The Zygon Invasion/Inversion
(Series 9, Dr 12 with Clara, 31/10/2015-7/11/2015, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Daniel Nettheim)
Rank: 76
'Yes its time to play Truth Or Consequences. or Take Your Pick, that's a much better game. OK, you twisted my arm, any Zygon or Human that can go longer than ten minutes without saying 'what's that Dr?' and getting gonged out can go to the grand final. In this exciting finale they have to pick one of my 13 regenerations and defeating the monster that lurks behind it and defeating it. I hope none of you get the drashig! Now what's on the board, Carole Ann Ford?
And so it’s goodbye (at least if you’re reading these reviews in alphabetical order) with a fitting ‘final end’ that lets bygones be bygones by letting Zygons be Zygons and last push for the moral message that runs in so many of these other reviews: the importance of being kind. Even to people you don’t like, don’t agree with or are trying to blow you up. Because people are only people. Even when they’re actually blobby orange duplicates from outer space. It’s a worthy note to finish on as at last, after a season and a bit of just missing the mark for a variety of different reasons, the Peter Capaldi era comes right with a story that would make any Doctor look good but which is also built to all the 12th Doctor’s particular strengths and which couldn’t really have been made in any earlier era. The Zygons, popular monsters from the 4th Dr era revived surprisingly late into the new revival for the 50th anniversary special, go from being B-movie villains and comedy interlude to being a properly serious threat with a particular moral message most unlike their less blobby rivals. For their arrival isn’t an invasion, it’s an assimilation. They’re not trying to take over our planet but to live on it, as equals. The fact that these Zygotic refugees can adopt our culture, our language, our appearance so well we can’t tell them apart from the real thing makes them the perfect monster to tell this very different sort of story, a twist on ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ where it’s not an invasion but an assimilation by a race that (mostly) really have come in peace about assimilation not invasion. A lot of similar takes on the same go, mostly 1950s scifi B movies, are really about McCarthy witch-hunts and the idea that communists are waiting everywhere waiting to bring down capitalism. But Dr Who is more critical of capitalism and on the side of ‘true’ communism (the Lenin original before Stalin made a mockery of it) and makes up for all those cold war stories by having a story where the with-hunts trying to reveal who is really a Zygon are in the ’wrong’ and at risk of destroying the peace. For does it matter where they came from? They should be judged on who they are right now and nobody can tell them apart anyway (only other Zygons, occasionally, in one part of the script that never seems to be tied down and changes from scene to scene). I love the way this story tackles prejudice – all those arguments about ‘not in my back yard’ and how ‘they don’t look like us’ fall apart (because they flipping well look identical!) and ‘come over here stealing all our jobs’ (the Zygons have their own community and advanced technology they’re generally happy to share) fall apart and show such prejudices for what they really are, empty rhetoric. Even the numbers, of 20 million Zygons, are clearly a drop in the ocean compared to 7billion Humans.
The idea that all life is
sacred isn’t new to Who, but it’snever been done in such a way right under our
noses, before. Showrunner Steven Moffat always wanted to look at this sub-plot
from ‘Day Of The Doctor’ in more depth, the
tentative peace between mankind and Zygonkind and knew that he wanted his next
Doctor to be there when the peace failed. Moffat was also concerned at all the
wars that seemed to keep breaking out in the Middle East for no reason that he
could see (clue: they’re mostly about resources and selling off to rich Western
nations). So from as early as 2013 this story was in the running, eventually
moved back a season to better fit the ‘epic two parter’ vibe of series nine. As
such this is perhaps the only story in this book that isn’t so much a sequel to
an earlier story so much as an extension of it, which takes what’s maybe only a
couple of scenes in the original (solved ridiculously quickly so we could get
on with the inter-Doctor banter) and turns them into a gripping 100 minute
drama. However Moffat didn’t have time to write it so he gave the story over to
Peter Harness (despite the mess he’d made of ‘Kill
The Moon’), figuring it would suit his writing style of humans facing tough
decisions that come to a sudden head. It does too, as Harness returns to the
peace agreement and sees that while it’s been highly successful, enabling 20
million Zygons to assimilate into earth without most of the Human population
knowing (maybe that’s a Zygon behind you right now! Ha, made you look...Oh wait
no, it really is!) all peace treaties only hold as long as everyone want them
to be. It only takes a few people on either side to break it. That’s a clever
idea, returning to a monster that wants to assimilate rather than invade in an
era when Britain’s reckless entry into various wars (especially in the Middle
East) had caused an influx of refugees. Most of the Zygons have integrated
perfectly well, adopting to the local customs and re-starting their lives from
scratch. The problem though is that it only takes one troublemaker to start a
war and soon there’s a Zygon extremist fringe group, angry that they’ve been
pushed to the margins of society and desperate to enact revenge against a
lesser species. So they take matters into their own blobby hands, sending
ISIS-style execution videos (where the
head Zygons, who have taken on the form of two little girls, are disintegrated)
and threatening to reveal who the Zygons on Earth are once and for all. The
Humans, always quick to retaliate, want to get rid of all of them and go on the
attack. But why should their views of 20 million peaceful Zygons be coloured by
the act of a violent two?
There was a school of
thought in fandom when this story came out that it was anti-immigration. It
really isn’t. There are only two Zygons out of 20 million taking the Humans as
suckers; the rest just happen to have suckers. That’s nothing compared to the
Zygons who genuinely want peace and the
pain of them having to hide their real selves and who they are. This is a story
where ‘alien’ is used in its old fashioned sense as ‘foreigner’ from overseas
rather than from another planet. But where you come from counts for far less
than what you’re doing now. Harness is always careful to show that this is a
world where the Zygons have reason to feel cheated. They’ve done everything
that was asked of them, adopted to the local culture so well that Humans can’t
tell them apart and hidden their home comforts so as not to offend anyone. But
it’s still not enough. They will never be ‘Human’ enough to be accepted, even
when wearing Human faces. No wonder resentment creeps into one or two
extremists. But then there are some Human extremists too who will do anything
to kick them out, even without knowing who they are. The vast majority on both
sides, though, just want peace. The Zygons are the perfect monsters to do this
with because they’re so good at blending in – they could be anywhere. I could
be a Zygon writing this now in fact and you’d never know (any typos that remain
are blamed on my blobby fingers hitting narrow keys!) Your teacher or boss
could absolutely be a Zygon – and most probably are. It’s a clever nuanced idea
perfect for 2015 in a story that couldn’t really have been told much earlier
and which seems more and more relevant everyday: there will always be some
people, on both sides, who don’t want to play fair. At the time of re-writing
this there are a bunch of dunderheads with criminal records who have clearly
never watched an episode of Dr Who in their lives waving flags, painting
roundabouts, singing ‘patriotic’ songs (that are either about or written by
refugees ironically) and attacking the houses and shops of innocent people who
provide a huge service to their adopted homeland. All of whom have a mixture of
DNA from Vikings, Romans, Normans, various members of the British Empire and a
whole lot of visitors along the way. The idea that attacking every foreigner
you see, who grew up a quadzillion miles away from a criminal who was deported,
when statistically even per ratio crimes are more likely to be committed by drunken
white Englishmen, does anything to keep anyone safe is stupid. It’s only going
to end in retaliation from a small percentage of people angry at how they’re
being unfairly treated. Which will set everything off again. This isn’t a war
anyone can win, unless both sides agree to live in peace and to stop poking the
Zygon bear to make it react.
After all, there is no
real ‘enemy’ to fight – both sides really want the same thing, peace, even if
they disagree about the terms and how to go about it. Usually UNIT troops don’t
have a problem: the enemy is easy to spot because they’re a different colour
and usually look really weird, but this is a story that asks bigger questions.
After all the Zygons have families and loved ones and many of them are doing
good in their communities the same way as the Humans. And they’re only aliens
by birth, they live here now. There are two glorious scenes where the soldiers
hold their fire because the Zygons have used their shape-shifting ability to
take the form of their loved ones, their grannies husbands and children, and
the soldiers just can’t bear themselves to shoot someone they love. Usually
when Dr Who stories do plots about ‘doubles’ it means the budget has run out
and/or the writer needs a straightforward subplot to pad a story out, but not
here. ‘Invasion/Inversion’ looks at what it really means to be a ‘double’ of
someone, to take on another’s personality, to not be able to trust whether the
person next to you is a Zygon or a Human. It’s best demonstrated by Osgood, UNIT’s
scientific advisor, who lost her ‘twin’, the only person the outsider felt ever
understood her – she doesn’t care that she happened to be an alien, she’s spent
her life feeling like an alien (one cut line that’s maybe a bit strong but I
wish they’d been brave enough to keep: she says how in her head she’s still
screaming in despair and mourning for her ‘sister’ and when The Doctor comments
that she’s hiding it well stares back and says ‘Nowadays I’ve learned not to
scream out loud, that’s all’). We still don’t know if it’s the Human or the
Zygon who was killed in ‘Dark Water/Death
In Heaven’. It still doesn’t matter. They don’t reveal it even after being
taken hostage by Zygons. All that matters is the peace, which is still
maintained by the Osgood Box, two simple buttons that can wipe out one
population or the other, but no one knows which, the sort of thing ‘classic’
Who should have done with its tale of cold war battles. Only this one isn’t
like the cold war. This isn’t an arms race but two species trying to live
alongside each other and finding it hard. Cleverly the plot never sides with
either the humans or the Zygons; the refugees and the locals are all to blame
and neither quite believed in peace, they just saw it as a temporary truce
until they got what they wanted. You only need to look at the problems in
France a few weeks ago (from writing the first draft of this review, in 2023)
for what happens when people are told they’re equal citizens for the cameras,
and then patted on the head and moved out to the poor districts in town and
treated like second-class citizens – unfairness just comes up and bites you
later, when the oppressed feel they have nothing to lose by overthrowing their
captors. Refugees have been a major talking point for as long as new Who has
been around and its very much something that needs to be said and debated –
which the plot does, as fairly as it can, before falling on the side that the
shared need for peace is stronger than any differences and that everybody loses
in a war.
We need a go-between, an
alien who can see things from an outsider’s perspective and, just as Dr 3 used
to do, Dr 12 is in the room. Being Dr 12 he’s royally pissed off with everyone
and it’s really interesting to see him try and maintain peace after seeing the
calmer, more patient Dr 10 and 11 have a bash. Peter Capaldi finally gets to
play The Doctor the way he was born to: he isn’t simply a ‘grumpy old man’ with
antisocial quirks here, he’s a timelord whose seen it all and frustrated that
history is repeating itself. He isn’t a rebel without a cause this time, he’s
seen the effects of war firsthand and knows where disputes like this lead. Even
the comedy is spot on this week: rather than have the 12th Doctor be
a mad hatter cracking jokes he’s entirely deadpan while the situation is funny,
such as his desperate interrogation of two small kids on a school playground,
following them around the (metaphorical?) swings and roundabouts and trying to
get them to listen. Capaldi gives easily his best performance in the role, full
of pride, full of anger, trying to restrain himself from what he’s really
thinking before unleashing a tirade of wild fury at the perpetrators on both
sides. This isn’t a ‘Thick Of It’ sitcom style comedy scene either but
gloriously real and the big showdown, about the horrors of war on both side, is
rightly hailed as one of the iconic scenes of modern Dr Who (I’ve even seen
non-fans use it occasionally. Maybe they think its actually news footage and
Boris Johnson is looking particularly blobby today). It still doesn’t get
enough love this speech I don’t think – its ‘our’ version of the great Charlie
Chaplin speech at the end of ‘The Great Dictator’. Well, I say it’s a speech,
actually it’s three. All
beautifully balanced, all full of emotion and every time the Humans or Zygons
think they’ve raised a point The Doctor the perpetual outsider, shuts them down
beautifully. Those in the minority don’t have a right to attack the majority.
Equally the majority don’t have a right to make the minority become like them.
Those who want power for power’s sake might have the best intentions but who is
to say what they want won’t be worse for someone else? They should read this speech to every person in
charge and especially anyone who wants to start a radicalised splinter group
because they consider themselves a ‘minority’ – because every party that comes
to power will have to deal with people like them. The only regret is that the
draft script had an even longer one about the practicalities of governing and
how its actually quite hard: ‘Will
you grow potatoes? Will there be enough potatoes? Do Zygons even like potatoes?
Do they prefer beetroots? Is it going to be a vast land of beetroots forests,
this paradise? You know who you want to destroy, you know who you want to kill,
you think you know what you want to free people from, but you don’t understand
what you’re freeing them to do because you don’t understand what it’s like to
live with other people, how complicated it is. You don’t understand what it’s
like just to be a person, how complicated and strange and contradictory that
is, you’ve got no imagination, no empathy, you can’t see beyond the end your
stolen little nose. Life isn’t black and white, life is dark, it’s full of
rainbows, it’s a dazzling array of dimmer colours, and you’re not equipped to
deal with it, that’s why you’re going to fail!’ The Doctor is challenged that he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a
rejected outsider that nobody wants and when you’re burning with revenge and he
simply explodes: he fought in the time war he’s haunted by screams every night
still, this war is nothing by comparison. He doesn’t want anyone to ever feel
like that. The full speech lasts some ten minutes – a super brave move for an
era of the series when it was at its most action-based and least talky - and is
a tour de force; bravely they even run it without music. Somehow it’s not an anti-climax
that we get the exact same solution we did in ‘Day
Of The Doctor’ because this time both sides seem to learn their lesson and
realise how close they came to annihilation. And The Doctor forgives them all,
on both sides, no matter what they tried to do to him and his friends, because
only by finding forgiveness can people break the cycle of hate and move on.
Hate never gets anything but hate, whereas if everyone had shown love and
tolerance from the beginning it might have been alright. And to think people
say Dr Who is a silly children’s series! Capaldi gives his all in a scene he
clearly believes in and nails a good 90% of it. He gives his all in other ways
to this story too, ending up with a meniscus tear from all the running that
means his Doctor is going to be more stationary in the stories filmed after
this (funnily enough it’s the same injury Matt Smith had on ‘Time Of The Doctor’, which is why he uses a
walking stick for so much of it – his gag to his successor ‘look at what this
show does to you!’ suddenly didn’t seem like so much of a joke!)
With Clara out the way as
much as she is we finally get to see Osgood as The Doctor’s companion,
something fans had long hoped to see (and many groaned when she turned down the
chance to travel with The Doctor). The human face of UNIT, that would be in the
front row in the cosplay conventions if Dr Who were a show in the Dr Who
universe, she makes for a good double act. Err, mostly with herself. Though she
starts off the rescued damsel in distress and is such a fan she dresses like
multiple versions of The Doctor at once, thereafter she doesn’t do anything the
usual ‘companion’ way. Her brutal honesty, so useful in holding the peace, rubs
The Doctor up the wrong way (‘If I was the baddy I’d have had you shot dead
from the first. Twelve bullets just to make sure’ is almost her opening line on
him rescuing her). The fact that we don’t know if she’s a Human or a Zygon is a
clever storytelling device too: to both of them it doesn’t matter who she is,
the peace is all that matters. Funnily enough Ingrid Oliver is now officially
named ‘Osman’ rather than ‘Osgood’ after marrying the writer and broadcaster Richard
a few years after this story. She’s both the story’s quiet heartbeat and moral
conscience and the source of the best comedy (such as commenting on the JNT era’s
habit of having question marks on everything he wears; he still wears question
mark underpants, or so he says!) Rather sweetly, after several episodes of Osgood
telling The Doctor how much of a fan she is, here in their last meeting (to
date) The Doctor says that he is a big fan of hers too. Given how so many Whovians
identify with Osgood it’s a sweet moment.
Clara, meanwhile, is more
like a supporting character for a change and she gets very few scenes with The
Doctor (most of the time she’s on answerphone, with the very Clara message that
she’s ‘either on the tube or in outer space’ – no doubt her friends think it’s
a joke without realising how true to life it is!) There’s a theme across season
nine that Clara has become too much like The Doctor for her own good. For the
most part it’s undeveloped, reduced to having Clara take too much on or
improvise trying to get out of a situation until The Doctor saves her and will
result in one of the feeblest exists of any companion from the series in ‘Face The Raven’. But here it really matters.
Clara’s always played close and fast with the rules, happy to lie and
manipulate if its better in the long run (the biggest difference between her
and Amy, who is so truthful and open it hurts everyone, including her
sometimes). There’s a superb cliffhanger (spoilers) in which it turns out that
Clara has been taken over long ago, but no one has noticed. Not even The Doctor
apparently. You couldn’t have done that with Amy, or Rose, or Martha, or Donna,
or Ace, or Leela, or Sarah, or Jo, or Jamie, or whoever (I like to think Clara
has always been a Zygon and this plan has been running a lot longer than the
start of this episode,although that would contradict quite a few stories
admittedly!) We know them too well, trust them too much and whenever they did
try that sort of thing in the past it didn’t work because we could always tell
when they were acting out of character. But not Clara. In context of her other
stories it makes perfect sense she’d take on more than she could chew, that she
would be up front with UNIT despite not being a soldier, that she wouldn’t let
on everything she knew. So it’s a genuine surprise when Brigadier Bambera (a
distant relation to the one in ‘Battlefield’
who happened to get the same job?) and ‘Clara’ break into the compound (very
like footage of American troops attacking Al Qaida operatives) and find that
the ‘real’ Clara is already there, apparently dead. At first Clara fights back from within her
brain, doing the common Moffat thing of talking to the baddy in a ‘mind palace’
ia a television set (the showrunner does get a co-credit on the second episode
after all) and seems to have the upperhand, manipulating the more
straightforward Zygon and turning the tables on her. But then the Zygon reveals
that she can tell when Clara is lying because she is inside her body and can
tell from her heart rate and her pulse. Even Clara can’t hide that and is
forced to tell the truth. Clara, so often used as either the unwitting cause of
an episode or the deux ex machina method of solving it, finally gets to act
like a real person– the Human conscience caught in the middle who shares the
Doctor’s rage but also understands how hard co-operation by two such different
species can be because she’s had more experience of living in a broken and
divided world. She makes for a good baddy too when she turns out to be a secret
Zygon; Clara’s always had a darker side than most companions so it’s a surprise
how little she has been taken over by aliens across her run in the series and
Jenna Coleman manages to make the two portrayals subtly different without giving
the game away too obviously (mostly it’s the hair that tells you which is which
before you know, while Clara is always doing something to her hair so it’s not
a giveaway at first). It’s one of the best uses of Clara as a character and
Jenna Coleman turns in one of her better performances too, perhaps helped by
the fact she was good friends with Harness in real life (they’d been at Oxford
Uni together). For there is absolutely nothing of ‘Clara’ left in the unlikely
named Zygon ‘Bonnie’ once she reveals herself (a lot of fans took the name as a
dig at Langford, but I don’t think it is really) once we see her turned: none
of the smirking or wry smiles or flirting with the eyes or all the things that
make Clara ‘her’. Instead Bonnie is straight, direct, no-nonsense and shows
just what an ‘act’ the playful Clara is.
This also leads into the
story’s overall theme of ‘Truth Or Consequences’, an idea that sadly doesn’t
quite come off. This is a real place in New Mexico – as Clara tells us, it was re-named
as part of a radio contest so that a big radio/TV show of the same name would
record some episodes there in the 1950s and never changed the name back again –
not least because the original name, ‘Hot Springs’, was terribly generic. Clara
says she knows this because she memorised all the ‘Trivial Pursuit’ cards as a
kid so she could win, which is the one thing in this story that doesn’t seem
very Claray (the need to win at all costs is much more Amy-ish). It clearly
tickled Moffat and Harness who use it a lot, a symbol of how for any peace to
hold everyone on both sides need to tell the truth and stop playing games. But
it doesn’t really come off. Had the Zygons only assimilated into that town it
would make sense, but it’s just a place with a cool name and isn’t properly
integrated into the plot. While the idea of having a Who story that travels the
globe is a good one (and an influential one: this looks a lot like the
political globe-trotting Chibnall stories to come, just with more heavy-handed
lectures) there’s too much outer travel than inner space this episode,
travelling to places that don’t matter. The Doctor even gets his own ‘presidential’
plane from UNIT, something the 3rd Doctor would have adored (but the
1970s budget would never have stretched to!) Dr Who also chickens out of
setting the Zygon retaliation in an actual country so we get our first
‘fictional’ country on Earth since Atlantis (well…maybe) with the fictional
‘Turzmenistan’ fills in for any number of countries in the Middle East (a sort
of cross between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran and
Iraq). Caerwent, Monmouthshire looks impressively like the real thing, but it
takes away from the fact that this story is ‘real’ and happening ‘now’ when
it’s in a fictional land, one that will be back for the ‘monk’ three parter the
next season. After a strong start with lots of sympathetic Zygons it’s a shame
when we cut back purely to Bonnie too, as while Jenna Coleman plays her well
she’s more one-dimensional, a committed zealot who believes only in her own
ideals, without much colour or shade. She’s a more obvious baddy, in a story
that seemed for a moment as if it was going to be brave enough not to need one.
If there’s a character that lets the serial down it’s Kate: she may be a
Lethbridge-Stewart but other than the name she shares nothing with her
Brigadier dad - she’s more pompous and out of touch with the outside world than
he ever was and far more ineffectual, relying on the Doctor to solve pretty
much everything. The UNIT soldiers too are pretty dense, even compared to the
comedy goons we used to have (a cut scene has Kate moaning about budget cuts so
she can’t train them properly. She happens to say this to Clara, who as a
teacher rolls her eyes and says ‘tell me about it!’) There are moments, too,
when this story is painfully long and drawn out, one of those stories that
builds to a tense crescendo but which starts off fairly low key and slow, with
a lot of talking (‘negotiating?) without much action happening. But then peace
and diplomacy is a series of sudden spikes of action followed by lots of back
and forth. The second episode, climax aside, isn’t anywhere near as strong as
the first either (although at least it follows on from it instead of ignoring
it and going somewhere else, as so often happens in the Moffat era!)
If the rest of the two
episodes can’t compete with its five peak moments though, The Doctor chasing
children round a playground – Allensbank Primary School, with a few additional
scenes at The Yamaha School Of Music, both of them in Cardiff and maybe six
miles away from each other), the soldier talked out of shooting the Zygons
impersonating her family, the soldier arguing with his Gran that she’s a Zygon
when she’s looking so disappointed in him, the cliffhanger reveal and the great
epic speech at the end, well what can? This is a very smart, intellectual
carefully thought out and well plotted story that really is the best of its
era, taking on real life situations all viewers of the time would recognise but
putting a Dr Who stamp on them. In fact it seemed a little too true to life on
broadcast, as the morning ‘Invasion’ was transmitted a Metrojet flight from Egypt
to Russia was blown up (and claimed by Islamic State, though it was never fully
verified), killing all 224 people onboard. The Dr Who version looked
uncomfortably like the real thing, which caused pause for thought though as the
scene was such an integral part of the episode it was left in (thirty-one
people complained, which is a lot for Who). That only makes the point all the
more powerful though, the desperate need for peace before anyone else gets
hurt. The result is a story much more like I expected the anniversary special
to be when we first heard who was going to be in it, before the Zygons got
sidelined for the time war sub-plot, full of body swapping and peace
negotiations (I fully expected the deceased actors to be brought back with
doppelgangers who were ‘not quite right! I still say that would make a good
idea for the 70th anniversary…)
If the points about peace
are best made in the set pieces rather than all the way through (the story goes
to sleep a bit in the first half of part two), this time even the interim
scenes are all pushing towards the same end plot for once without any diverting
sub-plots (mercifully they dropped a confusing one where Courtney, the pupil
from ‘Kill The Moon’, is really an
undercover Zygon who becomes a second terrorist) and there’s no attempt to look
away at something else, to brighten the mood or be silly (there are some great
jokes but they’re almost all dark this story). This is also perhaps the best
paced of all the modern series two-parters, with the cliffhanger coming at the
natural mark rather than with lots of vamping or padding or moving through the
plot too fast to get there. The brilliant and very Dr Who ending where the Humans
and Zygons have a face-off (no, not the melting Kane from ‘Dragonfire’ kind, I
mean a showdown) and both prepare to use their ‘Osgood boxes’ to destroy the
other, but find them to be empty (and have their memories wiped, so they aren’t
sure which is which anymore – and find out this has happened fifteen times
already!) makes up for anything. This is what Dr Who is was and always should
be ‘for’, asking deep and pertinent questions about the way we live our lives
that scifi shows like this one were born to ask. It’s
a story that more than anything shows that the world is a reflection of who we
are. If you’re racist and xenophobic
then your Zygon double will no doubt hate you and try to kill you first. But if
you’re Osgood then you know that differences don’t matter and peace is the only
way. Me? My Zygon duplicate and I sat down to a dr who marathon and really
enjoyed it, only falling out when he ate all my biscuits and wouldn’t give me a
piece of his Zygloberone. It’s hard
though. Kate complains at the way The Doctor simply took off (all three of
them) at the end of ‘Day Of The Doctor’
leaving her with ‘an impossible situation’ and he agrees and says that’s what
peace is, a tenuous hold against warlike divisions factions and rebels but one
that has to hold if we’re ever going to survive on both sides. That makes ‘Zygon
Invasion’ very much the child of the ‘classic series’ cold war stories in this
book but in a way that couldn’t possibly have been allowed on screen before the
collapse of the Soviet Union. A lot of
the Capaldi era stories have all the right ingredients and try hard but feel as
if no one remembered to turn the oven on so everything ends up as drab and slow
and undercooked (as well as being shot
in the dark) but this is the one story of the era that shines brightly, a story
that wouldn’t work anywhere nearly as well with a different Doctor. It’s a
story that has a lot of intelligent things to say and says most of them well.
Not bad for a story about a monster that was made to be comic fifty years
earlier! There’s just one real downside that I can see. What happens to the
poor Skarasen still living in Loch Ness? Surely it can’t be providing milk for
all 20million Zygons? Is there a Milkzygonman going door to door? And surely it’s
easy to spot who the Zygon duplicates are even without a box – they’re the ones
having constant holidays up to Scotland…
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The story
follows on quite neatly from ‘Day Of The Doctor’.
And the end is finally here, after
sixty years and ****3680 pages of adventures in time and space and more
genre-hops than you shake a blobby alien tentacle at. We end with a story that
proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dr Who really had done absolutely
everything in it’s **sity-three years. Because
‘Zygon: When Being You Just isn’t Enough!’ (2003/2008) is…Dr Who porn!
Yes you read that right. Goodness knows what BBV were thinking when they
commissioned this story – or indeed what Zygon creator Robert Banks-Stewart was
thinking when he let them – but this direct-to-DVD release has become notorious
in fan circles, with ‘Zygon porn’ the Dr Who equivalent of a series ‘jumping
the shark’, the moment the spin-offs went too far. And yet it’s probably not
what you’re expecting – certainly it’s not what I was expecting; far from being
‘Carry On Doctor Who’ it’s played pretty straight (well, straighter than
‘Torchwood’ anyway, whose average episode is much more like a porn film than
this) and is quite possibly the least sexy porn movie ever made. For behind the
appalling acting and production values (worse even than usual for BBV), beneath
the fact that of course the Zygons were chosen for the crossover given they
have their own built-in ‘blobby bits’ already, there’s actually a pretty decent
story in here somewhere, honest. I mean, the first six drafts (!) were written
by respected longterm Who author Lance Parkin, before handing over to Jonathan
Blum who wrote another six, even if both writers went uncredited (officially
because director Bill Baggs replaced so many of their words in the final thirteenth
draft, but being associated with this probably wasn’t good for their careers
either!) In between the often hilariously cringy sex scenes there’s some pretty
decent characterisation from a Zygon’s point of view as it spends so long
trapped inside Human bodies living a new life that they’ve ‘forgotten’ what
they used to be – until horrified to find themselves shimmering back to blobby
orange reality in the heat of passion. Our first Zygon is a man whose gone to
see his psychiatrist, haunted by dreams of another world, only to kill his
therapist and take over her body for the second half of the film! Every time
he/she has sex it seems to end in murder while they continue to have dreams of
an elderly man who turns out to be a real life Zygon living down the road and
wondering what’s happened to his undercover agent. The bodies then pile up
before the therapist ends up falling for someone called ‘Bob’ claiming to be an
enemy Zygon agent. Is he? She says she doesn’t care who he is and the film
ends. Almost all the shooting was done in 2003 but was abandoned after the
writers officially left the project; in the end just one day’s shooting in 2007
was made to finish off the film. The things I watch/read/listen to for this show…
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