It’s getting hard to find new ways to say “another great episode” but that’s par for the course as we work our way through Doctor Who’s Golden Age. Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen are at the peak of their collaboration as the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, playing off each other effortlessly as partners— Sarah as the Doctor’s first “best friend” in the TARDIS, rather than his follower, admirer or sidekick (that’s been in evidence for a while— I neglected to comment on a beautiful moment in last week’s episode when, in the TARDIS console room at the start, the Doctor is making a very grand and portentous speech while behind him Sarah drapes a shawl over her head and makes mock-mournful faces at him, not taking his gloom at all seriously).
The story itself continues this season’s trend of paying homage to the classics of the horror genre— in this case “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by way of a cold war thriller about Soviet sleeper agents (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was also allegorically about Soviet sleeper agents, so you inevitably do both if you do either one). The episode title lets the viewers know what’s going on well before the Doctor and Sarah figure out that people have been replaced by android duplicates, but the story plays with various bits of misdirection anyway, and it saves a very effective twist all the way until the end of part 2. At that point we viewers know Sarah’s been replaced by an android and are wondering whether the Doctor’s figured it out or not— but he surprises the viewers by revealing something that we weren’t even thinking of (I won’t spoil it here).
The aliens are creepy and sinister, the androids get in some moments of both straight horror-movie stuff as well as deliciously eery Twilight Zone-ish moments, the invasion plan is genuinely threatening, and the whole plot retains Dr Who’s trademark eccentricity. Meanwhile the Doctor and Sarah are both just having so much fun. It’s another high point from a season of high points for the series.
Details:
- This story continues the phase-out of UNIT. On one level it’s an aliens-invade-Earth story that would be right at home in the Third Doctor’s era, and there are UNIT soldiers around, and even Sgt. Benton and Harry Sullivan make appearances (the last time for both characters). But the Brigadier is away “in Geneva” and we never get around to any UNIT-battles-the-aliens scenes that we certainly would have in an actual UNIT story. It’s a transitional episode in between the UNIT stories of old and the non-UNIT alien invasions we’ll see in the future of the program.
- Harry and Benton get a delightful little moment between them, at the end of their characters’ run on Dr Who. Late in the story, in mission control watching an astronaut return, the Colonel in charge while Lethbridge-Stewart is in Geneva exclaims with awe: “He’s been further into space than any human being in history!” Behind his back, Harry and Benton exchange a look of amusement: not only do they know several people who’ve gone father, they’ve both gone farther themselves. (Even Benton took a trip all the way to another Universe in The Three Doctors.)
- The story was written by Dalek creator Terry Nation, and is one of only two non-Dalek stories Nation contributed to Dr Who (the other was “The Keys of Marinus” way, way back in seaon 1).
- It was directed by Pertwee-era producer Barry Letts. Letts had always preferred directing to producing, and his motive for finally vacating the producer’s chair at Dr Who was to get back to directing. Meanwhile new producer Philip Hinchcliffe had realized early on that one of the toughest parts of Dr Who’s production was to find a director who could deliver given the series’ limited resources. Letts knew how to do that, and his reason for leaving the producer’s job had nothing to do with being tired of the series, so it was inevitable he’d be on Hinchcliffe’s short list for directors. The only surprise is that he didn’t direct Who stories more often (Letts would remain closely involved with the series all the way until the 80s).
- Speaking of limited resources: I haven’t brought this up often, but let’s take a look at how limited those resources were. At this time, Dr Who is a weekly half-hour series, primarily shot in-studio on video tape (with only a limited amount of location filming allowed). The series built its stories around 4 to 6 episode serials but in terms of broadcast schedules it’s a weekly half-hour series. The BBC, in its wisdom, gave it exactly the same budget and production schedule as any other weekly half-hour series, i.e. the average sitcom. It’s fashionable even among fans to mock the failures of Dr Who’s special effects but here’s a challenge: put an episode of Dr Who from this era side-by-side with one from a sitcom of similar vintage (e.g. To The Manor Born), reflect on what each series had to accomplish in a given episode, and recall that they each had the exact same amount of time and money to do it. It puts Dr Who’s rubber monsters and chromakey spaceships into perspective.
- How successful were the shows’ creators within these limits? Dr Who during the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era had the highest ratings in the history of the show (including today). According to the sources I’ve seen, about 25% of the UK was watching Dr Who every Saturday night. Note well: that is not 25% of TV viewers. That is 25% of the entire UK population. That never happens in TV, not then or now.
- A tale of two plot holes: at the climax of the episode, the Doctor of course finds a way to deactivate the androids (I hope that’s not a spoilery surprise for anyone: I’ll refrain from saying how). Then in the next scene he’s using one of them for a purpose of his own. The script had a scene explaining how he reactivated that one but there wasn’t time for it. Letts and Hinchcliffe worried about deleting that scene, and sure enough they got letters objecting to it: “How did the Doctor use that android when he’d deactivated them all?” I personally can’t understand this: of course the Doctor could reprogram and reactivate one of the androids if he wanted to, who needs to see that scene? On the other hand, a large part of the plot revolves around the aliens having tricked astronaut Guy Crayford into believe he was injured. As part of the deception, he wears an eyepatch because he supposedly lost an eye— until the Doctor tells him, “you were never injured, they lied to you, have a look” and he lifts the eyepatch to reveal a perfectly good eye. So just how gullible do you have to be to not even once, in years with the aliens, lift up the eyepatch on your own face and realize you’ve still got an eye there? But no one objected to that plot hole at all. (Perhaps because the actor playing Crayford does such a good job with the scene that it makes a good dramatic character moment whether it makes sense or not.)
Next week:
“The Brain of Morbius” 4 episodes.
