#9 (13.13 - 13.16): The Android Invasion.

The Doctor is captured by the evil Kraals!

4 episodes. Approx. 96 minutes. Written by: Terry Nation. Directed by: Barry Letts. Produced by: Philip Hinchcliffe.


THE PLOT

The Doctor and Sarah Jane materialize near Devesham, a rural English village located not far from a Space Defence Station. They have only just arrived when they spot a UNIT soldier, who runs erratically over a cliff to his death. When the Doctor searches the man's body, he discovers that his money is all newly minted - which is very improbable.

Mysterious events continue to build up. Strange men in spacesuits fire on them without even a word exchanged. When they reach the village, they find it completely deserted - with the money in the local pub all newly minted, just as the soldier's was. When the people finally arrive, they are dropped off in trucks and shuffle into the pub where they sit or stand like zombies - until the clock strikes twelve, at which point they suddenly behave normally.

The Doctor goes to the Space Defence Station, in hopes of finding UNIT allies to fill him in on the situation. He finds familiar faces: Harry Sullivan, Warrant Officer Benton. But these friends turn on him violently. These are not the real Harry and Benton, but android duplicates - and by the time the Doctor reconnects with Sarah Jane, she has been replaced as well...


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Though The Android Invasion isn't one of his better stories, Tom Baker is on excellent form. The scene at the end of Part Two, in which he confronts the android Sarah Jane, is a particular highlight. He has a calm, even casual tone as he reveals what he's figured out so far (which is a lot), but there's a dangerous undercurrent as he asks what has happened to the real Sarah. He switches between casual irreverence and deadly seriousness regularly throughout the story, sometimes within the same line delivery, and makes a fairly weak script very watchable in large part through sheer charisma.

Sarah Jane Smith: You know you're in a Terry Nation script when capable Sarah Jane Smith can't help herself from falling over nothing in each of the first two episodes - the second time, even spraining her ankle! To Nation, all companions are Susan Forman. That said, I love the easy screen rapport that had developed by this point between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. The opening bit, as they leave the TARDIS and walk into the woods, is wonderful as the Doctor's aside about "watch the bramble" is carried on to a full, natural-sounding conversation as they walk away. There are a lot of little bits like that between these two, who just "fit" beautifully together on camera.

Harry Sullivan/Warrant Officer Benton: This serial is the final series appearance of both characters. Not that there's much for either of them to do - We don't even see the real Harry and Benton until the final episode, and the effectiveness of having android doubles of them is undercut by Terror of the Zygons having done something similar just a few stories earlier. They remain welcome presences, though, even if one could have wished for stronger roles for them.


THOUGHTS

With its rural village and UNIT involvement, The Android Invasion feels very much like a leftover from the Pertwee era. One expects the Brigadier to pop up and start shooting at things and for the Doctor to hop into Bessie at any moment. It also is another Season 13 story whose plot involves doppelgangers of familiar faces, which can create a sense of deja vu so soon after Terror of the Zygons.

These factors probably have a lot to do with just how poorly-regarded this serial is. To be sure, this isn't one of the series' better stories. The Kraals are weak villains with a plan so convoluted as to practically be nonsensical.  An ending twist involving the weak-willed Crayford (Milton Johns)'s eyepatch is so ludicrous in its stupidity it about crosses the Event Horizon of idiocy. That's not even mentioning the presence of Colonel Faraday (Patrick Newell), a third-rate Brigadier knockoff who might as well be clad in a sandwich board reading, "Nicholas Courtney wasn't available, so you got me."

For all its faults, though, I find this a passably entertaining runaround. It moves along at a decent pace, and Barry Letts' direction is sturdy. The opening episode is by far the best of the story's four installments. The Village of the Damned trappings are genuinely spooky, and the script artfully piles one mystery on top of another: the strange spacesuited figures, the radiation, the mint condition money, the odd behavior of the locals. It's all effectively presented, and builds quite nicely... albeit, to a very weak cliffhanger.

The Android Invasion is an enjoyable time-filler, and it's given a tremendous boost by the performances of Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. But its plot feels half-formed, and its most effective ingredient - evil doubles of our regulars - was already done earlier in the same season. All of which leaves this a passable runaround, but ill-placed and outclassed by most of the stories surrounding it.

Overall Rating: 5/10.

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#1 (12.1 - 12.4): Robot

The robot menaces the newly regenerated 4th Doctor and Sarah!

4 episodes. Written by: Terrance Dicks. Directed by: Christopher Barry.  Produced by: Barry Letts.


THE PLOT

The Doctor has just regenerated into his fourth persona, and it's his most eccentric yet. Gone is the brittle yet dignified dandy.  In his place is a large, curly-haired, grinning figure who seems to be more than a little childish, and possibly a little insane.

It's a bad time for the Doctor to be unstable. The components of a top-secret disintegrator gun have been stolen by an unknown force. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart initially insists that he needs the Doctor's help just to keep him safely around for observation - but as the crisis escalates to the point of a nuclear apocalypse, it becomes apparent that the Doctor truly is needed, possibly more than ever before.

But can this new Doctor be trusted to maintain focus on the task at hand?


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Cards on the table: Despite being the fan favorite, the Fourth Doctor has never been a particular favorite of mine. That said, most of my issues with him come later, and there's no denying that Tom Baker makes a strong first impression. He's energetic and zany, but he also takes care to keep the Doctor at a certain remove. The Sherlock Holmes-like aspects of the character have always been there, ever since the First Doctor talked a primitive tribe into seeing the significance of a caveman's knife, but they're extremely prominent here.  This is particularly true of scenes in which he appears to be distracted by irrelevancies while actually collecting important observations, such as a crushed dandelion at a crime scene.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: My first draft review of Robot was written after a run of Season Seven stories, and the jump from Inferno to this really showed the Brigadier's deterioration. In Season Seven, he was brisk, efficient, and intelligent - a man born to lead. That Brigadier wouldn't have needed the Doctor to point out that two components of the same weapon had been stolen, he would have noticed all on his own. Even viewing in strict chronological order, I'd rate this as one of the character's most ineffectual showings, and it's as well that the new production team quickly decided to rest both him and UNIT.

Sarah Jane Smith: A strong story for Sarah Jane. With Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks still in charge, her background as a journalist and an independent-minded woman is still a driving force. For the first episode, and for much of the second, she is actually more proactive than the Doctor and the Brigadier are. After she is subject to a "demonstration" of the robot's inability to override its directive to never harm humans, which causes it considerable distress, she shows compassion for it, setting up (overly obvious) King Kong parallels for the rest of the serial.

Harry Sullivan: Ian Marter, who previously played an unrelated guest role in Carnival of Monsters, makes his debut as new companion Harry, a naval physician assigned to UNIT who starts out as the Doctor's doctor. Marter brings a relaxed and likable presence to the role, and he has an easy rapport with both Baker and Sladen. There isn't actually much for him to do in this story, an early sign of why he was written out after only one year, but I wasn't sorry to see him step into the TARDIS at the story's end.


THOUGHTS

Robot marks the beginning of the end of the UNIT era, and it honestly was about time for the show to move on. By this point, UNIT had become a collection of comic book soldiers, an impression not helped by them being pitted against a league of mad scientists plotting to take over the world - with a giant robot and a Ray Gun, no less. I question how some could complain about Doctor Who cartoons such as The Infinite Quest and Dreamland. Decades before that, this was a cartoon that just happened to be in live action!

For all of that, I mostly like Robot. Some of that is nostalgia. It was not the first Who story I ever saw, but it was the one that made me a regular viewer back in the mid-1980s. From here, I watched every story during PBS' mid-1980's omnibus reruns of the series, going all the way through to Trial of a Time Lord (which, for a long time, I had thought to be the series' finale).

Even without nostalgia goggles, there is much to like. Terrance Dicks understands the importance of story construction and pace. Robot moves along briskly, effectively introducing the situation and the guest characters, establishing the threats, and bringing them all together for the final episode. The plot may feel a bit thin, but there are enough strands to give the Doctor and the Brigadier elements to investigate even as Sarah pursues leads on her own.

The UNIT set-up also ensures that Tom Baker's debut story felt familiar to contemporary viewers. This is a very different Doctor, but he's surrounded by familiar regulars while navigating what's essentially a mid-range Pertwee story. Given Pertwee's five-year tenure and his enduring popularity, this was a canny way to reassure the audience that this was still very much the same show, a bit of comfort food before the new production team took over to steer it in a very different direction.

For its first three episodes, I think it works quite well. Too bad that it falls apart in the final installment. Once the robot grows to giant size to make sure no one misses the King Kong allusions, all internal credibility vanishes. The next several minutes, showing the robot rampaging around toy cars, paper houses, and plastic soldiers is ludicrous and - worse - dull.

After five years of spearheading Who, Letts and Dicks had to know the giant robot was going to look awful. Worse, the script doesn't do anything interesting; in fact, once the robot grows in size, the script stops doing interesting things.


OVERALL:

I would rank Robot as the weakest "new Doctor" story of the first five (though it's still better than the debuts of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors). It's a thin story even during the enjoyable first thee parts, and its final episode is largely poor. Still, it is mostly enjoyable, and Tom Baker makes a good first impression in the role.

It's good that a new production team was coming in - because the series was about to get a major jolt of renewed creative energy...


Rating: 6/10.

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