The Invasion Of Time
(Season 15, Dr 4 with Leela, 4/2/1978-11/3/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: David Agnew (pseudonym for Graham Williams and Anthony Read), director: Gerald Blake)
Rank: 5
'Well doctor, as much as the Sontarons thought the Vardans were patsies in their great plan, really they were patsies in our plan to take over Gallifrey - Yes it is me, Yartek of the alien Voord, with my armies of zarbis and pet Myrka. Attack! Oh dear, that scuppered my alien invasion plan. The zarbi ended up in a Tardis ant trap, the Myrka's been put in the Tardis stables and I've just stumbled over my flippers into the Tardis swimming pool. Curses, foiled again!'
I love ‘The Invasion Of Time’ a lot more than I probably should. I mean it’s clearly rushed, nonsensical in parts, has a crazy finale and a long bewildering chase round the Tardis that comes out of nowhere, as well as a monster that’s as low budget as they come (the Vardans are, quite literally, made out of baking foil). On showing it to non or casual Who fans usually their response is to laugh and wonder if I’m showing it to them as a joke. But no, for all its faults, for all the huge great rush it was made in, the story is just so good and so very Dr Who, a gripping tale of trust and deceit and double-crossing that pushes even the all-powerful timelords to their limits and where even the Doctor gets things ‘wrong’, full of little moments of quite brilliant emotional drama. It’s also incredibly funny, full of smart witty one-loners and ad libs that are some of the best bits of comedy in the series not written by Douglas Adams. And then there’s the brilliant star turn, one of the best bits of acting any of the leading men ever did, a role that pushes the Doctor into places no other story ever asked and which shows off just what an incredibly gifted actor he was.
There were times when
this show got incredibly lucky, the way all long running shows do. By and
large, from the very beginning Dr Who has had all the right people working for
it, pulling together making all the right decisions, even though at the time to
outsiders they seemed ridiculous. It’s only with hindsight that we know some of
the risks taken with the programme would pay off – at the time a lot of them
seemed like suicide. One of the luckiest, which is another way of saying
inspired, was in the hiring of Tom Baker in the lead part. Nowadays he’s the
most famous human ‘alien’ around, the go-to eccentric that people can’t help
but love, the person perhaps more associated with Dr Who than any other single
figure. To many people’s still the Doctor, even forty years after he last
played it. At the time he was hired in 1974, though, he was the least known
actor Dr Who had ever had in the title role.All his predecessors had huge
careers they could look back on and a ready-made audience curious to see how
they would turn out (Hartnell mostly on film, Troughton in a colossal variety
of parts hero and villain on TV, Pertwee on radio) but Baker? He’d been too
busy being a trainee monk to be an actor, before discovering the delights of
wine, women and song and changing career paths at an age when most actors have given
up and settled for second careers. Most actors in Dr Who, even playing bit
parts, have an acting CV as long as the 4th Dr’s scarf but Tom Baker? He was
out of acting work more often than he was in it and, famously, got the news
that he was the Doctor while working as a hod-carrier on a building site, the
only job he could find to pay the bills. Hiring a great unknown to replace
household treasure Jon Pertwee, after five years establishing himself as even
more of a household name, feels in retrospect like the biggest risk the show
ever took, not least because it was practically the last decision executive
producer Barry Letts ever made (most producers would have been happy to kill
off a programme they’d made a success, if only to show off how important they
were to the series, but thankfully Barry was bigger than that and wanted to see
Dr Who thrive – getting someone that wise and as good at juggling both balance
sheets and people equally at a time when the series was close to being
cancelled was definitely another one of Dr Who’s other luckiest breaks). Watching
Tom Baker’s two big breakthrough roles today, the ones that convinced Barry
that he’d found his man, I’m not sure even I’d have picked him as the Doctor;
they’re both ‘baddy’ roles for a start, ones that rely on his goggle-eyed stare
rather than the manic energy with which he’ll make his name, mad monk Rasputin
in the 1971 film ‘Nicholas and Alexander’ (where Baker channels his monastic
background) and Prince Koura in 1973’s ‘The Golden Voyages Of Sinbad’ (where
Baker channels his inner still rage and love of dressing up in funny costumes).
Letts is said to have come up with pages and pages of possible stars for the
role, none of whom ever felt quite right, before having a chat with BBC head of
serials Bill Slater in case he’d seen any talented. He had: he thought Baker
had been excellent in a bit part ‘Play For Today’, George Bernard Shaw’s ‘The
Millionairess’ (ironically enough he plays a doctor). Barry had missed it: back
then TV was only shown once and rarely repeated. However the name stuck in his
head and when he heard that To was appearing as the baddy in ‘Sinbad’, a film
he wanted to see anyway, he went along to the cinema, saw Baker’s charismatic
villain and declared ‘that’s our doctor!’ Baker’s undeniably the hit of the
film, with an intensity that means you can’t take your eyes off him, but he’s
not like any of his predecessors: he’s untrustworthy, unpredictable, dangerous,
the opposite of the Doctor (though he’d have made a good Master).Baker would
declare to many an interviewer during his seven years as the Doctor that ‘there
were things he could never do in the part’, referring particularly to the
strict moral compass that meant the Doctor always had to be morally upstanding
and essentially good (and that meant he
had to cut down his heavy drinking between roles). Which makes it more amazing
that he was picked for the role after two starring jobs where he’s decidedly
wicked and evil.
My guess is that Letts
had in mind the sort of Doctor that William Hartnell was in the early days, a
shiftier, darker character perhaps haunted by the karma-death of the third Doctor
(in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’) and a contrast to Pertwee’s heroically dashing
regeneration in whom you always had faith was going to do the right thing. But
if that was the idea then by the time Barry left and Phillip Hinchcliffe takes
over as producer that idea gets forgotten, until Phillip gets replaced by
Graham Williams who starts thinking well, why haven’t we tapped into the
potential for that darkness yet? For out of the entire canon of Dr Who perhaps
no story is written more as a showcase for the star lead than ‘The Invasion Of
Time’, a story that very much taps into that Rasputin/Sinbad energy that got
Baker signed. It is the fleeting ‘what if?’ idea that became the driving force
behind ‘The Invasion Of Time’, a story written in a colossal hurry across a
busy fortnight to end season fifteen, one of the most troubled in the show’s
history thanks to regular production strikes, new cast and crew members and a
huge pile of scripts that fell apart left, right and centre. One of them was
the new script editor Anthony Read’s baby, a story variously referred to as
either ‘Killers Of The Dark’ (it’s official title) or ‘The Killer Cats Of
Gen-Singh’ (the title Graham seems to have invented when pressed to remember it
during a convention and reported that way in all the fanzines!) The writer was
Read’s good friend David Weir, a man who’d got him his first job and who he
enjoyed a close friendship with, the pair of them commissioning each other
across the various series they worked on. Only Weir didn’t have much interest
in scifi and had never seen Dr Who so his resulting script was a tad, erm,
ambitious: the finale alone called for 96,000 of extras dressed as alien cats
in Wembley Stadium (something that’s always made me wonder if Russell included
his own alien cats in ‘New Earth’ as a bit of a show-offy joke, to say ‘look we
can film this sort of thing now!’) Read and Weir had always taken each other’s
scripts on faith and Read hadn’t bothered to check in much with his friend
until, the week before a director was commissioned he thought he’d better read
it – and sat in the production office, head in hands, crying ‘how could my
friend do this to me?!’
So, in an emergency (and reportedly very drunken) meeting in the BBC canteen Williams and Read put together a gameplan: the director would be put off for a couple of weeks while Read got to work on the idea Williams had come up with and had hastily fleshed out across a few sides of paper. Despite the troubled circumstance in many ways it was the break Graham had been looking for: every other producer of Dr Who had either started life as a production manager, production assistant or director but Graham’s background had all been in writing before he’d turned to production to pay the bills. By now, at the end of his first year in charge, Graham had built up a pretty good idea of what Dr Who was all about and had eagerly dived into the series’ folklore, lapping up all the iconography and history and coming up with his own list of things he really wanted to see other writers do; only now he had to chance to do them all himself. Read duly set off writing and turning the notes into a workable six-part script, taking a fortnight to cobble together a workable script, which Williams then hastily re-wrote himself, across four ‘sleepless’ days and nights, getting it finished just as production was officially starting. If you’re thinking to yourself ‘I don’t remember any of this from the credits then that’s because this story went out under the BBC’s regular in house pseudonym ‘David Agnew’. – and if you’re the sort of person that watches out for names on credits and are thinking ‘gee what a prolific guy, he wrote for so many different things’ that’s because it’s a BBC tradition to credit works that couldn’t be given real credits to this fictitious writer (another Who script editor, Anthony Root, was the first to use it, in fact, in his previous job while script editing ‘A Play For Today’).
You can tell that ‘The
Invasion Of Time’ was (co)written by someone with a knowledge and love for this
series. It’s filled with all the things fans were crying out to see in 1978 –
Gallifrey is explored in depth, after the half-goes in ‘The War Games’ and ‘The Deadly Assassin’, with an actual
exploration of timelord society and what the Doctor’s people did all day.
Graham had been fascinated by the Doctor’s home planet and the fanbase was
still reeling from the revelations of Bob Holmes’ ‘The Deadly Assassin’ the
year before – what a great opportunity to calm things down and find a sort of
halfway house between a society that was all pure or all corrupt. Graham also
loved Holmes’ inventions The Sontarons and was keen to use them in a third
story. The producer, always sensitive to the feelings of the people working for
him, had also noted the colossal tension on set between his leading man and his
leading lady and was genuinely afraid they might end up coming to blows so came
up with a plan to keep them both apart for the vast majority of the story. The
directors too: there’s a story that the one for this story, Gerald Blake who’d
directed ‘The Abominable Snowman’, interrupted a rant with the line ‘I remember
you when you used to be Patrick Troughton!’ (a line that would surely have
ended up in the script if Williams had heard it!) Most of all, though, Williams
wanted to write the one thing we thought we’d never get to see: the Doctor not
just visiting Gallifrey but saving it, the way he did other worlds but never
his home planet (and if you come to this story from ‘The War Games’, where the
Dr’s the wayward child exiled for betraying his kind, that makes it the single
most unlikely plot since, well, two schoolteachers got whisked away in a police
telephone box). Graham was particularly taken with the dramatic potential of
the Doctor as the ‘prodigal son’, returning home to the planet he’d once run
away from and being it’s potential saviour while his own people were in denial.
It’s also the one planet we can’t, for absolute certainty say the Doctor is working
for the best interests for, so when it’s the 4th of all Drs, going all
goggle-eyed and belligerent, betraying the planet and the people he felt once
betrayed him, for the first time in a long time none of us can say with any
true certainty that it’s all going to come right in the end (because, after
‘Assassin’, all bets about this series were off: for all we knew Gallifrey was
a criminal planet run by charlatans).
Mostly, though, I reckon
Graham Williams was having a bit of fun with his leading man. Of all the
327-ish Dr Who stories this is the one that, I suspect, was most written about the
real life situation of working on the show, with a plot that revolves around
the mood of its main star yet has such utter faith in his brilliance that
without him being so good it just wouldn’t work. No story makes a better play
of making the Doctor into a monster and, for three episodes at least, Tom Baker
is as monstrous as they come, delivering a tour de force performance that’s
impossible to take your eyes off. By now Tom Baker has been in the part for
four years and has worked on the show longer than anyone else still associated
with it. He was incredibly protective of his character and what he thought he
ought to be doing and was quite open in attacking co-stars, writers, directors,
staff and especially his poor producer if he felt they weren’t listening to his
ideas and taking him seriously because, by now, Tom half-thought he was the
Doctor and could run the show better doing all the jobs single-handed. Before
things go back to normal and we learn what’s going on a good half of ‘The
Invasion Of Time’ has Tom Baker presented not as the hero he is to millions of
children but as a lot of the production team were beginning to see him: as an
unpredictable monster who might bite their head off or sit in huffy silence. He
was also, shall we say, slightly egotistical?
Just check out the much quoted and very funny line when Andred,
referring to the matrix, mentions ‘the greatest source of intelligence in the
universe’ and the Doctor gleefully replies ‘well, I do talk to myself
sometimes, yes’. Of course to do this on screen Williams also needed absolute
faith that his star could pull off such a different role, to be that hated and
apparently bad and yet still keep watching through sheer charisma – and Tom
Baker is never better than when playing an evil Doctor (one just like he used
to be in ‘Nicholas and Alexander’ and ‘Sinbad’ both) with such utter conviction
the story draws you in. I mean, unusually we never do get to see what made the
Doctor come to Gallifrey: has he been brainwashed, has he been threatened, has
he finally flipped, has this been his plan all along because of some big secret
that made him run away from his people in the first place or is it all an
elaborate ruse? The fact that it lasts three whole episodes before we start to
get hints of what has really happened is a hugely brave move but one that pays
off so well, partly from the writing but also because of the faith that writing
puts in Baker to pull this off.
It might be significant,
too, that this story revolves around a beloved heroic figure turning evil when
banging his head against a mentor, his old teacher Borusa. Gallifrey has, in
both its previous two appearances in Dr Who, seemed more like a private school
than a planet of intergalactic beings, with the Doctor it’s naughtiest pupil who
left school as early as possible to head off into the ‘real world’ and Williams
wanted to explore this relationship with Borusa that had been in the background
of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (and played by a different actor: good as Angus MacKay
was in that story he’s not a patch on John Arnatt’s air of continual bemusement
here. Borusa’s a great creation that never gets enough love I think: the first
authority figure the Dr ever got to rebel against, a figure that to some extent
the 1st Doctor seemed to model himself on: he’s aloof, cold, exasperated, a
stickler for rules and the one person who won’t react to the Doctor with
surprise the way everyone else does (you can’t help but feel in places as if
the Doctor has been running around saving the universe just to prove a point to
his mentor), but behind it all someone with the same love of life as the Dr and
a similar twinkle in his eye. Rather than simply paint Tom Baker as ‘the evil
one’ though, this story is far subtler than that: Borusa is a man trying hard
not to show any feelings and keep his authority but he can’t help chuckling at
his pupil’s outrageous schemes and antics and is the one person (other than
Leela) to have a sort of blind faith in what he’s up to. If you’ve ever had a
teacher that disapproved of everything you did because it was against the
rules, but still took on a kind of chuckling pride in your exploits because
secretly they thought the rules were stupid too and the other pupils who
followed them blindly were even stupider, then that’s Borusa, firm but fair,
played by John Arnatt with just the right dash of detached bemusement.
Borusa is also, surely,
Graham Williams writing himself into his own work, or at any rate picking a
character from Dr Who folklore that he particularly identified with, as the
relationship of Borusa and The Doctor is very like Graham and Tom: a mixture of
exasperation at someone who flouts all the rules and just won’t listen to
reason, combined with admiration for their sheer cheek and charisma. Though
Graham was younger by eleven years he was the de facto ‘authority figure’ and
Tom wasn’t sure whether to treat him as a father, a teacher, a pupil or a child
so instead treated him as a sort of brother with all the love, hate and
constant one upmanship and bickering that relationship implies. Much has been
written about the fractious relationship between star and producer, to the
point where in documentaries of the era companions, guest stars and production
staff alike talk in hushed tones about some of the stand-up rows they used to
have on set. But they’re a pair that clashed because, while they both had
different ideas, they both loved the show so much they wanted to get it right
and the stand offs more often than not ended up in truces down the pub where they
laughed like old friends. Watch Tom Baker on camera when he talks about
Williams (who died far too young, in a shooting accident, aged 45) in any of
the DVD or Blu-ray documentaries: he gets upset in a way we’ve only ever seen
him get when talking about Eliasbeth Sladen and Ian Marter, where he’s merely
respectful (sometimes) to the other people nominally ‘in charge’ of him. You
get both halves of that complex relationship between teacher and pupil here,
two men who are all too often pretending to not stand each other but who love
the other so much they would give their lives in a heartsbeat for the other if
it came to it. Then again, it’s not just a producer getting his own back
either – it’s Graham giving Tom what he always wanted. One of Tom’s biggest
criticisms was that the scripts always had his Doctor in the same place, story
after story, and said much the same things and gave his Doctor no room to grow
or push himself so here Williams writes a story that pushes the Doctor more
than ever before. At one stage he even gives Baker the ‘authority’ he craves –
not only against his ‘mentor’ but against the whole of time and the most
important planet in the universe, taking up his rightful place as lord
president of Gallifrey (an accolade granted at the end of ‘The Deadly Assassin’). Williams too
gets what he ‘wants’. For one story (well, half a story) the roles switch round
so that the Doctor gets to be the villain and Borusa becomes our substitute Doctor,
morally upstanding, willing to sacrifice everything to fight off the baddies
and be the ‘hero’ (a wish fulfilment, perhaps on Williams’ part?) If so then it
might be significant that the two timelords end up realising they are on the
same side after all by the end, with a trust that goes both ways: the Doctor
knows he can rely on Borusa’s sheer goodness, while Borusa knows that his
wayward pupil’s hearts are in the right place and trusts him when nobody else
will, even if his outbursts are sometimes a mystery.
Had Baker not been up to the challenge then this might have been one of those jokey in-stories you get sometimes in long running show, a little frisson of reality to make the actors laugh, but Tom Baker is more than up to the job. He’s a superb Doctor of course, but he’s also a magnificent baddy, intense and genuinely scary in a way most of the most monsters he fights never are. For two and a bit episodes at the start of ‘Invasion Of Time’ such is the sheer brilliance of his portrayal (his best of many many great turns in Dr Who) that you start believing the Dr really has turned evil, despite the past fourteen years of Dr Who stories and counting to the contrary. You’re reminded here just how much the Doctor is an acting part – one that fits the actor like a glove to the point where he never even came close to shaking it off in his future roles (though he makes for an under-rated Sherlock Holmes I always thought, in a 1982 TV production of ‘Hound Of The Baskervilles’), but is, nevertheless, only part of the man not the whole. This evil Dr is just so different to the one we know and love: he’s cold, strict, bad tempered, demanding, prone to angry outbursts and above all so so still he barely moves at all, closer to what people describe as the real ‘darker’ side of an actor even his biggest and best friends would consider ‘complex’. And yet, rather than just writing this as a bit of petty revenge, Williams is sure to make him still as charismatic, brilliant, funny, intelligent and occasionally as warm as ‘our’ Doctor, the smartest and most charismatic person in whatever room he’s in. Of course nothing is quite what it seems with the plot or with the Doctor and ultimately he’s revealed to be just as committed to keeping Gallifrey (the series?) safe the only way he knows how, he’s just going about it in different means. When we find out what’s really going on (mega huge spoilers that really will spoil the whole thing if you haven’t seen this story yet), that it’s all a ruse to make token invading baddy The Vardans think he’s on their side, because it’s easier to get rid of them once they’re on Gallifrey and away from their planet than on the outside trying to invade it, suddenly it all makes total sense. It would have been easy to make the Doctor just an evil shouty baddy but what hits you most, on repeat viewings, is that it’s all a matter of perspective and there’s a reason for all the things that outraged the viewer at the start of the story. We’re used to our Doctor greeting everyone with a warm grin for instance, but this Doctor can’t look anyone in the face (because to see them so upset with him would break his hearts?) The Doctor banishes Leela from the citadel and at one point even has K9 physically prevent her from talking– an act that seems like the cruellest thing he’s ever done when the viewer first sees this story (and is pretty close to what the actor wanted to do for real), but all becomes clear when the invasion threat is revealed: the Doctor knows Leela stands a better chance of living on the outskirts away from civilisation than under the power of the Vardans, who are closest to her savage race The Sevateem, while he knows an outraged Leela trying to do the moral thing is a bigger risk to his plans than all the weak-kneed timelords who will just acquiesce to his authority– and perhaps because he can’t bear to look into her eyes most of all. It’s unique, for a Dr Who story: yes we’ve seen the Doctor grumpy, angry or possessed but this is the only story where he actively seeks out all the ‘wrong’ people (albeit for all the right reasons as it turns out). This is a series all about the Doctor making the people around him better, but this is the only story (except perhaps ‘Waters Of Mars’ and ‘A Good Man Goes To War’) where he brings out their worst.
I love the detail, too,
that the Dr demands his room to be decked out in the ugliest metals on
contemporary Earth, which everyone takes a sign that he’s gone kookoo and spent
too long on his favourite planet (this is, after all, the Dr with his usual
aesthetic values and love of good things taken away from him) but no: it’s the
only substance that will block out the Vardans’ telepathic signals. It’s such a
clever, subtle idea that you really don’t see coming on first watch. The idea
of an enemy that can read thoughts and tell if you’re lying is such a clever
idea too that gets a bit lost in the plot: no wonder the Doctor has been acting
so weird and he must have been so alone, ‘becoming’ the very authority figure
he hates in order to save his planet. No wonder the Doctor has been surrounding
himself with the sort of collaborators he knows will fall into line: he can’t
dare risk having anyone who resembles himself, whose going to rebel.
Re-watching the story when you know what’s happening is a very different
experience to seeing it the first time round: you feel the Doctor’s admiration
for Andred, the one soldier brave enough to stand up to him and do the very
thing the Doctor would usually encourage (in that sense Leela’s sudden romance
with him at least makes a little sense: he’s a less powerful version of the
Doctor closer to his ‘level’), his horror at the guards who have been killed
for ‘revolting’ against him and his pain as every single one of his own people
he so longs to have a ‘well done’ and a pat on the back from go ‘well of course
he’s a traitor’ and roll their eyes. But the Doctor acts as he does because
otherwise he knows the Vardans can wipe his people out.
If the Vardans are a bit
of a washout on screen, bits of baking foil that shimmer with electronic
gadgetry that looks silly now (while voice artists Stan McGowan and Tom Kelly
don’t exactly do their monsters any favours, sounding like they’re taking about
popping down to the shops, not taking over the most important planet in the
cosmos), if you judge them by what they say rather than what they sound like
saying it then they’re another great Dr Who creation shifty, devious,
unfathomable, with powers that make even timelords nervous. In the days
before the time war they’re the only species brave/foolhardy/confident enough
to risk invading Gallifrey and they really push the Dr along the way, seeing
through most of his schemes to stop them and remaining wary of his co-operation
long after other aliens would have taken it a sign of their sheer brilliance
and scariness and left him alone. The fact they’re mind-readers also takes what
would usually be the Dr’s two big advantages away too: he can’t use his
thoughts and words to outwit them and he can’t use them to whip up other people
to rebel against them either because they’re always listening in. I long for
the Vardans to make a return appearance in Dr Who, with a proper budget this
time, so that we can see just how good they can be: done in the right way I
reckon they’d be as tough, cunning and threatening an opponent as any. Perhaps
even more so than the Sontarons, who turn up out of nowhere at the end of
episode four in one of my favourite cliffhangers and, perhaps, another nod from
producer to star that he isn’t quite as clever as he thinks he is. The Doctor
is enjoying one of his greatest victories of all, saving his home world and
finally getting the applause of his own people that he so craves and he’s
finally proven to them that what he said in ‘The War Games’ is true: that
travel does broaden the mind and that rubbing alongside other cultures is worth
it, because without that knowledge of life smarts as well as book smarts giving
him the idea Gallifrey would be dust right now. After four episodes of his
people thinking he’s the villain, at last he’s the hero he always said he
was.
Baker finally gets to unleash that whacking great gleeful grin and all is right with the world again, after a month of the Doctor acting weird. Until he senses the mood in the room change from one of celebration to fear, turns round and sees a Sontaron trooper pointing a weapon at him. It’s a huge moment: the timelords only half trusted the Doctor and now think they have evidence that he was evil all along. The Doctor, for his part is horrified: all that effort to try and save his kind and now it’s his plan that might lead to them being conquered after all. In a story full of lies and deceit and betrayal it’s a great idea that the Sontarons – one of the all time straightforward races in Dr Who, often bordering on the stupid – have somehow manipulated The Vardans into going first. It’s a neat mirror, too, for what the Doctor has been doing with Borusa, using him as a cover up for what was really going on. Basically the Dr’s been fooled by his own ‘Trojan Horse’ trick he came up with in ‘the Myth Makers’ and it’s one of the few times, especially in the 4th Doctor era, when you feel that he really doesn’t have all the answers this time. It’s a thrilling moment: we don’t often see the 4th Dr panicked and out of his depth but you do here: the look on his face is one of utter dejection.
Some fans don’t like the
twist, which seems to come out of nowhere just as the story had wrapped itself
up, but I do: letting the Doctor get his way would have been to spoil the
themes of trust, deceit and control. As a fan of the 1st Doctor stories in
particular that loved playing around with the idea that stories bled into each
other I love the fact that people watching this in the days before VHS and DVD
running times, who maybe hadn’t checked the Radio Times that week, didn’t know
the story lasted those extra two episodes and that the stakes are now even
higher. The general consensus on ‘The Invasion Of Time’ is that the story goes
sharply downhill in its last two episodes after this cliffhanger, with a tacked
on runaround ending we didn’t really need, but I love those two parts as well
just in a very different way. Again, Williams is an actual Dr Who fan in a way
most of his predecessors never were and he’s grown up on the mystery of the
show’s early days when it was a series that could go anywhere and do anything.
In the same way that he’s been dying to see more of Gallifrey he’s also been
dying to see more of the Tardis and this is his big chance, the Doctor
sacrificing his ‘home’ for his home planet’s, as he leads the Sontarons a merry
dance down its corridors (one of them must still be in there somewhere – or at
least we never see what happens to him on screen!) These Sontarons don’t look
or sound as good as in their previous two stories, actor Kevin Lindsay having
sadly died two years earlier, but they’re still a brilliant creation well acted
by Derek Deadman, a relentless stubborn immoveable force that makes for a good
match with the even more powerful but rather lost and wishy-washy timelords
(and yes of course you can have cockney Sontarons: every planet has the sound
of four bells. At least it’s not as off-putting as Drax in ‘The Armageddon Factor’).
Actually getting to see
the insides of the Tardis is thrilling and the production team go to town,
switching the usual working methods of having an alien planet shot on location
and the Tardis in the studio by going to all sorts of exotic locations to shoot
the Doctor’s timeship: St Anne’s Hospital London, industrial complex British
Oxygen and, of course, a quarry in Beachfields, Surrey. In a show that often
promises us the extraordinary and impossible without actually being able to see
it we finally get to view an Olympic sized swimming pool (and get to admire a
Sontaron’s awkward centre of balance when one trips over a lilo, I still can’t
believe they left that shot in – not since the Voord and Zarbi have we seen a
monster race this clumsy, though to be fair maybe the gravity’s different in
the Tardis?), walk down a huge art gallery surely the envy of half the cosmos
and admire the very Earth-like tubing down some of the longest corridors seen
in the series. I love the fact that the Tardis is pretty much equally half
split between arts and sciences: there are works of huge cultural and artistic
significance (the Venus De Milo, a Turner, a Van Eyck, a Chagall) just casually
propped up on the most impressive engineering around. Originally Williams’ idea
was to film in an impossibly big silo, to have the Doctor one tiny speck in the
corner of the screen in a room that stretched for miles, but they couldn’t find
one willing to let them film in the tight deadlines so it got changed to the
hospital at the last minute; so last minute that a lot of the sets had been
built for TV studio conditions and had to be altered on the fly. Of course the
Tardis looks like this, as contradictory and messy and scatterbrained as the
pilot: for the first time since ‘The Edge Of
Destruction’ it feels impossibly large again as big on the inside as
everyone always says it is. I often say that the Tardis is my favourite
‘character’ on the show and here, after over a decade of being shunted to
opening/closing scenes and/or being turned into your everyday vehicle (when
it’s not parked in the corner of the 3rd Dr’s UNIT laboratory) here at last
perhaps the most brilliant creation in the greatest shows finally gets some
much delayed screen time. Yes it’s all a bit self indulgent, with a couple too
many scenes of running around taking away from the plot, but it make a change
running down Tardis corridors as opposed to the usual ones and by the
penultimate episodes in a long and difficult series that very nearly didn’t
make it on screen at all everyone’s earned it and so have the fans. View the
last two episodes as a DVD extra, an Easter egg for longtime viewers and a gift
from another longtime viewer, rather than an essential part of the plot and it
makes much more sense. It’s certainly a lot better than the runaround in ‘Journey To the Centre Of the Tardis’, a story
which tries to be just as self-indulgent but doesn’t ‘earn’ that right by
giving us a story first.
Forget the Tardis if you
want though: perhaps even more important than the Tardis is how we explore
Gallifrey: what was, in ‘The War Games’ simply one room and for all the hoo-ha
about ‘the Deadly Assassin’ wasn’t really much more than a town square plus a
surreal virtual reality headset is now a living breathing planet, complete with
its own society and rules, ‘time ladies’ (what happens when they change gender then
eh? Do they have to move out?!), outsiders, even its own simpering lackey
(Milton Johns in one of his best Dr Who roles, playing the same sort of
duplicitous collaborator he always plays; he’s the sort of character who always
says ‘I for one welcome our new alien overlords’ in scifi serials, though
annoyingly he never quite says that here: it would have been very in character
if he had). Yes ‘Assassin’ invented the Prydonian seal and the distinctive
timelord collars but ‘Invasion’ gets overlooked for how much detail is filled
in to that story’s broad strokes and the detail given to the sort of people the
Doctor grew up with, a little bit stuffy, woefully unprepared for invasion,
emotionally distant, easily led, but still with the same beating moral compass
the Dr has (most of the time anyway). I love the mixture of styles on this
planet – the savages so like Leela living on the outskirts of all that power
and the pomposity within, living to archaic rules and regulations that everyone
follows without remembering why. Williams and Read between them have been
thinking heavily about what sort of society this would really be, full of old
men who live for thousands of years per regeneration and figure that they would
be a ‘glass ceiling’ world, full of ambitious bright young things like Rodan,
frustrated at being stuck on traffic control while great but increasingly
senile men remain in charge, having atrophied (she’s a fine trial run for the
two Romanas, with the haughty inexperience of the first and the giggly
schoolgirl of the second) . This is a planet long overdue a revolution, where
absolute power over the universe for so long has corrupted even the kindest of
people and turned them insular. After being both an abstract impossible to
imagine planet, then a cartoon full of scheming wannabes, ‘Invasion Of Time’ is
the story that makes Gallifrey a living, breathing planet at last. Ultimately
nobody has the right of authority of another, no matter where they are in the
food chain, be it high up timelords over less timelords, Sontarons lording it
over Vardans, Vardans lording it over timelords. Sometimes the only person who
can see how things should be is an outsider who doesn’t have to play by the
rules – and this time, more than perhaps any other adventure, that outsider is
the Doctor. He’s simultaneously both the perfect choice as president of a
planet that doesn’t want him (whose doing the wrong things for all the right
reasons) and the worst (because becoming president would mean the Doctor would
be stuck in one place as an authority figure – and become everything he isn’t).While
stories that reveal too much of the mystery at the heart of Dr Who can be a bit
of a mixed blessing, I love this story because it reveals so much about the Doctor
and who he is, asking questions that haven’t been asked since the series’ early
days about why he left. By seeing so much of the Doctor’s home planet (large
and impressive on the outside, small and confined on the inside) and then in
the last two episodes his home from home (so much bigger on the inside) it
feels as if we know more about the Dr than ever and why he left in the first
place. The Doctor doesn’t belong here, he belongs out there, in the universe,
with us. This is the story that finally grapples with the debate that’s been at
the heart of this series since day one: Was the Dr right to leave? Was he right
to defy his people and try to leave to see the universe? We know that the Doctor
can defeat alien monsters with hi-tech guns, but does he have the courage to go
back and face his people after deserting them? We’re used, too, to seeing the Doctor
save other planets by getting people to trust him, but the people he turned his
back on?
This story wouldn’t work
on any other planet and it wouldn’t really work as well with any other Doctor
and it doesn’t work too well every time the series has tried something like it
since. This story, though, is a true under-rated gem. After a few stories of
falling into a rut Dr Who is suddenly unpredictable again, making us question
this timelord’s motivations and as great as all those other Dr Who stories about
planetary invasions the Dr finally facing up to his past creates even more
drama than usual. For this is a story all about responsibility, of whether
ultimately you owe the same morals of protection and freedom to the people who
restricted you and tried to keep you trapped. Of course the Doctor does the
right thing in the end, because the Doctor’s bigger than that and he’s often at
his best when snubbing his nose at authority and breaking petty rules, but no
rules are more important to him or have such impact breaking as his own
planet’s. If this goes wrong we know from ‘The War Games’ how high the stakes
might be: he could be exiled back to
Earth again indefinitely, or worse kept in a Gallifreyan prison (Shada?) or
simply executed – and unlike a mysterious monster the Doctor doesn’t know yet
he absolutely knows what the stakes o his home planet are. This really is one
of the most under-rated and cleverest Dr Who stories I think, one full of half-hints and complexities, one that
works as both a typical Dr Who story, as a wider study of the main character
and his own personal story and as a story full of metaphors and symbols. You
wouldn’t know this story was written in such a rush: it’s a credit to Williams
and Read in the script, who between them should have got to write many many
more Dr Who stories after this (sadly a second Williams script ‘The Nightmare
Fair’, got lost along with the rest of the cancelled season 23, during Who’s 18
month hiatus and that’s a shame because it’s another good one, updating the
very 1960s Celestial Toymaker to have him fool around with very 1980s arcade
games and fairgrounds and another script only a true blue Who fan could have
written back in the days when most writers on Who just thought of it as a job;
Read’s second script ‘The Horns Of Nimon’
too is, I think, a very promising script with the same moral complexities,
themes of deceit and betrayal and smart snappy dialogue as this one harpooned
by yet more production issues).
Williams also writes for
K9 better than anybody outsider creators Bob Baker and Dave Martin – he was,
after all, the man who spotted his
longterm potential after reading the script for ‘The Invisible Enemy’. In a story
that’s all about trust and betrayal a robot dog who always tells the truth is
both the Doctor’s biggest blessing and his greatest curse. At times K9 is the
only person the Doctor can trust not to give the game away, taking everything
he says at face value; at others he’s the danger, the one person that can give
away all his plans. At one point K9 is used as the substitute president,
anointed with the great sash of Rassilon and tied up to the matrix because he’s
far more suited to the job than the currently-duplicitous Doctor (even though
you suspect this bunch of rule-following old men set in their ways would be
more appalled at being temporarily ruled over by a robotic animal than they
would at being invaded). Sometimes K9 helps the Doctor break the rules and sometimes
he helps him keep them and his logic versus their sometimes illogical traditions
and his similar insistence in making sure such rules are followed, is delicious,
as is K9’s sparring with the Tardis when connected to her, two very different pieces
of technology bickering like Orac and Zen in Blake’s 7 but a year early (‘You
are a very stupid machine!’) John Leeson always shines when given more to do
and really makes the most of his part, effectively becoming the Doctor’s main
companion this story while Leela runs around shooting at things.
However it’s an even
better story for Tom Baker, whose even better at being bad than his fellow
Doctor-actors were in their equivalent ‘Doctor gone rogue’ stories like ‘The
Massacre’ ‘The Enemy Of the World’ ‘Human Nature’ and ‘Nightmare in
Silver’ (notably the 3rd and 5th Drs are so unquestionably good that the series
never tries the same thing with them, while the 6th and 7th so morally
ambiguous chances are no one would notice, while they simply ran out of time to
do this with the 8th and 9th). Baker is a truly brilliant actor, often wasted
in the roles he plays both pre and post Dr Who, and never more so than here
where he proves that Barry Letts was totally right in hiring him those four
years earlier. One of my favourite scenes in all of Dr Who is the moment when
the Doctor finally reveals that it’s all a ruse to his mentor whose already
guessed as much – and yet still is incredibly wary and more than a little
scared of his pupil because he’s finally delivering on that huge promise for
good or ill he always possessed, going from the little kid at the back of the
class to the most powerful being in the universe. Baker goes from deliciously
evil and out of control to vulnerable and guilty and still out of control, to
calm and composed and utterly trustworthy and in control within the space of
just a few lines. Not many actors are good enough to pull off a scene like that
off but Williams, for all of his struggles with his star for control over the
series, also knows just how great he can be when called on.
The result is a tale that
gets a lot of stick from fans, mostly I suspect because it looked so bad on
screen at times: glance at the screen and a bit of foil on a chair delivering
threats with all the impact of a firm of elderly solicitors is not going to cut
it. A lot of the supporting cast are phoning it in too, timelords outsiders and
monsters alike. But if you can see past that to what the script and most of the
actors are doing, of the way Tom Baker at last gets every opportunity he wants
to be funny and dashing and despicably evil by turns, of one of the great supporting
roles in Borusa and the sheer scope of a story that defies budgetary
constraints to show the most important planet in the universe and the depths of
a time machine that’s bigger on the inside, with the confidence that they can
actually get away with this despite more obstacles and problems than normal
(the BBC actually told Graham there was no way he would get this last story
made after yet another dispute over studio embarkations meant a backlog of
studio time and he should cut his losses), is thrilling. Best of all, despite
the drama, despite the tension and themes of responsibility, it’s often
hilariously funny – the funniest Dr Who story, I would say, outside Douglas
Adams’, with Baker given lots of room for comedy and laughs to offset his
grimness in the opening. So what if it falls on its face sometimes? (Sontarons
quite literally). After a couple of years of playing things safe suddenly Dr Who
is back to being its ambitious elastic-stretching best again, a series that can
go anywhere and do anything all over again, in a story that’s just dripping
with the love and affection that people have for this series, writer producer
and star all committed and giving the performances of their lives. Far from
being an invasion, the show has never been in safer hands. One of the greatest
and most under-rated Dr Who stories of them all.
POSITIVES + This story has
some of the very greatest cliffhangers around: we’ve already mentioned the best
one at the end of episode four but the others are great too, each one playing
with the idea of what’s really going on and backing up the idea of the Doctor
as a baddy. The end of part one has the Dr clutching his head as he falls to
the floor in agony, apparently a ‘victim’ of the Matrix ’rejecting’ him for
being unsuitable to govern (apparently confirming he’s a wrong ‘un, even though
it turns out the Doctor is just trying to ‘prove’ this to his alien masters: it’s
even more impressive when you know the plot and that the Dr knows how much it’s
going to hurt him). The end of part two has the Doctor telling the timelords
the Vardans now have control of Gallifrey, a really chilling moment if ever
there was one. At the end of part three Andred gets to ‘be’ the Doctor for an
episode and rebels against Tom Baker’s authority, being the only timelord brave
enough to stand up to him and try to assassinate him – and you think he really
will, too. Even the weakest cliffhanger, episode five, has the Tardis being
flung into a black hole by the Castellan’s desperate need to survive, doing
what the Sontarons tell him to do, which in any other story would be the
winner. That’s five at least semi-classics, each one of which drives the plot
forward; some Dr Who stories in this era can’t even manage one.
BEST QUOTE: Leela:
‘Discussion is for the wise or for the helpless – and I am neither!’
Previous ‘Underworld’ next ‘The
Ribos Operation’
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