April 23: "The Invasion" Episodes Five & Six

Now we know that the Cybermen are involved in this intended invasion, we can see what they're up to.  Although at this point the answer is "not much."  Vaughn's people have been reviving them and sending them to lurk in the sewers until they're needed.

This is a "holding" episode in multiple ways.  The Brigadier attempts to get the Ministry of Defence to investigate Vaughn's facilities, but as Vaughn has gotten to the minister first, he doesn't have much luck.  He can go over Major General Rutlidge's head to UNIT HQ in Geneva, but that will still take a couple days.  (Except it does make Vaughn nervous, so he decides to bring the invasion plans forward.)  Meanwhile the Doctor's trying to work out what the extra circuits in all of IE's equipment do, but he's not having much luck either.  So all that's available is a lot of reports and hearsay but no physical proof.  Thus it's left to Isobel and Zoe (accompanied by a reluctant Jamie) to go down into the sewers and get photographic evidence that the Cybermen are in fact here.  And that's really about it.  Now, that said, the scenes between the Brigadier and Rutlidge are quite entertaining, and Vaughn remains as watchable as ever -- particularly when he gleefully orders that a half-revived Cyberman be hooked up to Watkins' Cerebraton Machine and made to experience fear -- but this is an episode in which little happens to advance the plot.  Cybermen are in the sewers and the invasion is being brought forward, and that's all you need to know.

Episode six, on the other hand, has quite a bit of action.  There are the scenes at the beginning, where a few UNIT soldiers fight a couple Cybermen in the sewers with grenades (and one grabs Jamie as he's climbing out the sewer in a scene reminiscent of a similar one in The Tomb of the Cybermen).  There's also the quite worrying scene in Vaughn's office where Watkins is goaded by Vaughn into shooting him: Vaughn hands him a gun and tells him to fire, and when he doesn't immediately do so he slaps him hard across the face, leading to Watkins firing the gun three times.  The sight of three smoking holes in Vaughn's chest, while Vaughn himself simply laughs, is rather disturbing and memorably effective.  Of course, all this and Professor Watkins' rescue still happens offscreen by "at least thirty" UNIT men (indeed, this seems so abrupt that for years there were rumors that this part of the episode had been edited out).

The Cybermen begin their invasion. (The Invasion Episode Six) ©BBC

But really this episode has been building up to the cliffhanger, with the beginning of the invasion.  The Doctor has worked out that the extra circuits are designed to put everyone on the planet under Cyber-hypnosis, to make their takeover of the planet easy.  There's a wonderful moment of calm in the early morning.  "Do you think the Doctor could be wrong this time?" Jimmy asks.  "I mean about the invasion." "... Yeah, I know what you mean," Isobel replies.  "... Looking at all that peace out there, it's so difficult to imagine."  And at that moment the signal is broadcast.  We see people in the streets collapsing (excitingly, as this is really the first time we've seen anything like this happening out in the city, other than a man being attacked by a War Machine) -- and the Doctor succumbs too, his special anti-Cyber-signal gizmo having fallen off his neck.  And then, most memorably of all, the Cybermen burst out of hiding, throwing aside manhole covers and stalking the streets of London.  The invasion has begun, and it seems that everyone but the Doctor's small group has succumbed to the hypnotic signal...

April 22: "The Invasion" Episodes Three & Four

Has there been a better villain than Tobias Vaughn?  Episode three is a showcase for him.  From his oh-so-smooth manner at the top of the episode ("So here you are again.  You really are beginning to try our patience, you know," Vaughn tells the Doctor and Jamie in the most charming manner possible) to his fit of anger, when he learns that Packer has once again failed to catch the Doctor and Jamie ("You're a stupid incompetent!  I want that Doctor!  Put the whole compound on alert!  Have every available guard on the job!  Find him, Packer, find him!"), Kevin Stoney puts in a tour-de-force performance.  How can you not love what he does?

Yes, there are other things happening in this episode (for instance, we finally meet Professor Watkins, who's working on a special kind of teaching machine), but really, this episode does belong to Tobias Vaughn.  Everything the Doctor and Jamie do, whether it's talking with Watkins or escaping up a lift shaft, is in reaction to something Vaughn does.  Although let's take a moment to note the lovely business near the beginning of the episode, when Vaughn offers to take them to the factory out in the countryside, where Jamie climbs in the back set of Vaughn's car, goes out the other side, and gets into the front passenger seat before looking innocently at Packer, who was apparently going to sit there.  Oh, and the sheer cheek of pointing out that Vaughn's office in his factory complex is the same set as the one in his London building.  "It's exactly the same as your office in London," Jamie says.  So there are other things happening in this episode, but when it comes down to it, this one is all about Vaughn.

The Doctor makes his way up the rope ladder to the UNIT
helicopter. (The Invasion Episode Four animation) ©BBC
Worldwide

Episode four is action-packed, with a daring helicopter rescue from the roof of one of Vaughn's buildings.  It's a bit of a pity, then, that this is the other episode missing from this story.  Still, the animation does a good job of making up the difference (even if the shot of the Doctor dodging bullet fire on the roof is clearly based on a move from episode eight), and it remains a suitably exciting set piece.  The bits with Jamie climbing down to where Zoe and Isobel are being held captive and having them all climb up to the roof and then into the helicopter are quite thrilling, and one wonders if the helicopter really did start to fly away with Jamie still dangling from the rope ladder -- it certainly sounds that way at least.

Then we get a bit of intrigue as Captain Jimmy Turner brings up the matter of UFOs that seem to disappear around Vaughn's factory.  We know that Vaughn is planning an invasion with an alien ally, but we don't know who that ally is.  So the Doctor and Jamie decide to infiltrate Vaughn's London complex once again (this time via canoe) to find out more information.  And we learn that those alien allies are in fact the Cybermen!

Well, except it was already revealed that the Cybermen were returning in the Radio Times listing for episode one.  So maybe it was more a case of "Finally!" than "Oh my word!"  But in any case.

April 21: "The Invasion" Episodes One & Two

Episode one of The Invasion is the first season 6 episode to no longer exist.  And there are no telesnaps either (nor for any season 6 episodes after The Mind Robber episode 3).  But fortunately we have an animated version from Cosgrove Hall (makers of Danger Mouse, you know) on the DVD to enjoy, and it's definitely done well.

We open with roughly two lines of dialogue acknowledging the events of last time ("Hey Doctor, it's all right, it worked!" Jamie says) and then it's off to the new adventure, as a missile is fired at the TARDIS from the dark side of the moon.  One quick move later and we're on Earth, albeit with a faulty visual stabilizer circuit that renders the TARDIS invisible.  So it's off to look up Professor Travers again, to get some help repairing the circuit.  Well, after escaping from International Electromatics' secretive compound in a lorry being driven by a man who's later shot and killed by IE guards.

But this isn't another follow-up to The Web of Fear (though it was intended as such at some stage), as Professor Travers is in America and letting his place out to a man named Professor Watkins, who happens to be working for IE.  The Doctor and Jamie go to IE to find him while Zoe stays behind with Watkins' niece Isobel.  We don't meet Watkins, but we do encounter the head of IE, Tobias Vaughn -- played by the marvelous Kevin Stoney.  Here's a villain (and he's largely portrayed as a villain from the outset) who's charming, sophisticated, and thoroughly likeable, which means we can see how he became a success.  So many of these people in charge are such ranting lunatics that it's a wonder anyone ever gave them anything.  Vaughn, by contrast, is so slick that you can't help but be charmed.  Even if he blinks too slowly and seems to be working with some sort of alien machine.

Episode two is present in all its glory, so we can see things like the business where the Doctor and Jamie are trapped in an alley and the Doctor starts dealing out cards, including to the men there to take him away.  But then a jaunty theme from composer Don Harper suggests that maybe these men aren't in fact the bad guys, a fact which is confirmed when they're taken to a mobile HQ inside an airplane which is being led by none other than The Web of Fear's Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier and the head of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, or UNIT -- an organization designed to investigate strange happenings that was set up after the Yeti incident.  UNIT has been watching IE with concern, as people have been going in and either coming out different or not coming out at all.  Nicholas Courtney does a fine job in this role, making him enough like his last appearance to be recognizably the same character while still having undergone a metamorphosis for the better (he's noticeably less fatalistic and helpless here than he was in The Web of Fear).  Oh, and we get our first good look at Benton (played by John Levene, who was also in The Web of Fear -- albeit as a Yeti), who will also return next year.  (All right, he's actually in episode one as well, but here we can see him.)

All this and intrigue too.  Zoe and Isobel go to IE after the Doctor and Jamie and end up wrecking a computer -- which, wonderfully, makes Vaughn laugh with delight rather than rage with anger.  And so the Doctor and Jamie go after them, snooping around the IE building in search of them.  But they're soon caught by Vaughn's guards, including his henchman Packer.  "Like rats in a trap!" Packer proclaims triumphantly as the credits roll.  Trapped indeed.

April 20: The Mind Robber Episodes 4 & 5

Episode 4 has a few more flaws than the earlier episodes.  For some reason Zoe insists on believing that Medusa is real, even though a logically trained mind such as hers must know it's not (and she didn't have any problem denying the existence of the unicorn charging at her at the top of episode 3).  There's also a moment where, after having cautiously stepped over a photoelectric cell that alerts the Master to their presence inside his citadel (as Jamie discovered when he tripped it near the start of the episode), Zoe has a panic attack and crosses all the way to the other side of the room to trip the beam, just so the three of them can be captured by the White Robots from episode 1.  (We will, sadly, see this character trait again in season 8.)  And Zoe is also the winner of a decidedly unconvincing fight versus a comic strip character from 2000 called the Karkus (who the Doctor can't deny the existence of because he's never heard of him).  There are a number of falls and flips from the Karkus as Zoe enthusiastically throws him around -- that's the idea, at least, but what we actually get is a lot of Wendy Padbury grabbing Christopher Robbie's arm, followed by Robbie doing a somersault each time.

But the love of language and literature continues to shine through in this episode, so even though it's not a very long installment, it still maintains its drive.  We're finally introduced to the Master himself, who turns out to be a rather kindly old English writer from 1926 who was kidnapped and brought to this place.  ("Oh, but that's a long story," he says on how he arrived.)  Now he's old, and the Master Brain controlling him wants to replace him with the Doctor.  The way the Master switches between a gentlemanly demeanor and a harsher, clearly under-alien-control persona is very effective.  And the final cliffhanger, in which Jamie and Zoe are turned into fictional characters (you know what I mean) by the visual conceit of being literally trapped inside the pages of a book, is a fabulous image.

The Doctor is linked into the Master Brain. (The Mind
Robber Episode 5) ©BBC

Episode 5 sees the Doctor finally engage directly in a battle of wits against the Master.  Of course, first he's tricked by fictional Jamie and Zoe into an equally fictional TARDIS, which is actually a direct link with the Master Brain -- which means the Doctor can now write the stories at the speed of thought.  This means that we start getting additional classic characters added into the mix, as Cyrano de Bergerac engages in a swordfight with D'Artagnan (a much more exciting fight, it must be said, than Zoe's tussle with the Karkus last time), who then fights Bluebeard, who then confronts Lancelot in full armor -- thanks to the Doctor and the Master fighting it out with the power of words.  And, somehow, the Doctor convinces Jamie and Zoe to free themselves from the book they've been trapped in as they push their way out.  But he can't work out how to get himself free without turning into a fictional character himself (you know what I mean).  Fortunately, Zoe and Jamie overhear a snatch of conversation from the Master and they overload the Master Brain's circuits, destroying it and the realm they've found themselves in.  As the place disappears, they disappear too, back to where they came from, as the TARDIS reforms -- and that's that.  (And, somewhat frustratingly, the events of this story are never explained or even touched upon again -- there are about two lines of dialogue next week and that's it.  And The Mind Robber episode 5 is, at 18'00", the shortest ever episode of Doctor Who's original run, so it's not like they couldn't spare the time.)

The Mind Robber is a very imaginative story, and there's enough incident to keep things entertaining.  After the impressive first episode (doubly impressive when the pressure it was made under is taken into consideration) we're treated to a tale where storybook logic beats "real world" logic, where Gulliver and Rapunzel can inhabit the same world and interact with each other.  There's a sense of joy underlying all this, so that even the somewhat repetitive nature of some of the problems confronted by the TARDIS crew (a fictional character attacks but then is defeated when the Doctor and Jamie and/or Zoe deny its existence) isn't nearly the issue it was in The Dominators.  It also helps that there's a definite sense of style here, with both the camera and staging doing an excellent job of selling this somewhat surreal tale (and here one can't help but note that this story marks David Maloney's directorial debut on Doctor Who), so that it all feels like part of the same world.  This is a triumph of imagination, both in the script and on screen, and is easily one of the standouts of Troughton's time on the show.  It's hard to believe this is the story that followed The Dominators.

April 19: The Mind Robber Episodes 2 & 3

The imagination continues here.  After the console and the Doctor spin away into the void, they all find themselves in a strange forest.  Jamie is attacked by a Redcoat who turns him into a photograph, Zoe is trapped inside a building and then a jar (as part of a riddle), and the Doctor is confronted by, er, some schoolchildren.  Well, they don't all have to be dangerous.  He also encounters an odd English gentleman from 1699, who seems to also talk in obscurities and riddles.  And this is all being watched over by someone who the Englishman (and the credits) both call the Master -- but don't get excited, it's not that one.

The Doctor puts the wrong face on Jamie. (The Mind Robber
Episode 2) ©BBC

This is a story which relies on imagery and story logic.  The best part is when the Doctor has to reconstruct photograph Jamie's face and gets it wrong, which means Hamish Wilson is playing the part of Jamie this week.⁴³  He does a good job, and it's definitely unsettling to see someone unfamiliar playing such a familiar part, particularly because the Doctor simply accepts that Jamie looks a little different right now.  (And this is the reason why a different Jamie is unsettling in a television show that changes lead actor every few years -- in almost every case regarding the Doctor there's a degree of uncertainty when the change happens, and each one has a degree of build-up, to let the audience know something's coming⁴⁴; here it's brought up briefly and then treated as normal.)  There's also a nice moment where, after Jamie sees that the forest they're in is actually a forest of printed words, the three of them attempt to hide from the toy soldiers that are searching for them, while telling the Englishman not to give them away.  Except the Englishman apparently can't see the soldiers, so he inadvertently does give them away by addressing them: "I could not forebear smiling, sir.  What you told me is mistaken.  There was no army here."  So the soldiers lead them away to be run down by a unicorn.

Episode 3 is more of the same.  The unicorn problem is solved by the Doctor having Jamie and Zoe insist that the unicorn isn't real; once they do, it turns into a statue (well, a photograph blowup, but the Doctor calls it a statue later).  It seems that belief is a powerful force in this realm.  Jamie is once again turned into a photograph, but with Zoe's help (who's very funny by the way when she works out why Jamie's face looked different: "You got it all wrong!") they bring Jamie's proper face back.

After this most of the action occurs inside a labyrinth underground, complete with a ball of string to help guide them.  The Doctor and Zoe go ahead to confront the Minotaur, which the Doctor once again insists isn't real (he'll change his mind when we get to The Time Monster) and thus isn't a danger to them.  Jamie manages to outwit and escape from a toy soldier, and climbs up a cliff via a convenient rope which turns out to be Rapunzel's hair.  Except Jamie finds himself inside not a medieval tower but a more futuristic library, which happens to be printing out a new story: the one that the Doctor and Zoe are currently experiencing.  After encountering the Englishman again, who the Doctor works out is in fact Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift's novel, they head back to the center of the labyrinth where the minotaur was, only to find Medusa confronting them...

These two episodes are different in style from episode 1, but the same sense of story logic and hidden danger is present here, which means that even though we've moved from a white void and robots to a fairytale place and toy soldiers, the underlying threat is still the same.  Let's hope they can keep this up for the last two episodes.







⁴³ The real world reason: Frazer Hines has chickenpox this week.  Fortunately they're doing a strange surreal story at the moment, so they can use this to their advantage.
⁴⁴ With the obvious exception of Time and the Rani, for reasons we'll no doubt come to when we reach that particular story.

April 18: The Dominators Episode 5 / The Mind Robber Episode 1

Yep, you guessed it: the cliffhanger was resolved by Rago coming in and yelling at Toba for wasting time and energy on hunting and killing "primitives" rather than on the all-important drilling.

Episode 5 is probably the best of the lot, because things are actually happening.  Toba's no longer running around the island trying to hunt down our heroes, which means there's a greater sense of urgency at play here.  And the Doctor has worked out what the Dominators' plan is: they're going to turn the planet into a giant radioactive mass that their fleet can suck up and use as fuel.  In order to stop them they decide to dig a tunnel from the bomb shelter where they're all hiding to the central bore, where the seed bomb that will start the process is going to be dropped, and catch the bomb on the way down.  Meanwhile Jamie and Cully are running around the island blowing up Quarks (thanks to a homemade bomb made by the Doctor) in an effort to distract the Dominators and slow down the drilling.  As I said, this is a much more exciting episode (and consider the fact that it was apparently episodes 5 and 6 that were condensed down into a single episode -- contemplate what those episodes must have originally been like and shudder), and thankfully it's not the same actions being repeated over and over again.  And so they complete the tunnel, catch the bomb, and return it to the Dominators -- which means that Dulkis is saved, and there will only be a local volcanic eruption.  Except that volcano is erupting right where the TARDIS is.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea behind The Dominators.  The problem lies in the actual scripts and the execution.  This might have worked as a four-parter, with a number of repetitive scenes (particularly most of the arguments among the Dulcian council, which tend to stop the story dead in its tracks) removed.  But as it is we get the same stuff over and over again, with only minor variations, and (worse) that same stuff isn't particularly interesting to begin with, and we've seen it done better in previous stories.  There might have been a spark to make this work before script editor Derrick Sherwin removed it (though, as mentioned before, the consensus seems to be that there wasn't), but it's not present in the finished product.  As a story designed to fulfill five episodes The Dominators is a success (which, as we'll see, is an accomplishment in itself for season 6), but by any other standard this is a dull and plodding tale.

So, they've cut down The Dominators from six episodes down to five, which means now they have an extra episode to fill and no one around to write it.  It's too late for Peter Ling to write an extra episode, and nothing else is ready, so script editor Derrick Sherwin is forced to mark time for an episode (and note that this episode has no writer credit).  The result is episode 1 of The Mind Robber.

It starts out fairly normally -- the TARDIS is having issues in the wake of the volcanic eruption from the end of the last episode, so the Doctor is forced to use the emergency unit to get the TARDIS out of danger.  But the emergency unit takes the TARDIS completely out of time and space, to "nowhere", as the Doctor puts it.  "Nowhere" is realized as a white void -- a decidedly striking image -- and it seems the TARDIS isn't the only thing out there.

Jamie and Zoe are surrounded by White Robots. (The Mind
Robber Episode 1) ©BBC

What follows is a battle of wits, as Jamie and Zoe are both lured outside the TARDIS and into the void by images purporting to be their home.  This leads to them wandering the white void, unable to find the TARDIS again, and confronted by strange creatures (known in fandom as White Robots, even though they look more grey) which seem to hypnotize them and make them look like whitened-out versions of themselves.  The Doctor is forced to go out after them, stepping out of a white TARDIS into the void (another great image) and ushering them back into the TARDIS.  Whoever is out in nowhere luring Jamie and Zoe outside dislikes this, and assaults the time travellers inside the TARDIS.  Unable to withstand the assault, we get another striking image of the police box exterior of the TARDIS breaking apart, leaving Jamie and Zoe clinging to the console while the Doctor spins off on his own into another void, but black this time.  And then everything fades out of sight.

It may be an episode written under immense pressure and with no money (and note that this is the second-shortest episode yet, at 21'27"⁴²), but this episode is impressive, full of striking, memorable images and with some fascinating mind games being played.  If the rest of the story is this good, The Mind Robber will be one of the standouts of Troughton's run.







⁴² The shortest being Fury from the Deep Episode 3, which clocks in at 20'29" -- though subsequent episodes of The Mind Robber will break this record.

April 17: The Dominators - the third episode & Episode 4

For some reason, the third episode of The Dominators is missing the "Episode 3" caption -- hence the rather odd labeling I've gone with...

Cully and Zoe are watched over by a Quark. (The Dominators
[Episode 3]) ©BBC

So let's see: this time around it's the Doctor and Jamie who argue with the Dulcian planetary council and Zoe and Cully who are captured by the Dominators: the opposite of episode 2.  Although Zoe and Cully are put to work alongside Balan and his two students, Kando and Teel, to help clear away rubble for a drilling site, so you could argue they've got it worse than the Doctor and Jamie did.  Toba attempts to destroy and Rago yells at him, and really not much has changed since episode 2.  Oh!  But at least Cully has destroyed a Quark with an antique laser gun.  And you can sort of tell that Troughton and Hines think this story isn't up to snuff and are therefore doing their best to make things as entertaining as possible (e.g., their scenes inside the travel capsule).  Admittedly it works to an extent; the Doctor and Jamie's interplay is easily the most watchable part of this entire serial.  But they can only do so much to distract from the same things happening over and over.  Although I've worked out that it's not so much that the episodes are badly edited (though they're not error-free on this part) as that almost no effort has been made to match the studio scenes with the location filming -- which is particularly a problem when the two are supposed to be identical.  This seems to be the main reason why Toba and the Quarks seem to leap about the island, rather than shoddy editing.

Oh, and look, episode 3 ends the same way episode 2 ended, except Toba's destroying the atomic museum instead of the survey unit.  Unfortunately for Cully, he ends up trapped in both buildings...

Episode 4 opens with Rago yelling at Toba (again) and Toba being sulky (again).  We get a minimum of plot advancement as the Doctor and Zoe are taken aboard the Dominators' ship and left there under Quark guard, which lets them work out that the Dominators are drilling for fuel in an area where the crust of Dulkis is thin, and that the fuel they're looking for needs to be radioactive.  And now it's Rago's turn to visit the Dulcian council -- although instead of having the same arguments with them as the others, he just has a Quark shoot one of them dead (and to be perfectly honest, it's rather hard not to be on Rago's side at this moment).

The most exciting part of the episode comes when Jamie taunts a Quark by throwing rocks at it, luring it into a trap whereby Cully rolls a giant boulder down at it, crushing it.  It's a nice bit of action from a story that sorely needs it.  Of course, this upsets Toba, who rounds up all the prisoners and demands to know where Jamie is hiding.  When they refuse to tell him, he has a Quark kill Balan (so something new actually happened!) -- and if no one speaks up, the Doctor will be next...