A TARDIS malfunction, and a missile attack from the dark side of the moon, forces the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton), Jamie (Frazer Hines) and cute Zoe (Wendy Padbury) to land on Earth in the late '70s/early '80s to look for the bits of kit to repair the old spacecraft.Naturally, nothing is ever straight forward for The Doctor and he is soon embroiled in a plan to takeover the world by the Cybermen, using a massive London-based computer firm, International Electronics, as their front.
However, International Electronics' head Tobias Vaughn (Kevin Stoney) has his own sinister agenda. Vaughn is a megalomaniac from the James Bond School of Villainy, hamstrung by his incompetant, flustered, psychopathic Number Two, Packer (Peter Halliday), who leads a security force even more inaccurate than Imperial Stormtroopers.
More important than the return of the Cybermen, though, The Invasion sees the first appearance of UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) headed by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney). They even appear to operate from an airborne base - a prototype for the Valiant? - and from the off, have a very British approach to problems: a cup of tea, then blow it up.
This being a pre-Time War incarnation of The Doctor, he has no problem with UNIT blowing up Cybermen left, right and centre or firing nuclear warheads at orbiting space armadas.
While Jamie doesn't really do much, except sleep and drink tea (and disappears from the screen for quite some time after getting shot in the leg), it's Zoe's brain that helps save the day in the final confrontation when she computes the necessary angles of attack for a missile barrage to take out all the invading fleet.
The Doctor's "crazy kids" (as The Brigadier calls them) are joined in this story by the daughter of a missing scientist, ex-model and wannabe photographer Isobel Watkins (Sally Faulkner, better known for her more revealing role in the sexploitation flick Vampyres), who might not be a great photographer but makes a damn fine cup of tea. A slightly redundant character in the greater scheme of things, Isobel just happens to be totally stunning eye candy, so I didn't really mind.
Vaughn and the Cybermen's plan for invasion involves infiltrating global technology (from computers to transistor radios) with International Electronics' microchips as Trojan Horses - a scheme so popular it's still being used today by the alternate universe Cybermen in Rise of The Cybermen and The Master in The Sound Of Drums.
Prints of two episodes (the first and fourth) have been lost from the BBC Archives and so top cartoon studio Cosgrove Hall were appointed to produce animated replacements (using the original sound tracks).
These are superb, with a slightly Japanese anime vibe to them, and I just wish it were financially viable to have all the "missing" Doctor Who episodes eventually resurrected in this way. Perhaps one day a philanthropist fan, with pockets as deep as The Doctor's, will come along and help make that dream a reality!
This is an epic, eight-part, three-hour story that never sags, but certainly wouldn't suffer from some pruning of repetition and unnecessary diversions. The Cybermen themselves don't even appear until the cliffhanger of the fourth episode - a revelation that would have had more impact when first broadcast in 1968 than in a DVD with a Cyberman on the front cover, and the actual invasion doesn't really get going until the end of the sixth episode!
My only real niggles with this story are Vaughn's unconvincing anti-Cyberman gun (which projects "fear beams" at the emotionless androids) and the fact that after all the build-up the big climatic action happens pretty much off-screen, either in the cuts between scenes or reported second-hand by military types looking at radar screens.
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