The Invasion is the 46th serial in the Doctor Who series. It was first broadcast November 2 to December 21 1968 and it's got Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor, Frazier Hines as Jamie McCrimmon and Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot. The Tardis stops in space when some circuit breaks down. The Doc barely gets out of the way of a missle and lands on the Earth. There are cows in a field. They catch a ride from a lorry driver who tells them they landed on the private property of a big corporation called International Electromatics. He gets them through the checkpoint at the edge of the company's property, stops the truck and sends them on their way. After the Tardis trio run off into the woods motocycle riding men pull up and ask him to come with them. he refuses and is killed. The Doctor and his posse hitch a ride to London. The goal is to find a scientist they know. He's gone when they arrive at his home. Gone to America for a long stay. The woman living there is the daughter of another scientist who is missing in the IE headquarters. The Doc and Jamie go there and break in. They get caught and wind up giving the broken circuit to the head of the corp. Back at the scientist's house Zoe and the scientist's daughter get bored and follow. There's a lot of talking and plotting and running around. Turns out that head man has some alien friends and they want him to kill the Doctor.
The 1st and 4th episodes are lost but they were recreated using rather limited computer animation and fan recorded soundtracks. They look good enough. We meet the men of UNIT for the first time. Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart from The Web of Fear is now a Brigadier and he's in charge. He's investigating IE and the lorry driver happened to be one of his men. No one still knows he'd dead but the viewer. The Tardis gang get caught some and escape some. There's plenty of running around on the streets of 1968 London and that's kind of neat. We find out the aliens are the cybermen and that fight goes on for the last four of the 8 episodes. It's about 3 hours and 12 minutes of material. I played most of it at 1.5 speed so it was a more reasonable length. It wasn't too bad but even speeded it up it seemed kind of slow at times. Too many visits with the villianous business man and his loud voice. Of course the Doc, working with the men of UNIT, figures out a way to stop the robot creeps with the shiney heads and the Tardis moves along for another adventure. I read that the Doctor will have other adventures with the UNIT team.
The show was still being shot in Lime Grove, there's a picture up on the left, and that studio was pretty small and old fashioned. Not so old fashioned is Zoe's jumpsuit. She's practicing being a model. The sets were mostly good but the outside locations were more interesting. They even had a helicopter in one of them. The cybermen walking around London was cool. There are some gun fights in the later episodes so that gets a bit more exciting. Some space ships get blown up and that wasn't too bad. It's better than many of the episodes that I have seen so far.
It's a two disc set and the first disc has a documentary on the creation of the animation and another on some of the people that recorded Doctor Who off the air. Those audio tapes are some of the only available copies of some serials. There's a trailer for the animated episodes and a short video of character models of the Doctor and crew. The second disc has a 50 minute featurette on the episode. The whole serial has commentaries with various cast and crew people. I didn't listen to them yet.
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