Some stories have one or two poor special effects in them, which you
can easily gloss over, and which do nothing to spoil your enjoyment of them.
Then there are others where, for some strange reason, it is only that poor shot
that you ridiculed at the time which stubbornly refuses to remove itself from
the dump bin of memory, and dominates your recollections of the whole story.
Another example would be the Action Man Scorpion tank used in “Robot” next
season, and Dobbin the Myrkka in “Warriors of the Deep” in season 21. We’ll get
to them in due course.
So, look, we already know that the Dinosaurs in this show aren’t at
all good. That probably upset me more than it should when I first watched it,
since there were a number of things I was really into during the Jon Pertwee
era of the show. Manned spaceflight was one of them, and so were dinosaurs, and
so that’s maybe an explanation of why I can’t hear the words “Invasion of the
Dinosaurs” without the phrase – bad dinosaurs, bad dinosaurs- playing on a loop
through my head for a while. So what I’m hoping for from this particular
viewing, is a chance to assess this story for the story, rather than the
effects. At the moment I have it filed in my memory in the cabinet marked ‘crap
Doctor Who stories’ and I would hate for it to have to remain there a moment
longer than is necessary, not least because this is Malcolm Hulke’s last story.
After Watching
Was it hubris which made the Barry Letts production team
go ahead with this story? I’ll explain why I ask. For pretty much the whole of
the Pertwee era, when the special effects have been bad, they have got away
with them, simply because they’ve never tried telling you they’re any good.
There’s this tacit understanding along the lines of – look, we’re going to do the
best we can to show you the things we need to show you for the story. Some of
it, frankly, isn’t going to be brilliant, but it’s the best we can do, and
you’ll forgive us for it. – Now, if you call a story “Invasion of the
Dinosaurs” it’s not simply a case of -
oh and by the way there’s a dinosaur in it – as was the case with season 7’s
“The Silurians”. No, you highlight the dinosaurs in the title, and you’re
basically saying – Hey – look, we’ve got some dinosaurs. . . and they’re good
enough that we want to shout about it!-
And the problem is, they’re not.
So how bad are the dinosaurs in this? Well, being fair
there’s only two really bad ones. Unfortunately these are the first we see, the
pterodactyl, and the most foregrounded dinosaur the T-Rex. Well, that’s what
they call it, although frankly it really didn’t look like any reconstruction of
a T Rex that I’ve ever seen. Let’s start with the pterodactyl. I’m afraid that
time has certainly withered this one, and custom staled. It doesn’t matter how
skilfully you film it, but a rubber pterodactyl dangling on a wire will always
look like a rubber pterodactyl dangling on a wire. Now, none of the land bound
dinosaurs moves particularly well, but at least the sauropod, stegosaurus and
triceratops look halfway decent. The sauropod is actually called a brontosaurus
by the Doctor – he should have known that not long after the story was filmed
pretty much everyone would stop calling this species by that technically
inaccurate name, and switch to Apatosaurus. Not that this would be a problem
for me if that was the only complaint about the dinosaurs. But as I say, the
incidental dinosaurs don’t move at all well, but the models really aren’t bad.
But the would-be T-Rex, well, I’m sorry but it’s god-awful, and it keeps popping
up all over the story, virtually immobile apart from its pathetic twitching
arms.
Now, this is going to sound contrary, but in a way I
think the dinosaur deficiencies would matter less if they were more important
to the story. That’s not a typing error.
When you boil it down, the dinosaurs are in the story for one reason
really, and that is to provide spectacle. When they fail to do this because of
the shortcomings of the models used, and their animation, then their inclusion
is worse than pointless, it is a definite failure. We don’t need dinosaurs in
order for the plot to work. The villains bring dinosaurs into the present day
for two reasons – to test their equipment presumably, and to scare the
authorities into evacuating London. Well, they could do the same thing just s
easily by, for the sake of argument, bringing some plague rats from the 1665
plague. Yes, they would kill a lot of people, but hey, they were going to die,
or should I say, to never have existed in the first place, so who loses? As a
rule, more often than not the show is very aware of what it can and can’t do,
but in terms of effects this is a prime example of the show overreaching
itself. In practice the dinosaurs it could produce did not provide the
spectacle the title promised.
The sad thing is that all of this is a distraction from
what is actually important about this story – the ideas behind the script, the
script itself, and the way that the cast deliver the script. Let’s start with
the ideas behind the script. The Doctor and Sarah return from their medieval
avdventure with Linx the Sontaran to find modern day London deserted. This is
nicely done, and evokes fond memories of both “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and
“The Web of Fear”. The deserted city is a Science Fiction trope I’ve always
enjoyed. Their first inkling that someone is maybe monkeying around with Time
is the encounter with the pterodactyl. The dinosaurs appear, seemingly out of
nowhere. They have in fact been gathered by a piece of equipment, a machine
invented by a Professor Whitaker played by the excellent Peter Miles. He was
Dr. Lawrence in Malcolm Hulke’s earlier “The Silurians”, and next season will
play Nyder, Davros naziest henchman in “Genesis of the Daleks”. Would the name
Whitaker be a sly reference to David Whitaker, I wonder? Whitaker and his
associate Butler, played by Martin Jarvis in suitably oleaginous and nefarious
form, under the aegis of Sir Charles Grover MP and General Finch, are putting
into practice a scheme. This firstly involves the evacuation of London, and the
removal of the Government to Harrogate – which is achieved through the dinosaur
apparitions. Secondly, they will use the machine to make the Earth regress in
time millions of years. He has several hundred people, many of whom are stored
in suspended animation, who believe that they are on a spaceship heading to a
planet they have dubbed ‘New Earth’ to start a new civilization since what’s on
the old one is going so rapidly down the toilet. When they have regressed the
Earth, then these people will be told they have landed, and will start to build
a society which will avoid the mistakes of the past.
Ok – well, it doesn’t do too much to over analyse sci fi
ideas behind and adventure story, but it seemed to me when I watched it that this
scheme would be a classic example of the grandfather paradox. If that doesn’t
ring a bell, a simple way of explaining it would be this. One day you invent a
time machine. You go back in time and materialise on top of your own
grandfather, crushing him to death before he ever met your grandmother. This
means that your father was never born, which in turns means that you were never
born. This means that you never invented a time machine, so you didn’t go back
in time, so your grandfather did survive, so your father was born, so you were
born, so you went back in time and accidentally killed your grandfather etc.
etc. So if Grover’s lot went back in time, this would condemn pretty much the
whole population of the earth never to have been born – and, although I didn’t
hear anybody mention it on the show, which is a bit strange considering that as
flaws in plans go it’s a bit of a biggie – condemning Grover and Butler and
Whitaker’s own ancestors never to have been born – with predictable
consequences.
Well, leaving that to one side, when the crazed Whitaker
does activate the machine, everyone seems to be caught, frozen in time, except
the Doctor. Being a Time Lord it seems that he has the ability to move outside
of time, albeit very slowly. Jon Pertwee mimes moving in slow motion to turn
the switch off. This section reminded me a little of the pretty much
contemporary Six Million Dollar Man TV series, when Lee Majors would mime
moving in slow motion to show off how strong he was. Look, I was only ten years
old at the time and it made sense to me. This isn’t inconsistent with
everything that has gone before – we know that the Doctor can exist within the
Time Vortex for example, from “The Time Monster”.
So the ideas beind the story are pretty much hokum. The idea
of the deluded elite within the ‘spaceship’ reminded me a little bit of the
people kept in the bunker by Salamander in “The Enemy of the World”. There’s a
level of predictability about it as well. I couldn’t remember that much about
the story, but as soon as we met Sir Charles Grover, even though the Doctor
seemed quite taken with him, being that kind of establishment figure who either
muck everything up for everyone, or are downright villains in this era of the
show, I knew he was the chief black hat. At least, well, at least it wasn’t
overtly through megalomania, which is a welcome departure from a lot of what
we’ve seen, but through a misguided, in fact downright twisted messiah complex.
So, we have a story which relies on the showcase effects
to provide spectacle, which they singularly fail to do. We have a storyline
with a couple of gaping plot holes. Yet for all that “Invasion of the
Dinosaurs” is not a grade A oven ready turkey – and it’s turned out that even
the least good Pertwee stories never tend to be that. What stops it from
becoming that particular avian, then? Well, the regulars have some pretty good
back up in the guest cast. I’ve already mentioned Peter Miles and Martin Jarvis
. Completing the baddies there’s a fine performance from Noel Johnson as
Grover, while John Bennett’s Finch was an interesting sort of Anti-Brigadier.
Even amongst the cameo parts we had Carmen Silvera, last seen, I think, giving
her all on the sinking ship the RMS Celestial Toymaker, who played Ruth, one of
the leaders of the elite aboard the ‘spaceship’. As for the regulars, I felt his was the story
where Sarah Jane really started to become the Sarah Jane we all ( well I do)
know and love. She’s treated like a spare part for the first three episodes,
but once she leaves the Doctor and goes off to investigate by herself she’s
just as brave, feisty and gutsy as Jo Grant ever was – and – sorry Jo, quite a
bit smarter too.
I suppose we should end with a comment on the betrayal
by Richard Franklin’s Mike Yates. Yates never really worked for me in UNIT. He
was neither one thing nor the other, and I have to say that Richard Franklin
never seemed to have the greatest range either. On a good day he could run the
full gamut of emotions from A to B. I’m afraid that when asked to play out of
his range in this story, that is, to show the treacherous Yates’ crisis of
conscience when Butler or Finch asks him to sabotage the Doctor’s equipment, he
frankly looks rather constipated.
So farewell, then , Malcolm Hulke. If you look at all
the stories he wrote or co-wrote –
The Faceless Ones
The War Games
The Silurians
The Ambassadors of Death (credited to David Whitaker)
Colony in Space
The Sea Devils
Frontier in Space
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
- it’s quite a body of work, all of it thoughtful, some
of it very good, and all of it a cut above the average. Thanks Malcolm.
Helicopter Watch
At one point the Doctor is giving the slip to General Finch’s men, and is tracked by a small,
fast army helicopter
What Have We Learned?
The Time Lords
only care when other Time Lords use a Time Scoop. When humans use the
equivalent, they couldn’t give a stuff.
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