The Invasion of Time - Episode 1

After being largely surprised with how much I have enjoyed the last few stories, I am looking forward to the six part finale that makes up Louise Jameson’s final appearance in the show. This story also marks the first appearance of the Sontarans since ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, nearly three years ago. This is their third encounter with the Doctor but this opening episode sees the show start off in a way that most people wouldn’t have expected. The episode starts off with the Doctor acting quite oddly. There is a nice scene between Leela and K9 and by the end of it, Leela looks like she is being left out in the cold. When the Doctor lands on Gallifrey he claims the presidency which is very unlike what I saw in the previous Gallifrey story. Tom Baker is on absolute fantastic form in this episode, giving the sort of performance that I haven’t seen for quite sometime.

This DVD is one that features new CGI to replace some of the rather poor special effects. The effects don’t really stand out in this episode but if memory serves me correctly then it wont take long for the effects to stand out. This story is famous really for delving into the TARDIS like the show had never done before, this will happen later on it the story. In this episode Leela is having a swim.

Once the action moves to Gallifrey, Leela’s role in the story becomes clear and it is to spend most of her scenes shouting at Andred. I cant quite make my mind up about Andred because he doesn’t really stand out much as a guard. He doenst have much of a presence about him and it does seem that if he was a guard then the standards would have slipped quite a bit.

This story takes place on Gallifrey but its slightly different to the Gallifrey that we saw in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ just two years earlier. Yet whilst there is a similarity to the old set, the new set isn’t as dark and it seems like they left the lights on during this story. The weird random chairs that seem to be dotted around the place are slightly distracting. They don’t really seem to fit the tradition and sophicastion of the Timelords yet just seem to be a ‘modern’ thing to add.

The cliffhanger was really good as the Doctor’s coronation starts off all nice but then it goes a bit wrong when the ‘crown’ is put on his head and he falls to the floor in pain. This ends what has been an intriguing opening episode and the Sontaran’s return is held off for another episodes, its not been 83 episodes since they last appeared. Having remembered what they look like, I cant say that their return is 100% welcomed.