‘Is everybody in this conspiracy,’ asks the Brigadier as the Doctor outlines General Finch’s part in the plot to frame him. The answer, pretty much, is yes. But that’s in part what gives this a modern, paranoid thriller style a long way from the criticised cosiness of something like The Time Monster. This time there’s no Master plotting world domination, or alien invaders to be beaten back. It’s all on us. Even our friend Mike Yates has fallen for the comfortable panacea offered by wiping the slate clean and starting again, to escape from a world that’s ‘too complicated and corrupt’.

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Whittaker and Grover wax lyrical about rolling back time to a golden age, promising that although they’ve been misleading their followers, ‘we’re going to bring the past to them’ even if it means condemning the rest of the country while they pursue their dreams of growing their own food, making their own furniture and bringing it all back how it used to be. Their pernicious nostalgia, a pining to duck the difficult decisions and complexities of modern life in favour of clinging to a rose-tinted perception of an easier, happier past, suggests that the real dinosaurs are these fogeys.

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This must be one of the thinnest scripts the series has had to date: whole stretches involve the Doctor driving round deserted London and lurking first in an abandoned tube station, and then an underground bunker, all in the name of playing catchup with Sarah Jane – who already discovered all of this last week. As such, it’s fine, but does feel like it’s just noodling on things we already know (for example, Mike Yates complaining again that he never agreed to murder the Doctor), and finishing with the implausible idea that the Doctor could be framed as the mastermind behind the Dinosaur invasion.

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While it’s easy to over-state the differences between companions (they’re mostly there to ask questions, get into trouble and be the Doctor’s strength and weakness), the way they each fulfil their role can vary a lot. Dropping Sarah Jane into a UNIT story creates a very different dynamic than with Liz or Jo, both UNIT employees. Sarah needs both a reason to be accepted by the Brigadier, and a reason to want to stick around. Last episode dealt with the former essentially by having the Doctor appoint her his temporary assistant. This episode focuses on what’s in it for Sarah. She’s not getting paid to be the Doctor’s assistant, so she needs a different angle: a story, ideally with some juicy photos of a captive tyrannosaurus. Later, she smells something interesting about a secret nuclear reactor, and goes off to interview Sir Charles Grover MP in a very business-like way. The result in both cases is the same as would have happened with Jo: Sarah gets into danger. But the route to the result is quite different, and spices up what could have been fairly routine.

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When I was a kid I absolutely adored dinosaurs. I had picture books, toys (not even smart toys, literally just solid, dinosaur-shaped chunks of plastic), I’d go mad for any film or TV that had them in. For my birthday one year my parents took me to the Natural History Museum in London to see the dinosaur skeletons. I could recite their names and tell you that the tyrannosaurus was the most ferocious dinosaur ever to walk the Earth. I was obsessed. They were the only thing that rivalled my obsession with Doctor Who. All of which is to say, if Invasion of the Dinosaurs had aired when I was six years old I would have been buzzing. It’s deeply unlikely I would have noticed or cared that the dinosaurs have all the mobility and liveliness of Liberace’s face. I would have been hooked. And I expect this would have been equally true for a big chunk of the target audience in 1974.

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Featuring eerie, deserted streets, London landmarks empty of tourists, darkened shops and the authorities on the lookout for curfew breakers, this is the perfect episode for CoVid lockdown viewing. Paddy Russell’s location filming is one of the highlights of this episode. It’s reminiscent of the show’s first big out-of-studio set pieces: the Daleks patrolling conquered London, and, as in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the initial excuse for the quiet is that it’s probably Sunday. But as we’ve already seen a dog eating something out of an abandoned car, and a milk float with its curdling cargo smashed about it, we’re already primed to expect something more sinister. Later, there’s an absolutely horrible shot of a looter, head bashed in, which is made more disturbing because it’s so brief and gives no time to take in the details. And as a result of the only partially successful colour recovery from the B&W telerecording, the whole thing comes closer than any other Doctor Who episode to looking like a grotty print of a grottier 1970s exploitation horror movie. No wonder I love it.

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This continues to be Robert Holmes’ funniest script to date. Bloodaxe, on first impressions a Baldrick type figure, slyly mocks Irongron’s pretentions: ‘Tis a cunning plan, Captain… Yours is indeed a towering intelligence’. Holmes even dares to poke fun at Pertwee (‘A long-shanked rascal with a mighty nose’), and while some of the quips about the ‘fair sex’ are a bit cringey nowadays it’s notable that Sarah is both willing to admit when she’s wrong, however grudgingly, and continues to be a driving force behind the fight against Linx and Irongron, leading the raid on the castle to capture the Doctor, and convincing Sir Edward and Lady Eleanor to give him a fair hearing.

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Apparently, the historical setting for The Time Warrior was suggested by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, and Robert Holmes was less than enthusiastic about the idea. The only tell is how irreverent this is: Holmes has resurrected the comedy historicals last seen in The Gunfighters, where modern sensibilities and humour make the past seem a less distant and unknowable place, and even the sexism of the Middle Ages is played for laughs. In many ways this story is the model for the bulk of 21st Century history episodes, which focus heavily on the sci-fi elements and assume that, funny accents and clothes aside, not much separates us from our ancestors. Compared to The Time Meddler, which largely kept the Monk’s plot separate from the grim reality of Vikings vs Anglo-Saxons, this plays much faster and looser with the concept of the (grits teeth) pseudo-historical.

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The striking new title sequence and logo emphasise that this is a new beginning of sorts for the series. With the UNIT Fam broken up, the Doctor free to roam time and space, and (behind the scenes) Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks looking to move on, the transition to the Tom Baker years is beginning. Which makes this something like The Invasion in Season Six: a story that features the current team, but anticipates many of the elements of the next era of the show. In this case, most notably the arrival of Sarah Jane Smith, a character that will go on to surpass Jo Grant both in tenure and popularity.

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The logical climax of this story is much more convincing than Robert Sloman’s last two scripts, with the first half focusing on ending the threat posed by the giant maggots (and, oh dear, the giant fly) and the second switching to defeating BOSS’s plans for global domination. As a result, there’s an unflagging pace, helped by holding back the meaning of Professor Jones’s mysterious declaration of ‘serendipity’. The neatness of the script is reflected both in the method of defeating the maggots (the edible fungus that’s been a running joke for the last five weeks), and in the Doctor’s appeal to Stevens’ humanity which is vital in foiling BOSS (‘sentimental friend,’ the dying computer proclaims, having called him a ‘sentimentalist’ back in Episode Three). All this is wrapped up in Jo’s departure, which has been seeded since practically the first scene.

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