Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Six

After the double disappointment of the spaceship being fake and the lack of any Death-Watch-style showdown, Starcat has given up on this story. Instead, keeping me company for the final part, I have with me my friend Mr Purple Cat (and also Dragon). I warned Mr Purple Cat about the scary dinosaurs in advance, but he said that he wasn't frightened of dinosaurs because he knows they evolved into birdys, and what cat was ever scared of a birdy? He's right! I wish I had known that five episodes ago, mew.

Hah, you don't frighten me now, Mr So-called-tyrannosaurus-rex!

It does frighten the Doctor, though, and when his jeep breaks down he has to try to run away. Luckily for him the tyrannosaurus decides to have a fight with another dinosaur instead of him. This fight is suitably epic, as befits the climactic episode, though it would have been even better if it had taken place in the Death-Watch building.

The Doctor is reduced to being a spectator in his own show, though I don't think he minds that too much. It gives him a chance to run away.

General Finch drives in to capture the Doctor, but then the Brigadier also drives in, just afterwards and from a different direction. Maybe it is their turn to have a climactic fight? Not quite, though they do have a bit of a staredown before Finch gives in and lets the Doctor go with the Brigadier and Benton.

Doctor: "Look, face up to it, Brigadier. General Finch is involved just like Grover."

Brigadier: "Is everybody in this conspiracy?"

Doctor: "Well, Captain Yates certainly is."

Brigadier: "Now that I can't believe."

It's not that surprising that the Brigadier can't believe that Mike Yates would be a baddy, since Yates has been his colleague and friend since all the way back in Terror of the Autons, and Mike's betrayal of his commanding officer is the unkindest cut of his, even more so than of the Doctor or Benton. Also he probably just expects that Yates has been hypno-eyesed again. But the Brigadier is soon faced with the truth when Yates comes in with a gun 

Yates stops the Brigadier from telephoning for help from "International UNIT HQ" so that Whitaker can Get Operation Golden Age Done. The Doctor has deduced what "Whitaker's machine" will do, so he knows what their plan is. He tries to reason with Yates, saying

"There never was a golden age, Mike. It's all an illusion."

and

Doctor: "Look, I understand your ideals. You know in many ways I sympathise with them. But this is not the way to go about it, you know? You've got no right to take away the existence of generations of people."

Yates: "There's no alternative."

Doctor: "Yes, there is. Vote Labour Take the world that you've got and try and make something of it. It's not too late."

Yates gets momentarily distracted, and Benton overpowers him, not waiting to see if Yates had been persuaded by the Doctor.

The Doctor looks disappointed, though from their manner I think the Brigadier and Benton were both furious with Yates and couldn't wait to get their claws on him. Now that he's been captured, that's the last we'll see of him, which is surprising because it means Yates gets no chance at redeeming himself - whether by the standard method of self-sacrifice or otherwise - which is in total defiance of the Genre Conventions.

Sarah has escaped from the cupboard where the Butler put her, and managed to get back into the fake spaceship. She tries to persuade the mannys there that the spaceship is fake (something which she could easily have done by leaving the door open) but most of them would rather stubbornly persist with their collective delusion about being the "chosen group" and so they allow Ruth to convince them Sarah is "mad."

Mark believes Sarah (though he has the advantage of having seen her open the door and leave), and there is enough doubt in Adam's mind that he contacts "Spaceship One" and asks to speak to Grover.

The Doctor and the Brigadier dodge dinosaurs as they drive to the secret base. The Doctor drives a lot of jeeps in this story, I'm surprised he didn't want to take his own brand new car, the novelty can't have worn off already, can it? The Brigadier says

"Well, I never thought I'd find myself blowing up a tube station."

even though a plan to blow up a tube tunnel was one of the very first plans that the then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor ever did together.

Grover comes into the fake spaceship wearing a fake spacesuit to fool the mannys there. He confronts Sarah and Mark, but Adam listens in so that when Grover explains the evil plan (he just can't help himself) it means Adam hears it too. Even now Grover doesn't want to kill Sarah and Mark, which makes him one of the more complicated Doctor Who baddys - he doesn't mind wiping out "generations" of mannys, but can't kill (or order killed) two that he has met. So when Grover leaves Adam comes in and releases them.

Benton gets briefly captured by General Finch, but manages to overpower him too. 

Finch: "You'll be court martialled for this, Sergeant!"

Benton: "Yes, sir. Very sorry, sir!"

It cuts away just before we see Benton beat the shit out of Finch.

Sarah opens the spaceship door to prove it is a fake, then leads a lot of very angry mannys outside to "demand an explanation" of the mannys who tricked them. The Doctor is also loose in the secret base by now, where he encounters the Butler and uses Venusian Oojah on him, although it looks more like thumping him in the stomach to me. I can't remember the last time I watched a story in which our heroes were so pissed off at the baddys and, therefore, so determined to give them a kicking.

The mannys from the fake spaceship arrive just in time to stop Whitaker from activating his machine. Adam says to Grover

"You're going to destroy all the civilisations of man. Leaving Earth for another planet, that was one thing, but this is evil!"

He thought they were going for a science victory, but it turns out they were trying to wipe out all the other players. The ultimate twist of this story - it was actually just one giant game of Civilization.

The Doctor enters, followed by the Brigadier and Benton.

Whitaker pulls a lever, which causes a special effect to freeze everybody except the Doctor. He is able to pull the lever back and stop the effect, then he presses some buttons that means when Grover pulls the lever again only he and Whitaker and the machine disappear, Whitaker's last words being

"No! He's reversed the polarity!"

The Doctor pulled a Superman 2 on them. Sarah realises the Doctor wasn't effected in the same way as all the other mannys because he is a Time Lord, which seems fair enough and is not a cop out at all, because it was established as early as part two that the Doctor wasn't affected by the SFX in the same way as the mannys were.

We hear from the Brigadier what happened to Mike Yates in the end:

"Extended sick leave and a chance to resign quietly. Best I could do."

This is very generous of him. And of Malcolm Hulke for that matter - Yates got let off much more lightly than Captain Hawkins did, after all, and he didn't even betray anybody.

The story ends with Benton telling the Doctor and Sarah about how he got to "punch a General on the nose."

"Just don't make a habit of it, Benton."

says the Brigadier, lol. And then the Doctor tries to persuade Sarah to come with him in the TARDIS for more adventures - hopefully ones with less evil baddys next time, like maybe only the Daleks.

What's so good about Invasion of the Dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs!

Making this story at all must have been a tremendous technical achievement, especially on a BBC budget. I mean, it was 20 years before Jurassic Park, when Hollywood gave dinosaurs the blockbuster treatment. And there was no CGI in the 1970s, making this even more impressive.

So how did they manage it? I can only conclude that Barry Letts must have somehow gotten some real dinosaurs for the show. This must have been done under conditions of total secrecy, or else every manny and his theme park would have wanted one - and this might explain why some of the effects were made deliberately poor, to fool viewers into thinking the dinosaurs were only models, or maybe mannys in costumes.

However, to the observant viewer there are several clues that give the game away. Firstly there are occasions when, by using the greater picture clarity of DVD that wouldn't have been available to the casual viewer in 1974, we can clearly see that the dinosaurs aren't models - these include the pterodactyl attacks in parts one and four, plus the bit in part six where the jeep goes under a dinosaur, a neat bit of stunt driving.

But for me the real clincher is the very obvious CSO used to put the actors in the same frame as the dinosaurs - this would have been essential because dinosaurs are very dangerous and, just as Kirk Vilb didn't fight a real lion, they wouldn't have wanted the likes of Jon Pertwee or Nicholas Courtney to get et by being too close to a tyrannosaurus.

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

While there is some padding, particularly in part five where it seems to be needed to keep the cliffhanger in the right place, this is an impressively paced story that could even have justified more than its six episodes, because of all the parts to the plot that we didn't see on screen.

Part one began in media res, when the Doctor and Sarah joined the story, with London already evacuated and UNIT already aware of the dinosaur invasion (there are some similarities here with The Web of Fear, which also saw London deserted before the TARDIS arrived, although that had a prologue in which Professor Travers accidentally reactivated a Yeti control sphere), but we could have been shown scenes from when the baddys' plan was just starting, and maybe seen something of the Brigadier and UNIT trying to cope without the Doctor's help.

We are given very little backstory for any of the baddys, nor do we see how they came together to form their not-so-little (considering how many of the named characters of this story turn out to be in it) conspiracy. I suppose none of that is strictly necessary, and we can still enjoy watching Grover, Whitaker and Finch being fairly archetypical baddys without it, but we don't even see how Mike Yates came to join them, or much of a reason why he should - the scene where he says he likes London in its deserted state barely qualifies.

This means Yates's betrayal of his friends, without having been coerced or hypno-eyesed in any way, feels like something out of the blue crystal. We are left to infer that he must be the sort of gullible idiot who would fall for every fad and scam going. In the modern day, left to his own devices, he'd probably be into all manner of wacky conspiracy theories on the internets, while living in the UNIT era (an early '70s vision of the near-future) he'll probably be into meditation, Buddhism, and other hippy bullshit.