Doctor Who: The Android Invasion [1975]

This serial - a rare latter day Terry Nation script without the Daleks - has a much better set-up than pay-off. The earlier episodes have a genuinely unsettling and original location perhaps influenced by the British small town built in Russia in the Danger Man episode Colony Three, and perhaps an influence on the Twilight Zone revival story A Day in Beaumont. An archetypal English village populated by android puppets representing the typical inhabitants turns out to be a site used in training by the Kraals, rhino-like humanoid aliens who intend to invade the Earth, working with a turncoat astronaut [Milton Johns].

Beside the something-not-quite-right village [the calendar has only one date, all the money is new-minted], the androids are interesting menaces. Evoking The Earth Dies Screaming in their raw form they are white-suited goons with forefinger guns and crash-helmets over see-through plastic 'faces' that are just dials and works; then turned into duplicates, including one of Sarah Jane that provides a good cliffhanger as her face pops off to show the bits beneath [a Westworld effect]. The problem is that by the time the Doctor shows up, the training is over and we never see the village being used for the purpose it was created - the idea of a rehearsal for an invasion is interesting, and might have made for good sequences. What we get is pretty dumb exposition and the usual wandering about/ getting captured/escaping/not being killed by a volley of shots business, with a couple of lazy and-or ludicrous developments to keep the story going, like a never-before-mentioned TARDIS function that whizzes it off to Earth unpiloted for plot convenience sake and the ridiculous bit about the aliens convincing the astronaut he has lost an eye by giving him an eyepatch [here's a species ruthless enough to plot the wiping out of all humanity by a super-plague but unwilling to poke out a single eye to back up their cover story].

There's also a supposedly lethal fast plague which isn't airborne - the main villain [Martin Friend] is killed with it, his make-up bubbling green, but no one else in a small room is affected or even worried, though Sarah Jane was earlier perturbed about potential radiation poisoning. It's another step in the downgrading of UNIT, with Nicholas Courtney replaced by a surprisingly slimline Patrick Newell as a new pukka officer and bits from regulars John Levene and Ian Marter which were actually their final outings, though they get no special send-off and are more often seen as barking, evil robot doubles than their usual characters. The extensive location filming and Tom Baker's more action-oriented performance in the first episodes are vitiated by a talkier third and a fizzle of a fourth - one Kraal is killed, and we are to expect a whole alien fleet in orbit just give up and go away [maybe they're in a landing queue with the Zygon invasion fleet of two stories earlier?]. Elisabeth Sladen wears a very fetching pink sailor suit with tight trousers and a plot-significant scarf.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com