The Invasion Of Time
I have quite vivid memories of parts of this: the surprise return of a popular monster in the Sontarans (and more than one of them too!) - the departure of Leela - that room with all the lead cogs and wheels. What I had forgotten were some of the poorer bits in between.
It all begins in a stunningly audacious way, as we are initially offered no explanation as to why the Doctor has turned to the dark side and become a power-crazed nutter. He shrieks at Borusa, belittles Leela and is callous to everyone else. Baker completely sells the whole idea of a ruthless Doctor who is (apparently) betraying the Time Lords to a foreign power. I was nearly eleven when this first went out, but imagine being six or seven and seeing your hero behave in this way? Plus that laugh when he introduces the Vardans as the new masters of the Timelords - far scarier than any alien monstrosity!
It's a shame then that the assembled Timelords react to this news with hardly a flicker of emotion. It's been established that they are decadent and nothing has changed in their society for hundreds of years, so you would expect an upheaval of this magnitude to illicit some kind of response. Maybe because there appear to be very few Timelords under the age of ninety, they are just too doddery and forgetful to even notice...."What's that Savar? Invasion you say? Speak up, man. What's making all that racket?..."
Of course there are exceptions. John Arnatt is perfect as Borusa - wise and reproving, yet with a manipulative streak as he subtly pulls strings behind the scenes. And then we have Milton Johns as Kelner. Weasely, smarmy, sycophantic, obsequious and oily. An outright cowardly crawler. Johns has always been one of my favourite Who actors and in this story he practically steals every scene that he is in. He's a joy to watch.
As for the Vardans? Well, I don't mind them as mysterious figures hidden in their cool looking pods / chairs (at least that's what I thought those odd shapes were). I don't even mind them as shimmering tin foil floating in the air (it's certainly preferably to the alternative effects on the DVD which have dated even more than the original) or as green-suited pen pushers from rent-an-extra. No it's their voices which grate with me. They are just so...dull. It's as if the actors portraying them were told "just say the words as if you were a quantity surveyor with zero personality reading a shopping list". Even I could have done better - and trust me you do *not* want to see or hear my acting. Yes, I get that they are *meant* to be inefficient and easy to defeat - the perfect cover for the Sontarans - but we are supposed to believe that these aliens were powerful enough to convince the Doctor that they were a credible threat. It's just hard to take them seriously when they make the Ogrons sound intelligent. Would it really have stretched the limited budget that much to put an effect on their voices to make them sound slightly more menacing? Glaswegian doesn't count.
There is a similar accent problem with the Sontarans when they turn up in that fabulous cliffhanger at the end of part four. I guess if lots of planets have a North then Sontar must have an East End. Stor sounds like he belongs on the set of the Walford soap selling fruit and veg. Maybe this clone batch are the Sontaran version of the Krays - all bully boy frontery and repressed sexuality. Accents aside, they do come across as quite menacing, trampling through the corridors blasting at anything that moves, even if there are only three of them.
Gallifrey itself has shrunk and devolved since the days of "The Deadly Assassin". Corridors seem to have been designed so you are unable to walk down them properly without tripping over huge buttresses in the way. None of the rooms have identifying plaques or numbers so it seems to be pot luck that you find where you want to go. With their obvious love of ostentatiousness in costume design and the vastness of the Panopticon, would the President's office really be behind some obscure little door? Instead of the the blinking computer lights of the Matrix conveying technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic, the scenes in the lower levels come across as the heating system of an old school - not superior shielding technology protecting an entire planet.
With the chase through the TARDIS during episode six, I find it hard to be overly critical when you know the insurmountable financial problems the production was up against. The rooms of the TARDIS can be anything and everything, so why wouldn't part of it look like an abandoned hospital (with added art gallery)?
It's an unpredictable mundane ordinariness that makes the ship even more bizarre than usual. I also quite like the idea that they have to keep running through the same empty swimming pool to get anywhere - the kind of recursive occlusion we won't get again until "Castrovalva". The sour note is that the Doctor so casually uses a gun - and not only that but one of the most powerful weapons in the universe - to wipe the Sontarans from existence. The De-Mat gun is a nice idea but it seems to go against the Doctor's code of non-violent solutions. Just as well he conveniently forgets all about it.
Leela's decision to stay behind on Gallifrey to marry the hapless Andred is ridiculous. He has all the charisma of a wet lettuce and there has been no evidence on screen to indicate that the two of them have any kind of chemistry beyond a couple of meaningful looks. He'll probably dump her within a month for some Gallifreyan filly who will prop up his self important ego. Of course nowadays RTD or Moffat would probably pair Leela off with Rodan, which would at least have made some narrative sense given the character development and trials the two went through. No such luck in the unenlightened world of 1970s TV though, so we are left with a ignoble end to one of my favourite companions. At least we get rid of K-9 Mark I and his box of spanners innards
All in all, I did enjoy "The Invasion Of Time" as an entertaining adventure. Yes some of the execution leaves a lot to be desired viewed through modern eyes, but I think that's typical of the Williams era where concepts and ambition outstrip ability. The script has some bold and interesting ideas, not least trying to subvert the idea of the Doctor as the reliable good guy. It's far from the worst story in this season.
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