Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Five

The one where Sarah discovers she's not on a spaceship at all...

It's interesting, isn't it, that after all these years of the cosy "UNIT family" investigating and battling alien invasions alongside the Doctor, when it boils down to it, the only person he seems able to trust is good old Sergeant Benton. Captain Yates is exposed as a traitor at the start of the episode, and the Doctor doesn't really know if he can trust the Brigadier any more either ("What about the Brigadier?" says Benton. "What indeed?" wonders the Doctor). Maybe if Corporal Bell was still around she'd be the Doctor's ally.

But it is heartwarming that it's trusty Benton who stays loyal to the Doctor, sending the other men away so that he and the Doctor can talk properly, and then encouraging him to use his "Venusian oojah" to render him unconscious to stage an escape. Benton was the most loyal friend of all the Doctor's UNIT colleagues, so it's a shame he never got to be reunited with him after his final appearance in The Android Invasion. I rather think John Levene would've loved that.

Part Five is a bit of a waste of time, treading water before the finale, but I must say it is a very well made bit of padding. The Doctor spends his entire time on the run from UNIT and achieves absolutely nothing, while Sarah spends most of her time going up and down in lifts but getting nowhere.

It's great to watch though, and the Doctor's flight from UNIT in a jeep (why not Bessie, or the Whomobile?) is wonderfully directed with pace and urgency by Paddy Russell, as he drives into the leafy countryside pursued by a helicopter. The footage of the helicopter is actually really nicely done, with some exciting shots of it from the ground, from its cockpit, and from behind in flight as it swoops over the lush Wimbledon Common. Sometimes you'd be mistaken for thinking you're watching a Bond film.

Meanwhile, Sarah makes a remarkable discovery that adds a new twist to the twist of her finding herself on a spaceship. The twist being that she isn't on a spaceship at all, but in an annex off the secret underground bunker! She works this out by finding that the ship's controls don't respond to her tampering, and also that the nearest "solar system" to ours (Proxima Centauri) is four light years away, which would take hundreds of years to get to rather than just three months. However, she takes an enormous risk in trying to prove all this to Mark by simply opening the airlock door. What if she was wrong? She'd also be very dead!

Sarah makes her way back to the surface to try and find the Doctor, only to bump into her "old friend" General Finch, who pretends to go along with her story and takes her back to Grover's lift, pulling a gun on her as they descend to the bunker. "Oh boy. I really do choose my friends, don't I?"

We then get a bit more meat on the bones of what Operation Golden Age's plan is, which is to roll back time far enough to return Earth to "an earlier, purer age", wiping out the existing four billion people with it. Everybody except the "chosen few" will never have existed, and neither will their ancestors. It's murder on an unimaginably vast scale, something close to genocide. And when Ruth, Adam and Mark walk out of their "spaceship" onto the surface of "New Earth", they will think they have a fresh start on a new world, not realising this new world is just the old one wiped clean.

Fair do's, Malcolm Hulke, that's a bloody good story. Using dinosaurs to scare everybody away is a little crazy, but then this is Doctor Who. What's also a little hard to swallow is that Professor Whitaker seems to think he'll be able to summon enough power to roll back time for the entire planet, having just demonstrated it by rewinding a smashed teacup for three seconds. Hmmmm...

The Doctor arrives back at the Underground station (incidentally, the Lindsey Motel seen here is where G20 Summit protestor Ian Tomlinson was living at the time he was unlawfully killed by a police officer in 2009. Two years later, that side of the street was demolished to make way for the Crossrail project). It's here that the Doctor is confronted with a T Rex, which is where the cliffhanger leaves us. It's a disappointingly repetitive cliffhanger, but I suppose this time there's the increased jeopardy of having a whole range of monsters materialising in central London all at once - a brontosaurus, a stegosaurus, and a triceratops too! Terrifying...

First broadcast: February 9th, 1974

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Shout out to Dudley Simpson for some lovely canorous music when Sarah is exploring the bunker, quite reminiscent of Les Structures Sonores' work for The Web Planet.
The Bad: It looks great, but the Doctor spends the entire episode running away and doing nothing.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 31 - the Doctor says: "Now listen to me Mike, we haven't much time" when he thinks Mike's on his side. (Later, Sarah tells Mark to listen to her too!)
Neck-rub tally: 15

NEXT TIME: Part Six...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Four; 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: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/06/invasion-of-dinosaurs.html

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is available on BBC DVD as part of the UNIT Files box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-U-N-I-T-Invasion-Dinosaurs/dp/B006H4R8W6