Season 11, Episode 2 | 6 parts | First broadcast: 12 January – 16 February 1974 | Writer: Malcolm Hulke | Director: Paddy Russell
Cast
- Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
- Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith
- Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
- Peter Miles as Professor Whitaker
Summary
Returning to a London evacuated after dinosaurs mysteriously begin appearing in its streets, the Doctor and Sarah Jane discover a conspiracy among idealistic scientists and disillusioned military officers who plan to fake the destruction of civilisation and rebuild society from a supposedly untainted “Golden Age,” using an illegal time machine to bring the prehistoric creatures forward. The Doctor must expose the plotters and stop their experiment before their scheme causes irreversible harm.
Interesting Facts
- This is the only Third Doctor serial to prominently feature dinosaurs, achieved through a mix of stop-motion models and puppetry that was heavily criticised at the time for its visual quality.
- It reveals a mole within UNIT itself, one of the era’s more shocking twists given the organisation’s central role throughout the Pertwee years.
- The story’s opening episodes were deliberately withheld the character list to disguise a major returning character’s involvement in the conspiracy.
- Its themes of environmental anxiety and disillusionment with modern society echo the ecological concerns raised in the preceding season’s The Green Death.
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