Doctor Who: Terror Of The Zygons (1975)

UNIT calls in the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) after a number of oil rigs in the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, are destroyed in mysterious circumstances.

He arrives with Sarah Jane (Lis Sladen) and Harry (Ian Marter) in tow and is initially annoyed that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) has called him in on what appears to be a commerical enquiry.

However, when The Brigadier points out that people have died and The Doctor discovers giant bite marks in the remains of the oil rigs he, Sarah Jane and Harry are soon off exploring the surrounding wilderness.

Harry gets hospitalised after a bullet grazes his head, then disappears from hospital. The Doctor is lured into a decompression chamber, where Sarah Jane is hiding from the zygon who ambushed her outside Harry's room.

Sgt Benton (John Levene) rescues The Doctor and Sarah, while the rest of UNIT (including The Brig) are knocked unconscious back at their base - the local pub - by a gas attack.

Meanwhile Harry is taken to the zygon's spaceship, which is a wonder of organic technology on the inside (sadly, it's outside - which we see later - in a very bland, generic spaceship that could have belonged to any race).

A zygon impersonates Harry, but doesn't fool Sarah Jane for long, and the tense mystery seems to be getting better and better until The Doctor and The Brigadier accidentally leave Sarah Jane with a couple of zygons-in-human-form who then proceed to virtually hand Sarah Jane the keys to their concealed spaceship!

From this point on, and especially once the action shifts from Scotland down to London for the big showdown, the plot gradually unravels into some vague, nebulous "take over the world" scheme by the zygons (their actual plan is to transform the Earth into a suitable home for the displaced refugees from their own world, which was destroyed some time after this group crashlanded on Earth).

For an intelligent race, who can sculpt spaceship parts out of living organisation, have mastered shapeshifting technology and can grow giant cyborg monsters, their plan comes across as a bit half-cocked and rushed.

Buried in there is a strong ecological message: that we, as humans and current custodians of Planet Earth, are polluting it so badly that eventually it will only be fit for habitation by alien lifeforms like the zygons.

Rather sadly though, this story is most memorable for the zygon's 50' pet monster - the Skarasen (said to be the actual Loch Ness Monster) - which is a pretty grim combination of primitive puppetry effects and bad CSO.

After the squelchy beauty of the zygon ship interior and the distinctive look of the zygons themselves, the Skarasen really brings the story down, stretching disbelief suspension well beyond breaking point.

Almost certainly a grand idea on paper, it falls flat in execution.

The zygons themselves, though, are such a well drawn alien race - with their shapeshifting technology having believable limitations built into it that serves both the story and the plot - that it really would be a shame if we never saw them in action again.

And hopefully a CGI Skarasen would look a bit more convincing...

* In one of those strange quirks of serendipity, having just seen BBV's Zygon, I wandered into our local library this week on a whim - the first time I'd been there in over a year - and the first thing I saw as I headed towards the sci-fi and DVD area was a battered old VHS copy of Terror Of The Zygons sitting on a shelf.

I actually had to check with Rachel, via mobile phone, that we still had a working video player; we never use it these days, since the introduction of Sky+ to our house.

It turned out we had and so for the nominal fee of £1 for a week's rental, the cassette left the library in my care.

There was also a copy of the previous Tom Baker story, Revenge of The Cybermen, so don't be suprised if a review of that pops up here in the next few weeks.