The Invasion Review

The Invasion

Story 46, Episodes 221-228, Season 6 Episodes 11-18

Doctor: The Second Doctor

Companions: Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot, The Brigadier

For the first time, modern England is invaded by an alien foe. In this eight-part epic, we get a lot of great UNIT action, but not enough Cybermen action.

The Review

Zoe and Isobel meet Vaughn. Zoe’s feather boa is pretty special, though she returns to the sparkly catsuit for some reason. 

Like the better classic series episodes, the wind-up toward the later episodes are still pretty good. Before the Cybermen, we have the villain in Tobias Vaughn, an ultra-powerful businessman in control of his own private security force. Not much more talk about large corporations is given here, but Vaughn himself is a fine imposing figure. The Doctor gets involved kind of by accident, the TARDIS goes invisible so he goes to find Travers. Travers’ house is now lived in by another professor who has been forced to work for Vaughn, and they meet his niece, Isobel there. Isobel is an aspiring photographer, she has some fun telling off the Brigadier for sexism later and is a good counterweight to all the serious military men. Eventually UNIT picks the Doctor and Jamie up, and helps them rescue Isobel and Zoe after Vaughn captures them.

Two episodes were animated, which was neat. I hope everything gets animated

The big returning player is of course, the Brigadier. The Brigadier is basically the consummate military good guy. He is always calm, fast-acting, but also always listens to the Doctor and does not shut him out. After so many stories where the Doctor has to convince people to do the right thing, having a full crew that believes him is a lot of fun. The Cybermen are more interesting than the Wheel in Space, and I really like their sleek new design. That famous cliffhanger with them walking out in front of the St. Paul Cathedral is great…but then we basically never see the Cybermen occupying London. The biggest issue with the Invasion is we barely see it. We get a lot of action fighting the Cybermen, and one shot of people reacting to their Cyber-signal but no people being menaced by Cybermen. The Cybermen deciding to bomb out the whole planet reveal comes too late, but we do get ‘the longest 12 minutes ever’ as the Russians manage to bomb it in time. The Invasion is an easy watch, but falls short of actually showing one.

With my foreknowledge of this as a template for the 70s era, my biggest wish is we actually see aliens invading in action.

8/10. The Invasion does a lot of things right, but stops short of providing genuine suspense and intrigue.

The Brigadier’s mustache is impeccable