Episode Two
Because The Invasion is the third story of Season Six it’s sometimes surprising to remember that it’s the first story to be produced during the programme’s sixth production block — both The Dominators and The Mind Robber were effectively made as part of Season Five and then held back for broadcast later in the year.
I think you can tell that this is the ‘start’ of a new season when you watch with the information in mind, though. All the gorgeous location filming is a dead giveaway; we’re at the start of the financial year for the show, so they’ve got the money to let Douglas Camfield go off and be brilliant.
And oh God, doesn’t it all look gorgeous? This is the fourth time Doctor Who has done ‘modern day London’ in the last few seasons, but it feels totally fresh. We’ve never seen our lead characters out and about in streets like this, or sneaking about on railway sidings, and it looks brilliant.
Kieran Highman pointed out on Twitter a couple of years ago that the street where Doctor Who and Jamie get picked up by UNIT is the same one that The Beatles run down in A Hard Day’s Night, and somehow that feels absolutely right. Streets like this just don’t exist any more, and I’m so glad that this episode survives so we can see how it looked.
Oh, look at me so casually saying ‘UNIT’ as though it’s the most every day thing in the world! This episode is massively important for reasons other than geography. This is the first appearance of UNIT, of Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier (as opposed to a Colonel), and of Benton. All of these things will be massively important to the show over the next couple of months in my marathon, and it feels momentous to see them falling into place here.
