The Colony of Lies

A colony ship crash lands on the planet Axista Four in the year 2439. Their mission was to find a new home and establish a colony where people are not slaves to their own technology, where people interact differently and life is simpler than it has become. One hundred years later the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive and find a colony on the brink of collapse, where the ideals of their founder to lead a simpler life have led them down a cultural cul-de-sac, and a breakaway group feels they need to abandon those ideals to survive. The arrival of an Earth Federation ship on a mission to bring refugees to the planet only complicates things more, but that's nothing compared to the awakening alien menace that has been dormant all these years.

It's interesting how an attempt to get back to a more basic lifestyle manifests itself as a wild west town in space, where the colonists are more or less living in Westworld just without the androids and the death. Life on the colony isn't the easiest but death is not waiting right around the corner either; the colonists may be at odds but they are not at war either. And the ship that brought them there is not totally destroyed; there's enough technology that survived to be able to bring them up to a more modern way of life if only they'd allow themselves to use it. It's almost like the Mennonites went to space (and I can say that because Mennonites don't use the internet and won't see this). Why the wild west though? That's what I was pondering the whole time. Did Colin Brake want to write a spaghetti western than badly? What was wrong with the Victorian age where there was enough science to get by, but nothing at the levels the colony founder felt were so wrong?

Colin Brake has placed this story during the first major expansion of Earth and its colonies; they're having their problems with the Daleks at this point but otherwise are expanding at their own speed snapping up uninhabited planets left and right. The conflict with the Daleks is creating the refugee crisis and Axista Four is going to become a dumping ground for them, which will put an end to the colony's internal troubles and effectively remove their independence. Undoubtedly the intent here was to loosely link this story to the era of the television episodes Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks and create a small cluster of future history continuity; it's a bit of a ballsy move to try it as there was never much attention paid to continuity where Earth's empire was concerned, and there are disjointed tales all over of Earth's rising, falling and then rising again Empire before it joins a Galactic Federation. At this point, though, Earth has its own Federation of mostly human populated planets, which lines it up with the almost-sister series Blake's 7; making a possible evolution of that Earth (or Terran) Federation going from the xenophobic distopian society of  Blake's 7 to a more inclusive Federation and then into an Empire which would grow and grow before declining as seen in The Dark Path. Linking the assorted Federations and Empires with Doctor Who can be tricky enough but to try and relate it to another series as well would seem foolhardy if the series' were not being made side by side.

But that exploration is somewhere ahead of us as far as this blog goes.

The Doctor comes into this story at the behest of one of his future selves; in fact the story opens with the seventh Doctor and his companion Ace and leads to this adventure in the Doctor's past. Colony of Lies was published in 2003 so the seventh Doctor's penchant for getting involved with events and influencing them to his own design was well established, but as far as this continuity study goes it's a bit of a glimpse into the future if someone had not seen any of the seventh Doctor's episodes. Zoe and Jamie are still with the Doctor, both of them getting a pretty rough ride with Zoe being knocked out a lot and almost tortured by using mental interfaces with computers (she had no such trouble in Little Doctors though) and Jamie getting into very physical dust ups with the Tyranians - a race of canine humanoids who have a prior claim to the planet over the human colonists. There's a particularly pointless bit where Jamie takes on one of them in some cliche trial by combat for honour notion but I have to wonder if Colin Brake forgot about how Jamie dresses when he wrote that part. I mean - has Brake ever worn a kilt himself, let alone gotten into a wrestling match in one? Dignity would be in short supply tussling around on the ground in one; I speak from experience as I wore mine last week on the streets in Ottawa and a sudden gust of wind had me mooning Parliament Hill.

There is also something mysterious about the Tyranians as well but it is thrown into the mix so close to the end it may well have not been put in at all.

Future history saved, the TARDIS crew head back into time and space for another BBC Books novel before returning to the televised adventures...

NEXT EPISODE: THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN

The Final Sanction

It’s 2204 and in the wake of the Dalek invasion the Earth military has gotten bigger and better and is embroiled in the last days of a conflict with the Selachians. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive on the front of the final campaign and are swept up in events and divided across enemy lines with the Doctor and Jamie with the Earth forces and Zoe as a prisoner of war of the Selachians. The Doctor knows that they are at a turning point in history and this war is going to end in a horrible confrontation, one he cannot change, but with Zoe in danger of being part of a holocaust, can he just let it happen?

Well this is a grim one. The second Doctor’s tenure is often remembered for it’s comedic moments and it’s parade of monsters, but it was rare to have something along these lines come up. Indeed the on screen adventures didn’t really go there at all, so it’s the BBC Novels which once more take those steps into the darker places, much as we saw with Combat Rock. The Final Sanction doesn’t go as far into the grit and guts as Rock did but it was published first of the two, when the novel series was still not sure how far it could push its own envelope where graphic content was concerned. And certain authors can do it better than others, and author Steve Lyons isn’t really known for gore.

He is, however, known for the Selachians, and here they are again for the third time in this continuity blog. Both of his novels featuring his shark-monsters were published some time before Big Finish waded into the waters of the second Doctor and put out The Selachian Gambit  where Jamie met them, so I was concerned that Sanction might have a continuity-jarring moment where Jamie doesn’t know what a Selachian is, but somehow that doesn’t happen at all and Jamie just knows who they are already. Whew. I myself am still not entirely keen on these monsters as they are pretty much just more mobile Daleks with the feelings left intact. The Selachians have a culture and a whole history from before they became warlike and went on the rampage but they’re just too obvious a substitute monster; at the time on TV the series didn’t have the Daleks to use and when the BBC Books were coming out there were no Daleks either for quite some time unless John Peel wrote the stories (stupid decision by the way).

But my gripes about the Selachians as a baddie aside, they are pretty ruthless and are downright horrible to Zoe. Under their interrogation and imprisonment her haughty intellectual dignity and superiority complex are literally beaten out of her and although she bonds with some other prisoners to mount escape attempts she is very close to breaking point. This is so far the most brutal treatment Zoe has received at the hands of any aliens she has met. Jamie on the other hand effectively enlists with the Earth military so he can help rescue Zoe and gains the admiration of Lieutenant Michaels, and the attention almost seems affectionate in some ways. Jamie is oblivious to this, and it may not be intentional on the author’s part but it just reads as if Michaels might have a thing for our Highland boy. And the Doctor even gets some great moments of conflict which we never really saw for Troughton; that whole changing of history thing is here in a new way. Usually changing history was all about the history we know in the past, but now here’s something new: future history which as far as we know he may be accidentally changing all the time when helping overthrow a dictator or defeating the Cybermen again. Military leader Redfern is destined to go Hiroshima on the Selachians’ home planet, but should the Doctor stop him? Can he stop him? This is where Sanction goes into the darker and heavier realm without the gore of the conflict as the focus, although there is enough justification for it to be both if Lyons really wanted to go there.

But from the wet world of aquatic monsters to the wild west of the future we go…

NEXT EPISODE: THE COLONY OF LIES

The Seeds of Death

The Earth’s Moonbase has had a refit and is no longer the source of weather control but a relay point for the newest mode of travel: an instantaneous transporter called T-Mat. The technology reaches every part of Earth, which is why a group of Ice Warriors overruns the moon and takes control of the whole system. Using T-Mat they start to send seed pods to Earth that grow into a fungus which unless the Doctor can stop it will destroy the world and leave it open for conquest.

So the Ice Warriors make their second appearance in the series and they’re… well, they’re not as fierce as they were before. Well, the actual warriors themselves might not be because they have a new leader, a commander named Slaar who is not as heavyset as the others and who is a bit more articulate even if his heavy breathing makes him sound something of an obscene phone call. Nevertheless it’s obvious that there are ranking classes within the Martian society, and Varga’s breed are just thugs who do what Slaar’s type tell them. They’re more methodical this time round with their plan as opposed to Varga’s desperate attempts to simply escape from Earth and go home, and it’s worth noting that this takes place before The Ice Warriors, so at this point in time while Slaar and company plot the Earth’s destruction, Varga and crew are somewhere down there below them locked up in the glacier. Even though it’s just their second outing the Ice Warriors already make for fascinating monsters and their popularity would only just rise with their return to the screen. Given that it was almost certain at this point in the show’s history that the Daleks were never coming back, something else had to come along to plague the Doctor in his travels, although they will only be back two more times on screen in the classic series.

At six episodes long this felt a bit slow in spots. The attempts to create tension and fear for the men trapped on the Moonbase were effective enough with great performances by terrorized technicians fearing for their lives, but they were counterpointed by the more comedic bits with the Doctor dashing up and down all the crooked Batman inspired corridors with the Ice Warriors lumbering along after him. In fact, the Doctor’s physical comedy comes into play a lot, with him desperately trying to avoid being overwhelmed by the fungus as it spreads across the planet below in episodes five and six. Still, the story has this sort of space opera feel to it, with a very distinctive soundtrack much like in The Ice Warriors and s customized titles sequence with the camera panning across space passing behind either the moon or Earth and then once to the other side zooming in on whichever location the action was to be joined on. Clever.

There is no actual Earth year given but at this point in time the people of Earth have not explored anywhere beyond the moon; rocket technology has been abandoned and T-Mat is the way to go now no matter what is being transported. Grumpy (and unemployed) rocket scientist Professor Eldred tells the Doctor that the human race’s curiosity for things beyond the moon has been stunted by T-Mat, so this is somewhere before Zoe’s time as she was stationed on a space station which was often visited by spaceships from Earth. The Moonbase was set in 2070, so this is sometime after that and The Murder Game (despite being expanded universe) is set in 2136 when humans are flying in space again, which would put this somewhere between them. There’s also no sign of a recent Dalek invasion, so it would have to be somewhere before 2150. Transporter technology would feature a lot in later Doctor Who episodes but not with the same regularity as on Star Trek.

I remember the first time I saw this one; it was my very first Doctor Who convention, Who-Fest 84 in Buffalo, New York; my parents surprised me with a visit there under the guise of some cross-border shopping and lo I got to meet third Doctor, Jon Pertwee himself, and get to see part of this adventure in a screening room along with a more recent episode which had been broadcast in the UK only a few months earlier. But yes, I got to see a glimpse of my first black and white episodes that day, and it would be a couple years before I saw it again in its entirety in Buffalo PBS station Channel 17. The novelization of the story came out in 1986 and was not as enjoyable, falling into the usual dull realm of novelizations penned by Terrance Dicks. At least I had seen it in full before then and knew it was enjoyable. And years after that, when my nephew expressed his opinion that the Ice Warriors were his favourites, I took a great pleasure in showing him this episode, even if his 5 year old brain didn’t get why we were watching it in “grey”.

And now from screen to novel we go…

NEXT EPISODE: THE FINAL SANCTION

The Jigsaw War and The Way of The Empty Hand

Jamie is in an interrogation room being grilled about his involvement with the Doctor and Zoe and the trouble they have caused for the ruling class of the planet they have landed on. There is a revolt afoot outside the prison, and Jamie feels confident that if he waits it out the Doctor will come get him. The Doctor always wins. But Jamie is experiencing his time in the cell out of sync with the rest of time, and moments are happening out of order around him. The way out is a door only he can see, and the only way he can escape is to sort the order of events around him out and find the door’s release code. If only he were clever.

Now this one was interesting. Big Finish have experimented with the notion of events around characters happening out of sequence for dramatic effect, not quite to the same extent as a Quentin Tarantino film but along those lines. In those cases, though, the characters were seen in their respective timelines and were part of the sequences being presented; Jamie here is fully aware that things are not happening in the proper order while his interrogator, Moran, is unaware and thinks it’s a tactic to convince him that Jamie is mad. The increasing din of trouble outside the door, though, adds the pressure to the goings on inside the room and the interrogation gets a bit frantic and heated in spots, then snaps back to a quieter moment in contrast. The overall feel of the tale is one of two people trapped in an elevator, even if one gets to leave sometimes.

On his own against an interrogator and an unseen presence Jamie has to rely on himself to get out of this situation. Fighting his way out is more his style – indeed, as the Doctor states at one point, he was born into it – but when he has to think he’s at a bit of a loss. He muses that this would be more Zoe’s thing, but if the whole point of what is going on is a test then surely that’s exactly why Zoe is not the one locked in the room. Despite his self-doubt, though, Jamie manages to grasp what is going on and realizes that he has to save himself this time because there’s no way for the Doctor to reach him. But through it all Jamie’s unfaltering loyalty to the Doctor is there, summed up so well in his simple statement: “He’ll win. Take it from me, he always does!”

Jamie’s particularly awesome if you ask me. He’s often referred to as the Doctor’s most loyal companion ever and really, he is. They’ve all had their doubts at times, they have questioned him, they have challenged him, but Jamie stood by him always, convinced that the Doctor was doing the right thing. Fraser Hines brings this out in Jamie so well even now, years later; you can hear the pride in his voice at being the Doctor’s best friend in the universe. And it’s that faith and determination which helps Jamie survive in this ordeal.

THE WAY OF THE EMPTY HAND

Jamie is put to another test on the planet Combatia, where a ruling overlord snatches warriors up from all across the universe and pits them against each other to see who is the greatest. While Zoe and the Doctor try to find him, Jamie and another captive, a warrior from Japan named Funakoshi, bond and set up a revolt against the overlord to free themselves and all the other kidnapped warriors.

A simple tale here; it’s one of the Short Trips variety so it only runs 27 min and tries to do a lot in that limited time. As a result there is always going to be an aspect which… I hesitate to say “suffers” but perhaps is not as well developed as others, and this time it’s the bad guy. His motivation isn’t really there, he’s not really distinct or anything – he could be anyone. He could just be really bored and watched too much WWF.

It’s not as violent as it could have been but that’s the point: Jamie may be a warrior in his own right but being with the Doctor he knows there can be another way, and Funakoshi realizes this in him.

And with two back to back audios done, it’s a return to the screen and the return of an old enemy…

NEXT EPISODE: THE SEEDS OF DEATH

The Krotons

The rules on the Planet of the Gonds are simple: you do what the Krotons want, or else. You learn what they tell you is important and if you’re very clever and smart you get to leave your simple life and become a Companion of the Krotons. If you are a Gond, this is what life is all about. It also gets you killed. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe discover that to become a Companion of the Krotons is to have your prized intellect sucked out of you for their purposes and your body is vaporized. The Krotons have decimated the planet once and will do so again if they are defied, but if you’re extremely clever, like the Doctor and Zoe, you get to live a bit longer. But you’re still going to die.

It’s a simple oppressor / oppressed story, really, nothing too complicated and certainly not the most promising start for one Robert Holmes, who will pen some of the best Doctor Who episodes ever as the series carries on and on. In his debut effort he gives us the steady trio of the TARDIS crew at their most ordinary; the Doctor is clever and smirks a lot, Zoe is clever and a bit full of herself for it, and Jamie is not clever but still smart enough to be headstrong and effective. And there’s really nothing wrong with that at all; the TARDIS crew can be simple and enjoyable together without heaps of personal baggage or the companion being some lynchpin to the future of the universe or secretly (or openly) going all doe-eyed over the Doctor (yes I am going to that shit-on-the-current-series place again). Holmes' trademark, though, will emerge as the presence of an engaging double-act among the supporting cast; there is just not such a combo here this time.

Unless it's the pair of Krotons themselves. How about those Krotons eh? Big shiny crystal light bulbs with deep booming voices. Admittedly the voice could be very intimidating if you’re a simple people, and you’d probably do what it wants just to make it stop. They don’t have a lot of dexterity in those pincer hands though, can’t even really hold their weapons either. And they’re practically blind. But the power to level a planet and poison it for generations makes the Gonds overlook all that and live in fear. One can't help but imagine there is a bit of a camaraderie between the two of them which we don't normally see when it's two Daleks or Cybermen talking to each other. The Krotons are certainly different from those hallmark baddies in that they are capable of getting angry and will in fact yell when getting frustrated - usually with the Doctor.

The Gonds aren’t mindless by any stretch, and among them are some who would rise against the Krotons and deny them their Companions; Abu defies the will of his father and dares to protect Varna, the woman he loves, from the Krotons. Other Gonds are quick to side with the Krotons until they see some advantage to defying them as well and hope to rise to some sort of political power by doing so. Still, people who are dressed as Sensorites (minus the round feet) aren’t going to do very well without the Doctor’s help.

The Second Doctor’s final season is really starting to head to its end, but from a simple tale to a more complicated one we go, and then the expanded universe of novels and audio will fill out some gaps between the remaining three televised stories…

NEXT EPISODE: THE JIGSAW WAR

The Rosemariners and Little Doctors

An innocent act of curiosity by Jamie has the TARDIS make an accidental landing on the research satellite Earth Station 454 just as it is being closed down. The final xenobiologist on board does not fully understand why the station is closing but suspects that there is some connection to the recent arrival of a group of Rosemariners from the planet Rosa Damascena. Suspicion rises as it becomes obvious that the Rosemariners have something else going on behind the scenes, and there is much more to it than their love of pretty flowers.

The Rosemariners as a species are an interesting bunch; they do not have blood per se but an ichor, and they are definitely plant-like humanoid creatures themselves. Their very existence is linked to roses and they haul a vast arboretum around with them in their ships to never be far from the plants they need. In looking at the cover I was thinking we were headed into some kind of origin story for the Chameleons from The Faceless Ones but the similarity ends at the vague faces. Oh, and the ability to copy people.

Evil alien plants, like the previous story’s evil feminist regime, is a science fiction conceit as old as the genre itself, most notably illustrated in Day of the Triffids where semi-intelligent plants (although they were probably just following instinct) attacked and slaughtered the blinded people of Earth. The Rosemariners themselves are not as plant-like as the Triffids, but their drive to collect every species of rose for their own preservation has led them to pick up the deadly rosa toxicara, which is a flesh eater of a rose developed by the Daleks to be a guard dog like the Varga plants on Kembel. The toxicara has a bit more aggression and actively grabs victims and sends them into a dream like trance with a touch of its thorns… I was sort of reminded of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. Or maybe Biollante.

Doctor Who has had (and will have) its own brushes with evil plants, and Rosemariners makes a fascinating addition to that list. The production for screen though would not have been the easiest to realize in the 1960s, with actors required to thrash around in plastic tendrils and pretend they are being attacked and consumed, which is most likely why it did not make it to screen. It’s also a bit on the horrific side as well and would be more suited to something like The Outer Limits, whose own plant from hell monster from the episode Counterweight was a right nasty looking thing with teeth. Still, the magic of Big Finish and all that, right?

Continuity placement is all good where it is, with the story not having any references to anything else in season six, and it’s realized with, again, the full cast of regulars and guest star David Warner who pops up a lot in the Big Finish series, although he laments not having been in the televised series yet in the interviews after the story concludes (and a year or so later though he actually was in one).  The interviews also go on to say that this is the last of the Lost Stories from Big Finish but that’s not true at all – this was just recorded last and there are several still to come.

And some stories to come are a bit… shorter than others…

LITTLE DOCTORS

Supercomputer Zeus has everything under control. Nothing can go wrong. And if something does, there’s an automatic system that creates robot guards through simple matter synthesis, and the machines to do so are everywhere so there’s no escape for wrongdoers. But when the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are threatened by this mechanism, the Doctor’s course of action leads the machines to produce an army of miniature Doctors, all infected with a sense of mischief and play – and havoc ensues.

Little Doctors is a Big Finish Short Trip read by Fraser Hines, and as such we get him voicing not only Jamie but the Doctor once again. Curiously, though, I couldn’t help but feel this is more of a Zoe story despite Wendy Padbury not reading it. Maybe she was supposed to and things changed up. Zoe is after all a computer genius so when dealing with a malfunctioning supercomputer she'd be the obvious saviour of the story.

But as with the other Short Trips it’s not a long tale at all but it still entertains; I was on the road for a day when I had this playing so it made the drive through the rural areas of Nova Scotia less dull to have this going on over the speakers. The Short Trips aren’t meant to be taken to too much depth – there’s simply not the time in the format to do complete soul searching or defeat an entire army. But an approximate 30 minute dose of the Doctor is an excellent way to be entertained.

NEXT EPISODE: THE KROTONS

Prison in Space

The TARDIS accidentally lands in the rooftop garden of a city complex far in the future, and the crew are arrested for trespassing. The garden is not a public space and is for the exclusive pleasure of Chairman Babs, the leader of Earth, and the offence of being there sends the Doctor and Jamie to a prison satellite while Zoe is taken for conditioning to take her place as a superior being in society while the worst of the inferiors languish in the prison. The truth comes out that male humans have been branded as the inferior members of society and the females have taken over completely, and it is up to the Doctor, like any prisoner, to attempt to escape.

Oh, this again is it? The perceived feminist agenda coming to full on fruition? I thought we dealt with this in Galaxy Four with the Drahvins. Well, here we go again it seems. Ever since the feminist movement started there have been men scared to death of it, figuring that it wasn’t about equality in the slightest, but just motivated out of revenge for the long struggle faced by women over the ages. And hey one can sometimes see why; we’ve seen some of those people on the news screaming about what they feel needs to be done to the male anatomy to make them feel avenged. And it still goes on to this day and age with some nervous males seeing every female lead in anything dramatic as some subversive move to champion women’s rights further and push men down the totem pole that much more.

Wow.

So here we have Prison in Space which is a script that was submitted in the 60s for consideration as a television episode but it was declined by the production team and sat for almost 40 years in Fraser Hines’ garage. The script came to light when the Big Finish team started putting the Lost Years series together, and with a few tweaks it was finally put out there. The tale is more of a comedy than anything and the anti-male rhetoric is ramped up accordingly, although there are bits where it might have gone too far and wisely it was held back from that point, for instance Chairman Babs was not referred to as Chairwoman Babs at all, nor was there ever any mention of womankind thrown out there.

One gets the idea that there was supposed to be a great deal of physical comedy as well and much of it is captured in the narrative bits, although Fraser Hines has admitted to waving his hands about and physically acting in his sound booth while doing his lines as the Doctor. Yes, he’s there again in both roles with Wendy Padbury along as Zoe still sounding very much as herself back in the day, although with a harder edge to her once she becomes a convert to Babs’ regime. Babs herself is a bit of a caricature and is referred to as a “toad of a woman” and one wonders if her hatred of men is just borne of the fact that she’s not attractive to them. She’s attracted to them, though; she takes quite a shine to the Doctor when he stands up to her and even after she has him flung into prison her thoughts dwell on him.

Prison doesn’t have any solid references to the televised serials around it so it’s safe enough to place it in the gap between The Invasion and The Krotons given that the first three serials of the season were played up to be back to back to back adventures. Where it might have gone if it had been produced is anyone’s guess. The possible reasons it was passed on are easy to guess; it might have been too grand for the effects budget and it might just have been too much of a comedy in a series which was playing itself a bit more seriously in those days. Comic moments show up in each of the tales that were produced that season but an actual full comedy story would just not have fit in.

But from the comic to the gritty horror we now go…

NEXT EPISODE: THE ROSEMARINERS

The Isos Network

The Cyberman invasion fleet is in flames over Earth but the Doctor spots one ship escaping the destruction. He sets the TARDIS on a pursuit course but due to the Cybermen deploying countermeasures the ship arrives on the planet Isos II months after the Cybermen, and the population has already been attacked and converted. The planet is also host to a species of gastropod which is causing its own brand of havoc as a military force arrives to put things right. But with the emergence of a Cybercontroller, the odds tip in favour of victory for the Cybermen.

I remember thinking for a bit after I finished this one that I must have missed something because I could not for the life of me remember anything that was the big reveal or huge “moment” of the story, and I sat here staring at the screen wondering what I was going to say about it. Did I nod off at a crucial spot, I wondered? Was my download from Big Finish missing some tracks? Surely I wasn’t on the phone while this was playing?

Turns out I can’t remember that kind of detail because The Isos Network doesn’t actually have anything like that in it. Someone in another blog said that by episode two “the plot vanishes up its own arse” and I really can’t put it better myself. But then as I thought about it a bit more, I realized it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a complicated story at all. The Doctor goes after the Cybermen after The Invasion and finds them trying to set up shop somewhere else to rebuild after their defeat. And that’s about as complicated as it gets.

Fraser Hines once again plays both the Doctor and Jamie as if it were just days after The Invasion was broadcast, and Wendy Padbury is there as Zoe as well. Mind you, they’re not exactly doing anything that any other companions couldn’t do; Jamie’s not baffled by science anymore (although to be fair he’s been with the Doctor a while and as we saw in The Mind Robber he has managed to learn how to read due to tutelage by Victoria, the Doctor himself and presumeably Zoe as well) and Zoe isn’t blowing up computers with her logic driven smarts; they could have been any companion duo save for the fact that this is set right after The Invasion. In the absence of really huge heavy plot or big character driven moments, then, there’s the awesome audio production values of the story to enjoy, starting with the series regulars and moving to the fantastic recreation of the Invasion Cyberman voices and the Controller from Tomb, which would make for the first time we have more than one “version” of the Cybermen in a story. And there’s the musical cues as well – definitely inspired by The Invasion to evoke the sense of those Cybermen once more lurking in dark tunnels on Isos II.

Problem, though. I mentioned in the post about The Invasion that there was a timeline difference between it and The Tenth Planet which now comes back to haunt as the Cybercontroller has data about the first Doctor as he appeared in Planet. The only way out of this one is to assume that the Cyberman countermeasures deployed to throw the TARDIS off their trail allowed the Cybermen themselves to travel into the future beyond Planet; the story states that it’s been a few months since the Cybermen landed on Isos II but hey who’s to say that it’s the same year as Earth during The Invasion anyway?

I’m going to go with that.

Did Big Finish finally deliver a sub-par episode? I don’t think so. There’s nothing wrong with something simple and fun so long as it’s done right. They don’t all have to have the fate of the universe at stake (again) and play out like the script was tossed on the floor and reassembled out of order (again)… they’d be the 2010 to 2013 series if that were the case and they, frankly, are crap. But we’re not there yet.

NEXT EPISODE : PRISON IN SPACE

The Invasion

After escaping from the Land of Fiction, the TARDIS materializes in space in orbit around the Earth. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe barely have time to rest before the ship is attacked by a missile fired from the dark side of the moon. They escape to Earth and attempt to contact their friend Professor Travers but find he has left London and his flat is being sublet by Professor Watkins and his photographer daughter, Isobel. Watkins has not been seen for days and to find him the Doctor investigates a company called International Electromatics and its owner Tobias Vaughan, only to discover that Colonel Lethbridge Stewart, now a Brigadier, is also investigating some strange events. But lurking behind the scenes isa massive army of Cybermen, and their invasion of Earth is about to begin.

The Invasion is epic. It's an 8 episode adventure filled with intrigue and suspense and hidden menace, about a madman who is willing to sell out the whole planet for his own gains, and an invasion so well conceived that without the Doctor's presence to interfere would have succeeded. Sometimes the longer adventures start to feel a bit too long, but it's obvious that the production team were aware of that as The Invasion somehow doesn't feel long *enough* - the story is paced perfectly, the characters are compelling, the danger feels real - and there are CYBERMEN IN LONDON, of course it left viewers wanting more. Part of that might be because the Cybermen themselves are not revealed until the end of episode 4; prior to their reveal it's all the sinister plotting and scheming of Tobias Vaughan and his thug, Packer, and the IE private security army. Vaughan is one of the best villains of the series if you ask me: he's a human selling out the planet to the aliens but with his own plans to overthrow them once he has what he wants. Oh the vanity of the man. But he's a ruthless businessman, his products are everywhere so he has already conquered the planet in one sense, now he wants it all. You know this isn't going to end well.

Now here's Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, who admits he is no longer the skeptic he once was after the Yeti invasion in The Web of Fear. The Candy Jar Books series of Lethbridge Stewart novels fleshed out those intervening years well, and now the man himself is in charge of a special operation called UNIT - United Nations Intelligence Taskforce - and investigation into the unusual and unknown is exactly what they are about. The group is new and relatively small, but it operates on a command structure outside of the regular military and takes orders directly from headquarters in Geneva. You can tell the Brig is proud of what he has built here; he has worked for it and has been rewarded with promotion. And he will become the Doctor's greatest ally on Earth in the years to come.

So - Cybermen! The Daleks got a bash at invading Earth in the past and were shown patrolling London after crushing humanity; here we see the Cybermen actually invading as Earth is helpless. There are a lot of iconic images throughout the whole Doctor Who series but none so striking as the Cybermen walking down the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in London. Manhole covers go flying as the Cybermen emerge from the sewers and wander the streets, and fierce battles ensue with the UNIT forces. The Cybermen are immune to bullets. But not to grenades and bazookas. And curiously they are not immune to a device that Vaughan has Watkins create for him: a machine that generates an emotional response from the aliens and destroys them. Does this mean that Cybermen have emotions somewhere in their psyche after all and it just needs to be brought out? And here's a good one: the UNIT stories are generally believed to be contemporary, so they would be taking place the year they were broadcast. This was 1969. The Cybermen debut story, The Tenth Planet, was set in 1986. This might suggest that the world would be ready for the Cybermen when they arrive, although when they do invade here they manage to incapacitate most of the planet when they do so; it's hard to say how many people may actually remember it. As far as continuity went when I first saw this, all I had seen by then were later Cyberman stories which I read were criticized for the Cybermen not being as good as they were in the early years - the chief complaint being that the Cybermen of the 70s and 80s were too enthusiastic and chatty. With the return of Tomb in 1991 I got an idea of what was being said, but here in Invasion it's perfectly obvious why people feel they're not as good as they were: these Cybermen hardly speak. They just march and kill. That is infinitely scarier.

And do not mess with Zoe. I love how she trashes Vaughan's robotic receptionist by inducing a full system collapse with a logic problem. And she enjoys it! She might also be having extra fun because she's get herself a pal to show off for in the form of Isobel. Between the two of them they have all sorts of galpal fun like taking fashion pictures, striking out on their own, blowing up computers.. getting kidnapped... teasing Jamie... striking out on their own again... flirting with soldiers. I don't think Zoe ever has as much fun as this her whole time in the series.

The Invasion is another one of the incomplete Troughton tales, but it benefitted from the animation treatment to restore episodes 1 and 4 to viewable status. The animation is a little rigid but I'm not going to complain - it's that or not see any of it at all. Previously it was released on VHS with some linking narration by the late Nicholas Courtney which was preserved and added to the DVD as a bonus. And like so many of the incomplete stories this one was for me just a legend I thought I would never glimpse when I first read the novelization back in 1985, and like so many others which translated so well to page I started to get edgy that I might not enjoy the visual as much. But I did. And I still do.

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