046 The Invasion

Started 05-Dec

Lots of ECU

Lots of OTT acting, especially from Kevin Stoney but also from Peter Halliday, Ian Fairbairn and Edward Burnham. Even Nick Courtney is shown to be visibly swaggering.

Obviously the actors are bigging this up since the script and the direction are good enough to allow it.

Consider the contrast here from Kevin Stoney's Vaughn to Ronald Allen's Rago in The Dominators. Theatrical medium shots are replaced by fast cuts and ECU and the result is wa-a-a-ay different.

The incidental music needs a mention. After the stock music of series 5 and Dudley's occasional forays into wild analogue synthesiser mode (Fury, Ice W's and Macra Terror but not Evil for some reason.). The cues presented here by Jazz musician Don Harper are spooky and used effectively throughout. Douglas Camfield is developing here. He'll be doing this style of thing again.


The 8 eps make this epic rather than dull, even though we don't even see a Cyberman till near the end of ep4.

The action in ep 7 and 8 is technologically out of date now and seems twee. It probably has some physical problems as well. A large rocket launched 50k miles into space is going to take more than 12 minutes to arrive. Launched at a record 16.3 km/s solar escape velocity in 2005 the New Horizons probe took 9 hours to go past the Moon's orbit (about 240k miles) (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#cite_note-airspace20150710-81.) At that speed the Russian rocket would take about 81.5 minutes to reach the Cybership. But a 60's rocket would not capable of launching at anything like that speed and the episodes are only 25 minutes long, so...

As for neuristors, de-polarisers, "emotional" circuitry and the Cerebration mentor.... handwaving waffle.


I think the external filmed 'action' sequences (esp. in ep2 & 3) are not Troughton's best side. He struggles a bit with 'action' scenes. It's more the sort of thing Jamie or the UNIT guys are suited to.

In the studio however he is excellent. I'll cite the scene in ep7 where he confronts Vaughn in his office. Cool fantastic... no scenery chewing, just awesome to the max.

The episode cliffhangers are mostly very good in this story. Late in Hartnell's run I commented that the Ark had a good one for ep2 and that generally they weren't so great up to that point.
In Troughton's era, cliffhangers have been better and better but Invasion has some absolute belters.

• Ep7 (Is this what you wanted Vaughn to be the ruler of a dead world?!), 
• Ep5 (They're coming at us from both sides.), 
• Ep4 (Throb throb throb throb throb, plink, plink plink, plink... who-ee woo)
• And of course ep 6 (It's the Cybermen. We've just seen 100's of them, coming up out of the sewers. Clong, clang, clung. Denk, dink, donk, dunk, denk, dink, donk, dunk, (repeat) )

A thought I had while watching this in the marathon blog context was this. How much better is the end of ep6 The Invasion than anything in ep4 of The War Machines?? The time 2.5 series....from mid 1966 to about Nov/Dec 1968.

The Invasion is a milestone and a landmark and a great example of what DW can be. It will be bettered. It will be copied. It is itself a rehash of previous attempts. Nowadays it's a curious and out of date B&W tv serial. But it's a classic DW B&W tv serial.



ABM Rating 3.49/4.00 
LJM Rating 4.40/5.00
SPJ Rating 8.20/10.00

No. 5 (out of 46)

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