Saturday, 4 March 2023

The Android Invasion: Ranking - 249

   The Android Invasion

(Season 13, Dr 4 with Sarah-Jane Smith, Harry and Benton, 22/11/975-13/12/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Terry Nation, director: Barry Letts)

Rank: 249

In an emoji: 🤖


''The vacant stare, the googly eyes, the monosyllabic sentences, the bitter sarcasm...They did a really good job with your double Brigadier! Oh wait, whose Colonel Faraday?!'








It's the long-awaited return of Terry Nation for the first time since writing fan favourite 'Genesis Of The Daleks' and only his second script not to feature his iconic monsters. So what burning issue of the day did he feel so passionate about writing that he agreed to come back? Erm robots. Again. Maybe Terry got his double to write this story? It's not awful by any means, but had it been written today everyone would assume it had been cobbled together by an AI robot who'd been shown every other Dr Who story and was then asked to write something similar. There's an alien menace taking over the Earth (check) who can create artificial doubles of people including the regulars (check) who can shoot with their fingers (check) and keep the 'real' people they've copied locked up and awaiting rescue (check). So not at all like the two Auton stories, gosh no. And this rehashed version doesn’t have the same level of wit, of intelligence, of threat. There isn’t one single element that ‘The Android Invasion’ does any better than ‘Spearhead From Space’ or ‘Terror From The Autons’: it isn’t as imaginative, scary, funny or plausible. It’s like a plastic replica of, well, a Dr Who story with monsters made out of plastic. And as anyone whose tried to recycle plastic will tell you, it’s not as simple as simply making something new out of them the way you can with cardboard or glass, there are multiple types of plastic that have to be kept separate and some which can’t be recycled no matter how much you try. Even that wouldn’t matter so much had we not had yet another story do exactly this sort of thing this very season, with The Zygons a far more interesting race than The Kraals are ever allowed to be here. 


 The strange thing is, though, Terry Nation was in America when those two Auton stories were on and had no interest in what was happening back home at the time so wrote this story with no idea that Dr Who had done this before. It seems to have been by sheer coincidence, or maybe the influence of micro-plastics in the air, that he came up with largely the same idea just five years later. Nobody seems to have told him that Dr Who had already done wonky fake versions of people who shoot from their fingers before either – not producer Phillip Hinchcliffe (who probably didn’t know himself given that he wasn’t watching Dr Who back then) but nor, weirdly, did director Barry Letts (who was producer for the two Auton stories) nor script editor Robert Holmes (who wrote the flipping things). It seems remarkably strange that two such similar foes should exist in the Dr Who universe, but then for a large time its teased that this isn’t the Dr Who universe. Chances are Terry Nation was inspired by a whole string of sci-fi movies: 1956 classic ‘Invasion Of the Body Snatchers’ is an obvious one – the androids in this story are even ‘hatched’ much the same way, from giant coffins that look like seed-pods. So is ‘The Stepford Wives’, a film that had only just come out the year this story was made (although the novel came out four years earlier), a very Dr Who-y tale of feminists being brainwashed into becoming subservient housewives after moving to a tiny village (they also turn out to be robots, with the extra detail, similar to this story, that the robots have been taught to ‘bleed’ to keep up the pretence). However the big one that isn’t often mentioned is 1973’s ‘Westworld’, the very America gung-ho amusement park tale of robots gone wonky. As a fan of both robots and cowboys (see his work on the Gerry Anderson series, that are treated like Westerns, apart from ‘Four Feather Falls’ which actually is one) you can see why this film would have appealed to Terry Nation. The scenes of apparent humans all moving in robotic synchronisation and then suddenly turning into ‘people’ at the same exact time as if a switch has been thrown (by far the story’s most arresting and memorable image) is stolen wholesale from the film. It feels to me as if ‘The Android Invasion’ is an attempt by a returning America-phile to do a very English’ version of the same – to replace the sprawling deserts of the Wild West with English village duckponds and the saloon settings with a very typically English pub. It wouldn’t be the first or most blatant recycling use of old ideas with a Dr Who stamp put on them either. The difference, though, is that there are a lot of ‘borrowed’ ideas and not very much Dr Who this week. 


 The most interesting part of the story by far is the first episode when the 4th Doctor and Sarah Jane are trying to piece together what could have caused the English village of Devesham to be deserted and for everything to be not quite right. There’s a dead twitching soldier whose fallen off a cliff yet somehow got up and walked into a pub, money found in people’s pockets that’s curiously new and freshly minted, an electrical charge in the air they both pick up on the second they land, no animals or birds around and later a bunch of dates on a calendar that are all the same. Throw in a bunch of pub-goers who are bussed in and stand around like mannequins until 8pm on the dot and a bunch of guards in radiation suits and our imagination is suddenly working overtime. We’re close to a nuclear research centre – has there been a nuclear fallout? It looks for a few episodes as if we're in a 'nuclear test village', one of those places built specifically to be blown up by atomic weapons so that scientists could research everything that happened- is this either a test, or perhaps an atomic war/nuclear accident for real? (Sarah points out that everyone seems to have left the local pub in rather a hurry). If not, has everyone been possessed by some alien foe? For a moment you even think they’re going all postmodern and have landed in ‘our’ world by mistake (where we have an ‘Evesham’ but not a ‘Devesham’). 


 The truth, when it arrives, is both more obvious and more implausible than any of these theories. What we get instead is (spoilers) a unique example of an alien menace having a 'practice run' for how to invade The Earth with android replicas. Which makes a lot of sense until you realise that the Kraals must be the unluckiest aliens in the universe to mock-up this particular village just as this particular armed forces are stationed there, who happened to be the only organisation on Earth created specifically to fight alien menaces. It’s with a sinking heart (and lowering ratings) that you realise that the big mystery that’s been built up steadily across the course of twenty odd minutes is going to be just like any old Dr Who plot involving both aliens and robots. A revelation that would, admittedly, have a much bigger impact had we not a) done this story twice already with Autons and b) had the title not given it away already. This plot revelation also doesn’t quite explain everything: why do the Kraals go to such trouble for research purposes when they have the power and weaponry to just invade already? Why do they bother to keep the ‘real’ people they’ve taken over alive when human life is so worthless to them? And why, out of all the places in the world to choose, did they go for a place within walking distance of UNIT, who just happen to overlooking a scientific space programme this week very (even though it clearly must have been running for years) and who just so happen to be pals with a timelord who lands right in the whacking middle of it? Why, after bumping into the local army, don’t they leg it and choose somewhere more secluded instead of whacking out android replicas of the only people trained to kill them? Terry Nation is a writer who has an interesting position amongst Whovians. We’ll always be grateful he created the Daleks and he wrote some of the best Who stories, but his work tends to come in compact, simplistic form. If a script editor is in the right mood and is interested to get heavily involved (as Robert Holmes did with ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’) then the results can be thrilling. And when they have their eye off the ball (as Holmes does here, busy as he is with his own stories) things can go very wrong very fast, with plots that feature lots of escaping and capturing rather than an actual storyline, clichéd aliens with clichéd plans, whacking great plot holes and ideas that rely heavily on coincidence and a sense that you’ve seen a lot of this before. 


 And yet there’s a lot to love about this script too, which is coming from a very different place to Holmes’ two Auton stories, even if the results end up being so similar. Holmes was writing about his fears of a modern consumerist society which was becoming more reliant on plastics and was losing touch with things that were ‘real’ - what scared him was the idea that plastic was getting so close to resembling human features and sucking the soul out of ‘real’ people that the line between the two was becoming blurred (if he’d been around today his office would be full of upcycled gizmos you suspect). Terry Nation is returning to one of his favourite themes that always scared him so much, war. This story might be set on Earth and might not feature the Skaro scourges but it’s basically ‘Genesis Of the Daleks’ told from a slightly different angle, the ‘start’ of a cold war that’s growing out of control (but whereas the Daleks were too fiery and ‘hot’ for that sort of a war to last for long, their replacements in this story The Kraals are more patient and more finicketty). In the real world there had been a longstanding rumour that Russia’s KGB were preparing for a mass invasion of either Britain or America or both and for training purposes had put together a ‘fake’ English village to teach undercover spies how to infiltrate into local life. The rumour continued that the Russians had been so successful that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them over here, leading a double life, speaking perfect English, all waiting for the signal that would see them revert to their naturally aggressive selves and takeover every location all at once. It was only a matter of time before we were over-run from the inside and your neighbours, your teachers, your work colleagues, maybe even the prime minister would all turned out to be Russian agents who’d been collecting information about you this whole time (let’s face it, that would explain a few things about life in England even now. perhaps especially now). And if that thought doesn’t have you running behind your sofa for real, well, you must be born past the 20th century, when the idea of any power being that patient when they could just drop a bomb on your house or fly a plane into your main buildings seems ridiculous. As it turns out the collapse of Soviet Russia in the late 1980s revealed all this to be complete and utter nonsense and that the Russians were way behind the place we thought they were, while convinced that we were about to do exactly the same them wit similar unfounded rumours of their own. If you were to make a story with this plot now it would be daft. But in 1975 it seemed eerily plausible and its only a small hop from ‘Russians in it for the longterm’ to ‘long lived aliens who have the time and money to tinker with human robots in the name of research’. Terry and Bob were both writing about the horrors of modern life in 1975 then, but two very different sorts of threats that just happened to end up looking alike. 


 Forget the KGB if you want: another influence on this story is surely the Watergate scandal of 1974 as seen through the eyes of a disillusioned fan of American culture. All that time we thought the people in power were above suspicion, that there were enough people around them to make sure they were keeping our best interests at heart, and it turns out that they were after their own greedy ends after all and all in it. The Nixon cabinet might as well all have turned out to be aliens for the good they did humanity. This isn’t the era to start turning presidents into aliens to make a point yet (there was still enough support for there to be a storm of letters and Dr Who in 1975 didn’t need any more controversy), but the idea of an alien working under cover and replacing people we trust with robots had never seemed more plausible than it did at this point in time. Richard Nixon even looks like a plastic Auton. Now that The Master is no longer in Doctor Who the closest we have to an authority figure people ‘trust’ is UNIT, so the script takes them over instead.

 

The clever part of the story comes from the twist on the usual Dr Who formula. We’re used to having cold-blooded aliens coming along to kill us warm-blooded, emotional humans without a second thought, right down to the point of making a lot of them reptiles (and cold-blooded in more ways than one). In this story, however, it’s the aliens who are big and emotional and who have feelings all over the place, while it’s the Humans who are cold (because they’re really robots). The Kraals must have made a refreshing change from writing for Daleks (and despite a longstanding rumour no they weren’t just Daleks in the early drafts – it was Terry’s request to have a break from writing for them). They’re not egotistical ruthless war machines but highly-strung scientists who seem on the verge of a nervous breakdown throughout, obsessed with detail and planning and getting things right. However, the jokes on them because even though they’ve got practically all the details right (including many that they couldn’t possibly have known and which seem unnecessary) they miss the bigger picture of what humanity’s all ‘about’. They don’t like finding that out either, at all. Even though we keep being told how thick their rhino-like hides are, by Dr Who monster standards they’re psychologically very thin-skinned indeed, always on the verge of losing their temper but struggling to be civilised (unlike, say, a Dalek who throws permanent temper tantrums and is proud of it). They look pretty good for the era as costumes go, with a thick heavy head that seems solid, but just enough of the actor’s real features (especially their eyes) peeking through to make them feel more than just a suit. Though what they do and how they talk is very generic, how they look and their back story are pretty interesting – more than deserving of a sequel anyway, though we’ve never had one at the time of writing (even on the Big Finish audios). They’re clearly powerful and one of the few alien threats that ever manages to ‘conquer’ UNIT, with all their training and experience at dealing with alien foes, perhaps because all their meticulous research has allowed them to predict what the human response to their threat is going to be to the letter. It’s the Doctor’s unpredictability that’s their downfall, a random element that they can’t control or prepare for. Every time they smugly lock him up and think he’s out of harm’s way he pops up again; every time they think he’s running for his life out the way he surprises them by coming back to the scene of the crime and trying again, every time they think they’ve got him occupied with an android Sarah perfect in every detail (except the scarf and tastebuds it seems) he sees through it. Interestingly they clearly know about the Doctor and his relationship with UNIT, but none of them think to keep an android lookout for blue police telephone boxes or have an emergency plan for what might happen when he turns up (and while the Doctor won’t be back in near-contemporary Britain for a while after this story, by this stage he’s still very much hanging around). That seems an odd mistake for such a detail-orientated alien race that have thought of absolutely everything else. Like the Daleks the Kraals are obsessed with detail but unlike the Daleks (or indeed most baddies) the Kraals are worries they might not win, which is why they’re working extra hard to make sure nothing with their plan to go wrong. As a result I find the Kraals quite sympathetic despite their evil plan: there they’ve been working hard, researching for years until they think they have everything sorted, only years mean nothing to a time-traveller and it only takes one timelord to undo one of the most meticulous and thorough invasion plans we ever see in this series, all that hard work ultimately for nothing. Poor things. I’ve had days like that. 


 It’s worth comparing all this to Terry’s ‘other’ big project of 1974: ‘The Survivors’. This was the first series Terry Nation had created from scratch and taken charge of himself (‘Blake’s 7’ is still a teleport away) and it has a similar feeling of being like ‘our’ world but where something’s gone ‘wrong’. This is the era when Terry moved back to Britain full-time, having accepted that his dreams of being a big success in American television (which paid far better than the BBC) were never going to happen. One of the main reasons he writes so many Dr Who stories at all between 1973-1975 is that he needed the money quickly after being out of work and abroad for so long. Returning to any country after being away for a long time is a weird experience for anyone: everything is 99.9% the same, but there’ll always be something - some in-joke, some local event everyone knows but you don’t, a craze or maybe a TV programme – that you just don’t get, no matter how many times someone explains it to you, because you didn’t experience it firsthand yourself. Those extra years away have changed the people you used to know well too, so that even though they seem on the outside to be identical to how they were before they’ll be ever so slightly different: sadder, wiser, maybe happier depending on how their lives have gone. Everything is so very similar those differences shouldn’t matter, but they’re disorientating. ‘Survivors’ is a more radical versions of this feeling (it’s a world not unlike the one we’re in now, with humanity dying out from a mysterious virus and civilisation reduced to its bare bones, people making a new life for themselves in the ruins of the old one, with memories all around) but it’s coming from the same place: how do you cope when home isn’t quite home anymore and you’re surrounded by memories of how things were the whole time? 


As ever with Terry Nation, it feels as if he’s sneaking another sub-plot in there too, while bored, one much closer to his own life as a freelance writer. We’ve seen, in our reviews for ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, Terry’s planned twin ‘goodbye’ stories to british TV viewers before setting off to America, that he was perhaps writing on some level about the act of watching television itself (the Dalek delegates in ‘Masterplan’ feel to me like a typical British TV demographic, while ‘The Chase’ even has the Doctor tuning in to a ‘space-time visualiser’ and effectively watching The Daleks on TV). After breaks for the twin Pertwee Dalek stories and ‘Genesis’ I think that concept might be back here: this village is a ‘training’ village, where people learn their craft and how to react to emergencies. Terry names this village ‘Devesham’ – and there’s never been a name of a place or monster in any Terry Nation script that didn’t have some deeper meaning or refer to something else (‘Kraals’ being Holmes’ suggested name, so we think, a little bit Daleky but separate). In real life ‘Evesham’ was the place directors and camera operators from the BBC went to learn their craft. They got to play around with sets and make the use of aspiring wannabe actors without getting under the feet of their colleagues at television centre and got to find out what things they’d learnt from their training courses they could use in ‘real’ life – and which they couldn’t. As someone who’d hung around a lot of TV studios (not least ‘The Survivors’, the first time Terry would have witnessed all this firsthand rather than heard about it from colleagues down the pub) the writer must have been increasingly aware of how, in television, you can prepare all you like and make as many notes as you want and plan things to the nano-second, but there will always be some unexpected emergency that interrupts your plans. The Kraals are perhaps the TV executives breathing down his neck, expecting product to arrive on time to the last detail as per his original plans (aloof and cold, yet emotional and quick to anger), while as an ex-Gerry Anderson colleague more used to working with puppets than actors firsthand Terry must have been thinking to himself how much easier everything would be if the cast were replaced with android duplicates he could programme (there really were an awful lot of problems with the cast of ‘The Survivors’ which is why the main actors kept coming and going across its four difficult years). 

 

Talking of TV, Barry Letts makes a welcome return to the series at this point after behind-the-scenes difficulties of his own. On leaving Dr Who as executive producer in 1974 he was ‘promoted’ to be head of drama serials at the BBC. In 1974 he was put in charge of a series about another ‘doctor’ Marie Curie and a big budget drama that was set to be one of the big TV events of the year. Only there was a ‘fight’ between the scifi and drama departments about whether it counted as a ‘science’ programme or a ‘drama’ programme. In the end Barry lost and the science department won. Twiddling his thumbs with nothing to do but still under contract and unable to work elsewhere, he dropped into his old offices to see if there was any work going he could effectively do ‘for free’ (other producers would have taken the money and run, or at any rate stayed in bed, but as the writer of a story about karmic giant spiders Barry was too conscientious to do that). Letts had been a director before becoming a producer (he’d directed the 2nd Doctor story ‘The Enemy Of the World’ back in 1968) so gladly took up the directing job, getting the chance to work with Tom Baker (the man he’d hired for the job) for the first time and re-uniting with old acquaintances Elisabeth Sladen, Bob Holmes and Terry Nation. From what I’ve read Barry was given pretty much the run of the scripts submitted for season 13 to do so it’s interesting he chose this one. On ‘his’ watch the Terry Nation scripts were two of the ones that caused the most trouble and there’s nothing obviously in Barry’s natural ‘style’ to latch on to (you would have thought ‘Planet Of Evil’, a morality tale about the importance of treating your planet with respect with lashings of CSO special effects, would be right down his street). There are though a number of touches that make this feel more like a ‘3rd Dr’ story than a ‘4th’ one in many ways though: this is the last time we see UNIT for many years, there’s a chance for actors to play their ‘evil twins’ (‘Inferno’ is the other story I’d accuse Terry Nation of ripping off, had he actually been in this country at the time it was on) and a lot of location filming in a charming village, just like ‘The Daemons’ (not Evesham but actually East Hagbourne in Oxfordshire). Which makes you wonder just how much of an impact on the writing and editing of this story Barry had. It still doesn’t feel quite ‘right’ as a UNIT story though (and not just because this is an android version). 


 It is, sadly, not the best home-coming for Letts, in his last direct connection to the series until writing ‘The Paradise Of Death’ for radio in the 1990s. UNIT are badly used. John Levene and Ian Marter both complained behind the scenes about the awful way their characters were treated in their last appearances – they both spend most of this story being ‘evil’, without the plucky reliable character traits we’re used to seeing (and in a much more basic way than Levene’s star turn as the right-wing Platoon Under-Leader Benton in ‘Inferno’). The last we see of the real Sgt Benton is him lying, apparently dead, on the floor and the Doctor doesn’t even go up to him to check he’s alright (he is trying to stop a mass invasion at the time but still, it’s very out of character). Harry, meanwhile, is just forgotten about and spends most of the story tied up in a rocket. It would have been sadder still to see the Brigadier go through this too but, despite officially still being part of the series, Nicholas Courtney got fed up hanging round waiting for the phone to ring and is off touring in the William Douglas-Home stage play ‘Dame Of Sark’, which as it happens is a very Terry Nation-friendly piece about the Nazi invasion of the Channel Islands (clue: he isn’t the Dame). Nobody seems to have bothered to check if he was free and only found out last minute, so we get some of the most awkward last minute re-writes in Dr Who history as Tom Baker walks into the Brigadier’s office and talks to a Colonel Faraday about the Brigadier being in Geneva while the Colonel delivers some very Brigadier-ish lines. In a story that’s all about how small differences can make big changes in the people you love it seems particularly odd, as if its going to be a plot point and the brigadier’s going to burst through the door at any time. Terry has no interest in writing for UNIT regulars (his two Pertwee scripts were set in space and barely featured them) so does the bare minimum he can get away with without any sense of true character or personality. This is a show that’s moved on so much it feels weird to have so many returns to the past that don’t fit the new format. It’s uncomfortable, like a school reunion where former best mates just have nothing in common anymore now they don’t share the same stretch of carpet and common adversaries and which makes you nostalgic for the proper old times instead. 


 The rest of the cast are struggling a little too. Of the trio of sycophants Milton Johns gets to play in Dr Who astronaut Guy Crawford is by far the least interesting, with nothing to really gets his teeth into, while one of the most interesting things about this story is seeing how Terry Nation writes for a race that are subtly different to the Daleks, something not helped at all by getting their regular voice artists Roy Skelton in to pay the Kraal Chedaki in much the same way (although he also sounds more like Zippy from ‘Rainbow’ than ever before despite that children’s puppet series not existing yet). The only actors who come out of this story well are the regulars and all the best scenes are the ones that at least feel as if they’re improvised by Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen at the height of their friendship, sparring off each other and cracking jokes. I just wish they'd had a more substantial threat to talk about while running around such lovely countryside to make all the extra effort everyone's clear gone to worthwhile. The most charming bit of all is Sarah’s joy at being able to rescue the Doctor at the end of part one after so many stories of it being the other way around! The rest of the story just drags when they’re not on screen and even falls flat when they’re separated. The ending, particularly, seems rushed, although the fourth episode is the best after the first in so many ways – especially the genuinely exciting moment when we see a whole army of Kraals after being convinced the budget would only stretch to two, as if the production team are going ‘haha, fooled you!’ Almost as good is the episode two cliffhanger where ‘Sarah’ falls over and her face falls off revealing herself to be an android – in a story that’s rather low on thrills the cliffhangers really are rather good (it’s just a shame that the close-up of Sarah’s face is a such a bad model shot, even more than the Auton ones, all the more so given that we know Sarah’s features well enough to recognise a fake a mile away –and so presumably, should the Doctor). 


 Some lovely ideas in there then and some nice moments, but somewhere along the way (round about the middle of episode two) Terry seems to have got bored and just drafted a boring generic Dr Who story where there was originally going to be a much more interesting nuanced one. After the revelation of what’s really going on (oddly made in episode two in a throwaway scene and not even in a cliffhanger) it’s just a typical Dr Who runaround where the only drama comes from whether the Doctor can possibly stop these monsters in time (and let’s face it, we know he will). Originally Terry’s script had the idea that the Kraals couldn’t tell their lefts from their right and had accidentally created a ‘mirror’ universe where everything would be the ‘wrong way round’, an idea Holmes took out at the editing stage because he thought it would be too tricky for the set designers to dress sets backwards, the costumiers to do the same with the costumes and the actors to use their ‘other’ less natural hands naturally. All understandable, but it’s a shame nothing else was put into its place as it means there are some truly weird plot beats in this story to cover up the gaps (Terry wasn’t the sort of writer who loved re-drafts and tended to leave them to other people, losing interest after he’d seen an original idea through to the endof a first draft). Just witness the first awkward scene where, within seconds of landing, Sarah Jane (not usually the most observant of companions) has picked up on the electricity in the air, seen a man fall to his death over a cliff, put on a scarf (because her android still having one later when it fell off will be a plot point – which I never understood because Sarah’s totally the sort of person to put her life in danger to go back and pick a scarf up again; in a clumsy continuity error she wasn't wearing a scarf anyway when she was captured, so there's no reason why the Kraals should have given her one. Maybe it as a lucky guess and they thought it matched her eyes or something) and commented that she doesn’t like ginger beer (another plot point, because the android Sarah does). The Doctor makes an awful lot of assumptions about his friend being captured that could have been explained by other means rather than a more obvious means of testing if she’s the real person like, say, asking how she’d feel about crawling through a ventilation shaft or what she thinks of giant insects. 


 The result is a story that’s a bit bland, a bit repetitive and with ideas we’ve seen done better so many times before, in Dr Who specifically and scifi in general both. The thrill of the mystery in part one, the Doctor-Sarah Jane interactions in part three and a semi-thrilling climax keep you watching and engaged, but there’s not really much beyond that: this is a story that starts our promisingly but ends up being just like every other Dr Who tale out there, with no distinguishing features except that the robots this week are of actual people we know and the aliens have distinctive pentagonal heads. Had the script concentrated more on the idea of those you love not being quite right, if the mystery had been kept up for longer, had the full cast been available and used better, had the ending not been quite so garbled (there were a couple of scenes they ran out of time to record which makes the action ‘jump’ just a little when the Doctor and Sarah are tied up and on board a rocket) then ‘The Android Invasion’ could have been a worthy story in its own right, rather than a malfunctioning duplicate of other ideas we’ve seen a thousand times. Most of all, though, it’s a shame they took so many shortcuts in both script and execution: in this of all stories, about meticulous planning and research, you’d think they’d have got the basics right. There are, however, flashes of brilliance throughout and there are some truly great ideas here, even if a lot of them aren’t strictly Terry Nation’s. This is one of those stories you maybe had to live through the cold war in order to get the most out of too (although Styggron’s funky screensaver on his video-phone does seem impressively modern). Most of all though, it’s daft – this was one of the last ‘classic;’ Dr Who stories managed to get a hold of (following Terrance Dicks’ surprisingly bland novelisation) and a bit of a disappointment. I should have realised: the first time I came across it was when, as a committed Tony Hancock fan, I borrowed Kenneth Williams’ notoriously acidic diaries. ‘Tuned in to see Dr Who for the first time in years’ he said after watching episode two of this story ‘It’s got very silly’. He’s right: for all of its origins as a cold war spy story, for all the very real existential horrors at its heart, this really is a very silly story indeed. 


 POSITIVES + The locations are gorgeous. We haven’t had any real proper location filming in Dr Who for a while by this stage following stop-offs on a very studio-looking Mars, a planet made entirely from CSO and even the supposed trip to Scotland is clearly a quick trip to Sussex for a few minutes before ending up in a TV studio again. There’s lots of location filming in ‘The Android Invasion’ though and, the Cambridge of the unfinished ‘Shada’ and the Portmerion of ‘Mandragora’ aside, it’s the most impressive and memorable looking story of the 4th Dr era (which did tend to feature location filming in car parks and industrial estates as a rule). The story makes good use of it too, unlike some Who stories filmed on location that could have been set anywhere, with the ‘real’ Fleur de Lys pub used as a set, a real memorial Cross the Doctor climbs up to see if there is any life around and lots and lots and lots of running through local bushes. The filming shoot was fun too apparently: hordes of schoolchildren swamped the production team all day asking for autographs and this was one of the happiest times Tom Baker had on set, loving every second and in a good mood throughout (such a shame this is a story about a deserted village rather than one with lots of extras!) The National Radiological Protection Board in Harwell stands in for the Space Defence Station and is a bit more what we’re used to seeing, but even this is as good a sterile and scientific base to run around in as any, all unusual shapes and right-angles. 


 NEGATIVES – It takes Sarah all of four minutes to randomly trip and fall down a ravine. Even for one of the series’ most endearingly clumsy companions this is some going! Harry would be proud (if he wasn’t an android). 


 BEST QUOTE: Sarah Jane ‘I’m sure you shouldn’t be drinking so soon after breaking your neck!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Oseidon Adventure’ (2012) is a big Finish adventure that once again pits the 4th Doctor against the Kraals, this time with Leela alongside him. This sequel is a deliberate trap laid out for the Doctor as revenge for the end of ‘The Android Invasion’ though it’s mostly set on the Kraals’ home world, never seen on screen. Like its source material it’s a bit on the basic side but the Kraals themselves are a lot more interesting than they were ever given space to be on TV. 

Previous ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ next ‘The Brain Of Morbius’


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