Invasion of the Dinosaurs - Episode 2

The second episode of this six part adventure is where the story really gets going because the first episode did a good job of setting up the setting up the location of the story and the idea of an abandoned London is a good one and one that always works well as a setting. The T-Rex that we see at the beginning of the episode is still a problem as far as I am concerned.  This twinned with the CSO used to put the soldiers in front of the T-Rex is another problem.

I love the scene with the Doctor and Sarah when Sarah mentions a theory which sounds rather flimsy. This isn’t really an episode for Sarah Jane but the thing that does come out of it is that due to the fact she’s a journalist she isn’t trusted and is treated like a pariah and its only when the Doctor says that she’s his assistant that it seems like she’s becoming part of the UNIT family.

The effect used to get that historical man to disappear back to where he came from was one of the few effects that worked. It works when they make the dinosaurs disappear. The Stegosaurus is a better model effect that the T-Rex and the CSO of it appearing with the Doctor is better. The CSO has mixed results in this episode and I think it largely depends on the dinosaurs and who or what they put on in front of it.

I think the scene between Mike Yates and Sarah is a nice environmental discussion where Yates talks about the peace being rather nice and Sarah preferring traffic. I don’t think that she does believe it but is just being opposite for the sake of it. Yates is different due to the effects of what happened to him in ‘The Green Death’. It’s in this episode that its revealed that he is involved in the Dinosaurs plan. Part of the reason why the plot works so well is that it’s a new thing in Doctor Who for one of the good guys to be smilingly working against the Doctor and putting him danger.

The explanation that someone is causing the dinosaurs to appear and disappear is explored here and this introduces Michael Jarvis and Peter Miles. Jarvis had previous appeared in ‘The Web Planet’ and Miles previously appeared in ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’. Jarvis plays Butler who is the nicer of the two and Miles played Professor Whittaker who seems like a similar version to Dr Lawrence in his previous story. Another of the people involved although we don’t know it yet (even though we do) is Sir Charles Grover (played by Noel Johnson). General Finch was introduced in the previous episode but its this episode where I think that his true colours are shown when he seems to be against the Doctor. John Bennett would return in a future Tom Baker story but here General Finch is at the moment the most obvious villain in the story.

The cliffhanger is ruined by the last shot being of the T-Rex looking at the camera. If it were a better model then it would be a far more effective way to end the episode. That said the main plot of the story is what makes this a better story that it could have been and why I get frustrated with this story because whilst it might b a good thing that the show is trying to do something different, sometimes its better to know your limits and there was no way that this was going to work.