Doctor Who: Series 13, Episodes 13-16 – “The Android Invasion” (1975)

An entertaining little yarn. I’m always a fan of doppelganger episodes of shows, and sci-fi series have so many reasonable excuses to use them. In fact, when you think about it, it’s a little surprising how seldomly it comes up on classic Who; new Who does a lot more of this, but considering its 26-year catalog, you’d think the classic series would have way more than it does. A parallel world here, a Zygon duplicate there, and, as here, the odd android replica, and that’s pretty much it!

Sarah Jane is convinced that she and the Fourth Doctor have landed on Earth, but the Doctor isn’t so convinced. As they move through a creepy, nigh-deserted village with unnatural-seeming denizens, these suspicions grow stronger and stronger. Nothing, it turns out, is as it seems, and with baddies capable of building android replicas of whoever they’d like, not even the Doctor or Sarah Jane are always as they seem!

Naturally, there’s some good fun to be had with androids here. There’s the ole “android makes a tiny slip-up that the other person instantly recognizes because they know you so well” routine, the human (or Time Lord) vs. their android grudge match, and of course, the fun of watching the actors play something not-quite their characters. Everyone is suitably creepy playing the implacable androids, but special mention has to be given to Ian Marter. When he’s playing an android (in a situation where the jig is up and he doesn’t have to pretend to be Harry,) he’s absolutely nothing like Harry. I don’t know that I quite appreciated him enough as an actor until I saw him in this serial.

What else is there to report? This is a great story for Doctor-companion interactions. There’s the aforementioned you-know-me-so-well brand of android-spotting, and in the early scenes, they bounce ideas off each other quite nicely. They also get in some top-shelf bickering, my favorite being when Sarah Jane points out the potentially fatal flaw in the Doctor’s strategy and, without a beat, he tsks at the holes in their plan. Ha! Even so, they spend a fair amount of the story apart, giving all the more reason for one or the other to be an android whenever they meet up again.

As far as the plot goes, I’m also interested in the dynamic between Crayford and the Kraals. Their evil scheme, while almost ridiculously detailed, gets a definite A for effort, and I like the particular set-up for how they wind up working with Crayford in the first place.