Invasion of the Dinosaurs

They went to their golden age. I hope they enjoy it.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the last Malcolm Hulke story and it gets generally mixed reviews. Conventional fan wisdom derides the story for bad special effects and dinosaurs that actually look worse than those seen in the 1933 version of King Kong. However, another group exists that praises the story as one of the best written of the Hulke stories and one that shouldn't be judged by limited effects. Being a bit of a contrarian, my initial inclination is to give the effects a pass, especially since I can accept bad effects when I know the limitations are in the technology rather than in the efforts applied.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Sarah arrive in a nearly deserted London. Unable to find anyone, they begin to walk towards the city center where they are nearly run over by a car. Following it, they find a man stealing jewelry. He holds them off with a gun and drives away but crashes, killing himself.

The Doctor and Sarah continue through empty London and follow another car into a garage. This time it's a small gang of robbers. The Doctor fights them but they manage to knock him down and run away, leaving their car with it's stolen goods. They enter the car to drive to UNIT headquarters when they are attacked by two pterosaurs. They drive away quickly to escape their attackers.

The Doctor and Sarah drive until they reach an army checkpoint where their car is searched and stolen goods found. The pair is immediately arrested. They are photographed and placed in holding with another thief to await military tribunal.

At UNIT headquarters, the Brigadier is overseeing the final evacuation of London as well as dealing with gangs of looters and the dinosaurs. He puts a request for more men to General Finch, who agrees. After Finch leaves, the Brigadier is informed of another batch of looters being caught and Sargent Benton notices the Doctor and Sarah Jane among the pictures. The Brigadier immediately leaves go collect the Doctor.

The military tribunal commences and all three are quickly found guilty, despite the Doctor's insistence on seeing Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. They are sentenced to be sent to a military camp until the crisis ends and they can be tried in a civilian court. The three hatch a plan to escape but the other thief turns on them. The Doctor knocks him out as well and he and Sarah try to commandeer a military vehicle. However, it is the camp transport and they are recaptured and placed in the back.

The truck drives through London but is stopped when a Tyrannosaurus Rex, driven away by one patrol, appears in the street in front of them. The two guards get out to drive it off while the Doctor and Sarah use the opportunity to jump out the back and run away. They duck into a nearby shed where the Doctor is able to free them from their handcuffs.

Shortly afterwards, they are accosted by a peasant from the era of King Richard I who believes the Doctor is a wizard. Panicking, the peasant attacks the Doctor but a time eddy kicks in and the peasant disappears. Confused, the Doctor and Sarah hear movement outside and try to hide but it's the Brigadier who brings the Doctor back to headquarters.

At UNIT HQ, the Brigadier brings the Doctor up to speed on how they've evacuated London and the patterns of the dinosaur movement. The Doctor proposes capturing one of the dinosaurs so that he can study it and see if he can determine how it got there. General Finch is skeptical but the Brigadier heads out with a Doctor when a new animal is reported nearby. Sarah stays behind with Finch's attaché, Captain Mike Yates, who transferred to regular army service following the events of The Green Death.

The Doctor and the UNIT men find a stegosaurus walking in an alley and the Doctor has the military bring him some rope. However, before they capture it, the animal is caught in a time eddy as seen earlier and disappears. The military men don't notice the effects of the eddy and think it just vanished into thin air. The Doctor however, does observe the effects and figures the someone is pulling the dinosaurs from the past for a brief time and then sending them back as a means of creating a panic to empty London.

The Doctor heads back to UNIT HQ where he rigs up a set of sensors that will allow him to get detailed information on the time eddy. He can then use that to determine the source of the power that is pulling the creatures forward in time. Unbeknownst to him, Captain Yates is working with the people involved. Learning of the Doctor's plans, they give him a device to sabotage the Doctor's efforts to capture a dinosaur, delaying their discovery.

The Doctor learns of the appearance of a brontosaurus and heads back out with his new equipment. He intends to stun the animal and then set up the monitoring equipment. Upon reaching the animal, he moves to use his stun gun but the animal disappears before he can fire. Then a Tyrannosaurus appears and the Doctor moves to stun it but his gun doesn't work. He drops it and tries to run but is knocked down by the concussion of grenades that the Brigadier has thrown to try and stop the animal. Yates dashes forwards, removes the sabotage device and stuns the animal. The Doctor thanks Yates for his efforts and the Brigadier transports the animal to a nearby warehouse where the Doctor sets up his equipment.

Yates, angry at the group's attempt to kill the Doctor, reports back that he will not do such a thing again. The group tells him to simply sabotage his equipment so that he cannot take measurements of their location and Yates does agree to that. Sarah meanwhile does some independent digging and discovers a professor Whitaker who disappeared six months ago and had rather radical ideas on time travel. She presents these findings to the Doctor and Sir Charles Grover, the minister left to supervise London. Sir Charles dismisses Sarah's theory, saying that he reviewed Whitaker's work and found it rubbish.

Annoyed, Sarah turns back to her regular journalism work. She is granted a special pass by General Finch to bring a camera in and document the dinosaurs. He then has his driver take her back to the warehouse with the Tyrannosaurus. She takes some pictures of the animal but it wakes up and moves to attack her. She tries to flee but finds the door locked. She bangs on it while the dinosaur thrashes about the warehouse trying to get out. The Doctor, returning to the lab, discovers her and pulls her out. The dinosaur breaks free of the warehouse but disappears shortly afterward.

The Doctor takes Sarah back to UNIT HQ to treat her head wound and they report this to the Brigadier, the Doctor noting that both the chains holding the animal had been cut and that the Doctor's equipment had been sabotaged so that he had no readings. The Doctor goes to build a mobile tracking device that will be less accurate but should still give them an estimate on where to go. Sarah tries to follow them but is told to stay behind and rest.

Frustrated, Sarah gets an idea. She heads to Sir Charles's office and asks about a government plan to build small nuclear reactors in underground bunkers in the event of nuclear war. Sir Charles does remember the plan and takes her to a records room where they find the plans detailing the building of the bunker in that very building. Sir Charles then opens a secret passage to the bunker, letting her know that he is a part of the conspiracy group.

Sarah is taken to a room and locked in with a set of pulsating lights. The lights knock her out. She wakes to the image of a friendly man who informs her that they are on a spaceship that left Earth three months ago, heading for a new colony world. Stunned, she is introduced to a celebrated athlete, novelist, and doctor, who have all abandoned their previous lives to join an ecology movement.

The Doctor, having finished his detector, drives around London in his newly designed Whomobile. He traces a signal to an Underground station and observes a man entering an elevator hidden as a janitorial closet. The Doctor follows but he is detected by Professor Whitaker and his assistant. They close off the various corridors, forcing the Doctor to head back up. They summon a pterosaur from the past to attack the Doctor but he manages to fight it off with a map. He then returns with the Brigadier but finds the elevator controls disabled, making it an ordinary closet.

Back on the ship, Sarah begins to remember that she did not come voluntarily and begins to argue with the others about how they plan to run their new society. The leader, Ruth, has Sarah taken to the reeducation room, to bring her back into line. Sarah is bombarded with propaganda about the evils man is doing to the environment. The athlete, Mark, brings her food and reports back to the others that she is resisting. Ruth informs the others that if she will not subject herself, she will need to be destroyed.

The Doctor and the Brigadier go to see Sir Charles about the hidden base but Sir Charles claims the project was abandoned. He also claims that he showed this to Sarah and had his driver take her back to base. The driver comes in and verifies it but he is Professor Whitaker's assistant.

The conspirators, including General Finch and Captain Yates assemble in the power room to discuss the Doctor as Sir Charles doesn't believe he convinced the Doctor. Yates refuses to use lethal force and Sir Charles agrees as he doesn't want to descend to the levels they are trying to escape from. Professor Whitaker calls the Doctor at UNIT HQ and claims that he was held prisoner but managed to escape to the lab the Doctor used earlier. He requests the Doctor to come and help him alone.

The Doctor agrees but when he reaches the lab, he finds it empty save for a mechanical device. The device activates and a Stegosaurus appears in the adjoining room. General Finch bursts in with the Brigadier and arrests the Doctor, claiming to have caught him in the act of summoning the dinosaurs. They take him back to UNIT HQ where he is put under the guard of Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton.

The Doctor appeals to Yates but Yates skittishly orders him placed in a cell and leaves. The Doctor realizes that Yates is the mole. Benton orders the other two guards to prepare a cell, leaving him and the Doctor alone. Benton asks the Doctor what is going on and the Doctor informs him of Finch and Yates working with Sir Charles on the plot. Benton suggests that the Doctor overpower him and turns his back. The Doctor knocks Benton out and escapes in a jeep.

On the ship Mark enters the reeducation room to check on Sarah. She darts past him and locks him in. She heads to the bridge to try and signal for help or change course but none of the controls work. She heads back, frees Mark and shows him the dead controls. She states that this combined with her bruised head demonstrates that she has only been here a few hours and they are not in space at all. He doesn't believe her so she opens an airlock that should exit into space but instead, calmly walks into the underground bunker. Mark tries to follow but he meets Adam who was going to have a talk with Sarah and he is forced to stall him to allow Sarah to escape.

Sarah walks through the bunker, overhearing Professor Whitaker and his assistant discuss their plans. She escapes through the elevator in Sir Charles' office and makes her way back to UNIT HQ. However, everyone is gone save one lone soldier. She leaves a note for the Brigadier when General Finch arrives. Unaware of his involvement, she tells him of Sir Charles' involvement. Feigning skepticism, he suggests they go investigate it.

They return to the office and when she activates the elevator taking them back down to the base, Finch pulls a gun on her. He takes her to Sir Charles who had been observing one of Whitaker's experiments involving time. He informs Sarah that they intend to rewind time to an earlier age of ecological purity and refound the human race, saving the future by rewriting history. As Sir Charles explains, Whitaker pulls a large number of dinosaurs forward to make a final push for the complete evacuation of London.

The Doctor meanwhile evades several patrols and manages to trick the forces searching for him that he had been captured at one point, giving him more breathing room. He arrives in front of the Underground station as more dinosaurs, including a T-Rex appear around him. The Doctor flees as the dinosaurs fight each other and runs into two patrols, one led by General Finch and the other by the Brigadier. The Brigadier takes the Doctor under the pretense of arresting him and head back to UNIT HQ.

In the bunker, Sarah is locked into a spare room to wait until the plan has been executed. She finds an air duct large enough for her to crawl through, pulls off the cover and slips out. She makes her way back to the fake spaceship where she tells Mark what is going on. They attempt to tell the colonists, who are being woken up by Ruth and Adam but Ruth has both of them locked into the reeducation chamber. Adam, beginning to question things, signals what he believes is another ship and requests Sir Charles to come aboard and reassure the colonists.

Back at UNIT HQ, the Doctor finds Sarah's note and begs the Brigadier to come and blow a hole in the station. The Brigadier decides to call Geneva and request greater authority but the call is cancelled by Captain Yates who holds them all at gunpoint. Yates is surprised by a soldier entering with some tea the Brigadier requested and the Brigadier knocks Yates out. He and the Doctor then leave for the Underground with the intention of finding the base. Sergeant Benton is left behind and ordered to round up all available patrols to come to the Underground as back up.

Sir Charles enters the mock spaceship wearing a space suit and reassures the colonists that all is well. He goes to the reeducation room where Sarah and Mark are being held and informs them that they will be brought along and will come to accept that what the group has done is for the right reasons. This conversation is overheard by Adam who frees Sarah and Mark after Sir Charles leaves. Sarah heads back out to the main room with the revived colonists and opens the airlock, demonstrating that it is all a fake.

The Brigadier and the Doctor arrive at the Underground station and the Doctor blows a hole in the janitorial closet while the Brigadier distracts a Triceratops wandering through the tunnels. Having opened a hole, the Doctor heads down while the Brigadier radios Benton to come with the reinforcements. Benton is distracted by General Finch who pulls a gun on him but Benton manages to disarm Finch and knock him out.

Sarah and the colonists enter the control room with Professor Whitaker and Sir Charles demanding an explanation. The Doctor enters a moment later, having knocked out Whitaker's assistant in the hallway. The Brigadier follows with his troops a minute later. Whitaker manages to break free of the men holding him and engages the time travel lever. Everyone is frozen save the Doctor who is resistant. He manages to disengage the lever with the group having gone back in time only a few minutes. He then alters the programing of the computer.

Sir Charles, believing the Doctor is trying to destroy the machine, lunges for the lever. Whitaker, aware that the Doctor has reversed the polarity of the machine tries to stop him. Sir Charles manages to pull the lever with Whitaker grabbing him. The two men and the machine disappear into the past and with no power source, they are trapped there.

General Finch and Whitaker's assistant are arrested however the Brigadier gives Yates an extended leave, allowing him to resign quietly. The Brigadier goes to help return the residents of London while the Doctor tempts Sarah with another trip in the TARDIS to a garden planet.

Analysis

This is a very good story. It has just about everything you could want out of a Doctor Who story: good acting, action scenes, a high concept, interesting twists and people who actually do things to try and solve the problem rather than just waste time. There are some negatives to be sure, but the positives well outweigh the negatives.

First lets get one thing out of the way, the dinosaurs look pretty bad. The pterosaurs are shot fairly well, most in the dark and only partially exposed, but even then they have a bit of a rubbery look. The brontosaurus and the stegosaurus are also not completely terrible as they don't move too much and are mostly just gaped at by the people like anything else on a CSO screen. The T-Rex is where things really fall apart. It suffers from several issues. One, it stands upright as was the misguided belief in the 1970's. Two, the model looks cheap and very rubbery. Three, to be threatening, it needs to interact more with the people and that sets up actors trying to interact with a CSO screen and all the problems you get in trying to do that. Early in Episode Two you see two soldiers firing grenades at the T-Rex, yet they are looking at the wrong part of the screen. It is a nice idea, but the technology required for it's proper execution just didn't exist at the time.

Now on to the good stuff and there is a lot of it. The acting of all the principles is top notch and even the extras do a good job in their various roles. Most of the story is played with a strong level of seriousness that would be easy to lose in dealing with green screened model dinosaurs. But there is also just a bit of levity thrown in here and there to keep the story from becoming too serious and enamored with itself.

My personal favorite is where the Doctor is explaining his detection device to Yates, an important scene as it leads in to the reveal of Yates as a mole, but it is played as comedy as the Doctor has to reshare some of this information with Sarah and then after dismissing her, the Brigadier enters and asks the same questions, giving the Doctor a wonderful exasperated look. As someone who has dealt with multiple people asking for things at once, I can appreciate how the Doctor felt at that moment.

The story itself is quite impressive in it's imagination. You would think that dinosaurs appearing in London would lend itself to a very silly and action based story. However, the dinosaurs become secondary to a rogue intelligence plot you might see in some spy thriller. It is even more interesting in that the secret plot is for a cause that many would agree with, reducing pollution and preserving the resources available on this planet. However, he takes them to the Soviet degree, using "reeducation" to silence dissenting voices and mass extermination as billions of people will be wiped from existence with a resettling of colonists millions of years in the past.

Given their plan, it is rather interesting to see the differing moral views that emerge. Finch, Whitaker, and his assistant are all coldly logical and are prepared to kill the Doctor openly. Yet, they value Sarah and bring her into the colony, despite the fact that killing her would be better for their overall safety. Sir Charles and Yates sit on the hypocritical side of the fence. They abhor killing, working to preserve both Sarah and the Doctor's life, yet they have no compunction about erasing billions from existence. I suppose that mimics reality where a person has no problem with the death of many in the abstract but can't handle the responsibility of the death of an individual when it is a cold reality that involves them directly.

One little plot hole that does niggle my brain is how the ecologists planned to avoid the time paradox they were creating. Whitaker's machine would create a time bubble, preserving those inside it from the travel. However, once the travel had been completed, their actions would destroy the development of humanity as it happened. Thus, they would destroy the elements that would enable their original existence. What's more, if they had succeeded and managed to create and preserve their ecological paradise, their descendants would be unaware of the need to go back in time to recreate the events that set up their world in the first place.

The only way I can get around this in my head is to imagine that Whitaker's machine is not actually full time travel but would instead move them to an alternate reality or universe. That would allow the preservation of their existence and the reality which motivated them to such extremes, while at the same time allowing them to create a past that prevents the future they left. Of course, as their plan failed, so the question is moot. With no women being sent into the past with Sir Charles and Whitaker, they would have lived and died with negligible impact on the overall timeline. Depending on when they arrived, you can even imagine them becoming dinosaur food within a short span of their arrival.

As well written and entertaining as this story is, it is a touch too long. I would imagine that Hulke probably wrote a four episode treatment and was asked to expand it to six. This story would have been a well packed four-parter so it expands fairly well to six. But it is difficult not to see that Episode Five is complete filler with the Doctor spending the whole episode evading patrols and Sarah escaping the fake ship only to be recaptured and brought back. Even the ending has time for a two-minute summary of what happened with the Doctor setting up his and Sarah's next adventure.

However, I will say that even when you know it is filler, Episode Five is very entertaining filler. There is witty dialogue, excellent direction and actually good special effects as there are no dinosaurs actually involved here. I found that it was actually Episode Six that started to bog down for me but I suspect that was because I had a good guess where they were going and wanted to get on with it. Still, there are a number of stories that are absolutely dreadful in their expansion to six or more episodes and this is not one of them.

Overall I would have to say that this story is much better than it's reputation. Yes, the dinosaur effects are bad, but there are so many bad effects in Doctor Who and Seventies television in general that I don't see any reason to punish this story as a result. It is well done outside of those effects and the quality of the story is excellent. I would easily pull this off the shelf for another watch at some point in the future. I would even go so far as to say that this is my favorite Third Doctor story to date. Granted, I have a number of stories to go, but this one rates pretty high for me.

Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5