{"id":165,"date":"2013-09-22T17:00:41","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T22:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keithgoodnight.com\/blog\/?p=165"},"modified":"2013-09-22T17:00:41","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T22:00:41","slug":"dr-who-the-invasion-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithgoodnight.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/22\/dr-who-the-invasion-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Who: The Invasion of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"InvasionOfTime\"<\/a>\u201cOne grows tired of jelly babies, Castellan. Eventually one grows tired of everything… except power.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

The Doctor returns to Gallifrey, and once again the main focus is on political intrigue among the Time Lords. But The Invasion of Time<\/i> falls far short of Robert Holmes\u2019 wonderful first visit to the Doctor\u2019s home planet in last season\u2019s The Deadly Assassin.<\/i> Putting the two side-by-side highlights how half-hearted this effort really is. Faced with the same crippling budget problem as last week\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s really the wrong reason for another landmark visit to the Doctor\u2019s home planet.<\/p>\n

Like last week\u2019s abysmal Underworld,<\/i> the story has an intriguing premise\u2014 the Doctor returns to Gallifrey to claim the Presidency (due to a technicality left unresolved at the end of Deadly Assassin,<\/i> he\u2019s the only legal claimant to the office) but he\u2019s acting strangely: more like the kind of villainous tyrant he\u2019d normally fight against. He\u2019s harsh, bullying and arbitrary, and it seems like he\u2019s 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\u2014 it turns out the Vardans have him \u201cbugged,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately it\u2019s very poorly realized. We need to see the Doctor\u2019s 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 \u201cthe Castellan is settling old scores.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019re missing the parts you\u2019re supposed to see, while wasting time with scenes you don\u2019t need.<\/p>\n

Compare to Robert Holmes\u2019 script for The Deadly Assassin:<\/i> in that season as well, they couldn\u2019t 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.<\/i> After the crowded assassination scene in episode one, the story is an intimate drama revolving around a few key players. Invasion of Time<\/i> is also an intimate drama with a few key players\u2014 but it doesn\u2019t revolve around them, it revolves around a larger situation the program can\u2019t afford to show us. The result is disappointment.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, the episode looks cheap on the screen as well. The main set, the Panopticon (the Time Lords\u2019 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\u2019s tiny-budget standards.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s 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).<\/i> But they couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s impossible to even pretend you think they\u2019re in the TARDIS.<\/p>\n

Summing up, the best I can say is that it\u2019s better than Underworld.<\/i> But saying so provides the very definition of \u201cdamning with faint praise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farewell to Leela\u2014 and K-9?<\/h4>\n

At the end of the story, Leela decides to stay behind on Gallifrey because she\u2019s fallen in love with Andred, captain of the Citadel Guards, and the audience goes, \u201cUh, what?\u201d because they\u2019ve hardly had 5 minutes on screen together. Leela barely looks at Andred even while telling the Doctor she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Jameson wanted to get back to stage acting, and had already accepted the role of Portia in a production of Merchant of Venice.<\/i> A couple years further on, when Tom Baker was due to leave the series, then-producer John Nathan-Turner asked her if she\u2019d be willing to return: the Doctor\u2019s 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\u2019d be willing to do the two episodes on either side of the regeneration, but JN-T didn\u2019t want to bring Leela back unless it was for a whole season, so she declined. In later interviews, she\u2019s said she regrets the decision.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cK-9 Mark II\u201d so it doesn\u2019t count. This really kinds of undermines K-9 as a character, if he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Details<\/h4>\n