Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 436: The Android Invasion, Part Four
Dear diary,
Ahhhrg! Roughly translated, that means ‘The Android Invasion is so bloody frustrating that I think I may burst…’ This episode continues in the same style at the previous three - throwing up lots of interesting ideas and a few really brilliant moments, but then managing to undercut them with just a lot of rubbish. I wan’t so desperately to like this story, and I’m always so glad every time I think it’s about to swing round for me, but it just doesn’t work.
Still, let’s be positive to start with. Things I love in this episode… The Doctor is on fine form throughout, and the scene where both the real Doctor and his android double encounter android Benton in quick succession is brilliant. One of those genuinely lath-out-loud moments. As the two Doctors then go on to fight each other on a few occasions, I have to confess that I’m impressed by the direction - it really works. The pod opening behind The Doctor and Sarah as they talk on the rocket, and the duplicate of our hero peers out is wonderfully sinister. Later on, a similar trick in employed by Sarah Jane, when her duplicate sits up from a pod. If anything, that moment is possibly one of Lis Sladen’s best… but then we never see her double again! Where did it go?
Speaking of sudden departures, it’s a good job I was paying attention today because that’s goodbye to Benton, Harry, and UNIT… and they don’t waste any time in giving them a send off! Benton’s final moments see him accepting the Doctor’s orders and heading out of the main control room at the Space Centre… before being seen unconscious a few seconds later, where he’s walked right into an ambush (John Levene continues to play android Benton for the rest of the episode, including the scene I’ve already mentioned where both Doctor’s confuse him, but this is the last sight of the real Benton). Meanwhile Harry gets an equally inglorious send off, being rescued from the rocket by Sarah, and expressing surprise at the fact that he’s got a twin.
The Brigadier - who was clearly supposed to be around in this final episode - has been replaced with a completely new soldier, who speaks lines that would be just right for our regular man-in-charge-of-UNIT. In a funny turn of fate, though, the replacement soldier is played by Patrick Newell, who was also in the episode of The Avengers that I watched yesterday! Small world.
I suppose at the time, they didn’t really know that UNIT wouldn’t be seen again for such a long time. Although Phillip Hinchcliffe was moving the series in a new direction, and Tom Baker wanted to get away from the trappings of his predecessor, I’d imagine they still expected the organisation to crop up from time to time. As it is, we’ll never see Benton or Harry again, and UNIT, save for a brief cameo at the end of this season, won’t be back properly now until Battlefield.
We also say goodbye to Barry Letts with today’s episode, as it’s his last directing work on the series. He’ll be back to oversee things as an executive producer for Season Eighteen, but this is the last time he takes such a direct input to the series. It’s nice to say that the direction has been one of the highlights for the story, and it was only today that I realised both Letts’ first and last direction work for the series feature doubles of the Doctor fighting themselves. In The Enemy of the World, we get to see the Second Doctor fighting against Salamander, while here we’ve got the Doctor vs his android double. It’s not the only connection Letts makes to his first work on the series, either, because Milton Johns turns up in vital roles for both stories.
I’m tempted to say ‘this is the last time Terry Nation writes a non-Dalek story for the programme’, too, but he only does it on two occasions, over a decade apart! Having been an active voice on the writing team for the last few seasons, though, he’ll now be slipping back into the shadows for a while to concentrate on Survivors and Blake’s 7, and we won’t see him again until the Daleks decide to make a reappearance in the Doctor’s life.
On the whole, The Android Invasion is filled with some brilliant ideas, some great concepts, and some wonderful moments… but it just doesn’t quite gel when you put everything together. A real shame, and possibly the biggest ‘blip’ in Season Thirteen’s track record…
