The Seeds of Doom

Chapter the 314th, where confidence is a preference for the habitual collector of what is known as ... plant life!

Plot:

A three-man scientific team in Antarctica discover a large, green plant pod in the ice. They send word to the World Ecology Bureau, who bring in UNIT as the pod's presence is unexplainable. The Doctor and Sarah travel to the scientists' base. Not heeding the Doctor's warning not to touch the pod, the scientists examine it, and one of them is attacked by a shoot that whips out of it. He starts to go green and transform into a plant. Meanwhile, a civil servant from the Bureau, Dunbar, makes some money selling information about the pod to a millionaire plant enthusiast Harrison Chase. Harrison sends his Head of Security, a mercenary called Scorby, and nervy pet scientist Keeler off to Antarctica to fetch the pod. The Doctor knows all about the pod, and knows that there will be a second one buried in the snow, duly uncovering it. It is a Krynoid, a carnivorous alien plant creature that will kill everyone on Earth if it isn't stopped. The scientist transforming into a Krynoid goes on the rampage. Scorby and Keeler steal the other pod, escaping after setting a bomb on a timer. It blows up the base, destroying the Krynoid. Luckily, the Doctor and Sarah survive. They are picked up by a rescue team and return to the UK. They trace the second pod to Harrison Chase's estate and sneak in to the house. Sarah is captured, and Chase intends her to be the second victim of the Krynoid. The Doctor rescues her, and Keeler is instead the one attacked.

Keeler begins to transform, and the insane Chase - desperate to see what sort of plant he will grow into - imprisons him in a cottage in the grounds and has him fed raw meat. Dunbar, trying to make amends, enters Chase's estate to confront him. He is killed by the escaped Krynoid, which has now grown bigger than a human. The Doctor, Sarah and Scorby are trapped in the cottage with the Krynoid outside, now grown almost as big as the cottage. The Doctor devises a plan, and escapes to return with reinforcements. Scorby and Sarah hide in the main house. The Krynoid can now control nearby plant life; vines and ivy smash through the windows of the house. Chase has somehow developed a mental link with the Krynoid and wants it to succeed. The Doctor returns with UNIT troops who use weedkiller sprays to keep the plants at bay. Scorby makes a break for it, but plants drag him to his death in a pond in the grounds. Chase tries to kill the Doctor by putting him in his industrial-size compost maker, but ends up falling in and getting minced himself. UNIT contact the RAF who blow up the Krynoid (now the size of Chase's manor). The Doctor takes Sarah on a holiday in the TARDIS, but they end up back in Antarctica again.

Context:

Watched from the DVD with the individual episodes spread out a little bit (I watched one every other day, approx.) during late October and early November 2024. People from the household would drift in and out during my viewings, but nobody sat down and watched the story with me. The Better Half was in the room, if not actually fully watching, for a couple of the episodes. She commented at one point that Tony Beckley's velvety villainous performance as Harrison Chase - one of my all-time favourite turns in classic Who - was, quote "A bit like Dick Dastardly". I thought this was a mightily unfair assessment, but after that there were a couple of scenes where Chase rants about how he's "surrounded by idiots", so maybe there's a little truth in it. As it turned out, I made a good choice to watch from the DVD. Had I viewed the story on the BBC iplayer, the story would have disappeared halfway through my watch. Both The Seeds of Doom and Terror of the Zygons were taken down from the streaming platform on the 1st November 2024, a year after being made available as part of the wider 'Whoniverse' section. There are two things unique about those two stories in the Doctor Who canon - they're the only ones written by Robert Banks Stewart, and the only two scored by Geoffrey Burgon. Presumably an agreement with the estates of one of those gentlemen (most likely Stewart) ran out after a year.

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 marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, and not just any Doctor. Completing every one of the stories starring Tom Baker, the longest-running Doctor ever having been in the role for seven years, was a big milestone. I'll go into more detail to mark this in the Deeper Thoughts section below. Tom is the fifth Doctor completed so far (the seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth Doctors having been completed before Baker). This post also marks the completion of another season, the 30th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

The obsessive detailing of every aspect of Doctor Who on the internet helps me to precisely date when I first watched particular stories. It works only if the first time I watched a story is when it was broadcast or repeated or released on a home video medium (the dates of which are freely available online for every story); there are a few, though, that are more difficult to pin down exactly because I first encountered them on a pirated video tape, the sort that was lent out or exchanged between fans in the 1980s and 90s. The Seeds of Doom was one of these: I know that my first glimpse of the story was on the Tom Baker Years clip compendium released on VHS in September 1992 (I was a bit bemused as to what was going on when watching a clip of various characters carrying pot plants from one place to another). So it was sometime after that but before the sell-through VHS release in August 1994. In that period, the only person who would have provided me stories that hadn't been officially released yet was fan friend David (mentioned many times before on this blog). I'd met David at university, but he was a few years ahead of me, and in 1992 had graduated. He did come to visit sometimes, though, so my guess is on one of those visits he brought a tape with him for us to watch. It was most likely early 1993 (I remember that Doctor Who was being repeated on BBC2 when he came back up to Durham in my second year). The reason why I'm particularly interested is that, given all the evidence above, I first watched The Seeds of Doom in my early 20s, but the one thing I can remember very clearly about that first watch is that the story creeped me out. I thought I was beyond being scared of  Doctor Who by that age, but The Seeds of Doom still had the power to horrify.

Reaction:

Just as I started to write up my reaction to The Seeds of Doom, the final story I had to blog of the early and popular Tom Baker era produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and script-edited by Robert Holmes, the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 610) was sent out to subscribers and dropped through my letter box. It was momentarily disconcerting to flick through the magazine and find this era and in particular Hinchcliffe himself was being covered in unprecedented detail, taking up about a third of the magazine. I thought for a terrible moment that he'd died, but happily this was not the case. It seems that his reaching his 80th birthday was the prompt for an in-depth and lengthy interview on his years working on the programme. Because he is so ubiquitously lauded by fandom, I probably react against that and tend to underestimate Hinchcliffe's input into the stories of his that I've covered here over the years. Undoubtedly he made a huge contribution to The Seeds of Doom. The most obvious sign of this is that the story's roots are showing; as with many a story that he and Holmes elicited from writers for Who, there is an obvious monster movie inspiration, or inspirations plural in this case: the first two-episode section set in Antarctica steals like a genius from the 1951 film The Thing From Another World. The second four-part section is a mash-up of Quatermass and The Day of the Triffids. That innovative way of structuring a six-part story in two sections is also something Hinchcliffe and Holmes brought in, and writer Robert Banks Stewart makes the most of it. As the audience has seen the impact on a human attacked by the pod once, there's enhanced dramatic energy in the third episode as the anticipation builds about who will be the second victim, and then the next three episodes show the process happening again, quickly progressing beyond what had been seen before.

Although all of that input from producer, script editor and writer is significant, it's the contributions from director Douglas Camfield and composer Geoffrey Burgon that are most important - they provide the eerie atmosphere I felt on my first watch that is this story's defining factor. The same people worked on the beginning story of the season as well as this season finale. They achieved a similar atmosphere in that story at first, but as I'll mention in the Deeper Thoughts section below the drama and excitement couldn't be sustained in the Zygons story. In this their second attempt of the year, they almost manage to sustain it for the full six episode length. Only once the interesting villain and henchman are dispatched do things start to fall apart. The solution to the Krynoid monster, that has grown to the the size of a mansion, is simply to blow it up. This is disappointingly prosaic, particularly as the Doctor has been quoted earlier in the serial saying that "Bullets and bombs aren't the answer to everything". Then, there's a supposedly humorous coda where the Doctor and Sarah end up back in Antarctica because the Doctor has failed to reset the TARDIS coordinates. Not only is this a continuity error (they didn't travel there in the first place by TARDIS but were helicoptered in) but it is also obscure. They join in reciting "Have we been here before ... or are we yet to come?" portentously, and then burst into laughter. But it's not a joke and it's not a quotation, so what does it mean? It's a bizarre way to end both story and season. It's a shame that the only major negative aspects of the story are saved for the very end, as everything else is pretty wonderful.

There are some good action set pieces: another thing that Camfield regularly brings to stories is well-shot scenes where soldiers blow things up, and he doesn't disappoint here. The soldiers in question are a kind of zombie UNIT. Technically this counts as the final UNIT story of their initial era, but none of the regulars of Jon Pertwee's time are featured, all having bowed out in stories earlier in the run; as such, this lot may as well be any old squaddies. There's a couple of moments where the Doctor behaves quite violently for the time - a neck twist he gives Scorby is particularly nasty - but these are brief. A rightfully praised bravura moment sees the Doctor smash down into a room through a skylight, knock out a baddie, grab a gun, save Sarah and deliver a quip (when asked drily by Chase what he does for an encore, he replies "I win") then exit the room, all in about 30 seconds. The production design is great (the skylight that Baker breaks and the room he drops into look real. The effects are all of high quality; Some scenes creating Antarctica are more impressionistic than realistic, but they work. The model work is intricate and excellent throughout. The stages of Krynoid transformation are mostly good, with only the wobbly version that attacks Dunbar at the end of episode four looking a bit too Monthy Python to be scary. Small lapses like that don't matter too much, though, as all the actors are playing the material with utmost conviction, and the material is rich. Baker is at his most brooding; the line "You must help yourselves", when suggesting that one scientist amputate the other's arm to stop the infection, is a moment that shows the Doctor at his most alien. Lis Sladen gets to challenge the baddies in some emotive scenes too.

The three scientists in the first two episodes are good, particularly as two of them have to deliver their performances from behind awfully fake beards, but it's the main guest characters that feature throughout or in the last four episodes that make this story special. Tony Beckley is fantastic at the velvety villainy, and does a plausible take on a rapid descent into madness. His childlike delivery of the line "I could have had two pods" is telling and chilling in equal measure. To my mind, though, he is marginally bested by his henchman. John Challis's turn as Scorby is one of the all-time best performances in the classic era of Doctor Who. Even though he is at first glance a stock heavy, Challis takes Robert Banks Stewart's words, which already give the character more depth than usual, and adds more to make Scorby a living, breathing and three-dimensional creation, and every scene he appears in is lifted by his presence. That's not to ignore some other great character performances, like repentant sell-out Dunbar (Kenneth Gilbert) or nervy reluctant accomplice turned victim Keeler (Mark Jones). The scene where the partially transformed Keeler starts to rant at Sarah, chanting "You want me to die" over and over is one of the moments in Doctor Who that most scared me - and, as mentioned above, I was in my 20s before I saw it for the first time. Even a minor character like Amelia Ducat (Sylvia Coleridge) shines. It's a nice bit of writing that she looks like a one-scene comic relief character, then unexpectedly returns as a complication factor, threatening Chase's plans. Just when we believe that she's coincidentally blundered in to things, it turns out she's a spy, deliberately investigating. It's no coincidence that when all these characters have exited or been killed off, the story runs out of steam - a giant green monster just isn't as interesting.

Connectivity:

I don't think this has ever happened before, but the titles of this story and the last one on the blog rhyme. The Seeds of Doom follows Boom. Bada-bing, bada-boom! Apart from that, both stories feature soldiers and an explosive device with a countdown. There's a reference in Boom to sentient mud, which is I suppose not that far from sentient plants, though the mud in the Ncuti story turns out not to be sentient in the end.  

Deeper Thoughts:

Milestone Watch Extra. As mentioned a couple of times before in blog posts this year, I have given up social media. As such, I have to get my news, including my Doctor Who news, from other sources. There's a certain obsessive fan flavour of FOMO - what if a box set was announced and I didn't hear about it to pre-order until the next Doctor Who Magazine arrived, and what if that was too late and they'd sold out, arrggh! - that compels me to regularly do an online search on the phrase 'Doctor Who' and check the News tab. There's very rarely any actual news, of course, but there are always hits. Nine out of ten of the hits will be clickbait articles on 'entertainment sites' speculating about something or other, or investigating some continuity error from a decade ago, or extrapolating a major character's return from something an old actor said at a convention. The tenth hit will invariably be an unconnected article with a headline along the lines of "Colorado doctor who slept with dozens of his patients jailed". I'd still rather get my Doctor Who news this way, though. This is because there's one thing I don't ever have to deal with using my approach: seeing Tom Baker trending, and having to investigate to confirm that the worst has not happened. My FFOMO, my fan fear of missing out, does not cross that boundary. The news that one day is sure to come, and may it be a long way off, that Tom has passed on is news that I'm happy to miss out on for as long as possible. I didn't grow up with Tom Baker's Doctor. I first watched Doctor Who when he'd just left the role, and the first story I ever saw of his was his swansong Logopolis when it was repeated in late 1981. Yet, such is the significant impact Baker had on the show in his time in the title role and ever since, that I feel it is required to take stock in the Deeper Thoughts section now I've completed blogging all his stories.

I promise I won't make a habit of this in posts to come (I'm near the end now, so most blog posts from this point on will be finishing some era or other). But, completing Tom Baker's era - seven years, 41 (or 42) stories, 170+ episodes, the exact numbers will depend on whether you count Shada or not - is the biggest mountain in the range I have had to climb, and is worth dwelling upon for a while. As I mentioned above, I only got into Doctor Who after Tom had left the role, so my experience of watching his stories was in a random order, which I then emulated in the way I've watched every Doctor's stories for this blog. After the repeat of Logopolis, the main way for me to watch his stories was when they came out on VHS as part of the official range. That range was slow to get going, but when tapes did start to be released the majority of them were for those stories starring Tom Baker. The first story of his I saw on tape was Revenge of the Cybermen, and the first one I bought was Pyramids of Mars. As noted in the First Time Round section above, there were eventually other ways to see Baker stories for the first time; I did see a few from pirated videos, and watched a few on UK Gold. The one thing I never did after Logopolis was catch a Tom Baker repeat on the BBC. This was mainly because the Beeb kept showing the same story (Genesis of the Daleks) whenever they repeated one of Tom's ones, and I'd already watched it on video. I worked out when I blogged it that the final Tom Baker I watched was The Sun Makers, when that story was released on VHS in 2001, so it took me 20 years to view every part of Tom's Who oeuvre (or Whoeuvre, if you will).

It didn't take 20 years to rewatch all the stories randomly for this blog, but it was getting on for half as long. The first one to come up was The Armageddon Factor - not an auspicious start - which I blogged in July 2015; nine years and four months later, the job was done. Tom stories came up with a reasonable regularity in the years in between. It didn't take too long (up to October 2017) for the blog to land upon Tom's first ever story, as the chronometer flies, Robot - the Deeper Thoughts section of whose post contains my tribute to the man behind the scarf, including mention of the time I met and had a book signed by Tom (a tale I think I may have told elsewhere on the blog too - apologies, I'm an old man who sometimes repeats himself). It took a lot longer before I blogged his last ever story (and the first of his I ever saw) Logopolis. I finally blogged it in December 2021. I had a few surprising reactions to stories over the years; the most disappointing watch was probably Terror of the Zygons. I'd always enjoyed viewing the story, never seeing - until the watch for the blog in September 2021 - that the story falls apart half way through. The same team (writer, director and composer) worked on The Seeds of Doom, and second time round they manage to put off the point where things fall apart until late on in the final episode, so it's overall much better. The Robots of Death maintains its high quality with every watch, including the one in December 2022 for the blog; Horror of Fang Rock gets better every time I see it, and might well turn out to be my favourite Tom in a couple of viewings' time. Underworld is nowhere near as bad as you might think. All in all, this body of work is a decent legacy for the great man. Seeing as they'll seemingly let anyone have a go at being president (twice, even) no matter how manifestly unfit and unqualified they might be, I'd say let Mister Baker do it. Tom for President!  

In Summary:

It's got atmosphere, it's got pace, it's got engaging characters and a lot of incident... it just hasn't got an ending.

Terror of the Zygons

Chapter The 201st, which features a Cheviot, a stag and some black, black oil. And shape-changing orange embryo people. And the Loch Ness monster.

Plot:

Called back from his travels by the Brigadier using a space-time (plot) device, the Doctor along with Sarah and Harry arrives in Scotland. Something is destroying oil rigs in the area, and UNIT are investigating. A cast taken of damage to a recovered fragment of a rig seems to show it was inflicted by a giant sea monster. Harry is down by the coast looking for any survivors from the latest rig disaster, and finds someone washed ashore, but he is shot by a kilted sniper before he can tell Harry anything. Harry is grazed and knocked unconscious by a second shot, but is found and taken to the sick bay in the oil company's shore base. Sarah's at his bedside when he starts to come round; she phones the Doctor, but is attacked by a Zygon (who was disguised as a nurse - Zygons can transform into a copy of any human that they capture). Harry's abducted and taken aboard the Zygon space-ship, and learns that their plan involves a huge creature from their planet, the Skarasen, that lives in Loch Ness and has over the years been mistaken for the monster.

Disguised as Harry, one of the Zygons attempts to recover an organic homing device found on the remains of one of the rigs, and when they fail the Zygon leader Broton sets the Skarasen onto the Doctor, but Harry interfering with the ship's controls allows the Doctor to escape. Broton is disguising himself as the local Lord, the Duke of Forgill. When researching in the Duke's castle, Sarah and the Doctor discover a secret passage into the spaceship under Loch Ness. They rescue Harry, and the Doctor is then imprisoned in the ship for a while as it flies off for a new location (a quarry - where else?!). The Doctor sends a signal from the ship secretly, allowing UNIT to track him down, and sets off the self-destruct after freeing himself and the remaining captives that the Zygons held for duplication. Broton still lives, though, and his plan is to plant a homing device at an energy conference in London while disguised as the Duke, and get the Skarasen to attack the building in which will be many VIPs from around the world. The Doctor and his friends cleverly defeat Broton by having a fight with him, then shooting him. The Doctor throws the homing device into the Thames, the Skarasen eats it and satisfied swims back up to Loch Ness.

Context:

The Summer Bank Holiday towards the end of August in the UK is never far away from my birthday, which is nice - I get a state-sponsored long weekend to celebrate. I half remembered that 'last year' I chose a favourite Doctor Who to watch with the family as part of my celebrations, overriding the random choice and using a fair amount of emotional blackmail on the fam to make them watch with me or else spoil my big day! I was keen to turn this into a regular thing. However, when I checked, it turns out that it wasn't last year but three years ago that I last did this. On that occasion, I chose a new series story so this time I wanted a classic era one. I scoured the remaining stories and finally settled on Terror of the Zygons. It's not necessarily an overall favourite of mine, but it was the one favoured in that moment. Sat down to watch with the whole family (Better Half making a rare appearance in the living room for a Doctor Who watch, and all three kids - boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) from the DVD. We split the story in two, watching two episodes a day. We coincidentally finished on August 30th, the 46th anniversary of the debut broadcast of the story's first episode. Early on, the eldest child asked "Is that the Downs?" about the filming location, and he's not far off: all the Scottish settings were filmed in Sussex, with the quarry where the Zygon ship hides being as near to where we live as the previous record holder for filming close to the family home, Brighton beach (as seen in The Leisure Hive and Mindwarp).

First Time Round:

I can't remember the exact circumstances of getting the VHS tape (though that is definitely how I first saw it). I often forget the specific action and emotion of watching more recent Doctor Who stories, and even some of the tapes that came out in the mid to late 1990s when the VHS range was going strong. Terror of the Zygons, though, was released very early on in the late 1980s, before regular and effective distribution seemed to have been established, and when each tape stumbled across in W H Smiths or wherever was like a gift from the heavens. The Zygons story would have been the 8th or 9th tape in my collection. The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which came out at the same time (November 1988) I remember very clearly getting as a Christmas present that year, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get the Zygons story at the same time. As such, I probably bought it for myself, either just before or just after Christmas (maybe the latter, funded by some cash given to me by another relative). It most likely would have been purchased in Smiths in Worthing (my regular home town supplier later, Volume One, had not opened then) or it could have been in Bognor Regis, if I saw it in a shop when visiting my Dad. I remember the feeling of the first watch, if not the details, enjoying the great visuals and its evocative score. As all stories were at that time, the VHS presentation of Terror of the Zygons was edited together as one feature length piece. The full version with end credits, re-establishing the magnificent cliffhanger of episode 1, did not come out until over a decade later in August 1999. I remember getting that (I was living in Brighton by then, so would have bought it in MVC), and remember watching and feeling a bit disappointed: I'd watched the old version so many times that just having the beginning and end credits re-inserted didn't feel that special. There was a nice little contemporaneous clip of Tom Baker on Disney Time included though. 

Reaction:

I met Dan Hall in a pub once, back when he was commissioning editor of the Doctor Who DVD range and I was still screenwriting. It was a writers and producers' meet-up, but a lot of those present were fans and talk turned before too long to Doctor Who. I believe, though it was a reasonably beery night and a long time ago, so I may be misremembering, that he confirmed there something that I'd heard rumoured, that Terror of the Zygons was being held back to be the final DVD release of the range. I've mentioned a few times in previous blog posts how the VHS release concentrated on the most popular stories upfront to such an extent that the final couple of years of the range were disappointing for a great many collectors. Obviously, they wanted the DVD range instead to go out on something more of a bang than a whimper. It came to pass, sort-of: it was the last complete story released of the planned range - a couple of stories that needed time-consuming animations or reconstructions to bridge missing episodes followed on after, and then there were a couple of previously missing stories recovered and released later too. The release of the Zygon story was in October 2013, though it was available slightly earlier in a limited edition luxury box "The Fourth Doctor Time Capsule" accompanied by a lot of old tat. Clearly, the story was thought of as something popular and special to merit this treatment. Indeed, that's what I thought too when I selected it for my Birthday watch. I was half right.

The first two episodes of the story are excellent. The script is solid, despite depicting an excessively twee, shortbread tin lid version of Scotland; the very first line of dialogue mentions haggis, someone called Willie, and someone else who "doesnae ken" something; a few minutes later there's bagpiping, kilts and talk of tossing the caber, and it carries on in that style. Perhaps there's no other way to script a story centring on the Loch Ness monster. Focussing on an oil company's rigs and shore base at least was a more up-to-date topic North of the border in the 1970s. What makes this story and particularly the first section atmospheric is the direction by Douglas Camfield and the score by Geoffrey Burgon. The combination of both can be seen in the incredibly effective sequence where a sniper aims at Harry and the man he's rescued on the shore, and the music and the tension builds and builds. Camfield gets some particularly spine-tingling moments in the can elsewhere too: the hayloft pitchfork attack by the vicious Zygon-Harry, and the wonderful studio moment where the bagpipe drone cuts out just as Sarah is mocking the landlord's extra-sensory powers, before the Doctor tells her that they'd been listening to a lament for the dead. The sudden shocking cliffhanger for episode one too: an abrupt first glimpse of a Zygon before the credits roll, only there for an instant but seared into the imagination of every child watching.

Costume designer Jim Acheson delivers one of his many many iconic Doctor Who designs, and perhaps his best, with the Zygon suits. All production departments are giving their maximum, in fact, which creates a consistent visual identity as seen in the globby organic sets and props depicting the spaceship technology. All the performances are top notch. It's Ian Marter's best work, in both his two roles, and up there for Tom Baker too - enigmatic and brooding, but also witty and fun. Liz Sladen has less to do, but does what she's given very well. Nicholas Courtney and John Levene provide stalwart support as ever. The guest turns are great too. Lillias Walker as the sinister Sister Lamont ratchets up to Nurse Ratched levels. Broton is a great character, and John Woodnutt is great at playing him, as well as the subtly different takes on the Zygon-Duke and the real Duke. All of this quality, though, is masking a logical flaw in the story's set-up, at least at first; but, it can't be concealed as the piece develops and more details come to light. From episode 3, as good as are the direction, sets, score and everything else, it still starts to fall apart. The body-snatching Zygons are conceptually spies - quiet, gradual stealthy infiltration their stock in trade. Their Skarasen pet on the other hand is a weapon of mass destruction. It can chew through oil rigs and can't be stopped by nuclear weapons. The script tries very hard to create a plan that can involve both these very different approaches through the clumsy creation of a homing device that needs to be planted on a victim, but it's not very convincing.

The Zygons key power of impersonation is simply not needed when they have a monster that can eat buildings. They want to terrorise some bigwigs meeting for a conference, so Broton assumes the Duke's form to get in to the building. But he could just drop the homing device on the doorstep, and the creature would destroy everything around. It didn't leave much of the oil rigs unscathed after all. The focus on the oil company, which seemed so important in the first two episodes, is dropped instantly that the second half of the story starts. A key character Huckle is helping UNIT with the investigations, but from episode 3 disappears and is never mentioned again. The destruction of the oil rigs turns out to be a red herring, just a test of strength for the Skarasen, If so, why on Earth destroy more than one if it's going to put the humans on red alert? Why bug UNIT? Why pretend to be a nurse in the oil company's base, or a ghillie, or a lord? Why shoot the survivor of the rig? You have no need for stealth, Zygons, get down to London and use your unstoppable cyborg to take over the planet. The effects work of the climax in episode 4, with a puppet Skarasen head in front of a photo of the Thames, is rightly criticised, but the real shame is the premise running out of steam rather than the production finally running out of money. A tussle with Broton in a dingy basement was not the grand ending implicitly promised by the earlier scenes of his and the Doctor's confrontations. It's a shame as there are so many possibilities in both the Zygon concept, and in a story explaining the truth of the Loch Ness Monster. Trying to do both in the same story meant the potential of neither was realised.

Connectivity: 

Both Terror of the Zygons and Planet of the Dead were stories broadcast after a short gap since the last regular run, and both feature UNIT battling creatures - the Skarasen, the "Sky-rays" - that are armoured cyborgs (or at least part metal, the origin of the Tennant story's monster is unclear) with tough exteriors that are difficult to penetrate with Earth weapons.

Deeper Thoughts:

Predictive Textual Analysis. Terror of the Zygons famously contains a scene in the final episode where the Brigadier answers a phone call from the Prime Minister, and says "Yes, Madam". The story was made and broadcast in 1975 just after Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the opposition in the UK, but was supposed to be set later than that (in 1980, if one believes the dialogue in Pyramids of Mars, two stories later). It would be four more years after Terror of the Zygons was broadcast before Thatcher had won a general election and become the UK's first ever female PM, and so she was in power in 1980. Whether the writer or production team had this particular politician in mind or not, it was a good guess. Unfortunately, in a story a couple of years earlier the Brigadier had a phone call with a different Prime Minister called Jeremy, and that has not proved correct (at least not yet). It's somewhat rare for Doctor Who to predict the future with the accuracy demonstrated in Terror of the Zygons, though it got off to a good start. In the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, the Doctor's time traveller granddaughter Susan tells her suspicious teachers that she thought the UK used a decimal system of currency, but then remembered that it hadn't started yet. Decimalisation would eventually come in for the UK in 1971. It was probably an educated guess: a committee of enquiry had been set up by the government and reported on the feasibility of decimalisation in 1963, the year that An Unearthly Child was made and shown. From then on, though, the show's hit rate became decidedly variable.

The UNIT stories normally ignored their setting a few years in advance of broadcast altogether (and sometimes contradicted it, e,g. a price in pounds, shillings and pence being mentioned in dialogue in Doctor Who and the Silurians); when they did, they got it right about as often as they got it wrong. The Daemons predicted that the corporation would eventually stretch to providing a BBC3 channel, but alas imagined its output would be documentaries about archaeology much more suited to BBC4's remit (and both those two channels would have struggled to get a programme budget to cover a live outside broadcast at night). Battlefield predicted a five pound coin, car-phones and that a round of drinks in a bar would get very expensive, but also imagined that the UK would have a King before the end of the millennium.  Different stories over the years have predicted more general things that would eventually come, again extrapolating from the thinking of the day: The War Machines in 1966 presaged the internet, The Green Death in 1973 predicted Quorn products, Vengeance on Varos in 1985 depicted something not a million miles away from reality TV. Fear Her looked a few years ahead from its broadcast to the London Olympics in 2012. Characters watch TV on their laptops a lot in that story, which looked odd in 2006, but was exactly how I consumed my Olympics coverage when the day finally arrived. Had an unauthorised someone bent to pick up the torch and run with it to the stadium as the Doctor does, though, they'd have been jumped on by security before they'd made it as much as a metre.

As with continuity errors, areas where Who differs from the real world's events give rise to all sorts of fan and official creativity to explain them away. The main proposed theory for the near future depicted in the UNIT stories is that it is a parallel version of our own world, where the interference of aliens has impacted. Technology from the Cybermen in The Invasion, for example, was harvested after their defeat to accelerate the UK's space programme such that our little country can send multiple rockets into space c. the mid-1970s (as seen in The Ambassadors of Death). This theory fits neatly because, well, it's the truth, isn't it? What are stories except descriptions of parallel worlds like our own, but where something more interesting is happening? Since 2005, the new series has generally followed this theory, going as far as to depict Earth people or institutions (Torchwood, Henry Van Statten in Dalek) salvaging alien tech for gain, and ordinary punters becoming more and more aware of alien invasions. Too much divergence risks the audience's empathy, though: who cares about the events on a world that's too different from our own?  The series tends to periodically clear the decks to avoid this; Steven Moffat created a crack in time that undoes previous events, so Amy has no memory of the Daleks recently invading her world; the events of Terror of the Zygons ("the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster") are hinted to have been covered up such that Ace and her generation are oblivious to them - as established in Remembrance of the Daleks). The point of Doctor Who is ultimately not to predict the future but to depict the present with just a little bit of exaggeration, adding monsters that wreak havoc, be they Skarasens, Zygons or the UK's first ever female PM (little bit of politics there for you, ladies and gentlemen!).

In Summary:

Either have the Terror of the Zygons or The Loch Ness Monster, don't try for both or you'll split the difference. It's testament to some excellent work done by everyone on the production that the story almost achieves greatness despite this.

Planet of Evil

Chapter The 174th, in which space travellers are trapped on a planet that's... forbidden. Where can the inspiration possibly have come from?

Plot:

The Doctor and Sarah respond to a distress call, and land on the (sentient) planet Zeta Minor at the edge of  known space. A geological survey team from the planet Morestra has been scouring the planet for a crystalline power source that one of their number, Professor Sorenson, has hypothesised will solve their energy crisis. The planet, though, doesn't want him to take any samples away, as they are anti-matter somehow and will be destructive once they leave the somehow safety of Zeta Minor. It fights back in the form of semi-invisible Id monsters like in Forbidden Planet (but not so alike that anyone could get sued or anything). When the TARDIS and a Morestran rescue ship simultaneously arrive, Sorenson is the only member of the original team left alive. The Morestran military have unfortunately put an idiot in charge of the rescue, Salamar, who won't believe the Doctor is innocent no matter how much he helps out. The Doctor convenes with the sentient planet and agrees that all the anti-matter material will be returned. But Sorenson has smuggled some on board, and when the Morestran ship attempts to leave it is gradually dragged back to the planet. Sorenson starts to go all Jekyll and Hyde, turning into an anti-matter monster and killing people because ripping off Forbidden Planet can only get a story so far. The Doctor takes Sorenson and the anti-matter material back to Zeta Minor in the TARDIS, and this persuades the planet to let everyone go and return Sorenson to normal.

Context:

We started this one on the last weekend in November, completing the month having watched an episode of Doctor Who every week on Sunday afternoons. We in this case was the kids (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) and me, and the story was viewed from the DVD. After the first episode on the Sunday, it was then put on an episode a night over the next few nights. I suspect that our weekly ritual may be reaching its natural end, as the eldest bailed before the end of episode 1, and only the youngest joined me for the next episode. She watched it to the end, but is getting as cynical as her brothers with age, and kept shouting "Fake" at various effects shots. After four new series episodes in a row, I had been crying out for some classic Who, but the children obviously less so. A shame. Still the next one to come up is another new series episode, so we'll see what they make of that, if anything. Some sample comments: the youngest is still predicting who will die from one scene to the next, and celebrating when she's right; the middle child said that one death scene was "terrible acting" but said a zap gun fight was "Pog" (this means good, apparently). The eldest, when the exploration team were gathering up crystals in an early scene jokingly asked "Are they making a meth lab?" which makes me worry as a parent where he's picking this stuff up from! He promised it wasn't from personal experience. I hope not.

First time round:

I first got a glimpse of this story on The Tom Baker Years, a video presentation released in 1992 which featured Tom's reactions to clips from every one of his stories. A number of those stories hadn't been released on VHS yet at that time, despite the early years of the VHS range being weighted very heavily in favour of the fourth Doctor. To a Doctor Who fan eager to see every single moment of his favourite show, this made an impression. The choice of clips used was a little erratic to say the least; sometimes the excerpt was misrepresentative of the story as a whole, and so the impression it therefore made on me was prejudicial. I think I may have seen the clip from Planet of Evil in the context of the Tom Baker Years more often than I've seen it in situ within the four episodes proper. As I watched the moment where Salamar recklessly zaps the Mr. Hyde wolfman version of Sorenson, turning him into many invisible Id monsters, I was surprised that a little inset of 1990s Tom Baker laughing didn't appear in the screen, top right.

The clip from Planet of Evil did not showcase the magnificent jungle set, but the empty undetailed spaceship sets, it highlighted possibly the worst combination of make-up and effects work in the piece, and captured Tom Baker failing to get sufficient urgency in his performance: he's supposed to be chasing to stop a misguided attempt at heroism that's going to make the situation worse, but he literally strolls around the corridors, half-heartedly asking Salamar to stop. Production values and Tom himself are much better elsewhere in the story, but it was clearly felt preferable to show him a rubbish sequence and get a laugh out of him. I finally saw the better stuff surrounding that small clip when the VHS came out at the end of 1993, between Christmas and New Year. It was an odd release slot, but it happened occasionally in the early 1990s that videos would come out at the fag end of the year with no fanfare. I wasn't expecting the release, and if memory serves I saw it in Boots in Worthing and snapped it up, when out doing post-Christmas shopping.

Reaction:

The notion of the supergroup is always tantalising, but usually disappoints. I'm more of a pop than a rock fan, and the scope within that style of music for supergroups to be formed is probably less, but it does still happen. Electronic's first hit, Getting Away With it, is a fine song and one of my favourites, but is it as good as tracks by New Order, The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys and The Art of Noise (members of each of which were responsible for Getting Away with It)? No. Things are not often better than the sum of their parts. Planet of Evil is made by the era's go-to guys combo of director David Maloney and designer Roger Murray-Leach. The key persisting production team of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes favoured having these gentlemen in their respective roles perhaps more than any others. The two had not worked together on Who before, but in the previous season, the first of the Hinchcliffe / Holmes partnership, Maloney had directed the big story of the year, Genesis of the Daleks, and Murray-Leach have done breath-taking work creating the sets for The Ark in Space that were then re-used later in the season. The two of them with Hinchcliffe and Holmes would form a 1970s supergroup of sorts, producing very popular stories The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng Chiang the following year. This first effort, though, is not as well remembered, and frankly not as good.

The key difference would appear at first glance to be the script, Assassin and Talons were both written by Robert Holmes himself, and he's pretty much the master of classic Who. But Louis Marks' script for Planet of Evil is perfectly good, and very in-keeping with Holmes house style of the time. The story's roots are showing: the first two episodes are riffing on the 1950s CinemaScope sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, and the second half goes back a decade or two, with echoes of 1930s film adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Wolfman. The abrupt change of plundered source text midway through is a little jarring, but not much worse than something like Talons, which switches from Conan Doyle to Sax Rohmer to Phantom of the Opera and back again. The science of the narrative is bewilderingly hard to reconcile to the physical laws of our universe, but again this does not make it unique in Doctor Who's history by any means. Zeta Minor is on the edge of the universe, and is composed on anti-matter? Is that right? But it somehow exerts some force that allows anti-matter and matter to co-exist, but only within the immediate atmosphere of the planet. And the planet somehow senses that Sorenson and his team are after taking some anti-matter away, so they kill everybody else except the person whose plan it is to do that, let him live but change him into a monster? It isn't very convincing as science, but if one just adjusts to the simple truth that Zeta Minor = magic planet, then one can forget about it, and enjoy the story.

It's not the writing, and no other single contribution is particularly dragging things down. No, it's the dream team of Maloney and Murray-Leach just having an off-day. Even then, 50% of what they do in Planet of Evil is up to their usual high standard. The jungle sets of Zeta Minor are some of Murray-Leach's best work, and one of the best examples of set design and build done in classic Who. Unfortunately, the money has run out by the time he gets to the Morestran spaceship sets, which are used for a large proportion of the story. He gets to put in split levels with steps joining them, which is a favourite trick of his to provide a certain sense of scale; but, the walls are plain with hardly any detailing, and the few instrument panels are reused from stock, and also seem to be repurposed within the story too in different places. Maloney shapes an interesting if a bit hackneyed dynamic between the two main Morestran Space corps officers - the hotheaded inexperienced commander, and the more rational and experienced second-in-command. There's also some good eerie bits as our heroes walk through the mysterious undergrowth of Zeta Minor, and Elisabeth Sladen does her best 'frozen to the spot by ghostly power' acting.  Elsewhere, though, as noted above, there's a lack of energy in the performances.

It's not exactly bad. There's lots of individual aspects to pick out for kudos - the special sound, for example, stood out for me; I particularly liked the zap gun effects in this story. That might not be because it's better than usual, just because it's different. This is one of the rare classic stories from the early 1970s onwards where Dick Mills must have been on holiday and didn't do the sound design, instead it is Peter Howell - more known for being an incidental music composer for Doctor Who - doing that duty. There's some very good model work, it's lit well throughout, and the score by Dudley Simpson is fine. It's a solid story, but nothing much more than that.

 

Connectivity: 

Planet of Evil and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS both feature a location with something of a mind of its own that traps some acquisitive invaders who want to steal part of it, until they give that part back. In both, the monsters are transformed humans with a less defined and more lumpen shape. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Tears and Tiers. [Warning: contains spoilers for Revolution of the Daleks, but only facts that have been revealed as part of pre-publicity.] Planet of Evil is solid enough fare, but it doesn't spark off any deeper thoughts particularly, so I'll instead take a moment to look around at what's happening right now. It's a strange time. Before 2020, one could be fairly sure that the plot of a Doctor Who story would be more complex than going out to have a pub lunch, but not any more. The Better Half and I were lucky enough to both have a day off recently, after lockdown 2 had finished, and took the chance to have a socially-distanced one household indoor meal at a local inn. Our area is Tier 2 in the UK's new categorisation, as most areas are, and this presents complications. During our time there having a beer and a burger, we witnessed many confused punters grappling with the rules. A party of six were turned away at the door because, even though they all worked together, they didn't live together, so they could only eat and drink in the beer garden not inside, but it was too cold. Another couple was discussing what exactly constitutes a substantial meal which one must order alongside alcohol (one main meal or two side dishes were fine, one side dish on its own was not enough), and one man came to ask "If I sit on own outside, can I have just a drink without having to have food too?" (No). The only person who knew what he was doing was the bloke that was very, very slowly nursing the last of his sausage and mash while ordering pint after pint of Guinness.

No matter how convoluted Chris Chibnall makes the plot of Revolution of the Daleks, it will be a blessed island of simplicity in the tumultuous sea that is everyday life right now. I could do with such a thing, as the festive season - as it has been in the last few years - is overshadowed by external events. This year, there's a pandemic, last year was a December UK election that brought in a Godawful populist government with a massive majority, the year before that there was the looming deadline for the exit of the UK from the European Union with no deal in place, which would have meant chaos (oh hello, we have that in 2020 too!). It may be me seeing patterns in things that aren't there, but the world does seem to have got just a little bit less good overall since the Doctor Who festive special moved from Christmas Day to New Year's Day for its regular placement. Is this a demotion, or is New Year's now the more sought after slot? I'd previously have thought anyone claiming the latter was deluding themselves, but I just saw the planned BBC line-up for December 25th 2020, and it's very uninspired and uninspiring; so, maybe I was wrong.  The week's additional wait is probably worth it, so that Doctor Who can be in slightly better company in the schedule.

 

Though there won't be any pandemic happening in Doctor Who's world, it's still likely to be an emotional rollercoaster. In one of the worst kept secrets in recent Who history - second only to the fact that Captain Jack was returning for this story, which was flaming obvious from the off - two of the principal cast are saying goodbye. Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole, who play Graham and Ryan respectively, are bowing out at the end of the new year episode. If one had to pick one of the three companions to stick around, it would be Mandip Gill's Yaz. Graham and Ryan's story has been fully explored (was after one season, to be honest), and Yaz always felt like she wasn't getting the full spotlight. The series up to now has been structured around the four leads to such an extent that it'll be interesting to see how things change. I hope that they don't add more people to the TARDIS team. Having so many regulars from the off struck me as a sign of lack of confidence in Jodie Whittaker to carry the show as the Doctor. Needing to include one companion as audience identification is fine, as Doctor Who's always worked best like that. But the need to include an old bloke and a young bloke as well, presumably so everyone in the audience could feel represented, wasn't valid to my mind. I hope no-one on the production team or in the wider BBC will panic that the show has become the adventures of two women exploring space and time, as I for one would like to see that given a go. 

In Summary:

Solid, unspectacular Doctor Who, which - given the people involved in the production - is a little bit disappointing.

The Android Invasion

Chapter The 147th, where Tom Baker visits a pub several times (art imitating life?).

Plot:

The Doctor and Sarah arrive at what appears to be the village of Devesham, near a space centre where UNIT are currently based helping in the recovery of long missing astronaut Guy Crayford, who's returning from deep space (at least I'm assuming that's why UNIT are there - is it ever properly explained?). But the village is near deserted, and the people they do see are acting very strangely, and there's various hints that all is not right (all the coins they find are minted in the same year, a calendar only has one date over and over). The TARDIS team get split up after a attack by androids with motorcycle helmet heads and guns in their fingertips. The Doctor finds that Crayford is present in the space centre working with an alien race called Kraals who are creating androids copies of humans, including Harry and Sergeant Benton. Sarah makes her way back to the TARDIS, but sees the unmanned ship dematerialise and leave without her. Despite encountering android copies of each other, the real Doctor and Sarah are eventually reunited and realise that they are not on Earth, but are on the Kraal's planet: the village and space centre have been copied too, to act as a training ground for the androids.

Crayford, who has been brainwashed by Styggron, leader of the Kraals, is going to return to Earth in his spacecraft as a diversion, and the android copies will be shot to Earth in pods to aid the take over. The Kraals also plan to use a virus to wipe out all life on Earth (this doesn't make sense 100% but it's contractual that Terry Nation scripts must include a virus that wipes out all life). The Doctor and Sarah hitch a ride with the invasion fleet, and are shot towards Earth. Using the android version of himself to bamboozle his enemies, the Doctor stops the invasion. Crayford gets killed and Styggron falls foul of his own virus. The Doctor doesn't say a proper goodbye to Harry or Benton whom he'll never see again, and he and Sarah go off adventuring in the TARDIS once more.

Context:

This is a first for the blog I think. Started off watching part 1 (from the DVD) with all the children (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7), but the Better Half entered towards the end of the episode and was intrigued, believing she'd never seen this particular story before. So, we had to repeat the experience a few days later, watching the first episode again, but amazingly, all the children re-joined us second-time round, and with just as much enthusiasm as first time. Thereafter, the family watched the remaining episodes on occasional evenings over the course of a week approximately. I made an effort to increase the mystery by not telling the kids anything about the story, and blocking the screen when the title came up at the start of the first episode. But on seeing the very first moments of action as the twitchy UNIT soldier walks straight toward camera, the youngest said "That's not a real person", and the middle child said "Yes, it's a robot". So, perhaps a longstanding criticism of this story - that its prosaic title gives too much away - is unfair, as it's clear the story is intending its audience to be clued in from the off. Everyone very much enjoyed this story, including me, which I have to say was a surprise as its reputation is of being under par - more on that in a moment. 

First time round:

I first remember seeing the novelisation in my primary school's library when I was a kid, so probably read it at one point in the early 1980s, though I remember nothing more than the cover: it was a good drawing, and the mysterious figures holding the Doctor wearing motorcycle helmets would likely have intrigued. The depiction of lead Kraal Styggron was rather better - and certainly greener - than it was on the telly box too. The first time I got to see the episodes would have been in March 1995 when they were released on VHS. This was one of the first pair of new releases that year (the other coming out at the same time was Carnival of Monsters), and both were the first to come with a free postcard of the cover art, which was a gimmick that they ran with for the next year. As per my standard behaviour pattern at that time, I would have purchased it in Volume One, an independent book and video store in Worthing, on its day of release.

Reaction:

This story comes from a period that to many fans is the golden age of Doctor Who: Tom Baker as the bescarfed Doctor - cheeky but commanding, and now fully settled in after his first year - travelling the universe with Sarah Jane Smith, righting wrongs. When they both step out in part one of his story, they do look amazing on screen together, and the chemistry between them makes them one of the most iconic of teams to ever helm the TARDIS. This particular story, though, is not necessarily as well regarded. The stories either side of The Android Invasion as originally broadcast, Pyramids of Mars and The Brain of Morbius, were the second and third Doctor Who VHS releases ever, coming out in the mid 1980s, a period when BBC Video had decided that stories where Tom Baker righted wrongs, usually accompanied by Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane, were what the public wanted. Why is it that The Android Invasion never comes near the top of any polls, is never included in the list of classics from this era, and did not see the light of day on tape until 10 years later?

One theory is that the story's undermined by any mystery regarding the antagonist being blown by the title. Writer Terry Nation has form in this regard, with all his 1970s stories featuring his creations, Skaro's finest, named in the giveaway "Something of the Daleks" format. But here, the mystery of the story is clearly not intended to be that androids feature, which is confirmed early on (and is obvious from the first moments if my children's reactions - see above - are anything to go by). The real mystery is about the village, and the odd clues found there; the big reveal is that the TARDIS has landed on an alien planet and not the sleepy English countryside at all. And that mystery and that reveal are a perfect fit for the audience of Doctor Who, particularly the younger ones, to enjoy. The scenes of the eerie deserted streets and buildings of Devesham are great, and the moments of all the impassive robotic villagers are pretty creepy. The similarly blank-faced motorcycle helmet androids are visually arresting too, and the finger guns are a nice touch, easy for kids to emulate in the playground. Tom Baker gets to gently tease the concept - "Is that finger loaded?" - without undermining it. The Kraals look good, though there's only two of them. Nation unshackled from having to deliver yet another Dalek story has produced some good work. Overall, the story's got a lot going for it.

Perhaps the story is overlooked because it is something of a throwback. The presence of UNIT regulars, and the direction of Barry Letts (producer of the stories of Tom Baker's predecessor as the Doctor, Jon Pertwee) means it is quite backward looking at a point where the show was striding out into new territory. In the later years of Pertwee's time, with the narrative reason given that the Doctor's freedom to travel in time and space had been returned to him, the Earthbound stories where the Doctor worked with UNIT were being gradually reduced in number, and fewer and fewer of the previous ensemble cast of regulars were appearing in them. Letts' successor as producer Philip Hinchcliffe seemed happy not to make major changes to the format, but it seems clear that the stories that travelled the universe were the priority and nobody's heart was fully in making more old school tales. This is the second UNIT story of Hinchcliffe's producer-ship and arguably the last (the later story The Seeds of Doom is nominally a UNIT one, but contains no returning regular cast, and the soldiers in it, who only arrive towards the end of the story, could be any fighting force).

It's such a shame that the Brigadier gets no proper send-off, and instead is represented by an empty office with his name on it occupied by a hastily cut-and-pasted in replacement. Actor Nicholas Courtney wasn't available for The Android Invasion, and instead the crudely similar but nuance-free character of Colonel Faraday appears (who coincidentally seems to be performed almost exactly like Peter Glaze's take-off of the Brig in the Crackerjack Who pastiche skit "Hallo my Dalek" which aired a few months before The Android Invasion was broadcast). Being available and in the show doesn't protect a character from having a rubbish send-off either. Ian Marter as Harry Sullivan and John Levene as Sergeant Benton both appear, but don't have much to do, certainly no big heroics, in their final outings, and disappear by the end quite abruptly. Of course, it was likely that nobody necessarily thought they were going to be their final outings at the time. This isn't that big a deal, and certainly is no explanation for why this serial is undervalued, it's just a shame, that's all. The best inclusion from the previous era is Letts himself, who manages some impressive material here, particularly the generous amount of film used, but also some subtle use of green-screen to make things look more expensive and expansive than the budget allowed.

One final stick that's often used to beat The Android Invasion is the ridiculousness of the Crayford eyepatch subplot. Milton Johns, in one of his many Doctor Who appearances, plays Crayford as earnestly grateful for the rebuilding of his broken body after his rescue by the Kraals from his spacecraft crash. The only part of him that could not be reconstructed is his eye, covered with an eyepatch until near the end. There is, though, nothing wrong with Crayford. People think it stretches credibility that he hasn't checked at any point to see if his eye still works - but the script clearly states that he's been brainwashed. That's not to say there isn't silliness in the plot, but for some reason the focus is on the eyepatch when in fact it's everything else that doesn't make sense. Styggron's plan is to distract Earth with the return of a missing astronaut, and fire androids to Earth in pods to take over in key positions. But his plan is also to destroy all humans with a virus. He really doesn't need both plans, and they conflict with one another. If the pods containing androids will just be mistaken for meteorites, then why does he need the misdirection of Crayford's return? He could just fire the pods to Earth without putting monitoring on alert for a returning spacecraft - which could, after all, endanger the plan - freeing him up to be able to kill the weak link that is Crayford. Or, assuming he needs a ship to get close enough to launch the pods, then why not just make an android copy of Crayford to pilot the ship and speak to mission control? It would be more efficient than brainwashing, and the technology clearly exists to make it happen. Then, if he could use all his supposed Kraal genius to work out a way to just shoot the virus to Earth in the pods, he could cut out the need for any other androids, and all that faff training them up for so long. Evil geniuses, they never learn: keep it simple.

Connectivity: 

The Android Invasion and The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone both feature a Doctor travelling with a single female companion, plus the inclusion of a semi-regular character first introduced with a previous Doctor.

Deeper Thoughts:

Double History. The Android Invasion is one of a rich seam of Doctor Who stories, from throughout its lifetime, that fall in to a particular category: rip-offs of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This Doctor Who story - with its sinister versions of familiar people emerging from pods - is pretty blatant, but it's only one of many, many examples. A couple of classic monsters - the Autons and the Zygons - are wholly built around the duplication and substitution method cribbed from Body Snatchers, and a couple of others have dabbled (the Sontarans used their cloning tech to make a fake Martha in The Sontaran Stratagem, the Daleks made a robot copy of the Doctor in The Chase that even looked like him from some angles). In the lower monster divisions, the Chameleons were the first Body Snatcher types to appear in the series, and Axos had a go copying Bill Filer. Then there was Sharaz Jek making android copies of people in The Caves of Androzani, and the various android makers of Tara doing similar (in The Androids of Tara) and probably many more that I've forgotten.

Doctor Who loves a doppelgänger (oh yes, of course, I forgot the Gangers from The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People, I knew there were more!). There's a few obvious reasons why; it allows a regular actor to play someone different, and usually evil, to demonstrate their range, or prevent them getting bored. In the early days, this didn't require much plot reconciliation beyond just throwing in a massive coincidence. William Hartnell got to play his double the Abbot of Amboise in The Massacre, and Patrick Troughton Salamander in The Enemy of the World, with no need for any clever trickery on anyone's part; the characters just happened to look exactly like their respective Doctors. By the time of later original series examples - Tom Baker as Meglos, Peter Davison as Omega - this clearly wouldn't wash, so some technobabble about copying body prints or some-such was tossed in. 21st century Doctor Who allowed its star to flex his acting muscles only a couple of times, with Matt Smith playing a copy of the Doctor in the aforementioned Ganger episodes, and David Tennant becoming two subtley different versions of the Doctor in Journey's End. Tennant memorably also got to play John Smith, a completely different character, in Human Nature / The Family of Blood. But, as both characters occupy the same body in that story it's not quite the same, and is more like a character possessed (another trope Doctor Who loves to do) than a dopplegänger situation.

The other main reason for lookalikes appearing in Doctor Who is not so much arising from the plot as it is a quirk of casting on a long-running show: the 'haven't I seen you somewhere before' factor. In the 20th century, this was just one of those things and didn't warrant explanation or even comment for the most part. As mentioned above, Milton Johns played several guest roles on Doctor Who over the years without rationalisation in the script, as did Bernard Horsfall, Micheal Sheard, Philip Madoc and loads of others. No one batted an eyelid when this happened with regulars either: Peter Purves and Ian Marter played different characters before they became companions Steven and Ian respectively, and Jacqueline Hill played a different character later without the Doctor commenting that she was the dead spit of his old friend Barbara.  Even a Doctor (Colin Baker) was cast after having been in the series in a guest role the previous year. It's only with the post 2005 stories that it becomes necessary to hang a hat on this with some exposition: Eve Myles and Freema Agyemen's one-off characters were mentioned as being related to the regulars they later played. Peter Capaldi, cast like Colin Baker as Doctor after an earlier guest role, has picked the face deliberately to remind him to be kind or something. The only one I can think of that's never been explained is why Karen Gillan was in ancient Pompeii before becoming regular character Amy Pond. But as current showrunner Chris Chibnall has expressed a desire to bring Pond back it's not too late. Just as long as a plot tidying up some age old continuity can tempt Karen Gillan back from Hollywood paychecks and budgets, it can't fail! 

In Summary:

Unfairly overlooked - this is a lot of (silly) fun.