The latest Doctor Who Blu-Ray set has arrived, and sadly they used some pretty poor AI upscaling thing that makes the picture look… weird, even to my eyes that often doesn’t catch that sort of thing, to the point where I’ve taken screenshots from the DVD release instead, which kind of goes against the point of these reviews but oh well! While it does introduce the Zygons, a great alien race that oddly never reappeared on screen until 2013, many decades after this story, my favourite thing about it is that it’s pretty much a Third Doctor era UNIT story with the Fourth Doctor… and being set in Scotland. Still! It’s a great story, so let’s take a look at it!
The Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry return to Earth after their string of adventures seen in Mr. Baker’s first season and realise they’re in Scotland. Well, then presumably knew in advance as The Doctor comes dressed for the occasion for the first episode, complete with kilt and that hat that stereotypical Scots always wear. Anyway, they were summoned by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (also wearing a kilt, the Stewart part of his name did always imply Scottish ancestry…) who is having an issue with vanishing oil rigs, something The Doctor isn’t actually that interested in until a piece of one of the rigs washes up with large teeth marks in it. UNIT’s investigation (which for the record includes Benton, now a Sergeant Major) isn’t welcome in the small village they set up shop in, especially with nearby wealthy landowner Duke of Forgill (John Woodnutt) and his groundskeeper Caber (Robert Russell), the latter of whom actually shoots Harry when he trespasses on his master’s land.
“Yes I’d like to order a cape and a yellow roadster, things are about to get UNIT-y!”
A local nurse named Sister Lamont (Lillias Walker) is the first to be revealed as a Zygon, at least to the viewer, as she abducts the wounded Harry and takes him back to the Zygon ship, allowing them to copy and impersonate him. It’s here we see the Baron and Caber are also Zygons as they have to keep the original “bodyprint” alive in order to copy it and they can be seen standing in pods either side of Harry. So that’s the set up for a while, us knowing who the Zygons are but the lead cast don’t, for a while at least. I’ll also mention a large creature called the Skarasen that’s being mistaken for the Loch Ness monster, it exists as the Zygons rely on to feed them via their lactic fluid (there’s an unpleasant mental image…) It appears off-camera for a few episodes but eventually makes its on-screen appearance, and in all honesty, it’s not that bad at all.
Still a fantastic cliffhanger, and a great costume too!
Now the old “shapeshifting alien race hides itself amongst humanity” thing is among the most over-used clichés in all of science fiction but the Zygons pull it off because their design is so great. They look like weird fetus men with suckers all over the place, and their ship interior is full of organic walls and buttons rather than any electrical equipment. It gives them a really unique feel and along with their whispery voices a very unnerving one at that, the cliffhanger to Part 1 where a Zygon suddenly appears behind Sarah Jane, its mouth open wide and lunging at her would’ve scared the bejesus out of me as a kid. So lot’s going on in all four episodes, it’s one of those stories that was hyped up to me for years as I patiently waited for the DVD release and I wasn’t disappointed when I finally saw it.
The Continuity:
Forgill does anything he can to not look at all the suckers running up the back of his Zygon buddy.
The Zygons, despite going down well, wouldn’t appear again in the TV series until 2013 in the 50th Anniversary special “The Day of the Doctor”. They also reappear in the Twelfth Doctor story “The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion”. Outside of TV though they appear quite frequently, including a Fourth Doctor audio “Zygon Hunt” and a pair of Eighth Doctor audios in “The Zygon Who Fell to Earth” and “Death in Blackpool”, not to mention a few books and comic cameos.
Harry Sullivan would actually reappear later in this very season in the story “The Android Invasion” and the events of this story are mentioned in Seventh Doctor TV story “Remembrance of the Daleks” and Tenth Doctor TV story “School Reunion”, while the Sixth Doctor TV story “Timelash” offers an alternate idea as to where the legend of the Loch Ness Monster came from (that’s not as fun, both the supposed creation of the legend and the story itself, to be fair…)
Overall Thoughts:
The Doctor sees how he looks on the Blu-Ray release…
Terror of the Zygons is considered one of the all-time classic Doctor Who serials and its easy to see why, the creatures themselves look great and disturbing for the younger audience, the UNIT vs. alien threat with The Brig and Benton brings a bit of classic Who into the mix and Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen were on fine form as the iconic duo of The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. An easy five.
Eventually Sarah breaks into the Zygon ship and frees Harry, and later The Doctor is captured and taken on board the ship and escapes, taking the real Lamont, Baron and Caber with him before detonating the ship. This isn’t the end though as Broton, the Zygon impersonating the Baron, escapes the ship before it explodes and places a calling beacon for to attract the Skarasen off the edge of the Thames.
… Yeah, okay, it’s not great, but the Chewits T-Rex from Invasion of the Dinosaurs was worse… Wow, there’s damning with faint praise!
Broton is killed in a warehouse showdown with The Doctor and then our hero eventually lures the Skarasen out of the Thames and gets it to eat the “Trilanic Activator” that was attracting it everywhere and therefore turning it into a tame creature of instinct, one that returns to Loch Ness and presumably cements the legacy of the creature. At the end of the story The Doctor heads off with Sarah but not Harry, who decides to stay behind and go back to his old life.
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