Day 211 — July 30th 2021
The Android Invasion Parts Three and Four
The Android Invasion — Part Three
This is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I’ve only just realised that the Kraals have horns. I always thought they just had a very pronounced bridge to their noses, and that there’d been a split in the mask which meant the top of the nose had detached from the forehead. The second I spotted that it was actually a horn it suddenly became totally obvious, and even looking at screen captures from yesterday’s pair of episodes I can’t un-see it.
I think I like the design more now that I’ve spotted the horn, but I wish it were a little more obvious. The design of the face makes everything appear very squashed together, which isn’t great for picking out the details. They’re also not great masks — there’s very little movement in them. While the design is quite nice, you never forget that you’re watching some poor actor having to emote from under a load of rubber. I seem to be saying this a lot at the moment, but it really does feel like a step backwards for the programme after the very strong run we had with the likes of the Draconians and Linx when we get something like this.
I’m also not sure that I buy the Kraals as very much of a threat. They seem to introduce a new one in each episode (so we get a third here, but he only stomps around a bit, and I don’t think has any dialogue), but there’s clearly an attempt to suggest that there’s hundreds of the buggers just off screen.
Take this bit of dialogue from Part Two;
Chedaki: ‘That weapon. It is new.’
Styggron: ‘So far effective only at short range, but my armoury section is developing a much more powerful version for our space cruisers.’
I think I physically raised an eyebrow during that exchange, because I just don’t believe that there’s a whole ‘armoury section’ working somewhere else in the base. We only really see two of the aliens squabbling with each other, and that’s exactly what it feels like. Maybe there’ll be a more prominent Kraal invasion force when we reach Earth?
The main issue with things like this — where I don’t buy something the story is telling me — is that I start to question other aspects of the plot which probably don’t deserve any scrutiny. In this episode, for example, I’ve found myself wondering why the android Harry is working for the Kraals. Now, I know that the Androids have all been created as part of a training mission for the actual Kraal invasion (and more on that in a moment), but almost all the other androids are simply playing their part in the village. We don’t see the pub landlord skulking around the Kraals’ base carrying test tubes, so why is ‘Harry’ doing it, instead of another Kraal? Obviously I know the ‘real world’ answer to that is that the audience know Harry, and it’s therefore something to latch onto, but I don’t think it makes narrative sense.
Oh and one last thing before I move on to some actual praise rather than criticism — the design of the Kraal base is quite nice, but it’s lit so boringly. Remember that quote from Philip Hinchcliffe the other day about trying to do interesting things with the lighting? Barry Letts didn’t get the memo.
Anyway! Good things! I love the idea that this whole village is a replica on an alien world that’s being used to practice a key part of an invasion plan. That’s brilliant. If I’ve a complaint (and I’m sorry to say that I do), I think the idea is a bit wasted. I want to see the village actually get invaded! Show Harry being shot down by the aliens! Have all hope seem lost, and then reveal that it’s all a test, so Doctor Who and Sarah Jane have a chance to stop it happening to the real Devesham. When the village is disintegrated once its work is done, the effect is achieved via CSO (making a surprisingly late appearance for a Letts’ story) and it looks brilliant, fading away to reveal the arid desert beyond.
This episode is also home to some absolutely brilliant dialogue, and as with Genesis of the Daleks I have to wonder how much of a hand Robert Holmes had in rewriting Nation’s scripts. I’m especially fond of Doctor Who’s first encounter with Syggron;
Doctor Who: ‘Oh, hello.’
Styggron: ‘Resistance is inadvisable.’
Doctor Who: ‘Look here, we haven’t been introduced, have we?’
Styggron: ‘This is no time for niceties.’
It manages to put me in mind of Pertwee’s early adventures — Doctor Who and the Silurians in particular — while also feeling absolutely right for Tom Bakers’ incarnation. This is the version of Doctor Who that I want to watch. Irreverent and charming, not the ‘detached olympian’ bollocks from Pyramids of Mars. People go on about the Fourth Doctor Who’s grinning, and in moments like this it’s impossible not to grin along with him.
Another lovely bit of dialogue comes in the form of a slightly cliched exchange between the Kraals, which I can’t help but enjoy all the same;
Chedaki: ‘He is a Time Lord.’
Styggron: ‘At the end of his time!’
All in all, I’m going with another 5/10 for this one. There’s some great ideas and moments, but it’s not blowing my socks off.
The Android Invasion — Part Four
There’s another similarity between this one and Terror of the Zygons which I wasn’t expecting to discover — I think it needs at least one more episode to wrap everything up.
This final episode is filled with loads of really interesting ideas and moments, but they all suffer for being packed tightly into 25 minutes. It feels as though the story lurches from one concept to the next in this one and none of them have any room to be explored or even enjoyed. Take all the messing around with doubles. There’s some brilliant reveals, like the discovery that Harry and the Colonel have already been replaced with Androids, but they never really do anything with it, because there’s no time.
The same can be said for the doubles of Doctor Who and Sarah Jane. My favourite moment of the entire episode is when the real Sarah discovers that she’s been talking to an android Time Lord, and then sees her own duplicate emerge from a pod behind him. It’s a really chilling moment, and a lot of that is down to Lis Sladen’s performance. She’s genuinely menacing as an android here. But because there’s no time to explore the mystery of who’s real and who’s not (‘Nobody knows who’s who around here,’ laments Doctor Who at one point) the next time we see the pair together, it’s the real ones and they don’t even think to question it. I want a bit of breathing room which would allow Doctor Who to use his ‘robot detector’ to check that his friend really is his friend.
While I’m on the subject, where did this robot detector come from? Has he had it in any of the earlier episodes of this story? I feel like it would have been handy before its single fleeting appearance here!
This problem of packing everything into the final episode means that the whole episode has suffered (I’ll be giving it a 4/10), which is perhaps unfair because some of the elements in here are definitely worthy of a higher score. I love Doctor Who encountering his double, and it’s incredibly effective to see Tom Baker pulling out a hand gun — that it’s such a shocking image makes his android feel all the more dangerous.
I think the absolute highlight of this episode, though, has to be Doctor Who and Sarah Jane discussing the plan;
Sarah: ‘So, providing we don’t burn up on re-entry, and aren’t suffocated on
the way down, we’ll probably be smashed to a pulp when we land.’
Doctor Who: ‘Exactly. Sarah, you’ve put your finger on the one tiny flaw in
our plan.’
Sarah: ‘Our plan? It’s your plan!’
Doctor Who: ‘Well, I’m open to suggestions if you’ve got a better idea.’
As ever, Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen carry the weaker moments simply by being so magical together.
Another problem with packing so much in here; we don’t get proper goodbyes for either Harry or Benton, both of whom make their final Doctor Who appearances with this episode. Benton is especially poorly served — the ‘real’ version only appears for a brief couple of scenes at the beginning, and we don’t see him again after he’s been replaced with the android. I want to see Benton come face-to-face with himself.
And it’s not only the semi-regulars who suffer in this way; Styggron — the main baddie! — only gets two scenes in the entire episode. One is less than twenty seconds long and the other comes about two minutes from the end of the episode. I feel like they’d have done better to lose the Kraals altogether, and simply have it be the androids themselves looking to invade. After my moaning in Part Three about not believing them to be a credible force, I was expecting more Kraal action in this episode, not significantly less!
It’s a shame that this story never really took off for me — I feel like there’s so many brilliant ideas in there, but they all desperately need some work to bring out the best.
