A bit of an odd day today. My (autistic) son stayed home sick from his Adult Day Training program, I stayed out sick from work as well, and although I did eventually treadmill it was at a weird time of day. Then, when I started watching Invasion of the Dinosaurs on the treadmill, I was initially thrown because part 1 was in black & white and opened with the title Invasion. I knew it couldn't be the Second Doctor story because the opening credits were clearly Third Doctor, but I was very confused. It turns out that the color master videotape for the first part had been wiped and re-used, and was lost for a full ten years until a 16mm black & white telerecording of the episode was found. That makes it one of the very latest "lost" episodes in the series, with only one other coming up in the next story. As for the title, the complete title was deliberately elided for the first part in order to keep the appearance of a t-rex at the cliffhanger a surprise.

So hey, dinosaurs running around in Central London. Let's talk about that.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Technically the title of the first episode is "Invasion part one", making it the only episode of the classic series to have an individual title since The O.K. Corral (that being the final episode of The Gunfighters). The sad thing is, for all the effort that they went into concealing the appearance of dinosaurs in part one, Radio Times went and spoiled the surprise by totally giving it away in the program listing for that week. Imagine if a movie listing for The Empire Strikes Back was phrased as something like "Luke Skywalker confronts his father Darth Vader" the week before the movie came out. Oops.

As for the story, it follows on directly from the previous one with the TARDIS materializing in present-day London -- which the Doctor and Sarah Jane find to be completely abandoned. It is properly creepy, with the two of them wandering around a major metropolis apparently devoid of people and with signs of abandonment and rapid escape all around. It turns out that there are looters about, which stirs up a bit of drama and which also leads to both of our heroes being arrested by military police as looters themselves. The climax of part one has them in the back of a military transport when they are stopped by a t-rex that suddenly appears in their path.

Part two has them escape briefly before they are found again, but luckily by the Brigadier himself. Just prior to that, though, they encounter a man who is by all appearances from the middle ages, but who disappears into thin air right in front of them. Once the Doctor and Sarah Jane are reunited with UNIT headquarters, the Doctor quickly deduces that somebody is scooping up dinosaurs from the distant past and dropping them into Central London. What he doesn't know, and what we find out in a big shocker, is that one of the people behind the titular dinosaur invasion is, in fact, Captain Yates. OMG!!

It turns out that after all of the trauma he experienced during The Green Death (which, I might mention, had Giant Maggots!!), Captain Yates had to take time off from UNIT to recuperate. At some point he apparently decided that the modern world was too horrifying, and that there needed to be a return to a "new golden age". So now he is betraying UNIT from the inside, in a misguided attempt to save humanity from the insanity of modern life.

It really is quite a shocking development, and one I would never have seen coming if I hadn't already been aware of it. It's kind of the memorable thing about Mike Yates in Doctor Who lore, so it's pretty hard to miss when you are watching it forty years later.

I have to say that, although the dinosaurs themselves are pretty dodgy (it's 1973 BBC special effects on a low budget, so it's no Jurassic Park), they are used sparingly enough to not be a distraction. Especially because the surrounding story is so interesting. I do wish the story had stayed with the original working title of Timescoop which better describes the plot. I mean yeah, sure, there are dinosaurs, but they are just pawns in a larger scheme. If you only look at the rubber monsters it seems a bit silly, but there really is a lot of depth going on in the story. In that sense, having the first episode be in lower resolution black & white actually served to accentuate the tension, even if it was purely accidental.

This one is a six-parter, so I expect a bit of plate-spinning in tomorrow's viewing. But maybe I'll be surprised.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Third
Companion(s): Sarah Jane Smith, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Episode(s): Invasion of the Dinosaurs - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 6,981 today, 1,239,974 total
Distance Walked: 3.48 miles today, 612.26 miles total
Weight: 261.46 lbs (five day moving average), net change -45.84 lbs