Inspirations - The Android Invasion

It's an invasion. Using androids.
Back in the day, we never had these things called "spoilers". With every new Doctor Who story broadcast the BBC generally let you know what was going to be in it in advance, going so far as to release pictures of the new aliens and monsters to the press as a means of encouraging people to watch. Story titles tended to be of the "Something of the Daleks" variety, so you knew at least one of them would turn up before the closing credits of Episode One.
When the 2019 New Year's Day Special dispensed with opening credits, I'm sure a lot of people were expecting the real episode title to be revealed as "Resolution of the Daleks" - or just Dalek, singular.
Back in Season 11, best friends Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke fell out over the re-titling of Part One of the latter's Invasion of the Dinosaurs. It went out simply as "Invasion", as Dicks wanted to keep the fact that the monsters invading London were prehistoric ones as a cliffhanger surprise. Hulke, on the other hand, felt that knowing dinosaurs were going to appear would attract more viewers.
I mention all this as having The Android Invasion as a title at the start of Part One of this story really acted as a terrible spoiler, and totally undermined the mystery which writer Terry Nation was about to set up.
The story opens with the Doctor and Sarah apparently arriving back in present day England, the TARDIS arriving in the middle of a forest. They go for a walk to see where they are, and come across a UNIT soldier who is blundering blindly through the woods. Ignoring their warnings, he then walks over a cliff and falls to his death. They are then attacked by some men in white overalls, their faces hidden under helmets. They flee to a quaint little village, which Sarah recalls from a story she covered some time before. This is Devesham, site for a space defence station. The village seems deserted, and strange things are found in the pub - like a calendar with every date the same, and all the coins in the till of exactly the same year of minting.

Things get even stranger when a lorry pulls up outside containing a bunch of villagers, who all file silently inside - and one of them is the UNIT soldier who they had earlier seen fall to his death. At the stroke of the clock, everyone suddenly comes to life, and acts as if nothing has happened...
If it hadn't been for that title, this would have made for a great mystery. It's not the first time that we, the audience, know what is going on, whilst the Doctor has to run to catch up.
Sadly, the rest of the story fails to live up to the atmospheric opening segment.
Following the success of Genesis of the Daleks, Terry Nation had been asked to deliver another script for Season 13. You'll recall he has been contributing something every year since Season 10. He had only ever written one story for the programme which did not feature the Daleks, and that was The Keys of Marinus way back in 1964. He was keen to do another Dalek-free story, and seems to have looked to another TV series which he had script-edited for a while for inspiration - The Avengers. Nation had been heavily involved in the final season of that show - the one with Tara King.
One of The Avengers' regular tricks was to take something fairly commonplace, and give it a twist. A number of episodes were set in seemingly ordinary English villages, where strange things tended to happen. The first Mrs Peel episode was about a village where the population had been replaced by enemy agents (1965's The Town of No Return), whilst another was about a whole enemy base built underneath a village (1967's The Living Dead). Later that same year we had Murdersville, wherein the entire populace of a village have been recruited as assassins by Murder Incorporated.

The Android Invasion even has, as one of its guest stars, an actor from the Tara King era of The Avengers. Patrick Newell, who appears here as Colonel Faraday, had appeared as the character 'Mother' - Steed and King's wheelchair-bound boss.
Newell was brought in when Nicholas Courtney was unable to reprise his role as the Brigadier, for this is a bit of a Pertwee era throwback story. The director assigned to this adventure is none other than Barry Letts, who produced all but one of the Pertwee stories. The Brigadier has an office at Devesham's space defence station, but he is not present. He's off in Geneva, as Courtney had accepted a lengthy stage role. Quite how the alien Kraals know this, and so fail to create an android replica of him, remains a mystery. Perhaps astronaut Guy Crayford's memory of the Brigadier was that he was always in Geneva and never at Devesham. We do get to see the return of Warrant Officer Benton (nee Sergeant), and Lt-Surgeon Harry Sullivan. They are android duplicates for two of the episodes, and only appear as the real Benton and Harry in the final episode. It's the final appearance for both of them, and their departures are nothing special. We last see Benton lying on the floor, having been attacked by his duplicate - so could have been dead for all we knew. A very sad way for such a well-loved character to go out.

The villains of the piece are the Kraals who, long before Russell T Davies started doing animal-headed aliens like the Judoon, are inspired by rhinoceroses. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe was dissatisfied with the creature design, as he did not think it likely that such brutish beings could be masters of intricate android electronics. They seem to follow their chief scientist Styggron, rather than their military commander Chedaki. The Kraals have rescued the aforementioned astronaut Guy Crayford after his spaceship foundered near Jupiter - the story which Sarah had been following when she first came to Devesham. You'll recall that, according to the Pertwee era especially, Britain had a flourishing space programme in the 1970's, what with the first manned missions to Mars and all. It seems it wasn't just Daleks and Cyberkings which disappeared through the crack in Amy Pond's wall. A whole lot of 1970's stories seem to have gone as well.
Crayford thinks that the Kraals saved him, whilst his colleagues back at Devesham abandoned him, so he's quite happy to help them invade Earth. They've told him it will be a nice invasion, with the Kraals settling in uninhabited regions, but Styggron plans to spread a lethal virus that will kill everyone within a couple of weeks. To prepare for the invasion, they have built a fake Devesham and its environs on their home planet of Oseidon, in order to test out the androids who will infiltrate the area and spread the plague. Terry Nation loved plagues and viruses. They have featured in a number of his Dalek stories, and earlier in the year in which The Android Invasion was first broadcast (1975) we were shown the first season of his BBC TV series Survivors, which told of the aftermath of a global plague.

Deadly doubles have featured in the series before, and are nothing new in Science Fiction. The Star Trek franchise had the whole Mirror Universe set of episodes across its various series, for instance.
Hartnell played the wicked Abbot of Amboise back in The Massacre, as well as a Dalek duplicate of himself in The Chase, whilst Troughton gave us the would-be dictator Salamander in Enemy of the World. Inferno had given us nastier versions of the whole UNIT contingent, plus most of the Project Inferno personnel. The Nestenes made Auton replicas of people like General Scobie. The Doctor encounters a lethal android copy of Sarah, before she then encounters an android version of him, and we've already mentioned that Benton and Harry are also copied.
Naturally, the Doctor uses the android duplicate of himself to help resolve the whole invasion scheme - pretending to be his android to get past android Benton and then to confront Styggron.

But first he manages to convince Crayford that his Kraal friends have been less than honest. And so we come to what is probably the most notorious bit of plotting in the entire classic era of the programme. Crayford thinks that the Kraals weren't able to replace one of his eyes, lost when his ship was wrecked. The Doctor points out that he still has it, under his eye-patch. Yes, Crayford hasn't ever noticed that he has a perfectly good eye under the patch. This ludicrous bit of plotting could have easily been got round by the Kraals simply telling him they had given him an artificial one. They're building precise android duplicates of people, for goodness sake...
This being a Terry Nation script, he has the TARDIS have something which no other writer has shown it to have, or ever will later on. Apparently if you leave the key in the door, a defence mechanism makes it travel on to its intended destination - whether the Doctor is on board or not. As safety features go, it's a crazy one. Presumably it only deploys when the TARDIS has landed in an alien replica of the place the ship was supposed to be going to, and the writer has only realised at the last minute that there's a gaping plot hole and he needs a way of getting the TARDIS off the planet when he's got the Doctor travelling on by other means...
Next time: H Rider Haggard meets Mary Shelley. Sarah can't see what the fuss is about, as the Doctor goes head to head with another rogue Time Lord...