“One grows tired of jelly babies, Castellan. Eventually one grows tired of everything… except power.”
The Doctor returns to Gallifrey, and once again the main focus is on political intrigue among the Time Lords. But The Invasion of Time falls far short of Robert Holmes’ wonderful first visit to the Doctor’s home planet in last season’s The Deadly Assassin. Putting the two side-by-side highlights how half-hearted this effort really is. Faced with the same crippling budget problem as last week’s story, producer Graham Williams and script editor Anthony Read decided to go back to Gallifrey because they still had the Time Lord costumes on hand, and the set designs as well, so neither would cost them any money.
That’s really the wrong reason for another landmark visit to the Doctor’s home planet.
Like last week’s abysmal Underworld, the story has an intriguing premise— the Doctor returns to Gallifrey to claim the Presidency (due to a technicality left unresolved at the end of Deadly Assassin, he’s the only legal claimant to the office) but he’s acting strangely: more like the kind of villainous tyrant he’d normally fight against. He’s harsh, bullying and arbitrary, and it seems like he’s doing it all as part of a conspiracy to help the militarist Vardans invade and conquer Gallifrey itself. Of course he has something up his sleeve— it turns out the Vardans have him “bugged,” even reading his mind, and he has to conceal his plans even from his own thoughts as he buries, amid all his capricious demands, the moves that will let him defeat the Vardans and save Gallifrey.
Unfortunately it’s very poorly realized. We need to see the Doctor’s short-lived police state in action, as the obsequious Castellan takes the opportunity to settle old scores. Instead we get a scene of one old Time Lord walking down a corridor under guard while the guard tells him “the Castellan is settling old scores.” We need to see why the Vardans are so menacing that the Doctor had to resort to such drastic steps to stop them: instead they don’t do much of anything. We need to see invading troops dragging off rebels and Time Lords sullenly going about under guard, but instead the whole place is deserted except for one or two ceremonial scenes. The whole story comes across as thin: you get a constant feeling that you’re missing the parts you’re supposed to see, while wasting time with scenes you don’t need.
Compare to Robert Holmes’ script for The Deadly Assassin: in that season as well, they couldn’t afford to build a whole Gallifreyan city or populate every scene with crowds of Time Lords, but Holmes wrote a script that did not need them. After the crowded assassination scene in episode one, the story is an intimate drama revolving around a few key players. Invasion of Time is also an intimate drama with a few key players— but it doesn’t revolve around them, it revolves around a larger situation the program can’t afford to show us. The result is disappointment.
Like many 6-parters, the story breaks into two in order to avoid seeming padded. The main story wraps up in 4 episodes but then a threat-behind-the-threat is revealed as the Sontarans take advantage of the situation to attempt their own invasion. Sadly, the two Sontaran episodes turn out to be 100% padding, with an amount of story that could have fit into five minutes. Most of them is spent in a prolonged chase scene inside the TARDIS, which sounds like it could be exciting but just drags repetitively along, going nowhere very slowly until it finally gives up and quits. It involves the Doctor’s attempt to build a terrifying ultimate weapon originally invented by Rassilon and forbidden ever since, because the Sontarans are just so terribly dangerous that nothing else will do. Then it turns out the ultimate weapon is a hand-held ray gun like a thousand ray guns before it, the Doctor without much difficulty shoots the lead Sontaran with it, and the story ends with a whimper. Never mind that Leela earlier killed a Sontaran with a well-thrown hunting knife, we absolutely needed that allegedly-horrifying ultimate weapon.
Inevitably, the episode looks cheap on the screen as well. The main set, the Panopticon (the Time Lords’ great hall) is spacious and looks good, but again suffers if you put a picture of it side-by-side with the previous set built to the same plan. The other sets look appallingly cheap and half-finished even by Dr Who’s tiny-budget standards.
And then there’s the chase inside the TARDIS. That could have been filled with fun stuff (just picture what the new series did with Journey to the Center of the TARDIS). But they couldn’t afford to build any sets, so they filmed it in an abandoned Victorian mental hospital. It might make some sense that the Doctor would decorate his TARDIS in Victorian brickwork and wrought iron, if you had a set designer run with that idea and make TARDIS-like sets out of it (the console room in the 1996 movie looks something like that). But just having people run through some old steam tunnels is so utterly unconvincing that it’s impossible to even pretend you think they’re in the TARDIS.
Summing up, the best I can say is that it’s better than Underworld. But saying so provides the very definition of “damning with faint praise.”
Farewell to Leela— and K-9?
At the end of the story, Leela decides to stay behind on Gallifrey because she’s fallen in love with Andred, captain of the Citadel Guards, and the audience goes, “Uh, what?” because they’ve hardly had 5 minutes on screen together. Leela barely looks at Andred even while telling the Doctor she’s staying behind. Three previous companions left the Doctor in order to marry someone: Susan, Vicky, and Jo Grant. In all three cases, the romance was set up over the course of the whole episode in which they left. It is beyond sloppy writing to just spring this in the last 30 seconds of the episode. The reason for it is that the producers were hoping to persuade Louise Jameson to stay on, so they wrote a gratuitous departure they could easily cut out in the editing room before the episode aired, if she agreed to stay.
Jameson wanted to get back to stage acting, and had already accepted the role of Portia in a production of Merchant of Venice. A couple years further on, when Tom Baker was due to leave the series, then-producer John Nathan-Turner asked her if she’d be willing to return: the Doctor’s main companion at that time, Romana, was also leaving and JN-T wanted a familiar face in the cast to carry over the transition to the fifth Doctor. Louise Jameson said she’d be willing to do the two episodes on either side of the regeneration, but JN-T didn’t want to bring Leela back unless it was for a whole season, so she declined. In later interviews, she’s said she regrets the decision.
K-9 also decides to stay behind, to take care of Leela, but immediately after the TARDIS departs the Doctor pulls out a crate labeled “K-9 Mark II” so it doesn’t count. This really kinds of undermines K-9 as a character, if he’s that disposable, but it begins a tradition of replacement-K-9s that will continue right into the new series, when K-9 gets destroyed in the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith, only to be promptly replaced with a new one.
Details
- However unconvincing the location-filmed TARDIS scenes are, they do add to the lore of the series. We get the first clear statement that the TARDIS’ interior is a construct that can be altered, and that it doesn’t need to conform to normal geometry. The Doctor and friends pass repeatedly through several identical passages, with Leela saying they’re going in circles and the Doctor insisting they’re not (we never quite find out who’s right). At one point they all split up and head through doors leading in opposite directions, but all end up in the same room. The Doctor’s former teacher, Borusa, reprimands him for letting his dimensions get so disorganized (suggesting perhaps that the Doctor hasn’t been paying enough attention when he redecorates?).
- We see the TARDIS swimming pool for the first and last time in Classic Who’s history.
- In one room there are growing plants under a sun lamp of some kind. The Doctor checks a sundial in the room and remarks that “this clock is running slow.” In this garden room is a man-eater-sized venus flytrap the Doctor uses to capture a pursuing Sontaran at one point, although he gets back out again unharmed sometime later.
- The main power room is disguised as an art gallery, with famous paintings and the statue of the Venus du Milo, but when one character pushes a button the artwork all vanishes and leaves the controls visible. Or I should say control, because it’s just one switch (all the production could afford).
Next Week:
“The Ribos Operation,” 4 episodes, the premiere of season 16
