Tony Fyler cuts a
six-parter down to size.
The Invasion of Time is
one of those curious, courageous things – a six-part Doctor Who story. Some of
the best stories in the show’s early history were six-parters – from The Dalek
Invasion of Earth through Power of the Daleks and Web of Fear, to The Sea
Devils and The Green Death, to Genesis of the Daleks, The Seeds of Doom and The
Talons of Weng-Chiang. Then there are those other six-parters: the
ones that make you scratch your head and think ‘Really? They needed nearly
three hours to do this?’ – The Chase, The Space Pirates, The Mutants, The
Armageddon Factor and so on.
So where does The Invasion
of Time sit in the pantheon of the six-part stories?
Well, really speaking,
it’s a story that starts at the height of its powers, and bowls along reaching
a series of peaks through its first four episodes…only to really rather fall to
bits once the main villains of the piece arrive.
At the start of the story,
Tom Baker is in barnstorming form, as a Doctor as capricious, angry and
unpredictable as anything Colin Baker or (so far) Peter Capaldi ever tried to
do in the role, but Baker makes it look effortless – he’s distant to Leela, arrogant
with Borusa and generally, he struts around Gallifrey with the air of a
semi-psychotic dictator – it’s Baker as Caligula, with a touch of Tiberian
melancholy thrown in to balance the performance. When he is invested with the
power of the President of Gallifrey, he is vacant, absent, the price of his
betrayal seeming heavy on his mind and face. When the Vardans arrive, Baker is
stunningly cruel, his laughter convincing the unwary viewer that their dear
Doctor really has gone stark raving mad after all, and as he goes through the
episodes and his real purpose is revealed – luring the Vardans to reveal
themselves so he can time-loop their planet and halt the invasion, we see a
Doctor increasingly desperate and potentially on the verge of a nervous breakdown
as he disables one barrier after another to allow the invaders to feel secure.
Baker though doesn’t
operate in a vacuum for these first four episodes – we get to see the nature of
Leela’s faith in her Doctor, believing and declaring that he has a plan when
others think he’s a traitor to all of Gallifrey. John Arnatt as Chancellor
Borusa gives a layered performance that shows both the twinkle that might have
inspired the Doctor, and the hard-as-nails politician edging his way toward the
Presidency himself. Milton Johns as Castellan Kelner delivers a particularly
fine performance as the smooth, clever chief guard who is completely unprepared
for anything to really threaten his world, and falls into subservience when his
cosy reality is shattered beyond measure.
Things begin to degenerate
only when the Vardans relax their guard and go, in half a heartbeat, from weird
shimmery alien overlords who can travel on radio waves and read thoughts to a
handful of the kind of tin-helmeted spotty blokes who have clearly never had a
date. Even the Doctor grins at their disappointing reality (a dangerous game,
this – presenting something naff and then having the hero point out how truly
naff it is), and Bernice Summerfield would famously later deride the Vardans as
being the only species in history to be foiled by the intellectual might of the
Sontarans. They simply go from credible villains to a bunch of sad gits far too
quickly, and after that, their defeat seems inescapable. Except of course it
comes too early. It comes at the end of Episode Four – pretty much where you’d
expect it to be in a four-part story.
The truth, unfortunately,
is that it probably should have ended there. Yes, when they were revealed, the
Vardans were naff, but the level of the performances throughout the first four
parts is high enough to have made The Invasion of Time a tense, thrilling
four-parter.
It’s true, the end of
Episode Four is brilliantly realised – the triumph of the Doctor undercut
beautifully by the unexpected arrival of a handful of Sontarans – but from the
moment of their arrival, The Invasion of Time begins to look flabby and
overstuffed…much like the Sontarans themselves. Almost everything about Derek
Steadman’s performance as Commander Stor seems odd to anyone who had watched Sontarans
as played by Kevin Lindsay in The Time Warrior and The Sontaran Experiment –
the build, the head (which rather looks as though Stor has been in a fight just
before arriving on Gallifrey and has the black eyes and bruises to prove it),
the costume, which looks let out and cheaply helmeted, and the weird hissy
delivery of ‘Dok-torrrr.’ You wonder if he’s the product of a very much weirder
clone batch than any Sontaran you’ve seen up to that point (an idea that was
sadly to recur with the towering Sontarans in The Two Doctors). And while the
Doctor feels dramatically in control all the way through the Vardan story, as
soon as the Sontarans arrive, he seems determined to run away, going further
and further into the Tardis, in padding scenes probably rightly criticised for
their repetitive use of the same film locations.
The conclusions of the
storylines are equally tonally odd when looked at in the overall canon of Who.
Having secured the Great Key of Rassilon, the Doctor instructs K9 and faintly
pathetic Time Lady Rodan to build not only a gun, but a thoroughly forbidden
gun at that – the De-Mat Gun, with which to eliminate Stor from time
altogether. There’s a certain logic in using a gun against a force as
militaristic as the Sontarans of course, but it rather feels as though it’s his
own mistakes the Doctor is trying to erase from history. And then of course,
there’s Leela.
You have to really, badly
want to see the character logic in Leela staying behind on Gallifrey to marry,
of all people, the rather pompous guard-turned-revolutionary, Andred. Given
that she’s been introduced to the Shobogans – one-time Time Lords who have gone
back to a more primitive way of living outside the Citadel – it begins to seem
inconceivable that it’s Andred who has caught Leela’s savage eye. We can say
she’s grown up and feels that the Doctor no longer needs her to look after him,
while Andred needs someone to introduce some fire into his belly, but it all
feels like what it almost certainly was – hopes and plans from the Production
Team to change Louise Jameson’s mind about staying on for another season
ultimately coming to nothing, and a resolution being found which made human
sense, if not any particular sense within the characterisation of Leela.
Ultimately then, The
Invasion of Time is a good solid four-parter, with two additional episodes of
vaguely pointless running around tacked onto the end. But what is crucial is
that for most of those first four episodes, Tom Baker is unassailable – brutal,
brilliant, loud and arrogant, while, when free to reveal himself, also showing
intelligence, humour, sarcasm and wit. It’s the Baker performance that powers
the viewer through at least those first four episodes of bizarre Gallifreyan
architecture, Time Lords in funny hats, shimmering tin-foil aliens who become
irritating, tin-helmeted aliens, and all the rest of the storytelling oddness.
Through it all, Baker is supremely manifested as the Fourth Doctor. If you’re
going to watch it again, you might consider switching off after the end of
Episode Four, and ignoring the arrival of the Sontarans altogether. As a tight
four-parter, Baker’s performance elevates the first two-thirds of The Invasion
of Time to something truly special. As a flabby six-parter, it’s Baker’s
powerhouse interpretation of the vagabond Time Lord that manages to redeem a
story that goes badly astray and crashes into the wall at the end.
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