Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs

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Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the second serial of Doctor Who Season 11, originally broadcast in six episodes from 12 January to 16 February 1974. It was written by Malcolm Hulke and directed by Paddy Russell. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates.

The Doctor and Sarah return to London to find the city emptied and real dinosaurs appearing in the streets, while UNIT struggles to keep order and uncover who is behind the chaos. A secret project called Operation Golden Age aims to turn back time using stolen technology, and trusted faces are caught up in the scheme.

Episode 1

The TARDIS sets down in the heart of London, and the city is wrong. Streets lie silent under curfew posters, shopfronts hang open, and the air feels charged, as if a storm just passed. The Doctor and Sarah Jane pick their way through back lanes, dodging jittery patrols who mistake them for looters and haul them in.

UNIT pulls them clear; the Brigadier briefs fast: the capital has been evacuated after “monster sightings.” A soldier swears a dinosaur walked out of thin air on the Embankment and then vanished. The Doctor hears “vanished” and thinks time, not zoology. That night, in a warehouse lit by moonlight and dust, a pterodactyl flickers into being, shrieks, and dives; a second later it blinks out, leaving only claw marks and panic. General Finch, representing martial law, bullies the investigation while a smooth government ally, Sir Charles Grover, promises political cover.

Sarah follows a lead on blacked-out vans moving after curfew; the Doctor maps energy spikes that rise and fall like tides. Another surge cracks the night: a tyrannosaur looms in a junction, roaring London awake, and then: gone. The pattern is clear to the Doctor now. Something is fishing creatures out of Earth’s past and dropping them into deserted streets, one time-rip at a time.

Episode 2

Daylight brings barbed wire and roadblocks. UNIT hunts for a common source while the Doctor builds a crude detector to triangulate the time distortions. Sarah, nosing around a shuttered ministry garage, spots a familiar van and a face she can’t place (civil servant Butler) before she’s bundled into the back and chloroformed.

She wakes in a bright, clinical cabin where calm voices tell her she is aboard a colony ship bound for a new world, that Earth was doomed, and that she must accept the ship’s strict creed. She plays along, looks for windows, and finds only screens and slogans. On the ground, the Brigadier watches the Doctor bait a dinosaur with sonic pulses and swears the beast stepped through a hole in the air. General Finch presses for heavy weapons, but the Doctor warns that brute force is pointless against a phenomenon arriving from the past.

Sir Charles Grover tours the cordon and publically backs UNIT, privately takes notes, and leaves smiling. In a basement lab no one is supposed to know exists, Professor Whitaker calibrates a “timescoop” with cold delight and orders Butler to “remove the journalist.” Sarah tests the ship’s “gravity” with a dropped spoon and listens to the hum in the walls. Nothing feels like space.

Episode 3

Sarah challenges the ship’s leaders (earnest young idealists carefully chosen for their faith in a cleaner future) and is shut down by gentle doctrine. She notices the stars never drift, the air never stales, and the “external view” loops; it’s an underground studio dressed as the heavens. She whispers doubt, earns believers, and plans a break.

In London, the Doctor’s readings point to a cluster of surges under Whitehall. He and the Brigadier stalk a new distortion and nearly lose men to a stegosaur that pops in the middle of a diversion Finch has “coincidentally” arranged. The Doctor announces he can build a field to trap the next arrival, study it, and trace the timescoop’s carrier wave back to its source. Someone leaks his plan. A tyrannosaur manifests inside the very warehouse UNIT has wired, and a power cut kills the Doctor’s cage at the worst second.

The animal rips free and vanishes; the Doctor is accused of endangering civilians and clapped in custody on Finch’s order. Benton doesn’t like the smell of it; Mike Yates, oddly remote, counsels patience. Sarah tricks her way out of the “ship,” finds a maintenance hatch, and falls into a concrete corridor that leads to Whitaker’s lab. She sees Sir Charles Grover step from the shadows and knows there’s a conspiracy.

Episode 4

Sarah overhears “Operation Golden Age”: Grover and Whitaker intend to roll Earth back in time to a pristine era, erasing industry, cities, and billions of lives: then repopulate the planet with their handpicked “colonists” from the fake ship. When she’s discovered, Butler drags her before Grover, who speaks with missionary calm about saving the world from humanity.

She is gagged and locked away. In the city, Benton “loses” a key and helps the Doctor slip his cell; Finch storms in too late and orders Benton arrested. The Doctor returns to the warehouse, rewires the trap by lamplight, and successfully nets a tyrannosaur inside a force field: a terrifying, priceless living compass. Before he can tune the timescoop’s recall on it, the dinosaur winks out, cage and all. Someone on the inside is telling the enemy everything.

The Brigadier leads a sweep through government basements and finds nothing but dust and a faint ozone tang where the lab should be. Sarah is marched back through the “ship” to be re-indoctrinated; instead, she shouts the truth until doubt ripples through the crew. A siren whoops. Grover moves the schedule up. Whitaker grins and asks for maximum power: the next surge won’t bring a single beast: it will reset the clock.

Episode 5

London buckles under new incursions as multiple dinosaurs flash in and out around key junctions, snarling any attempt at a full search. General Finch “temporarily relieves” the Brigadier and puts trigger-happy troops on the streets. The Doctor, now living in alleyways and labs-on-the-run, tracks the timescoop signature into the Underground and marks an abandoned station as the source.

Yates confronts him there, motor idling, and softly, regretfully admits he believes in Operation Golden Age. He lifts a pistol. Benton barrels in, takes the shot meant for the Doctor on a locker door, and lets the Time Lord bolt into the tunnels while Yates, shaken, lowers the gun and walks away rather than fire again. Below, the Doctor slips past razorwire into Whitaker’s lair: banks of humming cabinets around a platform that glows with bottled stormlight.

Sarah breaks the fake ship’s hold with proof (a “space hatch” that opens onto a London cellar) and frees the colonists; some are horrified, others still yearn for the promised Eden. Sir Charles arrives, saintlike, and invites them to stand aside and let history be “healed.” On the surface, a brontosaur sways through a traffic circle like a nightmare carousel. The Doctor studies Whitaker’s machine and feels the wrongness of a planet about to be unmade.

Episode 6

The Doctor strides onto the timescoop platform and offers Whitaker a scientist’s praise: and a physicist’s correction. Time isn’t a toy; it’s a web. Pull one strand, the world tears. Whitaker smirks, dials power, and asks if he’d prefer to be erased with compassion or without. The Doctor flicks a bank of switches he rewired on the way in.

The machine’s recall turns inward. Grover lunges to stop him, trips the failsafe, and both conspirators tumble into their own temporal vortex, trapped between moments: neither in prehistory nor here. Sarah drags the colonists out as equipment detonates in careful bursts, collapsing the lab. Above, the Brigadier regains command, arrests Finch on charges that will stick, and stares sadly at Mike Yates, who cannot be court-martialed for conscience but cannot stay. Mike resigns, eyes shadowed.

The last dinosaurs flicker, called home by the dying machine. London exhales. Sarah watches families return to city squares with picnics and feels, for a breath, the tug of Grover’s lie: a simpler world, clean and empty. The Doctor squeezes her hand and reminds her that goodness isn’t found by deleting people, it’s made among them. Benton cracks a joke; the Brigadier snorts; sirens go quiet. The TARDIS door opens on another bright, impossible day.

Themes

As urban conspiracy drama, Invasion of the Dinosaurs punches above its rubber teeth. The empty London, martial-law tension, and “Operation Golden Age” idealists give it the adult bite of The Ambassadors of Death and the time-twist unease of Day of the Daleks, even if the dinosaur effects can’t match the atmosphere.

Coming off The Time Warrior, it feels tougher and more political: closer in moral heft to The Green Death than to the flamboyance of The Time Monster. It lands as upper-tier Pertwee: scrappy, thoughtful, and quietly bold.

Its links are rich and pointed. The deserted-city imagery nods back to The Dalek Invasion of Earth, while Sarah Jane’s investigative spark here propels her through Death to the Daleks and The Monster of Peladon, toward the hard goodbyes of The Hand of Fear.

Most crucially, Captain Yates’s betrayal reshapes UNIT, setting up his redemption in Planet of the Spiders, where the Metebelis III thread (teased since Carnival of Monsters and carried through The Green Death) finally closes the Third Doctor’s era. By exposing how noble intentions curdle into authoritarian schemes, Invasion of the Dinosaurs bridges the ecological warnings of the past with the spiritual reckoning to come.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Third Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Third Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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To view the list of other Doctor Who serials, please click this link

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