Now back in colour, the Doctor and Sarah run away from
"A tyrannosaurus rex. The largest and fiercest predator of all time."
Oh noes! This is too scary for me to watch on my own, I'm going to get help from my friend Gamma Longcat. And Dragon has joined us too - he likes dinosaurs because, so he says, they are nearly as large, powerful and ferocious as dragons.
The soldiers shoot uselessly at it for quite some time, until eventually one of them remembers he has a grenade, although it doesn't seem to be any more effective than their bullets.
The Doctor and Sarah hide in a room where they meet a manny who calls the Doctor "accursed wizard." Has he just turned up two episode too late to be in The Time Warrior? The Doctor responds in the same way as he did then and denies being a wizard. They ask the manny what year it is and who's the king, to which he replies
"Well, Richard, of course. But he's in the Holy Land. John rules now."
Aha! So i was basically right when I surmised that it was set during the reign of one of the Plantagenets. This narrows The Time Warrior down to the years of the third crusade (1189 to 1192), or possibly a little later when king Richard was a prisoner of Leopold of Austria until 1194.
The manny fights with the Doctor and Sarah, until a special effect causes Sarah to go backwards and the manny to disappear. The Doctor does his second best Mr Spock impression* when he says
"Fascinating! Absolutely fascinating. That was a time eddy. For a moment there time went backwards."
They hear soldiers approaching and the Doctor gets ready to Venusian Aikido the first one that comes in...
...but it is the Brigadier.
It cuts to UNIT's HQ where the Brigadier is giving them (and us) exposition about what has been happening
"It all started just after you, Doctor, and as we later discovered, Miss Smith, went off on your last little jaunt."
This probably means that the Brigadier and UNIT don't know if the dinosaurs and mannys coming forwards in time are connected to the disappearing scientists and the "man in armour" from The Time Warrior, so I'm sure the Doctor and Sarah will be quick to reassure him that they aren't and explain exactly what happened.
"Yes, some other time, Miss Smith, if you don't mind?"
No, it turns out the Brigadier couldn't care less about what became of "half a dozen leading scientists and several million pounds worth of ultra-secret equipment" because he's more concerned that
"A variety of prehistoric reptiles began to appear in the central London area."
He means dinosaurs have been invading. Benton is also there and is keen to explain about their map:
"It's a colour code, Doctor. We're using red pins for tyrannosaurus, blue for triceratops, green for the stegosaurus, and pink for your actual pterodactyl."
The Brigadier tells the Doctor
"So far we've absolutely no idea where they're coming from or, come to that, where they go."
The Doctor has clearly already deduced the answer to this but, before he can explain, they are interrupted by General Finch and Mike Yates, so they are present when the Doctor says
Doctor: "Somebody or something is operating a temporal displacement on a very vast scale."Finch: "Never mind your scientific gobbledygook."Doctor: "The creatures are being brought from the past into the present, General, staying here for a while and then returning to their own time."Finch: "Rubbish!"Doctor: "I take it then that you have a better theory."Finch: "Yes, some mad scientist fellow has been secretly breeding these things. Now they've all got away."
Escaped from his theme park, perhaps? Gamma Longcat, who hasn't seen this story before, wondered if it could be Silurians, because they had pet dinosaurs? It's certainly a possibility, since the writer of both this story and Doctor Who and the Silurians, Malcolm Hulke, does like his continuity references, as we saw back in Frontier in Space.
There's a report of another dinosaur. General Finch wants to blow it up using "artillery" (he's like a version of the Brigadier who hasn't had four seasons of character development) while the Doctor prefers to study it instead, and so he and the Brigadier go to see it.
Poor Sarah is left behind to talk to Mike Yates. He tells her how he likes London with no mannys about.
"I rather like it. Have you noticed the air? It's clean. No cars, no people. Do you know yesterday I saw a fox in Piccadilly?"
That does sound good, so long as there are still cats. Sarah disagrees, and says
"No, I like London the way it was, traffic jams and all."
The Doctor is just about to try a plan to capture the dinosaur when the same SFX as before makes the Brigadier and his soldiers go backwards and then the dinosaur vanishes. Again only the Doctor is unaffected, so back at UNIT's HQ he tries to explain what happened:
Doctor: "Whenever a creature appears or disappears, the temporal displacement causes a localised distortion in time. Now as far as the people in the immediate vicinity were concerned, time literally runs backwards, so naturally, they'd have no recollection of what occurred."Finch: "The man's mad. Temporal displacement? Time travel is impossible, we all know that."
General Finch urgently needs to be told what show he's in, mew.
The Doctor deduces that whoever is bringing the dinsosaurs through time is hiding somewhere in the area where they are appearing, and he has a plan to track them if he can capture a dinosaur.
We see that the mannys responsible are Professor Whitaker (played by Peter Miles, so there is a definite possibility that he is really Dr Lawrence under a new name) and his Butler (who I don't think is ever named on screen, but is played by Martin Jarvis). Gamma Longcat and I are agreed that Whitaker could definitely have been the Master in an alternative version of this story, as this is exactly the sort of zany scheme he would come up with to troll the Doctor and UNIT with. Alas that it is not. Another possibility that I considered is that, given they are two scientists messing around with time travel, Whitaker could have been replaced with Ruth and the Butler with Stuart from The Time Monster. That's probably a level of continuity beyond what would have been reasonable in the 1970s era, even for Malcolm Hulke, and is more the sort of thing that might have happened in the 1980s or the new series.
The Doctor is trying to make his machine to knock out a dinosaur when he keeps getting interrupted, first by Mike Yates, then by Sarah, then by the Brigadier.
The Doctor wants them all to go away.
Sarah: "Oh alright. I'll go and chat up that nice Captain Yates."Doctor: "Yes I'm sure he'd enjoy that."
The Doctor must be vexed indeed to resort to sarcasm like that, mew!
The Brigadier wants the Doctor to meet "Charles Grover, Minister with special powers" but he's obviously not the same Minister as from The Green Death because the Doctor is pleased to meet him, saying
"Oh my dear Grover, I'm delighted to meet you. This planet needs people like you."
Somebody from UNIT is secretly W-wording for Whitaker, and we soon see that it is Mike Yates!
Yates tells them what he knows of the Doctor's plan, and Whitaker implies that Yates should kill the Doctor to stop him from interfering in their "Operation Golden Age." Yates replies
"I'll do nothing to harm the Doctor, nor will I allow him to be harmed. If we descend to that sort of thing, we're no better than the society we intend to replace."
Whitaker changes tack immediately, and instead tells Yates to "sabotage the Doctor's stun gun," giving him a small device to do just that with. This scene puts a different complexion on the earlier scene where Yates spoke with Sarah - now we can tell that he was really testing her to see if she might be sympathetic to the baddys.
Gamma Longcat thinks Mike Yates must have already been secretly hypno-eysed by the baddys before this story began, even though he was also hypno-eyesed in the last story he appeared in, which is pretty unlucky to say the least. I disagreed with him, because I have never liked Yates; from the very beginning I have seen him as an usurper to the rightful place of Captain Hawkins as UNIT's regular Captain character, so it doesn't surprise me that he would turn out to have been a baddy all this time, just waiting his opportunity to betray the Doctor and the other UNIT mannys. Also, I have seen this story before, mew. On the other paw, if the Master had been the main baddy in this, it would have made a lot more sense for Yates to have been hypno-eysed into obeying him.
Gamma Longcat still expects to be proved right, and he is waiting for the Doctor to bring out the blue crystal in order to de-hypno-eyes Yates once again. Silly Gamma Longcat, we shan't be seeing the Metebelis 3 crystal again! One thing we can both agree on is that Yates will be lucky to make it to the end of the story alive seeing as Malcolm Hulke is the writer, and he has form for killing off UNIT captains - Yates is just lucky to have dodged appearing in any of his stories up until now.
The Doctor, the Brigadier and Yates all go to where the latest dinosaur has appeared.
"Apatosaurus, commonly known as the brontosaurus. Large, placid and stupid. That's exactly what we need."
says the Doctor, giving us all a lesson about dinosaurs. He isn't scared of this one, but says of his his stun gun plan:
"Mind you, I wouldn't like to try it on a tyrannosaurus rex."
Yates sabotages the stun gun before he gives it to the Doctor, who then goes forward to pew it only to find that his stun gun is borked. The SFX comes in yet again, making the "placid" dinosaur disappear, and replacing it with the very scary tyrannosaurus rex - the one thing the Doctor didn't want to happen! It rars at the Doctor - cliffhanger!
Dinosaur cliffhanger count: 2
* His best being that time he replaced a picture of Mr Spock on The Goodies DVDs for rights reasons.
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