C046 The Invasion

When the shattered TARDIS reassembled and materialized in real space behind the moon, it evaded an apparently unprovoked missile attack. The Doctor wondered whether his ship had been recognized. Landing in a cow pasture, the Doctor declared the TARDIS needed an overhaul and brought some circuits to show to Professor and Anne Travers in London. Leaving the now invisible TARDIS and flagging down a ride, the TARDIS trio learned they were inside the compound owned by the world’s largest electronics firm. Their driver told them to slip away while security guards searched him and his vehicle before they killed him. The TARDIS trio found Isobel Watkins and her uncle had taken over Travers’ rooms. She was a photographer and began photographing Zoe while the Doctor and Jamie looked for the Professor. A week ago, he began working for International Eletromatics, the firm that owned the compound. Frustrated by electronic answering and reception machines, they looked for a real person while being observed from inside and outside. Their outside observers recognized them. Inside, they were gassed and Packer took them to see the firm’s managing director, Tobias Vaughn. He aroused the Doctor’s suspicions after a slip of Jamie’s tongue and Vaughn’s charm maneuvered the Doctor into revealing the TARDIS’ circuits. Vaughn rewarded Jamie with a radio. Then, to ask about his uninvited visitors, Vaughn tipped aside his office wall to reveal the Cyberplanner. The Doctor and Jamie’s outside watchers took them to meet Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, who had been promoted to head UNIT, paramilitary investigators of the strange and unusual like recent UFO sightings. They were watching Vaughn’s London offices, where people like the TARDIS trio’s driver from the compound had disappeared and others mysteriously changed. Major General Rutlidge, the Brigadier’s superior, was no longer keen on UNIT’s investigation of Vaughn, for example. Hence, the Brigadier needed evidence to move against the powerful, influential company.

Vaugn’s head researcher, Gregory, reported the TARDIS circuits were totally unique. When Vaughn asked the Cyberplanner about the Doctor and Jamie, he was told they were hostile; needed to be destroyed; had been encountered on “Planet 14”; and had “a machine” that made this encounter possible. Zoe worried about the Doctor and Jamie and went with Isobel to Vaughn’s London offices to find them. Using an equation without a solution, Zoe blew up the reception computer before she and Isobel were captured. The Doctor and Jamie learned they had gone to Vaughn’s offices and began working with UNIT to find them. The Doctor and Jamie were observed sneaking back into Vaughn’s London offices, where Packer caught them and Vaughn invited them to search the train taking Zoe and Isobel to Vaughn’s factory. It was gone when they all reached the tracks.

UNIT followed by helicopter as Vaughn’s car brought him, Packer, the Doctor, and Jamie to the factory. There, the Doctor discovered a deep space transmitter before he and Jamie spoke to Professor Watkins, whom Vaughn used Isobel’s captivity to control. He hoped to learn about the TARDIS, but the Doctor used a magnet to outwit electronic surveillance. Vaughn told the Doctor he wanted the TARDIS and had Zoe, so he expected to get it. The Doctor and Jamie eluded Packer in an elevator and reached both the roof and the ground via fire escape ahead of Vaughn’s security–enraging the boss.

Hiding on the train, the Doctor and Jamie determined something occupied the containers in which Zoe and Isobel had been transported. After rejoining the Doctor, Jamie told him whatever had been in his container with him had moved. Before they could check, their attention was drawn to Zoe an Isobel’s plight before Vaughn gave them ten minutes to surrender. Instead, with the help of the UNIT helicopter and a rope ladder, the Doctor organized Zoe and Isobel’s escape. Vaughn chewed out Packer and took the Professor back to London. Watkins’ teaching machine could generate emotions and would enable Vaughn to double cross his allies. UNIT’s actions made the timetable critical, and Vaughn decided the invasion would take place in a day.

After regrouping, the Doctor and Jamie canoed to Vaughn’s headquarters and observed a Cyberman emerging from a gauze cocoon. When they returned, the Brigadier met with Major General Rutlidge, who wouldn’t authorize UNIT action against Vaughn. He was determined to go around his superiors, but needed proof Vaughn was involved with Cybermen. Vaughn learned it would take one or two days for the Brigadier to get new orders. Vaughn told the Cyberplanner he wanted the invasion moved up again. The Cyberplanner said they would launch a homing beacon into the atmosphere to guide their forces in, convert suitable humans into Cybermen, and wipe out everyone else. Vaughn disagreed, insisting he would rule the world and retain his human mind. The Cyberplanner agreed. Afterwards, Vaughn ordered the teaching machine tested. He used it to make a Cyberman afraid. The victim Cyberman went nuts and was released into the sewers. Isobel offered to take pictures of Cybernen and solve the problem of needing proof of Vaughn’s activities. The Brigadier thought it would be better for his men to handle the assignment. Zoe, Isobel, and Jamie went to London to take pictures for UNIT. When the Brigadier sent UNIT after them, the Doctor decided to come along and investigate the odd circuits he found in International Electromatics products. A constable followed Jamie and the girls into the sewers and was killed by Cybermen. Zoe spotted and Isobel photographed the crazed Cyberman Vaughn had released. Jamie realized he and the girls were cut off from both directions.

Backing up, they let the crazed Cyberman pass as UNIT entered the sewers. Cybermen ordered them to surrender and a UNIT man who had a panic attack got killed. Using grenades and a rifle butt, UNIT enabled everyone to escape. The Brigadier worried the photos Isobel took would not convince his superiors before he received word Professor Watkins was being moved. UNIT rescued him off camera and, upon learning of the Professor’s rescue, Vaughn had Gregory executed. Talking to Professsor Watkins, the Doctor realized the circuits he was studying were emotional and Cybermen would use them to enslave humanity, He began building devices to defend against the signal. The Invasion began.

The Brigadier decided to consolidate his forces. Vaughn insisted on directing the invasion and ordered Professor Watkins recovered. Both groups arrived at Watkins’ house at the same time and Jamie was injured in a short firefight. The Doctor decided to return to Vaughn while UNIT listened to him while he learned their enemies’ plans. They also decided to knock out the cybersignal’s transmitter near the moon and needed the Russsian rocket to deliver it. The Doctor made his way to Vaughn’s London offices through the deserted sewers. Vaughn and the Doctor discussed the complications of Vaughn’s plans to double cross the Cybermen. Meanwhile, the Brigadier, Zoe, and UNIT brought the missile launch site at Henlowe Downs online while Vaughn prepared to guide the Cybermen’s invasion force to Earth. Zoe spent half a minute working out a firing pattern for the missiles to wipe out the invaders’ fleet. After their success, the Cybermen decided they no longer needed Vaughn and would use a Cybermegatron Bomb to wipe out life on the planet.

The Doctor explained making bargains with the Cybermen couldn’t be done because they couldn’t be trusted. Vaughn decided to help humanity because he hated his former allies. He destroyed the Cyberplanner with the Professor’s machine and the Doctor used it to kill the Cyberman who entered the office and killed Packer. UNIT brought Vaughn and the Doctor to a warehouse at Vaughn’s compound where they hoped to turn off the radio beam guiding the Cybermen’s bomb to Earth. UNIT soon arrived within minutes to lend support. A massive firefight ensued during which Vaughn was killed and Isobel got enough pictures of Cybermen to land a contract with a publisher. Once the radio signal was switched off, the Cybership moved into range of the Russian missile in order to drop the bomb. The Russians needed to turn their missile in order for it to hit its new intended target. UNIT drove the TARDIS trio to the cow pasture where they had landed and left Isobel alone with her “dolly soldier”.

“The Invasion” was the last appearance of Cybermen in both the 1960’s and the Patrick Troughton era of DOCTOR WHO and would be a pivotal serial in the series’ development. It brought back and promoted Colonel Lethbridge Stewart to Brigadier and replaced the Army with the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. UNIT was introduced as a device to facilitate stories on Earth in the present or near future. Another portent of things to come was the introduction of actor John Levene as Corporal Benton. Script Editor Derick Sherwin, who wrote this story, originally intended to use Professor and Anne Travers, characters from writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s Yeti stories. The second of which, “The Web of Fear”, was a successful prototype for this story. Sherwin, however, had problems with the writers over another serial they wrote, “The Dominators,” after which they didn’t write for DOCTOR WHO again. Both Travers characters were dropped and replaced by Professor Watkins and his niece, photographer Isobel Watkins. Cybermen co-creator Kit Pedler devised the core of this story involving the second Doctor’s emotionless nemeses. Sherwin stretched the story to eight episodes, in part, to help guard against script problems plaguing the show at the time. The means by which Sherwin padded Pedler’s idea was to include a human opponent for the Doctor, Tobias Vaughn, the head of the world’s largest electronics firm and the Cybermen’s human ally. Director Douglas Camfield cast actor Kevin Stoney to play Vaughn, who had also portrayed the Daleks’ human ally Mavic Chen in the William Hartnell’s longest serial, “The Daleks Master Plan.”

Vaughn kidnapped Isobel and Zoe to pad the story and gain leverage against Professor Watkins, whose expertise was essential for the human villain’s plans to double cross the aliens. It seemed like the script downplayed some importnat plot points by having the Doctor muse about them absently. Professor Watkins was working for Vaughn against his will, but another scientist, Gregory, was the human villains’ loyal minion. Camfield did not have time to shoot the scene in which Gregory was to die on location for episode six. In the original scene, Gregory would have been killed in a firefight during which UNIT rescued Professor Watkins as Vaughn’s security men moved him. A quick death scene for Gregory, in wich Cycbermen shot him as he ran along a sewer tunnel, was slipped into the story and shot in studio. While padded to the point of being too long and thereby delaying the arrival of the story’s real villains, the performances are excellent and the pacing holds viewer interest in a fantastically entertaining epic tale of intrigue and alien invasion.