"The Krotons"

We've been slaves for a thousand years; do you think you can free us in one day?--Beta

Episode one, 28 December 1968
Episode two, 4 January 1969
Episode three, 11 January 1969
Episode four, 18 January 1969

Written by Robert Holmes
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Herriot

A thousand years ago, the Krotons' spaceship landed in the midst of the humanoid Gorns' settlement.  The Gorns were a primitive people, and apparently stereotypically so; without understanding what was going on, they immediately attacked the spaceship.  The Krotons retaliated by making a dark rain fall, which turned the land surrounding the Gorns' settlement into a wasteland where nothing would grow.

The Krotons remained in the Gorn settlement after this brief war as their overlords and protectors, though the Gorns never saw them--they always remain in their spaceship.  In fact, using knowledge the Krotons gave them, the Gorns built a learning centre around the spaceship, with computerised learning machines on which all Gorns are educated.  Periodically, when a Gorn scores highly enough on the learning machines, they're called to be a "companion of the Krotons", meaning that they get to enter the Krotons' spaceship--and are never seen again.

The Gorns have become much more advanced under the Krotons' tutelage, but there are gaps in their knowledge--the Krotons forbid the Gorns, for instance, from studying anything to do with chemistry.  And no Gorn ever ventures into the wastelands, for according to the Krotons, anyone who visits them will die.

The TARDIS arrives, causing a great flurry of consternation amongst the Gorns.  Almost straight away, the Doctor makes two discoveries that completely shake the foundation of Gorn society: first, that the wasteland isn't poisoned at all.  Maybe it was once, but it has recovered a long time ago.  And second, those who are selected as companions of the Krotons--the best and brightest of the Gorns--are secretly murdered.

The story therefore depicts a moment in Gorn history, the moment when the Gorns, in shock over learning their entire culture is based on a lie, take up arms and throw off their technologically advanced Kroton overlords.

And of course, predictably, that's exactly what happens.  The plotline isn't the interesting part of "The Krotons".  The interesting party, besides Zoe's costume (a very nice miniskirt and go-go boots combination), is the people for whom this story marks their first involvement in Doctor Who.

This is the first Doctor Who written by Robert Holmes, who's generally seen as the greatest script writer the programme has ever had.  He's produced a fairly standard, unmemorable effort for his first attempt, but it does have a few interesting ideas.  The Krotons, for instance, turn out to be a sort of cross between living organisms and machinery; they don't die, but rather "cease to function", in just the same way their ship does.  And they've been killing the cleverest Gorns because their spaceship runs by extracting mental energy; the Gorns' death is just a side effect.

The other significant first-timer here is Philip Madoc, playing the Gorn villain, Eelek.  This is his first appearance in the television series, but not in the Doctor Who franchise--he had previously played the black marketeer in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD, the 1965 big-screen adaptation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.  Both then and as Eelek, he plays exactly the sort of role he'll become such a virtuoso of during the next decade.

He's ruthless, ambitious, consummately self-serving and thoroughly amoral, interested only in accumulating power to himself.  Even when he's being friendly, he exudes menace--there are precious few smiles more chilling than his--but, whenever his aims are frustrated, he can burst on a moment's notice into a thoroughly intimidating fury.  For me, only Jon Simm rivals him as the best villainous actor the programme's ever had--yes, that means he even surpasses Roger Delgado.

Here as Eelek, he demonstrates all those qualities that make him so great.   He's the assistant to Selris, the Gorns' headman.  When the Gorns learn the truth about the Krotons, he uses it as an opportunity to make a bid for power, overthrowing Selris, by positioning himself as rabidly anti-Kroton, ready to lead a crusade against them.  But when the Krotons offer to leave the Gorn planet if only Eelek will turn the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie over to them, he agrees unhesitatingly, happily abandoning the very allies who are the ones who showed the Gorns the truth in the first place.

What Lisa thought

 She liked three of the four parts, essentially--she felt part two really dragged.  Part two, incidentally, is the only episode that doesn't feature Philip Madoc.

The Invasion

Animated Cyberman!

Episode One, 2 November 1968
Episode Two, 9 November 1968
Episode Three, 16 November 1968
Episode Four, 23 November 1968
Episode Five, 30 November 1968
Episode Six, 7 December 1968
Episode Seven, 14 December 1968
Episode Eight, 21 December 1968

Story by Kit Pedler
Written by Derrick Sherwin
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
John Levene as Corporal Benton (first appearance)

We can essentially divide "The Invasion" into two halves, though that division is done pretty seamlessly during the actual story.  In the first four episodes, the TARDIS lands in a near-future Britain.  Dialogue places this story five years after "The Web of Fear", which was forty years after "The Abominable Snowmen", which took place in 1935, so that would seem to indicate "The Invasion" takes place in 1980--but such a date would give us problems when we try to reconcile it into the dates for other, later UNIT stories.  (Both "Web" and "Snowmen" are amongst the missing stories.)  So we'll go with "sometime in the 1970s" for the story's setting.

Anyway.  The TARDIS lands in near-future Britain, where it discovers a corporation named AppleInternational Electromatics has become the world's dominant company through the production of copious amounts of personal, portable-sized, affordable consumer electronics.  But all is not as it seems with International Electromatics--the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe soon end up investigating the corporation when they discover that it's holding prisoner Professor Watkins, a brilliant scientist who's also the uncle of their friend Isobel.

(Professor Watkins and Isobel are pretty obvious stand-ins for Professor Travers and his daughter Anne from "The Web of Fear", who have "gone off to America", presumably because their actors were unavailable to reprise their roles in "The Invasion".)

In the process, they fall in with UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a global secret police.  UNIT are headed by Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, a British Army officer who knows the Doctor and Jamie from "The Web of Fear", when the Yeti invaded the London Underground.  (Lethbridge-Stewart was a colonel in "Web"; he's now been promoted to brigadier.)  UNIT are also investigating International Electromatics and its CEO, Tobias Vaughn, though for something far more sinister than the kidnapping of a single professor.

The second four episodes deal with Vaughn putting his nefarious plot into action: he's allied with the Cybermen, and together they stage an attempt to take over the Earth.  Vaughn and his minions sneak a Cyber army into the sewers beneath London, and then the Cybermen transmit a signal through all the International Electromatics products that renders every human on Earth unconscious.  The plan is that the Cybermen will then emerge from the sewers and take control of London long enough to land the full Cyber invasion force from "the dark side of the Moon", and humanity will regain consciousness to find their whole planet under Cyber control.

(The Cybermen marching through the streets of London produces the famous image of a platoon of them marching down the steps with the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral behind them.)

But the Doctor has figured out Vaughn's plan, and he's able to shield himself and UNIT from the hypnotic transmission's effects--leaving UNIT (and Jamie, Zoe, Isobel and Professor Watkins) the only waking human beings on Earth.  A UNIT contingent flies to Moscow, where the Russians were about to launch a manned mission to the Moon; the UNIT troop replace the life pod on the rocket with a nuclear warhead, and are able to destroy the Cyber fleet while it's still in orbit.  Meanwhile, the Doctor leads a separate UNIT contingent in an assault on International Electromatics' tightly controlled corporate countryside compound, defeating those Cybermen who have already reached Earth.  Vaughn is, of course, killed in the process.

There's a whole lot to talk about with "The Invasion".  The most apparent is the way this story functions as a pilot episode for the way Doctor Who is going to get reformatted at the start of next season.  (We still have two more stories before we get there.)  No longer will the Doctor be a carefree wanderer in time and space; instead, he'll be partnered with UNIT on a near-future Earth, investigating, in Malcolm Hulke's immortal phrase, "mad scientists and alien invasions"--James Bond meets Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

It's to that end that the Brigadier is brought back from "The Web of Fear", giving the programme what's probably its best-loved character, at least amongst its fandom, and an actor who'd remain actively associated with it for the rest of his life.  (I'm writing this 44 years after the first broadcast of "The Web of Fear", and right now, the most recent episode of Doctor Who ever aired--three or four months ago--contained a wonderful scene dedicated to the Brig, as a commemoration of Nicholas Courtney's death earlier this year.)  The Brigadier will function as Captain Scarlet to the Third Doctor's James Bond--in fact, the Third Doctor is closer in characterisation to Bond or Simon Templar than he is to pretty much any of the other ten Doctors who've headlined the programme throughout its history.

(Given that the parts of the Watkinses were clearly originally written for the Traverses, one has to wonder if the original plan was also to have them on the UNIT staff for season seven, as well.)

The next thing that's so interesting about "The Invasion" is its depiction of near-future Earth--a depiction that's exceptionally prescient, even if it did till longer than 1980 to get here.  Over its eight episodes, we see a number of things that are commonplace today but weren't present in 1968:

1. A computerised, automated telephone-answering system at a corporate headquarters, that specifies to the caller what sort of input it needs and then responds to simple voice commands;

2. A device that looks and acts a whole lot like a cell phone;

3. Microchips! Referred to as "micro monolithic circuitry";

4. Disposable electronic devices (in this case, a transistor radio), like the disposable cameras that have permeated our society;

5. Webcams! Tobias Vaughn maintains a visual surveillance system throughout International Electromatics's headquarters, and this system takes the form of cameras that are small, white spheres about the size of a tennis ball, which can be placed unobtrusively at points in rooms where they won't be noticed, like on cluttered shelves. And they really do look just like webcams.

And the last (and to me, coolest) thing about the story is the fact that we can now watch it in its entirety.  Episodes one and four are missing, but about five years ago, the story was released on DVD with those two episodes reconstructed as Flash animation, set to the original episodes' soundtracks.  The first episode in particular is effective--it has a noirish feel that matches the spooky soundtrack and not-quite-sure-what's-going-on quality of the storyline at that point.

What Lisa thought

She thought the opening four episodes--the Tobias Vaughn and International Electromatics portion of the story--didn't work.  It simply wasn't credible to her, once she knew it was the Cybermen who were Vaughn's unseen allies, that these allies had been willing to put up with him for so long.  Vaughn keeps demanding more control and authority over the invasion than the Cybermen want to give, and the Cybermen keep caving in to his demands, because they need him.  The thing is, though, they don't need him--not once things have reached the stage that they've already positioned their commando force in the London sewers.

Her other reaction was that she thought the two animated episodes were a pretty weird experience--which is fair enough, I suppose, though when I went back and checked my original reaction post to this DVD release back in 2007, she agreed with me that part one was very effective.

The next story in our rewatch is "The Krotons".