The Invasion of Time

Even a sonic screwdriver can't get me out of here.

Invasion of Time is the only other Doctor Who story I can recall catching a glimpse of in my childhood aside from Masque of Mandragora and The Face of Evil. The small snippet I recall helped define classic Doctor Who as something that was both somewhat scary, but also rather cheap looking. After watching the whole thing through, I can fully vouch for the cheapness of the story but the scariness is a bit diminished now that I'm an adult.

Plot Summary

The story opens with the Doctor signing a secret treaty with an unknown alien race. The treaty is so secret that he has sealed Leela in the TARDIS with K-9 keeping an eye on her. Following the signing, the Doctor flies to Gallifrey where he moves to claim the Presidency that he won at the end of The Deadly Assassin. The arrival of the Doctor upsets both the Chancellor Barousa and Castellan Kelner but they are powerless to stop him. The Doctor has arrangements made with Barousa to line his new quarters with lead and then attends the ceremony where he is inducted.

With the fitting of the Matrix headpiece, the Doctor collapses and is taken away to rest. He wakes and orders that Leela be expelled from the city. Leela runs away through the city. Left alone, the Doctor sneaks out and returns to the TARDIS where he and K-9 make plans to bring down the city defenses. The Doctor then sneaks back to the apartments, unknowing that he was observed by Kelner. Leela evades the guards and meets Rodan, a Time Lady traffic controller. Rodan observes a fleet of war ships headed towards Gallifrey. As she does this, K-9 destroys the shield generators and then runs back to the TARDIS.

The Doctor calls an assembly of the council and orders them to submit to their new overlords, the Vardans, who appear as the shields go down. Seeing what is happening, Leela and Rodan move to leave the city. The Doctor and Barousa meet in the Doctor's redecorated office, which is now lined with lead to keep the Vardans from sensing their thoughts. In the office, the Doctor drops his act and informs Barousa of his plan. Barousa agrees with the Doctor's plan and promises to play along. Barousa plays things up and confronts the Vardans who stun him. The Doctor convinces the Vardans to keep him alive and he is placed under house arrest.

Leela and Rodan meet up with Andred, captain of the guard who smuggles them out of the city. Outside, the two are taken by a tribe of outsiders. They are given food and shelter while Leela explains what happened. She rallies the tribe and they prepare to march on the city. At the same time, under orders from the Doctor, Kelner has drawn up a list of political enemies and other Time Lords who might resist the Vardans and has them exiled from the city one by one. Captain Andred forms a resistance group and confronts the Doctor in his TARDIS, prepared to assassinate him.

K-9 stuns Andred and the Doctor lets him in on the plan to thwart the Vardans. He goes so far to modify Andred's helmet to block some of the Vardan's probing waves. Meanwhile, the Vardans are aware of Andred's resistance group and his compatriots guarding the TARDIS are gunned down. K-9, tapping into the Matrix, determines that the Vardans are putting out a signal that can be traced but it is being jammed. The Doctor decides that the only way to fully gain the Vardan's trust and get them to fully materialize is to open a hole in the secondary shield. He approaches the Vardans to tell them this and they monitor his progress. Once he lowers the shield, they fully materialize as humans.

Leela, Rodan, and the warriors of the tribe approach the city but split into two groups with Leela, Rodan and one warrior in her group. They are uneasy at the lack of guards they encounter on reentering the city. Andred and K-9 sneak out of the TARDIS and into the Doctor's lead-lined quarters. The Doctor also makes his way there, locking his Vardan escort out. The Doctor equips K-9 with access to the Matrix and he then sends a feedback signal that projects the Vardans back to their home planet. With the Vardans gone, the Doctor prepares to set things back to normal when a squad of Sontarans appear.

The Sontarans are looking for the Doctor but the Doctor claims to only be the Lord President. Barousa is sent back to his quarters. Leela, Andred, the Doctor, Rodan and a few tribesmen flee the Sontarans and make their way back to the President's office. Leela takes out one Sontaran with a knife in the probic vent. Locking the Sontarans out of the office, the Doctor sends the others to the TARDIS while he sneaks to Barousa's office. There, the Doctor confronts Barousa and acquires the Key of Rassilon. The two then head back to the TARDIS. Leela, Rodan, Andred, and K-9 have made it but the tribesmen were killed by the Sontarans, although one Sontaran was taken down in the fight.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor has Rodan tie the Gallifrean shields to his console. Meanwhile, Kelner has pledged himself to the Sontarans and attempts to take down the shields to allow the full Sontaran fleet to the planet. The Doctor manages to stop them by throwing the fail-safe in the TARDIS which locks all controls. Kelner unlocks the Doctor's TARDIS and the two remaining Sontarans enter. K-9 had been sent to the workshop while Barousa waited in the pool room. The Doctor, Leela and Rodan head down to meet them. Despite getting lost a couple of times, they all meet in the workshop. The Doctor hypnotizes Rodan and has her work with K-9 while the other lead the Sontarans away. The Doctor manages to trap one in a plant for a short time before he is freed by his commander. In one melee, Andred is wounded by Commander Storr.

The group makes it way back to the workshop where K-9 and Rodan have built a D-mat gun. Powered by the Key of Rassilon, it will vaporize anything. Commander Storr returns to the Panopticon but the other Sontaran and Kelner enter the workshop where the Doctor vaporizes the Sontaran. Leela prepares to kill Kelner but the Doctor orders him kept alive. Kelner informs the Doctor of where Storr is and the Doctor goes to meet him. Storr has armed a grenade that will destroy the city and the resulting cascade could cause a chain reaction that would destroy the galaxy. Storr moves to detonate the grenade when the Doctor shoots it with the D-mat gun. Storr and the grenade are destroyed but so is the gun. The Doctor also loses his memory of all events prior to his original encounter with the Vardans.

With things restored, the Doctor prepares to leave Gallifrey. Leela opts to stay behind with Andred. K-9 also will stay with Leela. The Doctor accepts this and leaves. As he flies away, he begins to open a box marked K-9 Mark II.

Analysis

The Invasion of Time was an interesting story concept but aside from that, there is not much else that is good to say about it. The acting of the characters outside of the villains was pretty good. I rather enjoyed Barousa's smugness over the whole thing, even when others were panicking. Kelner also wasn't bad with his toadying, although his motivations other than cowardice were rather unclear.

But aside from those two things, this was not a good story. The acting of both the Vardans and the Sontarans was sub-par. I thought the Sontarans tried a bit, but the Vardans, especially in their humanoid form were very stiff and showed almost no dynamism. The Sontarans were undercut mostly by poor dialogue, slightly rushed scenes, and poor direction. Commander Storr's wheezing and halting dialogue didn't help matters either.

One of the worst aspects though was the cheapness of the story. It is rather famously known that the show more or less ran out of budget and they couldn't even film in studio and were forced to film in an unused hospital. It shows too and it just takes you right out of the story. It's not completely horrible in the first four episodes, except for whenever things are shot in the "shield generator" room. There it's just painfully obvious that it's an old boiler room. For the most part, they do a decent job of dressing the corridors with leftover pieces from The Deadly Assassin which make it look somewhat believable. The kiddie seats outside the room where Rodan worked didn't help allay the illusion though.

The point where the set really fell apart though was when they were going through the TARDIS. In Masque of Mandragora we actually see corridors of the TARDIS that look similar to the control room and it is only the rooms themselves that take on other appearances. This is also shown to a lesser degree in some of the 1960's stories. In episode six though, they are shown walking though corridors that are supposed to be on the TARDIS, but are so obviously the basement of some building. There is an attempt to play it for laughs, but nothing they can do offsets the fact that it just doesn't work. Likewise, there are other rooms they duck into that you just don't believe because of the prior set up. Andred is wounded hiding in a room of showers. It looks like a hospital room and not something that you would find on the TARDIS. You might buy it if TARDIS corridors had been shown earlier, but as is, it only reinforces the idea that all filming was done in an unused building. The only rooms I bought were the TARDIS control room (because it was the same set), the pool room (which actually looked nice) and the greenhouse area as it was so invested with plants that it looked believable.

It's a real shame because the story itself has good moments. The Doctor is very out of character in the beginning and while you know something is up, you can't quite put your finger on it. There is just enough mystery going on that you want to know more and why the Doctor is acting the way he is. What makes it worse is that there are enough odd cuts and little bits left out that make you think that the production team could have made this a six-part story with only the Vardans themselves as the villains. That might have kept things on Gallifrey proper as well as keeping up both the palace intrigue part of the story, as well as Leela's leading of a rebellion, both of which were the actual interesting parts of the story.

Since I've brought it up, I might as well talk about it as well. Of all the ways to have Leela leave, marrying Andred was probably the worst option. Also known in the behind the scenes info was the fact that the producer, Graham Harper, kept trying to convince Louise Jameson to say for another season. But she refused and her exit was hastily written it. That was poor planning on Harper's side, but even then, a better option was shown throughout the story. Leela showed excellent rapport with the leader of the outsider tribe. She could have easily been made to stay behind and marry the leader of the outsiders or just become their new leader herself if they wanted to go the full feminist route. She had more contact and interaction with them than she ever had with Andred and the playing up of her savage nature was better suited towards being with them than it would with the captain of the citadel guard.

Rodan was less interesting as a character herself but more as a proto-Romana. I don't personally know if the production staff asked her to stay on as a new companion or just thought a companion like her would do well. However, Romana's first appearance in The Ribos Operation is so similar to Rodan's appearance throughout this story that it would be an amazing coincidence if her character was not either tied directly or at least inspired by Rodan.

This story was all downhill. It started well enough in the first couple of episodes, got kind of middling in episodes three and four, and then went downright bad in the last two. It looked cheap, the story bogged down, and the acting of the villains was near painful at times. I can't say I would be interested in rewatching it at all.

Overall personal score: 1 out of 5