The A-Z of Classic Who | Invasion of the Dinosaurs: The Road to Hell Paved with Dinosaur Droppings

We return once again to the work of Literal Communist Malcolm Hulke, in fact his final piece of work for the TV series, and a it is a story that has, if you can even believe it coming from Comrade Hulke, quite a lot of political themes and messaging. I know, I'm shocked as well.

Unfortunately, Invasion of the Dinosaurs is not a hugely impressive outing for Comrade Hulke to depart from the series on. While it does a lot right, particuarly in regards to character work, the overall premise is silly and contrived and Hulke seems to have given up even his token attempts to make the political messaging subtle. It's also let down by some egregiously poor special effects, even for the time, which the story has become somewhat notorious for. Nevertheless, there's a lot more to it than crap special effects - although not all good.

wassup

Before we take a proper look at the story, I should mention an important alphabet-related coincidence. Last time we looked at Inferno, a Pertwee story badly affected by the Standard Issue BBC Flamethrower™, while this time we look at Invasion of the Dinosaurs, a Pertwee story badly affected by the Standard Issue BBC Flamethrower™. I don't make the rules, I just follow them.

While Inferno suffered from poor quality throughout, however, parts 2-6 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs do exist on their original broadcast tapes. Part One does not, which is where the problem arises. The original tape was wiped not long after broadcast - it has been theorised that because Part One of this story is called just Invasion (in order to preserve the reptile surprise) the tape was wiped after being mistaken for an episode of the Troughton story The Invasion, the 16mm film copies of which were being junked around the same time. Why the Flamethrower Attendant would make such a mistake is left to the reader to decide. Whether that's true or not, the original tape doesn't exist any more, and in fact it was, for much of the early 1980s, the only Pertwee episode not to exist at all. The Abzorbaloff returned a 16mm black and white film copy of the episode in 1983, which remains the master copy of the episode to this day.

During the late 2000s and 2010s, black and white Pertwee episodes from The Ambassadors of Death, The Mind of Evil and Planet of the Daleks were being colourised using a process known as chroma-dot restoration, where colour information in the black and white print is extracted. This was tried on Part One of this story, but the poor quality of the print meant that the resulting colour episode was of poor quality. And that's where we get to the 'lowering viewer enjoyment' bit.

Sarah was dismayed to find half her face had become black and white

The DVD gives you the option to choose whether you want black and white or the crap colour. I chose the crap colour for this viewing and found it a mixed bag - it always looked washed out but sometimes the colour information seems mostly intact. But then you get instances like the picture above where it just takes you straight out of it. It's a shame they couldn't have plumped for a manual recolourisation but I suspect the BBC were being tight fucks the money wasn't available for such an endeavour. It's not as a big of a problem as Inferno though for three reasons - one, this is obviously on the first episode and not the whole story; two, this is hardly a great example of Doctor Who and so its not being dragged down much anyway and three, the first episode is easily the worst of the lot and not much is missed if you just skip it.

"Sgt Benton, the colours gone all wonky!"

So why is this first episode crap? Well that's another multi-paragraph explanation in the making, so I'll just boil it down as 'there were a lot of six-parters in the Pertwee era and most of them were pretty padded; this one is no different.' Yes, this era more than others depended on the unwieldy six-part format, which led to most stories needing extra material shoved in to make up the run time - see Comrade Hulke's Frontier in Space for a good example that we've already covered. Here the first episode is just a 25-minute attempt to set up the mood of the piece... which fails pretty badly. The first half of the episode is painfully slow and doesn't really manage to convey the atmosphere its trying to go for, while the second half is just a rehash of the beyond dull 'Doctor and companion get arrested for crime they haven't committed and need to escape', which is completely pointless as the Brigadier just gets them off in the next episode.

So, yeah, the first episode is just a giant waste of time with very little bearing on the rest of the plot, so if one episode had to get set on fire, I'm glad it's that one and not the rest of the story which is an improvement. But it's still not great.

"Never mind the dinosaur, shoot the tree!"

The first, and most notorious, problem with the story are the very poor special effects for the dinosaurs. If I've said it once I've said it a million times and I'll say it again - if you expect good special effects form classic Who then nine times out of ten you will be disappointed, but even for Classic Who this looks very shit. There isn't a good shot of a dinosaur in the entire story - not only are the models very unconvincing on their own, the way they are integrated into the story looks even worse - see above for the soldiers shooting at completely the wrong thing. It's honestly quite painful to watch at times - they look about a hundred times worse than the Drashigs from Carnival of Monsters, which was a year before this. What makes them even worse though is a storyline problem - it's that the dinosaurs that inhabit the story's title and provide it with its main gimmick but in terms of the central storyline, they are... irrelevant.

The dinosaurs serve the story by lumbering onto the screen every so often, usually to set up a cliffhanger, or to put our heroes in mortal danger. That's basically it - they don't serve a function regarding the actual story regarding Operation Golden Age, apart from the pretty flimsy excuse that they're using the dinosaurs to make the authorities evacuate London. I can't help but thinking there are better ways of turning evacuating London, ways that draw rather less attention to the weirdness of what you're doing, but sure, whatever, if that's the writers excuse for dropping dinosaurs in central London, then who am I to complain.

It's baffling because the central story itself has almost nothing to do with dinosaurs - it's really about pollution, technology and political extremism. And it's not like prehistoric reptiles are something Hulke is unfamiliar with - he invented the Silurians after all. For their introductory story, the reptiles were the most important cog in the story's machinery, an important reflection of the faceless enemy of the Soviet Union and a complex and sometimes sympathetic enemy to contrast with the humans representing the failures of modern British society. In this story, the dinosaurs go rawr.

rawr

So it's pretty poor that the dinosaurs are basically irrelevant to the plot and with a tightening up to four episodes you could probably remove them altogether. But then again, what potential is there really in dinosaurs in Doctor Who? They're mindless monsters, and compared with, for instance, the Drashigs, another race of mindless monsters, they'll always pale in comparison, because Drashigs are a cool science-fiction monster with awesome sound design, and not just useless monsters that go rawr. Just look at NuWho's attempt at a dinosaur story - Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, by Chris 'I somehow got the job as showrunner' Chibnall. It's precisely as good as the title indicates - i.e abysmal.

Anyway, enough of grinding that particular grudge. What about the rest of Invasion of the Dinosaurs?

The failure to utilise the dinosaurs in any real way wouldn't be as much of a problem if the rest of the story was good enough to move past it, but it isn't. The central idea of an enviromentalist organisation wanting to roll back time to the pre-industrial age, and conning impressionable people into thinking they're off on a space journey when really they're cooped up in a basement until they can repopulate a regressed Earth is actually a good one - it shows not only the lure of idealistic utopian politics and its consequences for those taken in, but also the dangers of political extremism taken to its ultimate form - lunatics ranting about how un-existing billions of people is the right thing to do. Given Hulke's history in and disillusionment with the Communist Party of GB, well, it's difficult not to draw the conclusion he's drawing from his own experiences just a bit. However, Hulke also makes sure the overall message of the piece is pro-environmentalism - while Grover, Whittaker, etc. are all murderous lunatics, the dangers of ignorance regarding the environment are also highlighted. He just wants to make it known that extremism to the extent of what the villains are doing is not the solution, instead using the Doctor's staple pacifism and scientific grounding to challenge it. He makes it clear the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that's a great central theme for this story. 45 years later, I think it's safe to say Hulke wouldn't be overly impressed with the progress we've made. But I digress.

So the central ideas are sound, but the story falls apart on the details. Problem number one is that the villains are poor. (Apart from Yates, who's a semi-regular and probably doesn't count anyway) they are generic, unsympathetic, have poor motivations and aren't memorable in... any way really. 

The three entries to the 1974 Worst Hairstyle Competition eagerly await the results

Sir Charles Grover is a very dull bureaucrat who never gives much reason why he's turned into a murderous lunatic and who's true allegiances are painfully obvious from the moment he arrives on screen, yet the story insists on pretending that it's a great mystery as to who is working for the baddies. Professor Whittaker has the benefit of being played by the always excellent Peter Miles but unlike his other two parts for the show, Whittaker is a one-note, dull mad scientist with very little in terms of shades of gray. General Finch barely even registers apart from a plot device as Obstacle to the Brigadier Being Able to Help The Doctor #474743903. They are painfully weak and it undermines the strength of the central ideas that the extremists we're supposed to see as dangerous to their own ideal are just boring idiots.

The crew of the 'ship', i.e the people being conned into thinking they're heading to a new planet to escape the polluted Earth blah blah blah, are all exceptionally boring and verge on quite annoying at times. The idea was to make them gullible but well intentioned people conned by high ideas and charismatic (supposedly anyway; sir Charles couldn't charm his way out of a paper bag) persuasion, but they instead come across as idiotic zealots, blinded by their ideals, acting totalitarian when Sarah disagrees with them and acting like a bunch of smug superior arseholes. They aren't likeable in any way and dampen any sympathy they might have received from the audience.

Oh, speaking of which, this story has my pick for the Worst Villain Plan in a Doctor Who Story Award, when the baddies decide the best way of getting Sarah out of their hair is to put her inside the 'spaceship' room and integrate her with the volunteers, even though a blind squirrel should be able to see that, at best, she would cause some trouble and discord, and at worst, would unravel the entire plan and reveal the sham to the volunteers, which of course, actually happens. You'd really think villains who want to un-exist billions of people wouldn't be averse to just shooting her, or if that's too beyond the pale for them, just conking her on the head and sticking her in a cupboard until she stops existing. It's a bafflingly awful plan and just reinforces how bad the villains of this story are.

The dinosaur was dismayed to find the Circle line suspended due to planned engineering works

The other problem with the political messaging is that Hulke has given up trying to be subtle with it. It worked wonderfully in Doctor Who and the Silurians when the analogy of British society at the beginning of the seventies was subtly buried under a strong sci-fi plot. It works less well here when the message is basically just told to us flat out by the Doctor. It's unfortunate as the central ideas and messaging work pretty well as I said, it's just portrayed in a way that robs it of some of its power. But it's not as big of a problem as the poor supporting characters.

Or indeed the other big problem with the story - that it's overlong, flabby and padded. I've already mentioned the superflous first episode, but there are more than a few plot threads that go nowhere and it moves along at a crushingly dull pace. For instance, the Doctor is suspected of a crime, arrested and escapes at least twice throughout the story, and Sarah has to explain to the volunteers how they're all gullible morons at least twice as well. It's difficult not to see the six-parter format as the problem here - a tidied up four parter would have been much better, but alas, it just comes across as boring and unfocused. 

So, are there any positives? Well, yes I already mentioned the strength of the overall themes but there's another thing - the character work around the leads.

First of all, the Third Doctor's character was well established by this point, but this story does a good job of exemplifying his anti-establishment streak and using it to present him as an effective counterpoint to the villains. He remains sympathetic with their motivations because of that, but not with their actions and this presents him as a good neutral for the audience to identify with. He's also got this fantastic blue jacket throughout the story which is easily the best variant of his costume. So there's that.

"Come on Doctor, you didn't lose the arm wrestle THAT badly"

This is also a good story for Sarah-Jane Smith. This is only her second outing but she aptly demonstrates the proactive, determined and courageous, uses her journalistic skills to the advantage of the heroes and does manage to convince the useless zealots in the 'ship' that they are being conned, playing her own role in the resolution of the story. Because she acted like a bit of a prat in The Time Warrior, I think it's fair to say that the Sarah we all know and love today was more or less born in this story. It's a great outing for her. Unfortunately for those watching in chronological order, Death to the Daleks is next, which undoes all of that, but I can hardly hold that against this story.

The Brigadier was obviously well established by this point, but he also has a good story. He clearly trusts and understands the Doctor by this point, but he's somewhat torn by his loyalty to his duty - when the Doctor is accused of being the mastermind behind the dinosaurs, he's clearly very torn and his eventual decision to side with the Doctor is a fantastic sign of how, despite his eccentricities, how far he's come in his trust in and support of the Doctor.

I've always felt John Levene's Sgt Benton is an underrated characters and he has a great story here. Unlike the Brigadier, he decides early on he's siding with the Doctor - the scene when he offers himself to the Doctor to be beaten up is probably the highlight of the story, as it really highlights that he is far more intelligent than he sometimes lets on. His confronting the General because of his belief in the Doctor also paints an interesting contrast with Inferno, where his alternate reality counterpart nearly murdered the Doctor - a fascinating contrast to draw. 

Then there's Captain Yates, who is the opposite of the Brigadier and Benton. Instead of keeping his faith in the Doctor, he's lost his (apparently because of the events of The Green Death, which honestly shouldn't have been that traumatic for him, but fine, whatever) and has joined up with the baddies, taken in by their message and is helping their plan. The scene where he ignores the Doctor's attempts to get him to help is shockingly brutal and a sign of quite how far down the rabbit hole Yates has gone (this directly precedes the aforementioned scene with Benton, which shows the contrast between the two men very effectively as well). And here's the thing - Yates is clearly not a bad person, he's just been taken in by a promising cause. He doesn't want anyone hurt and he's clearly uneasy about the whole thing. But this is made even more effective by the fact that, contrary to what you might expect, he doesn't do a turn back to the good guy's side. He just gets disarmed and is left out of the final showdown - he never changes sides or his views. He's a great way of showing just how easily good people can be conned into doing terrible things in the name of good intentions, and doing it with a very familiar semi-regular character was a bold move that paid off.

Here's Captain Yates holding a gun. I can't think of a better caption than that, sue me.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs, like most of Comrade Hulke's work, lives and dies on the strengths of its political message, and in this story, it's just not all that strong in how its portrayed. The central idea is solid and the character work with the regulars buoys it up, but in the end, having this message portrayed through crappy villains, annoying supporting characters and being stuck in an overlong, bloated story with a stupid dinosaur gimmick tacked on for no apparent reason does the story no favours. The good stuff in the story lifts it up and this is hardly an example of terrible Doctor Who, but it's not really an example of good Doctor Who either.

Pertwee's final season was not the strongest - apart from a fairly decent opener story, everything throughout was varying shades of not great, indicative of a star and a production team who had lost their passion for the series. And that's fine, it happens - change was on the horizon and the most successful and most consistently strong era of the classic series' history was just around the corner. Invasion of the Dinosaurs is a good example of this final Pertwee/Letts/Dicks season - some glimmers of brilliance but mostly just a bit naff. 

Final Score: 4/10. Some strong character work and a decent central idea can't overcome pointless dinosaur intrusions, poor handling of the central storyline and the story simply being too long for its own good, making this a below average story for Classic Who.

Next Episode: Kinda