Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Ingrid Oliver, Jemma Redgrave, Jaye Griffiths, Cleopatra Dickens, Rebecca Front, Abhishek Singh, Samila Kularatne, Todd Kramer, Jill Winternitz, Gretchen Egolf, Karen Mann, Aiden Cook, Tom Wilton.

The world is replete with the tales of the fear of losing one’s identity, of having it usurped, stolen, by another and seeing it misused, misappropriated and driven to the edge of a psychological breakdown; it is the story that has been the inspiration behind so many science fiction stories and the very real and perhaps just as imagined terror that led to the insanity of the McCarthy Trials in the attempt to root out so called Communists in American life.

This fear of everything about you being copied, being stolen and becoming a mockery of life, has been a staple of Doctor Who for many years, prevalent in many of Tom Baker’s stories and highlighted in the Terror of the Zygons and now carried on in the new generation of tales as The Zygons once more make their presence known in the excellent The Zygon Invasion.

The Zygon Invasion brings back the creatures with the ability to shape-shift and replace any person on the planet after the spectacular return in the 50th Anniversary special in 2013. It is a return that really frames not only the point of being replaced by your own doppelganger, but the question of war in the modern age, it asks why the military intelligences of the day seem so happy to annihilate an opposing force rather than talk to them.

Whilst the newspapers and media have made much of the so called declining viewers, a trend that has not just hit Doctor Who but right across the board, what they have left out, as is their right in their ambition to sell pessimism, or even to revel in their own folly which mocks the successful, is that the stories themselves so far in the series have been amongst the very best in the long history of the much loved science-fiction programme. It is into this The Zygon Invasion sits so with comfortable ease.

Aside from Peter Capaldi yet again being seen as the living embodiment of the adventurous Time Lord, the episode was made even more heartfelt and full of grit by the return of Ingrid Oliver as Osgood, Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart and the touching scene of misplayed trust played out the soldier Hitchley, played by Todd Kramer, and the breathing copy of his mum, played with great sincerity by Karen Mann.

Despite it all, the true star of this episode was the writer Peter Harness who captures with authority the subject at hand and like the classic series in which the fear of replacement was always treading water in the background, so to the 21st Century as the dread of society switching you with someone who doesn’t answer back, who doesn’t think for themselves, who has no use to those in charge except for how much money you make. It is a fear that is worse than the excuse held by McCarthyism, this is true nature of Government, make money or you will be replaced.

The Zygon Invasion stands up to anything that is thrown at it from the classic era, a full bloodied scream for Halloween.

Ian D. Hall