Day 210 — July 29th 2021
The Android Invasion Parts One and Two
The Android Invasion — Part One
We’ve entered the period now where Doctor Who has taken to utilising literary and film classics as the inspiration for new adventures. We’ve had shades of King Kong in Robot, Jekyll and Hyde in Planet of Evil, and we’ll be doing Frankenstein in a couple of days’ time. The opening episode of The Android Invasion takes its cue from the small screen, because this feels more like an episode of The Avengers than Doctor Who! That’s not a bad thing — this episode feels totally unique, and I think that works in its favour. The Avengers is a series which I enjoy but I’ll admit I’ve not seen nearly enough of, despite owning the DVDs, the Blu-rays and even the CDs of the ‘lost’ stories from Series One.
This episode specifically reminds me of two episodes I have seen, both from Series Four; The Hour That Never Was and The Town of No Return. The first is, I think, one of the more famous episodes, in which Steed and Peel arrive at an army base where things aren’t quite what they seem. There’s fish frozen in their tank, and the bodies of dead characters vanish from their resting place. The latter is an episode I only saw once before, and that was when I last watched The Android Invasion. The Production Subtitles on this story highlight it as sharing several similarities, and I seem to recall enjoying it more than I did this Doctor Who tale. I definitely need to check it out again, especially as I’ve yet to see it in full HD on the Blu-ray!
Anyway! I love it when we get a bit of a mystery to solve, and this one gives us some pretty enticing ones. The coins all being the same is the bit that intrigues me the most, because it’s something so subtle and yet manages to be totally conspicuous at the same time. While that concept is given plenty of exploration, I feel like the other big reveal — that the UNIT soldier we saw jump from a cliff is somehow still alive and perfectly fine — is underplayed a little bit. Our heroes whisper about it, and Sarah Jane gets a couple of sarcastic jabs in at the man’s expense, but it’s not given the big ‘reveal’ moment that I think it deserves.
The series has been shot through with a thick vein of horror since Hinchcliffe and Holmes took charge, and that’s evident in this story too but in a different way to usual. We’ve had body horror via creatures like the Wirrn and the transformation in Planet of Evil, but this one feels more like 1970s folk horror. The sequence in which a group of villagers are driven silently into the village and sent off to take their positions is far creepier than it has any right to be, and Sarah’s frosty reception in the pub wouldn’t feel out of place in the likes of The Wicker Man.
We’ve got some great locations on display in this one, too. The village of Devesham was actually filmed in East Hagbourne and it’s gorgeous — a proper picture postcard village. I’d love to visit some day and see if it’s still as pretty almost half a century later. There’s not a great many photographs available for The Android Invasion, but I have to mention the stunning image Clayton Hickman put together for the cover of the Figurine Collection a couple of years ago, editing the real life pub landlords out of a photo to create one of my favourite images of Doctor Who and Sarah Jane. The location of the Space Centre is rather lovely, too, in a different way. It’s got a fairly unique style of architecture which should look totally out of place with the quaint little village, but manages to look beautiful all the same. It helps that the location filming has taken place on such lovely days, so it feels like the perfect story to be watching with all the sunshine we’ve been having lately.
Having finally reached an iconic look for Baker’s Doctor Who in the last story, this one introduces another of his regular outfits with the arrival of the oatmeal jacket. I always had this one down as a style that I wasn’t overly keen on, but seeing it in action I was definitely wrong, because it looks fantastic. I’m also quite keen on the Jackie Kennedy style that Sarah Jane’s rocking in this one — it’s no wonder they chose this story for the outfits on the Eaglemoss figurines.
One last thing to muse on here; is this the first Tom Baker story which doesn’t follow directly on from the previous one? Planet of the Spiders links to Robot via the regeneration, and then a trip in the TARDIS for Harry takes us to The Ark in Space. At the end of that one they teleport into The Sontaran Experiment and their departure is hijacked by the Time Lords for Genesis of the Daleks. The Time Ring takes them back to Nerva for Revenge of the Cybermen and a call from the Brigadier takes them into Terror of the Zygons. Sarah Jane’s hair grows a lot between that one and Planet of Evil, but she specifies that they’re undertaking the trip to London that they started in Scotland.
Pyramids of Mars is a bit of a contentious one — they’re still trying to get back to London, and Doctor Who is having a strop about ‘[running] around after the Brigadier’, but you could argue that it’s some time later and they’ve been back to London and had some other adventure in between. I think the intention is that it’s all part of the same narrative, though. This one — so far — hasn’t made any reference of their attempts to get back to Earth, and Sarah doesn’t seem surprised that they’ve arrived there, only by their actual location being somewhere she recognises but didn’t expect to be. I’ve really enjoyed having all the stories link up again; it’s been a nice throwback to the earliest days of the programme. And I’ve been surprised for just how long they’ve kept it up, though it makes it tricky to imagine more adventures for the Doctor Who/Sarah/Harry line up.
A decent start to the story, and a 7/10 from me.
The Android Invasion — Part Two
After all my talk during Part One about how this story feels like an episode of The Avengers masquerading as Doctor Who, I’ll tell you what elese it reminds me of; Terror of the Zygons. Watching this episode it hit me like a tonne of bricks, and I remember saying the same thing when I watched it for the first time in 2014. It’s there in similarities between the plot (a group of aliens are duplicating people, and the second episode features an ‘evil’ version of Harry) but it’s most obvious in the direction.
I wonder if Barry Letts had seen Terror of the Zygons before putting this together? It’s certainly possible, given the X months between the two productions. It just strikes me as too much of a coincidence that so many of the shots seem to line up so well, and while I’d not be so crass as to accuse him of copying Camfield’s work, it’s perhaps telling that the bits which match the earlier story are the best-looking bits of this one.
Take a look at some of these examples;
Don’t get me wrong, some of those are a bit of a leap, but it is interesting how similar some of the ideas and the shots are given that these come only a couple of stories apart. I wonder if that’s another reason that The Android Invasion isn’t grabbing me as much as it should? It feels like an inferior copy of a story I only watched the other day.
That’s not to say that there’s not some great moments in this episode. I think the most famous (and probably the best) is the cliffhanger. Doctor Who announces that he knows he’s not talking to Sarah Jane, and then her face falls off to reveal an android underneath! Hah! Oh, that’s brilliant. There’s a reason it’s so well remembered, and I’m amazed they didn’t homage it with one of Sarah’s own companions in The Sarah Jane Adventures. I would have! The whole scene works incredibly well, right down to the brilliant dialogue;
Doctor Who: ‘You haven’t lost [the key]. You never had it. Sarah came here, turned the key in the lock, and cancelled the pause control. The TARDIS continued on its set coordinates back to Earth.’
Sarah: ‘I don’t understand.’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, you do. This isn’t Earth. This isn’t real wood. It’s some kind
of artificial material like plastic. These are not real trees. And you’re not the
real Sarah.’
This is one of those occasions where I’d love to be going in not knowing the twist — because watching it with the cliffhanger in mind it’s incredibly obvious from the off that we’re dealing with a fake. Indeed, I spent most of the episode wondering why Doctor Who hadn’t worked it out yet, so it was a bit of a punch-the-air moment when the penny dropped and he revealed he’d known all along.
Aside from that key moment, though, and a handful of other nice oddities (the calendar is especially scary to me as it’s permanently stuck on the day before my birthday!) this story isn’t doing a lot to grab me, and I’m afraid it’s a 5/10 for this one.
