The Invasion of Time Part Four

The one where the Vardans come, and the Vardans go, but then...

Andred levels his gun at the Doctor, announces he is going to execute him... then waits a little bit for the Doctor to react, then waits a little longer as the Doctor orders K-9 to stun him, which he does. Andred falls to the ground, stunned. Andred was pretty useless, but then that seems to be what the Chancellery Guard are trained to be.

Andred soon comes round to the Doctor's way of thinking though, and it's great to see the Fourth Doctor with a male companion again, however temporary. Christopher Tranchell is a good partner for Tom Baker, and with every passing scene he seems to remove another item of clothing. Although I haven't spent very long in Andred's company, I think I'm falling in love with him. Maybe he has that effect on people?

The Doctor has been instructed to dismantle the quantum force field, which will leave Gallifrey even more vulnerable. The Doctor doesn't know how to do this, so has to take a trip into the APC Net to link with Rassilon's mind and get the know-how from him. The Doctor is able to access the APC Net by simply putting the Coronet of Rassilon on and standing for a few seconds while he runs in and gets what he wants. Techniques have changed since The Deadly Assassin.

The Doctor needs the Vardans to materialise in their full form before he's able to identify their planet of origin. This seems odd. Has nobody ever heard of the Vardans before? Are they not a known race? Why do they have to physically manifest before this basic information about them can be ascertained? And does this mean that tin foil is not their normal appearance? I'm confused, but can very easily move on.

The tin foil continues to appal. There's so little attempt to disguise the fact it is aluminium foil that it's offensive. Could they not have coloured the foil in some way, or added things to it, just to make it look a bit less like Bacofoil? There seems to be a fundamental lack of care and attention paid to these Vardans. Director Gerald Blake even has them sitting in a chair at one point. That's a non-corporeal sheet of tin foil sitting in a corporeal chair. I mean, think it through, Gerald!

There's a good wadge of time spent where characters are in transit, whether it's Leela and her wilderness warriors travelling toward the Citadel across sandy wastes, the Doctor and his Vardan pal speeding along a very long corridor, or Andred and K-9 making their way nonchalantly along another corridor (Andred zapping a guard along the way with his no-ray gun).

There's a fab shot of the Vardan spaceship approaching Gallifrey's orbit (the first time we've seen Gallifrey from space?), but this just makes me realise that at no point do we see the Citadel from the outside, not even as a model shot. We all know what the Citadel of Gallifrey looks like - the new series has shown it several times now - but we don't see it at all in The Invasion of Time, despite people referring to it and pointing to it. There was originally a plan to have glass shots on location at Beachfield Quarry to show the Citadel (with helical towers), but this never came to pass sadly.

The Doctor manages to punch a hole in the quantum force field around Gallifrey, allowing the Vardans to fully materialise. "Disappointing, aren't they?" quips the Doctor, in the understatement of the millennium. They are three white men in pale green military uniforms. That's it. They're not monsters, they're not robotic, they're just bit-part actors from the lower reaches of Equity's talent pool. I think I preferred them when they were tin foil, at least then they had an element of kitchenware mystery.

The Vardans are defeated as easily as one might expect. K-9, temporarily crowned President of Gallifrey by being given free access to Rassilon's entire wardrobe of artefacts, identifies their planet of origin (coordinates vector three zero five two, alpha seven, fourteen span) and simply zaps them back home (the book No Future names the planet as Varda, which is just the right level of imaginative I'd expect). The Doctor says that he intends to put their home planet into a time loop, but he does not get the time to do this before something else happens...

The Vardans have been defeated, Gallifrey has been saved, everyone can relax (except all those dead Time Lords) and have a big old knees-up. But what's that behind the Doctor, what are they all staring at? It's only the bloody Sontarans, who have somehow materialised out of nowhere and are now standing in force at the heart of the Panopticon! It's a slam-dunk of a cliffhanger, pulled out of nowhere with such a courageous flourish that you're literally left speechless (as is everybody else). It would have been perfect if the Doctor had said "Sontarans!", just to bring it home for those viewers who didn't see The Sontaran Experiment, or can't remember them, but no matter. Even if you don't know they're Sontarans, the sudden appearance of another set of aliens, when it was thought all was won, is a game-changing cliffhanger.

They thought it was all over. But it seems there's more to come...

First broadcast: February 25th, 1978

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: There's no beating that cliffhanger.
The Bad: The tin foil aliens manifest as boring humans in green uniforms. The Vardans really are the crappest aliens in Doctor Who history. Not only are they boring in their true form, they can't even pretend to look interesting in projected form!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 17

NEXT TIME: Part Five...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Five; Part Six

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-invasion-of-time.html

The Invasion of Time is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Invasion-Time-DVD/dp/B0015083PI