Revisiting Old Doctor Who: The Invasion

[Broomstick]

The Invasion
(it's not a canoe, it's a kayak, dammit!)

Yay! Another Pat Troughten story! Yay! Cybermen! Yay! Evil human villan. Yay! Long-ass eight episode story -

Yes, in the old days when they had ample time to develop characters it was often a good thing but I think 8 episodes might be too much of a good thing. Oh, well – Second Doctor and Jamie, always a good combination.

Regrettably, episodes 1 and 4 are lost, at least the visual part of them. Fans had sufficient off-air recordings that a complete soundtrack could be reconstructed. They dealt with the missing video by animating the missing episodes. I like that they made those animations black and white, in keeping with the rest of the story. In some ways, the animated portions were sharper and visually easier to decipher than the surviving footage. However, I do have some mixed feelings about the use of animation. Certainly, it's better than nothing but switching back and forth was a bit disconcerting to me

The extras on the DVD set I borrowed from the library were as fascinating as the story itself, discussing how the soundtrack was reconstructed and the animation was approached. Also there was background on the story generation and shooting - apparently part of the shooting was done on the grounds of a Guinness factory which was only too happy to provide beverages during lunch. Apparently the main actors were a bit buzzed during some of the many running sequences.

Anyhow – since the original broadcast was 46 years ago I'm not going to worry about spoilers. The Invasion is an attempted invasion of Earth by the Cybermen, aided and abetted by a Evil Villain named Tobias Vaughn. It has some highly iconic images, in particular the six Cybermen in front of St. Paul's Cathedral. Oh, yes, you never see more than six Cybermen at a time, as that was the number of costumes the BBC was willing to pay for, despite the characters talking about hundreds, nay, thousands of Cybermen wandering about London. Ah, the power of imagination. We also get to see Colonel Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart again, there are references to Yeti in the Underground, it's the debut of UNIT, and for once Zoe is NOT screaming. But you won't see a Cyberman until the very end of episode 4. There's also quite a bit with other characters carrying the action rather than the Doctor doing it all which worked nicely for the story.

I found splitting this over two nights worked well. Otherwise, you're looking at sitting through 4 hours of Doctor Who. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm back to working for a living so I have fewer opportunities for lengthy marathons at the moment.

Yes, I enjoyed the story.

Random things I noted:

The “Kilroy was here” graffiti was very cute.

The jeeps are all left hand drives. I couldn't figure out what was odd about that at first (seriously, I see left-hand drives all the time, it's what I drive) then it hit me – this is England. Shouldn't they be right hand drives? Were all the jeeps in England leftovers from WWII jeeps sent over by the Yanks?

During the bits when they're paddling around in the water they keep talking about a “canoe”. That wasn't a canoe. It was a kayak. I'm sorry, it's one of those annoying things that take me out of the story. It's a kayak.

During the scene when they're shooting Jamie descending a ladder from an angle that aims up his kilt they tweaked the filming contrast so you couldn't see anything. Dammit, when do we get one for the mothers?

I really like what they did with Zoe – she's portrayed with both normal girl interests like clothes and fashion AND she's wicked smart, defeating computers with her bare intellect and performing ridiculously complex calculations to trigger chain-reaction explosions of cyberman (which makes me wonder if perhaps the Doctor enlisted her for the destruction of the cyberfleet in “A Good Man Goes to War”). And she wasn't screaming.

Kevin Stoney has a fucked up right eye. This frequently annoyed me. It looks like the outer upper orbit of his right eye was smashed at some point pretty badly. The result is that half the time it looks like he's got one eye closed.

Anyhow – classic Doctor Who and well worth watching.

[Isolder74]

A lot of military Jeeps were surplus US Jeeps. Also there were lots of them meaning it took a while before the newer models replaced them in the inventory. If they had used surplus army jeeps instead of active ones it would make sense to have so many WWII jeeps being used.

[Broomstick]

Apparently, the UK military was involved in the episode, providing settings, cargo planes, and using actual soldiers as extras so I suspect those were actual WWII jeeps belong to and used by the military.

[Hillary]

Interestingly, the original story was supposed to have Professor Travers from the Yeti stories (played by Deborah Watling's real-life father incidentally), but the BBC didn't want to pay royalties for using two previous characters (the Brigadier being the other).

I really like this one. Vaughn is a complex 'villain' who believes what he is doing is for the benefit of mankind, rather than for his own glory. The Cybermen are almost a secondary story here until the last couple of episodes - the battle is between The Doctor and Vaughn.

As you say, Zoe is used very well here (I guess her earlier stories were probably written more for Victoria's character originally, which would explain her growing usefulness).

I like the reconstruction - they have, as you say, managed to keep the feel of the story. I personally found it interesting to see the cartoon become reality in later episodes. In some ways, the cartoon is actually more 'realistic' than was possible with Television technology back in 1969.

It's one of my favourites of the Troughton era that are available on DVD.

[mr friendly guy]

I saw this some time ago (I still get the DVDs of classic Who, although I tend to avoid NuWho these days). Enjoyed it. Oh and if anyone finds Tobias Vaughan an interesting villain, he returns in one the EU novels, and if I may add one of the better written ones. This one to be exact. You might be able to find it in the local library.

[Black Admiral]

The only black mark I can think of on Vaughn's cred as a villain is his chief henchman, what with Packer being something of a moron.

[Eternal_Freedom]

This was one of the earliest Doctor Who's I watched, back on VHS where they had the missing episodes covered by ~5 minutes of narration by Nicholas Courtney which worked rather well. Obviously the animation is better, but the narration idea worked well.

AS for the story, well, damn it's certainly impressive. It's a long story but it doesn't feel like it. The action is pretty sweet (apart from when they rescue Professor Watkins and they just cut straight to the head researcher meekly explaining it to Vaughn, apparently they ran out of time on location to shoot the sequence ) and the characters are, as others have noted, well-developed. Seeing the Brig in his element is always good. This story is also notable as Benton's first appearance (he got a boost in the last two episodes because the guy playing Sergeant Waters (sp?) was always late, so they fired him and used Benton instead.

A few notes: Broomstick, yeah, Kevin Stoney's eye is actually fucked up. Something about a rugby injury in his youth apparently.

As for the "real soldiers" part, yeah, they were Coldstream Guards IIRC. In the battle at the end, the guys in beige berets are actors, but the Guards used their own black berets. Apparently they only had two questions about the filming: Was the Brig a real officer and did they have to salute him? The answers being no, and yes while on camera