Review - The Collection - Season 7

Before the usual range of posts recommence I thought I'd take a quick look at the latest of the Blu-ray classic season releases. Season 7 was Jon Pertwee's first as Doctor, and Caroline John's only as Liz Shaw. It is very much an atypical season, with an odd 4, 7, 7, 7 episode shape, so only four stories for the year. The opening story was the first to be produced and broadcast for colour television, and it was made entirely on location and on film thanks to a BBC strike.

The three longer stories all revolve around a scientific complex - Wenley Moor's cyclotron research centre, the UK Space Centre, and the "Inferno" drilling compound. The phrase "gritty realism" also gets bandied about for much of this season, though it's really only The Ambassadors of Death which features murderous criminals and far-reaching conspiracies. The story also features two big stunt set pieces.

I've looked at the stories in the past, and they will eventually be looked at episode by episode, so what of the extras?

To be honest, this set is a little light on new VAM. Inferno got a Special Edition DVD release, with a lot of new material, and Spearhead From Space had two big new documentaries when released onto Blu-ray. The other stories were double disc DVD releases, so came with a lot extras. All of this material appears on this new set.

Of the brand new extras, we obviously get more "Behind the Sofa". Couch 1 seats Geoffrey Beevers and Daisy Ashford (widower and daughter of Caroline John. He appears briefly in Ambassadors whilst she is now playing Liz on audio). They are joined by Toby Hadoke. Couch 2 seats Janet Fielding, Sophie Aldred and Sarah Sutton. When not complaining about the lack of strong female characters in the show in 1970, they're talking about handbags and what Liz is wearing. The third couch hosts Katy Manning and Matthew Waterhouse. The latter can be quite annoying at times.

Matthew Sweet interviews John Levene, who has reverted back to the surname Woods. He gets quite emotional at times, and it's nice to see him talk about some of his other, very varied, careers. Clips of him in other TV productions are interspersed through the end credits.

Sweet also presents one of the four new documentaries - "Terror in the Suburbs". This was very disappointing after a good start - a look at the filming locations for the Auton attack as they are today. It then develops into a socio-cultural essay on "Suburbia", and Doctor Who hardly gets a look in.

Much better is "Lucky 13" which looks at the science behind the Season 7 stories. There are quite a few archive clips of Kit Pedler, whilst most of the running time is given over to the space programme which was reflected in Ambassadors. In particular we look at Apollo 13 - hence that title - and the BBC's coverage of the events which coincided with the broadcast of the Who episodes.

The third documentary is a biography of Nicholas Courtney. It's slow to get started - by the 13 minute mark he still hasn't been born yet - and it sometimes drifts away on little tangents. It could have done with some tighter editing, to focus purely on his life and career. It would have been nice to have seen some of his other work as well. Presenter John Culshaw is joined by a Troughton sound-alike at the end - who sounds nothing like Troughton...

The last new doc takes a look at Malcolm Hulke - the latest of Hadoke's "Looking for...". Interviewees include Terrence Dicks' widow. A taped interview features, so we get to hear what the writer sounded like. He died in 1979, before fandom really got into its stride, so we never really got to know him like many of the other behind-the-scenes figures.

The convention footage this time sees Caroline John being interviewed, before being joined by Barry Letts.

Finally, a word about the restoration of the episodes themselves. There were sound issues with some of the interiors on Spearhead, and these have been fixed. The three 7-parters all had colour problems and these have also been improved, though with Ambassadors you often see it slipping into monochrome at the edges of scenes. Overall, the stories look far better than on any previous releases.

It was recently announced that the people who produce the animations of lost stories want to up the rate of releases. Apparently this is because they intend to include them on the Season 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 boxsets. This points to the B&W seasons being held back to last, so probably a Tom Baker set next, or perhaps Season 21 to complete the JNT era.

Re-entry Forbidden / Reuse Allowed

Those of you who follow the Talking Pictures TV channel will be aware that they have been showing episodes of Doomwatch on Friday nights at 9pm. We've already seen the two that everyone remembers - The Plastic Eaters, written by the show's creators Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis, and Day of the Rat, written by Terence Dudley. The show has many Doctor Who connections.

This Friday, 7th February, sees the broadcast of Re-entry Forbidden, which was originally shown in March 1970. 

I mention this because the episode shared a set with The Ambassadors of Death. With the advent of colour, the BBC's design departments elected to make some savings by sharing props, costumes and sets across several productions - provided that there was a suitable gap between broadcasts, and minor changes made to disguise their re-use.

Scenic Design spotted that the producers of Doomwatch and Doctor Who were both going to be featuring a space capsule around the same time, and so Barry Letts and Dudley agreed to share the set with the costs split across their respective budgets. 

Thus Doomwatch's "Sunfire" rocket returned a few weeks later as Doctor Who's "Mars Probe 7" / "Recovery 7" - director Michael Ferguson reusing a reused set.

Season 7 Boxset Confirmed

The set is now confirmed. The Matthew Sweet interview is with John Levene.

4 new documentaries - one on the science of the day and how it influenced these four stories; one on Malcolm Hulke; one on Nicholas Courtney; and another on the new Earth-based format.

One of the Behind the Sofa panels features Caroline John's husband, Geoffrey Beavers, and their daughter.

Presumably the two docs on the Spearhead Blu-ray are also included. One was about Pertwee, and the other about Caroline.

There are also two omnibus versions included: The Silurians and Inferno.

The Collection - Season Seven

This turned up on an online retailer site, then quickly disappeared - but not before people had downloaded the image. Announcements for the Blu-ray boxsets usually come out on Thursdays, so expect the official news, including the various bonus materials, later this week...

What's Wrong With... Inferno

In Professor Stahlman we get the latest in the increasingly long list of "people who should never be put in charge of important projects".

We've been meeting these regularly since General Cutler in The Tenth Planet, and they were especially common in the Troughton "base under siege" era. 

So far Season 7 has delivered two notable examples in Dr Lawrence and in General Carrington.

The issue here in Inferno is the question of why Stahlman is even here. What sort of scientist is he? 

He has come up with the idea that there is a new type of gas present deep beneath the Earth's surface, very close to the boundary with the molten core. This gas should be a highly efficient energy source.

To get to the gas, a drilling project is required. This should involve an entirely different set of skills to the Professor's chemistry background. A drilling technical expert ought to be the person in charge here - not a chemist.

Sir Keith does bring in a drilling expert - but only in the last few days of the project.

A very big question is, of course, how does the Professor know that the gas exists, let alone where it can be found, if no-one has ever drilled that deep? Even if there is a substance there, no-one can possibly known its composition or properties - so how would they know that it would be more efficient than coal or North Sea gas?

When green slime does start bubbling up from the depths, people just touch it with their bare hands. The Doctor quickly knows that it causes people to mutate into Primords, but doesn't do anything about Stahlman / Stahlmann when he knows that he came into contact with the breaking glass flask.

He doesn't force the issue when Stahlmann has obviously simply covered his infection up with a bandage (and you can see green skin underneath). 

The Doctor also allows the Professor plenty of time to get rid of the computer component he has removed. He allows him to empty his own pockets, rather than having them searched by a neutral third party.

Primord Slocum collapses immediately the nuclear reactor is shut down - suggesting cause and effect. The reactor is nowhere near the room where Slocum is, so how could he be instantly affected in this way.

One minute the Primords are vulnerable to bullets, the next they're not. One minute a fire extinguisher can stun them, the next it kills.

It is a government sanctioned project, and presumably funded by them, and they have placed Sir Keith Gold on the staff to act as their liaison - but he has absolutely no authority to do anything. To get anything done he has to go in person to London to ask for it. You have to ask what is the point of him being there?

When everything is going to hell, Sir Keith still flaps about, unwilling to go against the Professor despite the sudden presence of hairy monsters created by the drilling, and UNIT's scientific adviser warning that the planet will be destroyed if the proceed.

When Sir Keith goes missing, no-one knows what the outcome of his meeting with the minister was. Why does the Brigadier not simply pick up a phone?

Even when Sir Keith does return to the project, he is still coming out with nonsense like only Stahlman being allowed to give the shut-down order.

In The Underwater Menace - the last time we had a mad scientist trying to drill down to the planet's molten core - the plan would never have worked to blow apart the Earth. The sea would have evaporated the moment in came near the magma, leading to a continuous jet of steam - not the splitting apart of the Earth. We have a similar issue here. The writer seems to think that breaking through a certain subterranean layer will lead to a hole that can never be plugged. What you would get would be a volcanic eruption, of which there have been millions throughout history without the planet being destroyed. We saw this in The Daleks Invasion of Earth.

We can understand UNIT being called in to Wenley Moor as this comes after strange things have already started to happen. Likewise with the UK Space Agency in the last story, but why are UNIT involved at the drilling project in the first place? Strange things only start to happen after they have arrived, so it can't be this that has brought them here. If the drilling project is for the benefit of the UK government, who will be competing with foreign powers for energy resources, then surely the British army should have been called in for security - not an organisation which owes allegiance to the United Nations.

Why do the shelving units which are closer to the TARDIS console not get transported to the parallel universe along with Bessie?

Why is Stahlman's name different here, when no-one else's is?

The reactor power unit in the main control room of the parallel universe has the same small additional unit that the Doctor fitted in our universe, in order to run his own experiments. How can this be if the Doctor does not exist here?

The Brigade-Leader and Section Leader Shaw never ask the Doctor about the strange machine in the storeroom, despite suspecting him of being a saboteur: why has the TARDIS console not been taken apart to ensure it isn't a bomb?

Primord Bromley can bend metal bars, but he lies around his cell until he has someone to chase. (The bars are clearly bendy).

Finally, the Doctor is UNIT's scientific adviser. If he advises his old friend the Brigadier that the drilling must stop immediately or the world will be destroyed, surely that should be enough for him?

Instead of calmly notifying the Brigadier of the imminent danger, the Doctor acts like a madman and starts smashing the place up - making everyone doubt him and achieving the opposite of what he wants.

And surely if he was wanting to stop the drilling he would know exactly what equipment to smash to achieve this, rather than just randomly breaking things that don't seem to do anything.

Two significant things which went wrong behind the scenes on Inferno were Jon Pertwee striking one of the HAVOC stuntmen with Bessie, badly gashing his leg. Stunt performer Alan Chuntz had misjudged his leap to safety due to the unfamiliar heavy boots he was wearing.

Even more serious was the collapse of director Douglas Camfield, due to side effects from new heart medication. He had already filmed the location work and was handling rehearsals when he was taken ill. Producer Barry Letts, who had considerable director experience, stepped in and completed the story using Camfield's plans. Camfield's wife Sheila was working on this story - playing Petra Williams. Knowing how stressful the series was to work on, she forebade him from doing anymore Doctor Who. He wouldn't return to the show until Terror of the Zygons six years later.

What's Wrong With... The Ambassadors of Death

 

The biggest issue with this story is its convoluted genesis - which manifests itself on screen. 

There were three main writers involved, the credited one being the one with the least input as far as the finished product is concerned.

After Spearhead From Space, the remaining stories of Season Seven suffered from their length. To save money three of the stories were set at a seven episode length. This reduced the number of new guest artists, sets and costumes that were required. 

This lengthening of the stories meant that sub-plots had to be introduced to keep things going. With The Silurians this was the plague sub-plot, and with Inferno it was the trip to an alternative universe. Here it is the Doctor's conventional trip into space by rocket. However, Ambassadors is so disjointed in places that the sub-plot doesn't really stand out as actually being one.

The story began its life as a Patrick Troughton story, commissioned by Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin from former Story Editor David Whitaker and known as "The Carriers of Death" / "Invaders From Mars". 

The basic premise survived through to the version as broadcast - a First Contact scenario which goes wrong as the alien ambassadors are highly radioactive - but little else. As Bryant took more of a back seat and Sherwin took on more of his duties, Terrance Dicks also got involved as Assistant Script Editor.

Bryant then left the programme and Sherwin became full time producer. Dicks was promoted to full Script Editor and he took on an assistant of his own - Trevor Ray (he's the ticket collector at Marylebone Station who falls foul of the plague in The Silurians).

All this personnel movement coincided with the departure of  Troughton and the whole shake-up of the format of the series. The Doctor would now be exiled to Earth, working alongside UNIT.

As an "invaders from Mars" type story, Whitaker's scripts should have been easily adapted to fit the new format - but this wasn't the case. The production team weren't happy with Whitaker's first three scripts and asked for rewrites. These weren't acceptable either. Several attempts were made to get Whitaker's story to match what Sherwin and Dicks wanted. Trevor Ray rewrote Episode One and this was sent to Whitaker, to show him what was required.

Even with this, Whitaker wasn't getting the new format so the decision was made to pay him off and get someone else to write the story. Dicks blamed his own team for the problems, feeling Whitaker wasn't properly advised and supported. Whitaker was paid for the full seven episodes, and allowed to retain the credit, and he then left the country to live and work in Australia for a bit. This was to be his final association with television Doctor Who.

Malcolm Hulke, fresh from writing The Silurians, was asked to completely rewrite the story, although Ray's Episode One was retained intact.

The story therefore has two authors, neither of which is the one named in the credits.

Sherwin had always considered the programme to be set in the "near future". Here the UK has an advanced space programme, one that has successfully landed at least two manned missions on Mars - Probe 6 and Probe 7.

This is all contradicted by many other stories, where the progress of the UK's space programme matches harsh reality. E.g. why does UNIT have to rely on a Russian rocket in The Invasion?

These Probe missions comprise only two astronauts, which is a very big risk if one of them falls ill or is otherwise incapacitated. This is exactly what happens on Mars Probe 6, where one of the astronauts is killed - inadvertently - when he comes into contact with the highly radioactive aliens who are visiting the planet.

Even more of a risk is that Recovery missions comprise only a single astronaut - so no back-up at all if anything happens to him.

The Mars Probe ships take several months to get to Mars, and about the same length of time to get back, and presumably the astronauts spend some time on Mars rather than just coming straight back home again. We don't see the ship which takes them there, but the one that brings them back is just a small capsule. How can it possibly contain enough food and water for two for eight months?

Regarding the journey times of Mars Probes 6 and 7, and Recovery 7, the story seems to suggest that the distance between Earth and Mars remains relatively constant over an 18 month period, which totally ignores the reality of planetary orbits. Cornish seems to think he can just launch a rocket anytime,  forgetting all about launch windows.

What exactly are the aliens doing on Mars for all this time anyway? They are only supposed to be passing through on their way to Earth.

Why do the aliens wait until the day they are due to arrive to send the instructions for making a communications device. Shouldn't they have sorted this out a lot sooner? They have met humans before and know they can speak, and they speak themselves, so why communicate initially in such an obscure manner?

The survivor of Mars Probe 6 - Carrington - decides not to inform the authorities back on Earth what happened to his colleague. Instead, out of a need for revenge, he elects to formulate a convoluted plan to turn the Earth authorities against the aliens, provoking a war in which they will be destroyed.

Carrington would have had to travel back from Mars, a journey of months, all on his own, having seen his only colleague die. This would surely have affected his mind, and a very long period of rest would have been prescribed, with all manner of psychological tests. Instead, within a few months, he is made head of security for the entire UK space programme.

He's the latest in an increasingly long line of wholly inappropriate people to place in charge of important projects.

If Carrington is head of security, what are UNIT even doing there in the first place?

Why does he allow the journalist to broadcast from Space Control, when his plan might not necessarily go to plan?

He starts referring to the astronauts as "aliens", when he's still trying to convince everyone that they are the human astronauts who have been infected and quarantined.

Carrington has a deputy in the first couple of episodes who simply vanishes, and is replaced by Reegan, who just turns up out of nowhere and acts as if he's been part of the plot all along. There's another deputy named Collinson - the one played by the pathologist from Taggart - for whom Carrington goes to all the bother of springing from UNIT custody, only for him to also vanish from the story.

Dr Lennox is later held in the same cell - despite UNIT knowing that someone has only recently simply walked into it and freed a prisoner.

And who kills Lennox with the radioactive isotope? There's actually one school of thought that it was Sgt Benton, who turns up in the last few episodes acting like he's been in it from the start, just like Reegan. It's as though a new writer suddenly started working on this after the first couple of episodes...

Is there anything that Reegan can't do? For a hired mercenary he seems to know a lot about radioactivity, rocket fuel and electronics.

Talking of rocket fuel, the M3 Variant is labelled "M3 Varient". Why are the controls for the fuel out in the open, and not held within a secure building?

Reegan has gone to the trouble of coming up with fake documents, yet he hits the soldier who wants to check them without waiting to see if they are OK - thus drawing attention to himself.

What does Prof. Taltalian have to do to get arrested, or at least thrown out of Space Control? He pulls guns on people and carries out acts of sabotage, and he's back at work the next day as though nothing had happened.

His French accent disappears in the scene where he stops Liz from escaping from the bunker.

His booby-trapped briefcase kills him and wrecks the room, yet all the Doctor requires is a small sticking plaster on his cheek when he was standing right next to the Professor when the bomb went off.

For this story, and no other, the Doctor has the skill of "transmigration of object". He can make huge things vanish and reappear - things far too big to slip up your shirt sleeve. It looks like magic, rather than science.

Why does Carrington not recognise the Doctor when he's playing a doddery old man when Bessie has supposedly broken down. Surely he would have gathered intelligence about the Brigadier and his team if he's going to go up against them? And why does the Doctor not recognise Carrington as one of the two men who he got stuck to Bessie?

A behind-the-scenes thing that went wrong with the ambush sequence on the convoy was that one of the stuntmen lost control of his motorbike and it crashed into the director's assistant, injuring her leg.

In the Part One fight in the warehouse, Derek Ware is clearly shot but reappears seconds later unharmed to get shot again.

He's not the only one to make a miraculous recovery. Another soldier - played by Max Faulkner - gets zapped by the ambassadors, but is back at his post a couple of episodes later.

One of the alien ambassadors appears to be wearing National Health prescription spectacles under his helmet.

This is the first episode to have the TARDIS console operating outside the Police Box shell. How did the Doctor get it out through the doors? He didn't dematerialise it as it doesn't work properly. How can it work at all, if the entire power of the ship is supposed to be trapped beneath it.

It's a good job the Doctor and Liz swap positions around the console when they vanish, otherwise they would reappear inside each other.

What's Wrong With... The Silurians

The writer of this story, Malcolm Hulke, thought it a big mistake to have the Doctor exiled on Earth.

He foresaw a limited number of scenarios - mainly alien invasions and mad scientists. As it was, Terrance Dicks proved him wrong by suggesting a storyline in which the monsters are already on Earth in the first place, and it is the human race who are the interlopers.

Unfortunately, the Doctor actually refers to the Silurians in Part Seven as an "alien species" despite everything he knows about their origins, and the scientist in charge of the Wenley Moor research complex - Dr Lawrence - goes mad, so Hulke ends up writing the very thing he was complaining about.

Thanks to a misunderstanding with the people who wrote the title captions, this story is officially called "Doctor Who and the Silurians". 

Behind the scenes nearly every story was referred to as "Dr Who and...", and the caption at the end of The Gunfighters states that the following week would be broadcast "Doctor Who and the Savages". As it was, the title which appeared was just The Savages, without the "Doctor Who and...".

The other big mistake with this story is the name of its monsters. The Silurians were named for the geological era in which they are supposed to have originated. (Creationists, please look away now...).

The Silurian Era was the third period (of six) of the Paleozoic Era. The first two were the Cambrian and the Ordovician, and the last three were the Devonian, Carboniferous and the Permian.

The Silurian Era began 443.8 million years ago, and lasted until 419.2 million years ago. In appearance, the Earth was mostly seas covering the northern hemisphere, with all of the land masses joined together in the south. Much of the wildlife lived in the seas, with very little happening on land - certainly no dinosaurs or any large reptiles. No reptiles at all, in fact.

On the land we had things like arachnids and hexapods. Trilobites were common. The first boney fish evolved, as well as those with teeth.

Larger reptiles didn't appear until the Permian era, but if the Silurians come from any era it is probably the Mesozoic, as they say they overlapped with mammals. At no point did you have dinosaurs and apes coexisting, however.

A related problem with this story is the whole idea that it was the arrival of the Moon which prompted the Silurians to go into hibernation - thinking that this small planetoid that had wandered into the Solar System might trash the surface of the Earth as it passed by.

Latest thoughts are that the Moon is 4.5 billion years old, and that it formed not long after the Earth. It grew out of the collision debris when the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet (Theia).

The whole idea of plate tectonics and continental drift was very new at the time this story was written, and not widely accepted. Even so, the notion of Deep Time was known since Victorian times. It is therefore odd that Hulke believes that the Silurian shelter could remain intact, seemingly at the same depth it was built at, after millions of years.

Hulke is also confused about the Van Allen Belt, mistaking it for the Ozone Layer.

The Silurians tap into mankind's ancestral memories - and a glimpse of one causes a technician to revert to a primitive state, drawing on the walls of his room like a cave person. A farmer's wife is reduced to a similar state. However, when everyone sees the Silurians later on, they fail to have the same effect.

How big are these caverns, that a 30 foot dinosaur can run about in them?  

The Doctor states that the Silurian footprints they find are not the dinosaur's - being from a biped instead. 'Biped' means two footed - which the dinosaur also is. 

Why does Dr Quinn tell the Doctor all about the incident which befell the two pot-holing technicians? It simply serves to get the Doctor intrigued and start investigating - the very thing Quinn wants to avoid. Hulke will make the exact same mistake in the next story to feature Homo Reptilia, when Trenchard blabs about the sinkings.

In fact, Quinn does just about everything in such a suspicious way that he might as well get a badge or have a T-shirt printed announcing that he's in league with the Silurians.

What is the relevance of the missing pages in the log? If it's to conceal a pattern to the power failures, then everyone knows when they happened, so the information is out there anyway.

Dr Lawrence is the latest in the long line of people in charge of hugely expensive projects who simply should never have been considered in the first place. No matter what evidence he is presented with, he just won't accept it. Even when he's dying of the plague disease he just won't believe it.

Masters of the Ministry decides to go back to London despite feeling unwell - knowing of the threat that the illness poses. 

According to a map, the illness can leap to Paris, but is hardly present anywhere between Derbyshire and London.

Why does the Doctor waste time having drugs and equipment brought to Wenley Moor to combat the illness, when the main focus of the plague has shifted to London, and the research centre could come under attack by the Silurians at any moment?

Believing the Cyclotron is about to explode, the Silurians run back to their shelter, intending to wake up again in 50 years after the radioactive fall-out has diminished. Wasn't it their alarm clock that got them into this mess in the first place?

The biggest problem of all - why does the Doctor continue to work for UNIT after the conclusion of this story? The suggestion is that the Brigadier has blown up the shelter - killing every Silurian known to exist - so potentially an act of genocide. Even if he does need facilities to repair the TARDIS, the Doctor really ought to have walked away from UNIT after this.

What's Wrong With... Spearhead From Space

This is a story which actually benefitted from things going seriously wrong behind the scenes. The first story in colour, and the first to feature Jon Pertwee as the new Doctor, it almost never happened thanks to industrial action at the BBC - caused by that very move into colour.

In order to salvage the problem it was decided to dispense with studio recording on videotape and film the whole thing instead on location. 

This would later mean that this story could be the first to be upgraded to HD and be released on Blu-ray.

Writer Nigel Kneale was not very happy with this story, as it very much pinched from his Quatermass II in its first episode. The similarities to the earlier production's opening moments are obvious.

A lot of the rest of the story has been robbed from its author's own works - namely a low budget British Sci-Fi movie called Invasion, which centres round a small cottage hospital.

The remainder owes a lot to an unused version of The Faceless Ones, by Malcolm Hulke and David Ellis. The earliest version of this story was known as "The Big Store" and was based in a department store where the aliens disguised themselves as mannequins.

In a nutshell, this isn't the most original of works.

There is a chicken / egg conundrum going on. If an Auton (Channing) is collecting the Nestene spheres and creating new Autons, who made him?

Robert Holmes will refine the Nestene threat for their next appearance, but in this story it would be difficult for them to conquer the whole of the UK quickly - let alone the whole planet.

Had the dolls in the factory been killer Nestene ones then that would have created a much wider impact on the country, but shop window dummies aren't spread evenly throughout the nation.

Why is General Scobie left alive? If it was necessary to keep him, why have him put on display in one of central London's most popular tourist attractions, rather than have him hidden away somewhere in the factory where he could be properly guarded?

When the Doctor attacks the Scobie Auton, his troops just stand there and watch for ages without doing anything, like shooting the man attacking their leader in the middle of an armed conflict.

Channing's abilities to identify brain prints are variable. He fails to notice that the Doctor is an alien on their first two encounters but can sense aliens at Tussauds. He can tell when Ransome is in the area even from miles away, but has to be told that Hibbert, who he sees every day, is outside his door.

Why does the Auton searching for the swarm leader not have a disguise? It is mentioned that the Nestenes don't want to face any confrontation with the authorities yet, so why draw potential attention to yourselves with an undisguised Auton?

The same could be said for the attempted abduction of the Doctor from the hospital. This was a high risk operation - which failed - all because the Doctor might have knowledge of the missing sphere.

Why does the Brigadier automatically distrust the Doctor to stick around, when there was never the slightest hint of him doing a runner in the middle of their last two adventures together?

And why does Liz, who has been totally sceptical about aliens etc. up to now, suddenly believe that the Police Box can go travelling?

You can catch a glimpse of the technician hiding behind the TARDIS operating the smoke machine.

The UNIT officer at the tracking station is wearing her tie badge upside down.

One of the supposedly wax dummies in Tussauds flutters her eyes, and General Scobie sways a little. One of the supposedly dead pedestrians in the famous dummy attack scene moves his arm.

The TARDIS when first seen is a model, which has the St John's Ambulance badge on it. We then cut to the real prop on location, which doesn't have the badge.

Can a regenerated body really have a manufactured item on it like a tattoo?