DOCTOR WHO AND THE DINOSAUR INVASION
by Malcolm Hulke

El Sandifer views ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ as ‘a rejection of Doctor Who’ which exposes ‘the Doctor as no better than the villains’ (3). Certainly, there are similarities drawn between him and the villains, whether in how he bonds with Charles Grover over the problems humanity is causing the planet (4) or in the condescending tone he shares with the Reminder Room films (5), but Sandifer’s reading relies on their being a ‘distinction between what the Operation Golden Age people are doing’ (6) and the ‘noble goals’ (7) that are the reason ‘why they’re doing it’ (and Sandifer is speaking specifically about the novelisation here).

    I don’t buy it. The Operation Golden Age people do ‘terrible things’ because they’re terrible people. Simplest to say this of is General Finch, whose longing for ‘a bygone age’ is manifested in a desire to ‘hang looters in public’ (8), but not too dissimilar, despite his sympathetic backstory (9), is Butler, a man for whom frustration quickly prompts the desire ‘to batter Professor Whittaker’s head to pulp’ (10) and to even more graphic fantasies of driving ‘his fist into Whitaker’s pale face and [breaking] all his teeth’ (11). He’s also very ready to opt for the most brutal solution to any inconvenience, his immediate reaction to the Doctor entering the bunker being ‘I’ll kill him’ (12).

    Knighted, expensive suit-wearing (13) Charles Grover, though that surely already marks him as a baddie, is a bit more complicated. Unlike Finch, it’s his own past he’s wistful for, a time ‘when the future seemed full of hope’ (14), a time when, it’s hard not to notice, he worked in a grammar not a modern, before he entered parliament and had to come into contact with all the ‘undesirable people, people not approved by us as right-thinking’ (15) who he now seeks to eradicate. His contempt for the unselect is represented by his ‘well-known politician’s smile’ (16 – and it’s already come up at least once before (13)), frequently employed, we’re told (17), which ‘faded’ the moment the moment he began to speak honestly with Sarah. The manner in which it returns once he starts promoting Operation Golden Age to her (18) suggests his actions aren’t as pure as he protests.

    It could be argued that this is just a problem among the ringleaders and that the others are good people. Certainly, the people in the fake spaceship are unaware of the genocidal nature of Operation Golden Age and just want to start their own colony. But they’re fanatics who can’t bear a world that ‘isn’t quite as [they] like it!’ (19) or even an opinion that isn’t exactly theirs (20). Ostensibly non-elitist views, such as considering ‘the good of the majority’ (21), only become acceptable to them once they’ve ‘selected and screened’ the population to ensure they’re all alike (22) and, just to ram that grammar school analogy home, they even use education as a tool for ensuring hegemony of thought (23).

    And there is a definite class issue in all this. Innovations that make groceries, entertainment and socialising cheaper and more accessible are dismissed as worthless (24), collective services that made quality of life more equal are dismissed with ease (25) and the prizing of qualities such as ‘love and kindness and honesty’ receives such as oddly strong reaction you’d almost think all these people were brought up in boarding schools (26). Even when they discover the truth behind Operation Golden Age, their rejection of it is based on the legacy of humanity, the ‘civilisations’, ‘great literature’ and ‘art’ (27), rather than the eradication of so many lives and potentials.

    They’re not even benign. Faced with ‘a disruptive influence’, these ‘sweet, gentle people’ who couldn’t condone the slaughter of animals (28), are quite willing to kill for the sake of order, much like Finch and his eager embrace of capital punishment.

    Which puts the potential colonists and the ringleaders all in the same boat. The only possible defence for their actions is that they’re working ‘for the good of Mankind’ (29), the situation having become so desperate that this terrible act is the only hope the planet has, and Ruth surgically undermines that scintilla of a claim to selflessness when, on learning the true nature of Operation Golden Age, she declares: ‘why should we lose our chance of personal happiness? This is what we all planned. I say that we complete the plan!’ (30).

    There are only two significant characters left potentially untarnished – Mike and Mark. Mike, ‘a good man’ the Doctor insists (31) though ‘a bit old-fashioned’ by his own admission (32), ends up looking like he’s simply been exploited (33). He’s portrayed as psychologically vulnerable following the events of ‘The Green Death’ (the Brigadier phrases it slightly more contentiously (34)) and his involvement with Operation Golden Age is paralleled with his actions under the influence of Boss: he falls in with ‘a group of villains’, is ‘mentally ‘readjusted’’ and ‘almost murdered his good friend the Doctor, but his own conscience had prevented him […] at the last moment’. It’s never quite clear how much Yates knows about Operation Golden Age (Butler suggests he’s being kept in the dark (35) but Yates later shows himself perfectly aware of the details (36)), but he is eventually willing to kill for it (37), rendering him at the least morally compromised.

    No such caveats attach to Mark. There’s no suggestion his enthusiasm to establish a new world is anything but a free choice, he is never so blinkered as to ignore what Sarah says or seek to silence her and he immediately condemns the plan to overwrite history (38). However, he also reveals the moral rot inherent in even what the potential colonists believe they’re engaged in. When discussing their planned arrival on another planet, he likens his fellows to ‘the Pilgrim Fathers who went to America’ (39). As Sarah points out the effect of the Pilgrim Fathers on the indigenous American population and Mark blandly replies ‘We shall treat them kindly and decently’, it becomes clear that even those with unimpeachably good intentions are colonists in the historical sense as well as the sci-fi one – indeed, the two are the same. Mark might be willing to listen to Sarah but he’s clearly entertaining no plans to extend the same courtesy to whoever he encounters on his new Earth.

    Why the Pilgrim Fathers? There’s a strange sense that Hulke might just have it in for puritans, what with Sarah choosing Oliver Cromwell for her warning to ‘Beware people who know they are right’ (40), but it’s the manner in which these people’s concern for the environment has become an absolute and singular faith he seems to have an issue with. Ruth ‘must never be wrong’ (41), hence her willingness to switch readily to a plan that eradicates all life on Earth, and, when she leads Sarah to the Reminder Room, it is with the threat that she will soon share their ‘point of view—about everything’ (42), because their ecological crusade obliterates consideration for all other perspectives. Faced with an argument, their reaction is to ‘talk to each other as if [others] didn’t exist’ (43).

    To return to El Sandifer’s reading, the Doctor’s argument is ‘more positive’. Yes, he shares the Operation Golden Agers’ desire for humanity to ‘start using Earth’s resources in a rational and sensible way’ and ‘end the arms race’ but he views the tasks of tackling racism and corporate and class exploitation as equally urgent and even connected (44). Considering the Operation Golden Agers’ relationship with class and how it blinds them to social issues, putting their concerns in a list alongside how ‘people with different coloured skins’ are treated links it back to the Pilgrim Fathers and reveals the real rot at the core of their project, whether they know they’re wiping out human history or not. This lot want to take their White Man’s Burden to the stars.

    The reason for referencing Cromwell, who cemented an empire in Ireland against Catholic resistance, and the Pilgrim Fathers, to whom the birth of an empire is at least attributed and who explicitly saw missionary work as among their duties, is that religion has so often gone hand in hand with imperialism. Religious imperialism must inevitably involve some attempt at eradicating the past of the peoples encountered, and this lot’s religious zeal is clearly exposed when Adam imagines the future, with all ‘the evil’ left behind, and his ‘eyes [begin] to look like those of a prophet who was in personal communication with God’ (45). The colonists were always going to be involved in cultural obliteration whether they went to a new planet or went back to Earth’s prehistory

    And that ‘evil’ isn’t just industrialism. By showing Ruth ranting against ‘Moral degradation, permissiveness’ (46) and even choice (47), Hulke makes her a sort of Mary Whitehouse figure out to forge a new world in her image and, though less outspoken, the other Operation Golden Agers seem to fall within her silent majority. Certainly, the attitudes that swirl around Professor Whitaker suggest a remarkable intolerance.

    It’s never stated outright, but Whitaker is clearly gay in the novelisation, with hints such as his comment that the Doctor’s ‘handsome’ (48) and lament at Butler’s ‘awful scar’ (49),details like his fingers being ‘well-manicured’ (50) and his nails ‘well-polished’ (51) and his selection of Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward as historical celebrities it would be fun to meet (52). He also gets described as ‘peculiar’ (53). Now, everyone hates Whitaker, which is fine because he’s clearly a git (54), but then they also seem to be repulsed by him – Finch ‘couldn’t stand the sight’ of him to the extent that he turns away (55) and Yates interprets his smile as ‘sickly’, the sight of it (on every occasion) turning his stomach (56). The truth revealed through ‘the ability to describe character thoughts’ that El Sandifer felt was being used to make the Operation Golden Age people more sympathetic is actually being used to reveal them as people who feel physically sick when around anyone who is unlike them. That’s why they want to escape/wipe out everyone, that’s why they’re villains and that’s why the Doctor is better than them.

    Rather than targeting the Doctor, I think Hulke is turning his sights on ideological fundamentalism. Compare the Operation Golden Agers wish to escape a world of ‘mass production’ in which people become ‘slaves to the machines’ (57) to found a more ‘pastoral’ and ‘unspoiled’ land (58) with Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon’s colonists’ desire to reconnect with their humanity despite growing up in a corporate-run machine Earth and there’s a definite similarity. However, those future colonists were seeking to escape an IMCified future through the only possible means open to them whereas these potential colonists are seeking to eradicate the world they dislike even though they seemingly could all afford to just sell up and establish the life they want for themselves in their current world. Their concern isn’t with their own lack of freedom but with everyone else’s, to their eyes, surfeit of it.

    And their pseudo-religious zeal plays into this. Not for the first time, Hulke introduces specifically Christian references that were absent on screen (59): the Doctor challenges a medieval peasant’s belief in witches seemingly only on the grounds that they’re antithetical to Christian doctrine (60), he selects ‘the time of the birth of Jesus’ as a random example of a historical period (61) and, most noticeably, he treats The Holy Bible as a work of historical record (62). This seems an odd recurrent motif for a man who was ‘definitely’ atheist (63), but the contrast between how Hulke treats Biblical artefacts and actual faith, as represented by the Operation Golden Agers, is instructive, as is the fact he knows The Bible well enough, presumably from school, to pick out bits of Ezekiel.

    I think Hulke is using Christian text as a shorthand for a shared knowledge, stories and practices that link people to each other and a common past – which would certainly tie in with how the Doctor uses burial rites to tie Ashe and his followers back to their lost humanity in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon. Actual faith and religion though, as in the Operation Golden Agers’ missionary-like campaign to cleanse the Earth of evil, is prescriptive, exclusive and blinkered. It’s motivated by a desire for hegemony and Hulke, even down to his repeated embrace of Christian texts and ideas in which he doesn’t believe, is pushing against such a worldview.