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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
(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".
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