The Android Invasion
The Android Invasion is the fourth serial of the thirteenth season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 22 November to 13 December 1975.
The serial was directed by former series producer Barry Letts and written by Terry Nation — his first Doctor Who script for eleven years not to feature his creations, the Daleks.
In the village of Devesham, the Doctor and Sarah Jane meet a group of humanoid robots in white suits and opaque helmets, who shoot at them with their index fingers.
The Doctor and Sarah Jane flee to a pub, where the villagers wait motionless until the clock strikes, when they suddenly come to life, acting normally.
Sarah and the Doctor escape aboard Crayford's rocket and travel to Earth to warn the real defence station, while being followed by android duplicates of themselves.
After dodging pursuit, the Doctor makes his way back to the Space Defence Station's control room, where he had given a technician instructions to prepare a device that would disable the androids.
"[6] Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping gave the serial a negative review in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), writing that it was "stupid, tiresome and very irritating".
[8] In 2010, Mark Braxton of Radio Times awarded it two stars out of five, writing that The Android Invasion was the weak link in the season.
[9] DVD Talk's Ian Jane gave the serial three-and-a-half out of five stars, saying that it "may not be the deepest or for that matter the most original of stories told in the series but it's a fun tale that breezes by at a good pace".
[11] The Android Invasion was reviewed favourably by John Kenneth Muir, who described it as "an atmosphere-laden suspense thriller", despite finding some deficiencies in the storyline, which he referred to as an idiot plot.
Muir praised the conceit of frightening, android duplicates of familiar people, and he traced influences from the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Stepford Wives (1975).
He also notes the similarity of the depiction of androids in Doctor Who to the Fembots that appeared the following year in The Bionic Woman television series ("Kill Oscar", 1976), with "faces filled with circuitry and round, lifeless orbs for eyes".
Another familiar science-fiction device used in The Android Invasion is that of artificial duplicate settings; Muir considered that the "fake" village of Devesham imitated scenarios seen in earlier television series such as Star Trek ("The Mark of Gideon", 1969), UFO ("Reflections in the Water", 1971) and Space: 1999 ("One Moment of Humanity").
