Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 384: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Six
Dear diary,
I don’t know if it’s just me, but the film sequences in this episode look particularly impressive. It’s noticeable early on, when the Doctor watches two dinosaurs fighting in the street - there’s some great close-up shots of Pertwee’s face in more detail than I was expecting - and it’s repeated again later on, with some close ups of Nick Courtney. More and more it’s shots like this that make me impressed by Paddy Russell’s work on the programme, and for the first time I’m somewhat sad that we can’t actually watch The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, as I imagine that her work in black and white would have been stunning.
Unfortunately, such beautiful shots of the regulars on film don’t help the models when we cut back to them. I think I’ve worked out what my biggest problem with them is, though: it’s not so much the dinosaurs themselves as the sets that they’re being filmed on. Everything around them is just so flat. There’s one particular shot about halfway through, where from the angle we’re looking, you can clearly see that the wall behind the creature - windows, doors, and all - is just printed onto a flat piece of card. These sets are then lit very blandly all over, which doesn’t really help the effect. Add in a couple of not-great dinosaur models and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
It’s telling that the best looking model shot today comes i the form of the triceratops in the tube station. Shot in near-darkness, both the set and the dinosaur look pretty convincing, and even the introduction of the brigadier being CSO’d into shot doesn’t ruin the effect too much. Again, though, I think that the story is let down more by the use of colour separation overlay than anything else, and it’s a real shame.
On the whole, I’ve rather enjoyed Invasion of the Dinosaurs. I couldn’t really remember all that much about it from my previous viewing a decade ago, but there;s an awful lot to like in here. The plot strand of people being held underground put me in mind of The Enemy of the World, though I think the similarities are only evident because I’ve so recently re-watched the former tale. I’m glad to see Sarah churning them up and leading the revolution against professor Whittaker, as it feels like her character gaining another piece of that puzzle which will make her a fully-fledged companion.
As if we needed that fact to be cemented for us, there’s that beautiful end scene, in which she tells the Doctor that it’ll be ‘a long time before [she] gets back in that TARDIS’. The whole scene is played as two good friends, and it’s clear from the way she says it that she does fully intend to take another trip with him. The Doctor’s response, to tempt her with the description of a beautiful world, is great fun, and put me in mind of the scene in The Eleventh Hour, where the Doctor becomes something of a schoolboy asking out Amy on their first date. It’s a beautiful way to end the episode.
It’s also a nice send off for Malcolm Hulke, who makes his final contribution to the series with this story. Although he co-wrote two stories for the Second Doctor, I always think of Hulke as being very much a Third Doctor-era writer, and he’s penned several stories that have shaped the last few years. The Silurians and The Sea Devils have contained ideas about preserving the Earth that crop up again in this story, and his futuristic tales in both Colony and Frontier in Space have been key to creating that shared vision of the future for this era which I’ve banged on about enough times since October. He’s always felt like just the right kind of writer for the Barry Letts period of the programme, so it’s perhaps fitting that we should see him bowing out just as the rest of this phase is changing, too.
