The Invasion

Chapter the 328th, re: UNIT, and it feels so good.

Plot:

After narrowly avoiding a missile attack on the dark side of the Moon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Earth sometime in the late 20th century (we could argue forever about exactly when). The TARDIS is on the blink and becomes invisible. To fix it, the Doctor needs to work on some circuits, and trying to get help with this embroils him in the machinations of a global electronics corporation, International Electromatics. The head of this company is Tobias Vaughn, and he's in league with the Cybermen planning an invasion of the Earth. The TARDIS team meet Isobel Watkins, an aspiring photographer in swinging 60s (or 70s or possibly even 80s) London; her uncle went to work for IE and hasn't been seen since. Investigating this, the Doctor and Jamie are picked up by UNIT, a military taskforce run by the Colonel Lethbridge Stewart that they previously met fighting against the Yeti in the London Underground, who has now been promoted to Brigadier. UNIT has been keeping tabs on IE and Vaughn: people who have gone in to IE headquarters have come out changed, under Cyber control. There are also mysterious extra circuits in IE devices, and the Doctor can't immediately discern their purpose.

Vaughn is planning to double-cross the Cybermen, and is using Professor Watkins for this purpose. The Professor has invented a prototype teaching machine that provokes emotions in the user; Vaughn kidnaps Isobel and Zoe to coerce Watkins into turning his device into an anti-Cyberman weapon. The Doctor, Jamie and UNIT rescue the two women, but Vaughn bluffs the Professor and he finishes the job. UNIT then rescue the Professor before Vaughn can mass produce the machine. The Cyber army are hidden in the sewer system of London, and Isobel, Jamie and Zoe almost get killed trying to get photographic evidence of their presence. The invasion begins when a hypnotic signal, boosted by the hidden circuits in IE equipment, takes over the populace (the Doctor, UNIT and Co have a method of resisting the signal). The Cybermen emerge from the sewers and attack. The Doctor goes to the IE headquarters and persuades Vaughn that he can't control the Cybermen. They use the Professor's device to fight their way to the IE transmitter, with UNIT battling the Cybermen around them. Vaughn is killed, but transmission of the hypnotic signal is switched off. There are a tense few minutes while everyone waits to see if a missile will destroy the Cyber ship on the dark side of the moon before it can launch an attack on Earth. It does. Later, after the Doctor has mended the TARDIS circuits, the TARDIS team leave for new adventures.

Context:

The random number generator that dictates the order in which I blog Doctor Who stories indicated that it was time to cover my final black-and-white 1960s story, my final story with episodes missing from the archives, and - potentially - my final Cyberman story. I watched the version from the DVD, which has animated first and fourth episodes paired with the surviving soundtracks. I viewed the story spaced out over about two weeks of early May, accompanied by the Better Half for the early episodes. As this is one of her favourite eras of the show, and she was intrigued by the animation, I was able to persuade her to watch at first. Once the animated episodes were over, she lost interest and left me to watch the rest alone. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, with the second Doctor joining the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors, to make it 11 on the 'done' pile so far. It also marks the completion of another season with 37 completed out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I first saw The Invasion when it was released on VHS in 1993. It was the first tape released - in a range that had started a good few years before in the mid-1980s - that was presented as a self-contained story but had episodes missing because they were no longer in the BBC's archive. Starting a couple of years earlier, there had been tapes that collected together orphaned Who episodes within a documentary framing; these, though, had made no effort to contextualise the surviving material within the overall narrative. The Invasion plugged the gaps in the same way as the 1991 VHS release of Shada, which had sections that were unfinished rather than lost: an actor from the story (in the case of The Invasion, this was Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney) gave a brief to-camera precis of what the viewer had missed. It's fair to say that Courtney's links were not detailed (his material lasted three minutes, and that included credits and a preamble where Courtney introduces himself and the character of the Brig). My first opportunity to experience the two missing episodes fully (or as fully as then possible) was in November 2004 when their audio, alongside that for the other extant episodes, was released on CD as part of a Cyberman box set. Finally, I got to see the two episodes with moving pictures when the aforementioned DVD, with animation plugging the gaps, was released in November 2006.

Reaction:

Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can go anywhere and anywhen, telling any kind of story. Equally famously though, it is a show that exists to serve a broad audience (it was brought into being in 1963 to keep all ages amused between sport and pop programming on a Saturday night, and was still performing this role in mid-May 2025 when one Ncuti Gatwa episode nestled in the BBC1 schedules between the year's FA Cup Final and Eurovision Song Contest). Throughout its history, the programme has thus swung between the experimental and the crowd-pleasingly formulaic. The Invasion comes during such a swing. Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, who were effectively co-producers by this point, had taken over gradually from the previous producer / script editor team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. With input from a scientific advisor Kit Pedlar, Lloyd and Davis had hit upon a successful formula for Doctor Who that had been used increasingly throughout Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor: a base under siege by a monster of the week. By the season before The Invasion, this template was used for all but one story, with Yeti, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and sentient seaweed all getting a chance or two to kill or take over members of isolated, locked-in communities one by one before the Doctor defeated them. The formula had served its purpose and then some, and it was definitely time for a change. The first two stories of Troughton's third and final season preceding The Invasion were wildly different, both from what went before and from each other. But with experiment comes risk. Sherwin and Bryant wanted to create the certainty of a new winning formula, and The Invasion was a trial for an approach that they wanted to apply to every story from the next season onwards.

Though the storyline for The Invasion came from Kit Pedlar, and there are a few links to the most recent previous Cyberman adventure The Wheel In Space (the metal meanies use of a signal to control humans, and our heroes use of depolarisers worn at the back of the neck to combat this, are callbacks to that story), it is much more focussed on the future shape of Doctor Who than the past. The action doesn't take place on alien planets or in space, it's set on Earth, with the monsters coming to us; the characters aren't stuck in one base represented by a big set in Television Centre, but able to roam to many different places, many of them outdoors and filmed on location. The Doctor has a team to support him in banishing large-scale invasions too big to be handled just by him and the couple of friends with whom he tended to travel: UNIT was born. Leading this team was the Lethbridge-Stewart character, promoted to Brigadier, reused from a popular story of the previous season The Web of Fear. The Web of Fear - directed, like The Invasion, by Douglas Camfield - was very much a base under siege story, but had one key action sequence (the attack by Yeti in Covent Garden) that inspired many similar set pieces in The Invasion. Like in Web, there is a significant military presence in terms of both soldiers and hardware. The story world is expanded beyond the parochial, though: rather than the troops being from the British army as they were in Web, these are a United Nations taskforce (the story even involves an offscreen Russian missile team) with an investigative remit that allows for some espionage as well as shooting and blowing things up. The set-up has lots of potential, and would serve as the model for a lot of the Jon Pertwee era stories. It's not without drawbacks, though.

The importance of the Doctor and his companions is diluted by being part of a bigger team. Jamie is missing throughout the latter part of the story; part of this is because the actor was on holiday for an episode, but even when Fraser Hines is present in the studio, his character spends the best part of a whole episode asleep. His usual role of being the Doctor's minder isn't needed when the Doctor has the assistance of his own army. Early on, though, when the protagonists are more in investigative mode, there's some fun to be had in the sequences where Jamie and henchman Packer (played mostly for comedy by Peter Halliday) indulge in one-upmanship, squabbling like a pair of children. The Troughton Doctor too seems a bit diminished by becoming part of a professional investigation outfit; his usual schtick is to lure his enemies into a false sense of security by appearing to be bumbling and absent minded, but he can't really do this when he's in a role of expert advisor. There's the odd nice moment smuggled in - the Doctor undercutting tense sequences by stopping to play cards with Jamie, or posing for photographs - but in general, he just has to be serious and professional, which doesn't fit well. The series would struggle for quite a while in the Jon Pertwee era to square the circle of finding the fallible, human element in a serious establishment organisation: if its creator Sydney Newman was right, and Doctor Who needs a kid to make mistakes and get into trouble, why would UNIT hire such a person? Nepotism was the answer they finally decided upon, with Jo Grant having secured a job at UNIT because of a powerful relative.

In The Invasion, it is left to the character of Isobel Watkins to trip up herself and others into jeopardy, but she isn't sympathetic enough to provide the necessary heart. Her romance with a UNIT captain isn't given much air time, and doesn't convince when it is. The script also tends to patronise her and the other younger characters. The Brig casually disregards Isobel's evident knowledge of photography, and later refers to her, Zoe and Jamie as "crazy kids" when they venture into the sewers to secure evidence of the Cybermen. The Brig has only been involved in one and a half alien invasions, whereas Jamie and Zoe see off monsters every week; he should show them more respect. A lot of the early part of the story focusses on the fate of Isobel's uncle Professor Watkins, taken captive by Tobias Vaughn; once he's rescued, though, he disappears from the narrative - he's last seen early in the penultimate episode after having been shot in the leg, and - unless I blinked and missed it - he's never mentioned again. It's an odd paradox; The Invasion has too much going on to fully complete all characters' subplots, yet there is only six episodes worth of story here stretched to fill eight. On VHS, as mentioned above, it was reduced to a six episode story; annoyingly, the missing two episodes are from early on when the plot's put together fine. It's in the latter half that it falls apart. The ending is structured oddly, with the climax of the fight against Cybermen in the IE factory, including main villain Tobias Vaughn's death, happening too early. There's then a lengthy sequence of characters standing around waiting to hear about whether a missile has destroyed the Cybermen's ship in orbit. The sequences should have been swapped around, or - better - the missile could have been dispensed with altogether. The Doctor and Vaughn have a device that emits a Cyberman-destroying signal, plus a big transmitter to beam that signal into space; it would make more sense for that to be the mechanism that saves the day.

There's a lot of good stuff in here too, even later on: for example, the famous sequence of the hypnotic signal taking people over across London, and the Cybermen then emerging from manholes and strutting about near St. Paul's Cathedral. The special sound created for that signal and for other sequences like the revivification of dormant Cybermen is perfect, as is Don Harper's score. Little touches too, such as the repetition of Packer being summoned and appearing on a monitor, only for this to be twisted: the final time Vaughn calls for Packer, the scary blank face of a Cyberman appears on the monitor instead. This design of the Cybermen is probably the best of the 1960s, and the decision to hold them back for the first half of the story is a good one. The character of Vaughn is a joy to watch. Kevin Stoney creates a silky smooth psychopath, with occasional flashes of hysteria and anger. The way he says Packer's name is so fun, and so easy to imitate. Many a villainous character in Doctor Who's history has tried to ally themselves with the Cybermen, thinking they can turn the tables on them; Vaughn comes closest to pulling it off, with only Professor Watkins dragging his heels meaning Vaughn runs out of time to mass produce a machine to kill Cybermen (I was almost rooting for him to succeed). Though not a part of the original presentation, of course, it's worth noting that the two animated episodes are gorgeous, the art in character designs and backgrounds is probably the best ever created for a Doctor Who missing episode animation project. I had a slight twinge of disappointment both times the story returned to live action.

Connectivity:

The Invasion and Lux both feature the antagonists using entertainment technology to assist them in invading Earth: Lux uses movie projection equipment to corporealise, the Cybermen and their ally Tobias Vaughn use circuits in products like Jamie's transistor radio to send a hypnotising signal, quelling any resistance from the population. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Animated Meanderings. The Invasion started something by creating UNIT in 1968, and then started something again in 2007 - it was the inaugural story using animation to represent episodes that were missing from the story (because they were missing from the archives). As mentioned in the First Time Round section above, Doctor Who initially made do with brief linking synopses delivered by actors from the original story, specially filmed many years later. Sometimes these were in character, sometimes not. Occasionally, things got a bit more sophisticated with surviving audio recordings and off-screen photographs put together to form reconstructions of missing episodes (as happened for The Ice Warriors and The Tenth Planet) but often they fell back on that original approach of brief linking material (The Crusade, The Reign of Terror) even to the very end of the VHS range. These approaches were also only felt to be viable to replace two episodes of a story maximum, and usually only if the surviving episodes outnumbered the reconstructed / summarised ones. The Crusade VHS release in 1999, with the story split 50/50 between two surviving and two missing episodes was the only exception - this was because an episode of the story had been recently discovered, so half the story was felt to be enough of a draw (even then, though, it was released in a box set with the adjacent complete story The Space Museum). After the UK animation company Cosgrove Hall Studios (who had produced Doctor Who webcast Scream of the Shalka) created animated episodes one and four of The Invasion for its DVD release, the sky was the limit. Animated visuals of missing episodes matched to those surviving soundtracks were much more watchable than a reconstruction, and much more faithful than an actor's brief summary.

Though more possibilities had been opened up, with even the potential for a wholly missing story being released in 100% animated form one day, what happened next for the DVD range and animations was... nothing, for a good long while. There were still plenty of intact adventures to release, and it was six more years before another story had episodes animated, by which time Cosgrove Hall had alas closed down. There were other companies, though. In 2013, either because the range was running out of other classic series stories to release, or because the costs of animating episodes had become more affordable, or both, three stories came out: The Reign of Terror (two episodes animated) in January, The Ice Warriors (two episodes animated) in August, and The Tenth Planet (one episode animated) in October. With its recovered episode old news by 2013, The Crusade did not get similar treatment (it has loads of different characters and locales too, which would make the animation a challenge), but a different 50/50 story was done instead. In early 2014, The Moonbase was released on its own shiny disc. Parts one and three were animated, parts two and four live action. It was the first story that animation allowed to have a release on DVD that had not been a title on VHS. To date, thirteen stories have had their own moment on DVD or Blu-Ray that never got to be centre stage in the video tape days; for only one of these - The Enemy of the World - was this wholly down to the live action episodes being recovered. The remainder have had some or all of their episodes animated for release on disc. Nearly three years on from The Moonbase, The Power of the Daleks was the first wholly missing animated story; a couple of years later, it was followed by The Macra Terror.

By the 2020s, two different teams (one led creatively by Gary Russell, the other by AnneMarie Walsh) were working away, with The Faceless Ones, Fury from the Deep, Galaxy 4, The Evil of the Daleks and The Abominable Snowmen being released between 2020 and 2022. Many of these included episodes that had been animated even though they existed in the archives, to allow the cartoon version to be watched as one consistent piece. Animating episodes you didn't 'need' to would have seemed the height of extravagance even a short few years earlier. Beyond the five new stories released in that period, there was also an improved version of Power of the Daleks, and a new version of The Web of Fear with its single missing episode (part 3) animated; the initial vanilla DVD edition had used a reconstruction. By the end of 2022, a source of funding from BBC America had dried up and there was a worry that the animations would go on hiatus. This situation didn't last long, though. Towards the end of 2023, The Underwater Menace was released; in 2024, there was The Celestial Toymaker, and in 2025, The Savages. Those of us who've been collecting home video Doctor Who since the VHS days can only boggle at the things that have been achieved that we wouldn't have thought of as feasible back then. To pick just a couple of examples, there are now only three - three! - Patrick Troughton stories left to be released (his era amounted to a pitiful handful of video tapes); and - bar a five-minute introduction at the end of an adventure where she was otherwise not present, every moment of companion Dodo's time with the Doctor (from The Ark to The War Machines) is available to buy on individual shiny discs.

There now remain only nine stories that haven't had a dedicated disc release. One of these is the longest story (The Daleks' Master Plan at 12 episodes) but one is the shortest (single episode prologue to Master Plan, Mission to the Unknown), so it evens out. Of the remaining stories, most are historical stories (Marco Polo, The Myth Makers, The Massacre, The Smugglers, The Highlanders), which might be more challenging to animate, and might be a harder sell. The other two (The Wheel in Space, The Space Pirates) are science fiction tales with metallic monsters and / or spaceships, so might be an easier proposition. Additionally, The Crusade  - which had 50% of its running time represented by reconstructions for its Blu-ray release alongside the rest of the second classic season - may be animated before the end. If two teams continue working at the established rate, and with technological advances still gathering pace in parallel that could be brought to bear, all these stories could be out in as little as five years. Exciting. 

In Summary:

Massively successful as a reusable formula, slightly less successful as a story in its own right (mostly because it's a couple of episodes too long).