by Malcolm Hulke
DOCTOR WHO AND THE DINOSAUR INVASION
First published 19 February 1976*, between The Seeds of Doom Parts Three and Four
*http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Dinosaur_Invasion_(novelisation)
"A massive claw hit him in the face. In his last moment of life, Shughie McPherson resolved to give up drinking whisky"
Phil Sandifer views ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ as ‘a rejection of Doctor Who’ which exposes ‘the Doctor as no better than the villains’. 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 or in the condescending tone he shares with the Reminder Room films, but Sandifer’s reading relies on their being a ‘distinction between what the Operation Golden Age people are doing’ and the ‘noble goals’ that are the reason ‘why they’re doing it’ (and now, Sandifer is speaking specifically about the novelisation).
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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’, but not too dissimilar, despite his sympathetic backstory, is Butler, a man for whom frustration quickly prompts the desire ‘to batter Professor Whittaker’s head to pulp’ and to even more graphic fantasies of driving ‘his fist into Whitaker’s pale face and [breaking] all his teeth’.
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Knighted, expensive suit-wearing 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’, a time when, I note, he worked in a grammar rather than a comp, before he entered parliament and had to come into contact with all the ‘undesirable people, people not approved by us as right-thinking’ who he now seeks to eradicate. His contempt for the unselect is represented by his ‘well-known politician’s smile’, frequently employed, we’re told, 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 suggests his actions aren’t as pure as he protests.
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You could argue that this is just 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!’ or an opinion that isn’t exactly theirs. Ostensibly non-elitist views, such as considering ‘the good of the majority’, only become acceptable to them once they’ve ‘selected and screened’ the population to ensure they’re all alike and, just to ram that grammar school analogy home, they even use education as a tool for ensuring hegemony of thought.
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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, collective services that made quality of life more equal are dismissed with ease and the prizing of qualities such as ‘love and kindness and honesty’ receives such as oddly strong reaction it’s almost like all these people were brought up in boarding schools. Even when they discover the truth behind Operation Golden Age, their rejection is based on the legacy of humanity, the ‘civilisations’, ‘great literature’ and ‘art’, 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, 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’ and view the situation as so desperate that any sacrifice is justified. Ruth puts the kibosh on that. Her reaction to discovering the true nature of Operation Golden Age is so wonky it’s impossible to dissect its wrongness without being facetious: ‘why should we lose our chance of personal happiness? This is what we all planned. I say that we complete the plan!’.
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There are only two significant characters left potentially untarnished – Mike and Mark. Mike, ‘a good man’ the Doctor insists though ‘a bit old-fashioned’ by his own admission, ends up looking like he’s simply been exploited. He’s portrayed as psychologically vulnerable following the events of ‘The Green Death’ (the Brigadier phrases it slightly more contentiously) 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 but Yates later shows himself perfectly aware of the details) but he is eventually willing to kill for it rendering him at the least morally compromised.
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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. 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’. 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’, 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’, 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’, 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’.
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To return to Phil 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. Considering the Operation Golden Agers’ relationship with class and how it blinds them to social issues, putting that in a list with 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, and the Pilgrim Fathers, to whom the birth of an empire is at least attributed to those in it, is that religion went hand in hand with European imperialism. In the North American case, the Pilgrim Fathers explicitly saw missionary work as among their duties, which lends a sinister tone to Mark’s proud statement that they’ll ‘guide’ any inhabitants they find, and an appropriate zeal is seen when Adam imagines the future and his ‘eyes began to look like those of a prophet who was in personal communication with God’. Conversion inevitably involved the attempt to eradicate the past of the peoples converted, encouraging them to ‘leave the evil behind’, that 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 paganism or industrialism. By showing Ruth ranting against ‘Moral degradation, permissiveness’ and even choice, he makes her a Mary Whitehouse out to build a new world in her image, purging the land of anyone not on the true path to blue rinse and battenberg. Though less outspoken, the rest of the Operation Golden Agers seem to fall within her silent majority as witnessed through their feelings around Professor Whitaker. It’s never stated outright but Whitaker is portrayed as gay in the novelisation, with hints such as his comment that the Doctor’s ‘handsome’ and lament at Butler’s ‘awful scar’, the detail that his fingers are ‘well-manicured’ and his nails ‘well-polished’ and, probably, his selection of Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward as historical celebrities it would be fun to meet. He also gets described as ‘peculiar’. Now, everyone hates Whitaker, which is fine because he’s clearly a git, but then they also seem to be repulsed by him – Finch ‘couldn’t stand the sight of Whitaker’ to the extent that he turns away and Yates interprets his smile as ‘sickly’ and seeing it (on every occasion!) turns his stomach. The truth revealed through ‘the ability to describe character thoughts’ is that these are 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’s better than them.
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I think, however, that Hulke does have someone in his target. The allusions to religion aren’t confined to the Operation Golden Agers. We also get the Doctor challenging a medieval peasant’s belief in witches seemingly not because there aren’t any but because they’re antithetical to Christian doctrine, selecting ‘the time of the birth of Jesus’ as a random example of a historical period and, most noticeably, treating The Holy Bible, which he clearly knows well, as a work of historical record. Nor, in fact, are the allusions to religion confined to this book – most, if not all, of Hulke’s novelisations have introduced specifically Christian references that were absent on screen.
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I’d assumed that this was Hulke expressing his own religious faith in a medium where he was untethered by a producer and a script editor and then I read that he was ‘definitely’ an atheist. This wouldn’t preclude him from using The Bible as he does in Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion or indeed from allowing it to work as a moral guidebook in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon but the deliberacy of his repeated returns to the core concepts of a faith he doesn’t feel is odd. Interestingly, religion functions in similar ways in both books: in the former, it allows Ashe and the colonists to reconnect with their humanity despite growing up in a corporate-run machine future; here, the potential colonists’ religious zeal is borne of their desire to escape a world of ‘mass production’ in which people become ‘slaves to the machines’ and found a more ‘pastoral’ and ‘unspoiled’ land. I think, rather than taking aim at the Doctor, Hulke is putting himself in the crosshairs.
Were Professor Jones in this book, he’d more happily fit Yate’s conversion to the cause than Mike and, turning to adaptations of Hulke’s own scripts, were the Operation Golden Agers Reptile Men, Sea-Devils or even Ashe and his colonists seeking to undo the IMCification of Earth, they might elicit some narrative sympathy. He’s taking the structures of his own moral tales and exposing the problem at their heart by making the villains a bunch of 20th-century, middle class folk, laying bare the motives that sit behind such extreme action. The problem with all these villains is that they feel hegemony is the answer. And Hulke, through, for example, his repeated valorisation of Christian text and ideals, is resisting that temptation, pointing to the importance of including all walks of life in any way forward.
‘the entire plot of Invasion of the Dinosaurs seems like nothing so much as a rejection of Doctor Who. The central flaw of Operation Golden Age is that it just tries to blow up a problem instead of working to improve the world. That's what the Doctor half-heartedly tries to persuade Mike of, at least. And of course, at the end of things the Doctor blows up the problem and goes on to... run off to Florana with Sarah. He utterly fails to make a single move towards improving the world or presenting a more positive version of the agenda he's supposedly sympathetic to. And Hulke ends up exposing this hypocrisy directly - by confronting him with a situation in which he has no choice but to expressly praise the exact sort of person he isn't being in this story. This is staggeringly bitter of Hulke - an utterly cynical decision to cast the Doctor as no better than the villains’
http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/books-the-best-weapons-in-the-world-invasion-of-the-dinosaurs/
‘You two have a great deal in common, if I may say so. The Doctor’s very keen on this anti-pollution business’
‘Sarah knew that everything the voice said was true. What she didn’t agree with was the way in which these people on the space ship were trying to run away from the problem, and their schoolmasterly attitude towards anyone who thought differently’
‘that’s just typical! We’re attacked by a monster, and you talk about it like a schoolmaster’
‘Hulke is trying to write a story in which people do terrible things in pursuit of noble goals’
http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/books-the-best-weapons-in-the-world-invasion-of-the-dinosaurs/
‘Hulke takes advantage of the ability to describe character thoughts to reiterate more regularly the distinction between what the Operation Golden Age people are doing and why they're doing it’
http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/books-the-best-weapons-in-the-world-invasion-of-the-dinosaurs/
‘General Finch. Now he wants to hang looters in public! I sometimes think the poor fellow lives in a bygone age’
‘I was a London fireman. I tried to save a child that had crawled out of an open window and was stranded on a high ledge. I managed to pass it to safety all right—but I fell thirty feet through a glass roof’
‘Butler would very much have liked to batter Professor Whitaker’s head to pulp’
‘wishing he could drive his fist into Whitaker’s pale face and break all his teeth’
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 ‘The Doctor, UNIT’s scientific adviser. I’ll kill him’
‘a short intelligent-looking man in his fifties wearing an expensively cut lounge suit. His politician’s smile turned on the Doctor’
Sir Charles Grover: ‘He looked round the headmaster’s office. He remembered when he was master in a grammar school, long before he went into politics. They were happy days when the future seemed full of hope. He wished he could have that time over again’
‘We had to clear London so that undesirable people, people not approved by us as right-thinking, wouldn’t be taken back through Time with us’
‘Sir Charles’s well-known politician’s smile faded. His face set in stern lines. “That’s right, Miss Smith”’
‘Grover’s smile, seen frequently on millions of television sets’
‘his well-known politician’s smile starting to return now. “My associates and I are the only ones who are sane”’
Sarah: ‘“What a disgusting idea,” she blurted out, “to destroy the whole world because it isn’t quite as you like it!”’
‘And I’ll say whatever I like. I’ve met people like you lot before. Everything you believe in must be absolutely right! If anyone dares to disagree with you, you don’t even listen!’
‘We have to consider the good of the majority’
Adam: ‘I was assured by the organisers that everyone had been carefully selected and screened’
‘You are in desperate need of re-education’
‘Adam took up the argument. “Supermarkets, colour television, plastic cups. But what are they all worth?” “They make life comfortable for a lot of people”’
‘“But what about medicine and education? Surely they were good things.” Ruth laughed. “Compared with its evils, the benefits of technological civilisation are very few”’
‘Ruth’s one-sided attitude angered Sarah. “There is also a lot of love and kindness and honesty! Didn’t you ever notice those things on Earth?” Ruth’s mouth set into hard lines. “You mustn’t say such things!”’
‘“You’re going to destroy all the civilisations of Humankind,” said Adam. “All the great literature of the ages, every work of art—everything will vanish. Leaving Earth for another planet was one thing, but this is evil.” “Civilisation has already destroyed Humanity”’
‘A middle-aged balding man was the first to grasp what she was saying. “I find that difficult to believe. They made promises to us. I went into everything very carefully. I resigned my position as bank manager and even sold my house!”’ – the most telling thing about the ex-bank manager isn’t his celebrated insistence that they can’t have been duped because he ‘sold [his] house!’ but his claim that he ‘went into everything very carefully’, which is an extraordinary statement when ‘everything’ is a secret gathering of British people in spaceships travelling to a new world to establish a human colony in the 1970s. There’s a snark at the chattering classes’ blind belief in their own clearly inadequate research abilities if ever there was one
‘“The elders, Adam and Ruth, are not going to permit a disruptive influence among us.” “Do you mean they’re going to kill me?’ She tried to hide the fear in her voice. ‘Is that what they’ll do?” He averted his eyes. “They are really sweet, gentle people. They are both vegetarians because animals have to die to provide humans with meat”’
‘Everything we are doing is for the good of Mankind’
‘why should we lose our chance of personal happiness? This is what we all planned. I say that we complete the plan!’ – in other words, her dissatisfaction with the state of the world and her having committed to a new order trumps all life on Earth
‘He’s a good man, and believes what they are doing is good in some way’
‘Perhaps I’m a bit old-fashioned’
‘“How did you get involved in this, Mike?” “It was after that business with the giant maggots in Wales. You remember I was sent on leave for quite a time.” “You were very disturbed,” said the Brigadier. “I think you still are!” The Doctor frowned at the Brigadier, as though asking him to keep his mouth shut. “Do go on, Mike.” “I had a lot of time on my hands, and I went along to one of the Save Planet Earth meetings and heard Sir Charles Grover speak. It convinced me”’
‘Only recently, when UNIT and the Doctor had been battling against an artificially created outbreak of giant maggots in Wales, Captain Yates had been captured by a group of villains and mentally ‘readjusted’ so that he would do their bidding. At their orders he had almost murdered his good friend the Doctor, but his own conscience had prevented him from carrying out the order at the last moment. Although the Doctor had eventually helped Yates recover control of his own mind, it was generally believed that the young Captain had undergone terrific mental strain. He was given a very long leave in which to get better’
‘There are some things it’s better for Captain Yates not to know’
‘We intend to roll back Time’
‘“Are you going to shoot us all, Mike?” asked the Doctor. “Not unless you force me to. Sergeant, I told you to come and stand over here, otherwise I may have to kill the Brigadier”’
‘If we allow that lever to be pulled we shall become as evil and self-seeking, as the things we hate in this present world!’
‘“We’ll be like the Pilgrim Fathers who went to America.” “What about the present inhabitants of the planet? I don’t think the Red Indians liked the Pilgrim Fathers very much. Maybe these people won’t like us.” “We shall treat them kindly and decently,” Mark insisted. “We’ll guide them, and make sure they don’t make the same mistakes that were made on Earth.” “What mistakes?” “Surely you know. Factories and mines that destroy the landscape. Explosives of all kinds that kill and maim. Cars and aeroplanes that pollute the atmosphere”’
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‘Beware people who know they are right, like Oliver Cromwell. For the good of Humanity, those people sometimes do murder’ – why Cromwell? I’d guess that Hulke was a republican so it seems odd to pick on him when there are so many tyrannical kings and queens available. I mean, you don’t even have to look far – the problem with Charles I was that he was certain he was in the right. I’m not trying to suggest Cromwell didn’t do terrible things but he was as driven by pragmatism as by Biblical faith
‘The only reason you want to go ahead now is because you can’t stand being made a fool of! You must never be wrong!’
‘“Don’t worry, child,” said Ruth, taking Sarah’s other arm. “Very soon you will have returned to our point of view—about everything”’ – she patronises with ‘child’ and threatens by seizing Sarah’s arm and the pause/hyphen of a villainous coda
‘You see! You even talk to each other as if I didn’t exist’ – Ruth’s happy to make that literally true
‘You can try to make something better of the world you’ve got. You humans can end the arms race, you can treat people with different coloured skins as equals, you can stop exploiting and cheating each other, and you can start using Earth’s resources in a rational and sensible way!’
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‘Adam, ignoring Sarah’s reply, continued: “We shall take the good, but leave the evil behind.” “And who decides which is which?” “It’s all so obvious.” Adam’s eyes began to look like those of a prophet who was in personal communication with God’
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‘People on Earth were allowed to choose—and see what kind of a world they made! Moral degradation, permissiveness, cheating, lying, cruelty!’
‘“But don’t you think that people have a right to choose the kind of life they want?” Sarah blurted out. Ruth looked at her a little sternly’
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Whitaker on the Doctor: ‘He’s terribly handsome’
‘Butler had moved away and was reading power input dials. Whitaker thought it was such a pity about that awful scar’
‘Whitaker’s well-manicured finger jabbed two more digits on the miniaturised computer’
‘Whitaker laced his fingers and looked down at the well-polished nails’
‘Perhaps Oscar Wilde would be more fun to meet, or perhaps the late Noël Coward’
Butler: ‘he hated being cooped up with this peculiar professor day and night under the ground’ – Look, I’ll come out and admit I’ve got a queasy feeling that Whitaker’s homosexuality is actually a long way off being a clever ruse by Hulke to demonstrate how awful the Operation Golden Age people are. In fact, I’ve got a nasty feeling that the reactions of the other characters that I’m about to highlight are meant to be evidence of how awful Whitaker is and how morally compromised Finch and all are for working with him rather than simply how awful they are as basic human beings. Thing is, I’m not absolutely 100% sure I’m barking up the wrong tree though because there’s not actually any mileage I can see from reading this as homophobic Hulke getting some digs in. Very little is actually made of Whitaker’s sexuality. Meanwhile, a lot is made of the reactions of those around him and, as we already saw with Butler’s barely restrained desire to punch his teeth in, it doesn’t paint them in a good light
‘At last Butler was showing some sense. Of course everything depended on the brilliance and genius of Professor Whitaker. He liked it when other people acknowledged this fact’
‘Finch turned away. He couldn’t stand the sight of Whitaker’
‘The Professor looked up. His sickly smile always turned Yates’s stomach’
‘“I have always been a good man, paying the tithes, tilling my master’s land three days of the week, and my own for three days. I go to church on Sundays and have my children christened.” “But you also believe in witches,” said the Doctor’
‘If you are looking at a distant star, you may be looking at it as it was at the time of the birth of Jesus’
‘the Doctor was looking into a copy of The Holy Bible. “Read that,” he said, pointing to a page. “It’s Ezekiel, Chapter 1 verse 5-6.” Sarah read: “Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.” She looked up at the Doctor. “Who were these creatures?” The Doctor shrugged. “Perhaps they were from another planet, or from the future of this planet.” He replaced the book on its shelf’ – a work of the imagination doesn’t seem to be an option…
Miles Booy, in Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present, details many of these references, so it’s not just me. Sadly Booy delves no deeper
‘Two regular writers of Doctor Who were definitely atheists, Malcolm Hulke and Douglas Adams. However, neither of these writers wrote expressly about religion in their Doctor Who scripts’ – maybe not in their scripts!
David Layton, The Humanism of Doctor Who
I can only find one source for Hulke’s atheism but it does seem quite a good one: ‘He died on July 6 1979, and Dicks recalled that, as a convinced atheist, he had left orders that there was to be no priest, no hymns or other ceremony at his funeral’
‘The conveyor-belt system of mass production brings drudgery to the workers. Their natural creative drive is stifled. They are slaves to the machines. Working in continuous noise, unable to speak to their fellow workers, they are brutalised...’
‘New Earth is still pure, undefiled by the evil of Man’s technology. There is air that is still clean to breathe, and a simple pastoral people, innocent and unspoiled. It will be our task to guide them so that the evils developed on Earth shall not be repeated’
Hulkisms
The peasant from the Middle Ages ‘spoke with a strong Midlands accent’
‘It had been so much easier when he was fighting reptile men* in the caves of Derbyshire, or even trying to exterminate giant maggots† that came up from a disused mine in Wales’ – does Hulke only acknowledge his own books?
Hulke really does have a different view of Benton to everyone else: ‘“I think they said the prisoners escaped.” “I can hardly blame them.” The Brigadier turned away. “But they are villains, sir,” protested Sergeant Benton. “I mean to say, any civilian in the Central Zone must be there for the pickings. We have to stop the looting”’
‘“We had to shorten their names,” explained the Brigadier. “This Latin scientific stuff got a bit beyond some of my men”’ – what is Hulke’s problem with the military?
The whole opening with the stranded Glaswegian football fan, especially ‘In his thirty-seven years he had had more jobs than he could remember. He was married once, but that hadn’t lasted long. One day his wife had said to him, “Shughie, you’re a layabout!” Then she’d packed a suitcase and gone back home to her mother. He had never tried to find her’, ‘In the front bedroom, partly hidden at the back of the wardrobe, Shughie found the six bottles of whisky that were to be his only companions for the next four days’ and, above even all this, ‘A massive claw hit him in the face. In his last moment of life, Shughie McPherson resolved to give up drinking whisky’
Return of monster POV, especially ‘The stegosaurus […] stood bewildered in a narrow Hampstead side street. In the distance it could see the green of Hampstead Heath, and the prospect of so much lush foliage made its salivic juices run. But immediately ahead was a little group of mammalian midgets coloured brown, and they were frightening because they carried sticks that made big bangs. Each time one of the sticks banged, the stegosaurus’s nerve centre set in its hip reacted to pin pricks of pain. No doubt a tyrannosaurus or a pterodactyl would have enjoyed the little mammals, as a between-meals snack, but the stegosaurus longed only to munch peacefully on big green leaves’ – which does more for Yeti-on-the-lav than anything that made it to screen but also oddly gives a dinosaur a piercingly clear concept of other dinosaur species and behaviour
Return of the Educational Remit
Pretty much all of prologue ‘The Dinosaurs’, though was ‘did the newer and more nimble life-forms, the mammals, attack and kill them?’ ever a theory for the extinction of dinosaurs?
‘A ship called the Marie Celeste was found on the high seas, intact but totally abandoned. The crew and all the passengers had vanished as though they never existed. And, just as here, partly eaten meals were left on plates in the dining-saloon. No one ever discovered what happened to the people on that ship, and they never will’
‘Flowers did not exist in that world because insects had not yet evolved to carry pollen. To make life possible for so many varieties of cold-blooded reptiles, the atmosphere must have been warm and humid. The earliest mammals were just beginning to evolve, life-forms that carried their babies within themselves instead of laying eggs’
Triceratops: ‘The neck-frilled variety […] They used to roam in great herds across North America, and could charge at up to thirty miles an hour, impaling their prey on those horns’
The Doctor and Sarah: ‘“Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. Right?” “Everyone knows that”’ – Really? In miles per second??
Height Attack!!
A diplodocus ‘measured eighty-four feet from head to tip of tail’, pterodactyls are ‘eight feet wide’, a stegosaurus is ‘thirty feet long’ and weighs ‘two tons’, a brontosaurus is a ‘towering monster’, tall ‘as a three-storey house’, and there’s a ‘thirty-feet-high tyrannosaurus rex’
Rooms in the bunker include, next to each other
ROYAL SUITE and KENNELS. Is Hulke suggesting the
powers that be value corgis’ lives over people’s?
References I Didn't Get
‘The Giant Lemurs of Madagascar may soon suffer the same fate as the King Kangaroos of Australia—’
It appears there were lots of different giant lemurs and they’re all extinct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subfossil_lemur), though Hulke might be refereeing to black-and-white ruffed lemurs, the largest living species. King Kangaroos might refer to the extinct Sthenurus (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-mystery-of-the-extinct-giant-kangaroo-is-solved-it-walked-on-its-back-legs-9796718.html) or might result from confusion over the extinct emus of both King and Kangaroo Islands (http://thecuriousemu.weebly.com/extinction.html)
Miscellania
‘Do you know about Blinovitch? A great bear of a man from Russia. At least he was until he dabbled. He put Time into reverse for himself. The last I heard of him he was reaching babyhood. Rather a waste, I think. He was a brilliant man—when he was a man’ – where on Earth’s this come from?
This is rather good: ‘if you apply Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to the question of time, you find that it may move in great curves...’; this less so: ‘Only because you think of Time as one continuous process. But what if Time goes backwards and forward, or round in big circles?’
The Brigadier: ‘Have you ever known me not to believe you, Doctor?’ – that’s nice
‘Sarah said, “There’s no traffic.” “Can’t you imagine life without smelly motor cars?”’ – is he an idiot? ‘“Nothing seems strange,” said the Doctor’ – or just credulous?
‘Great Britain always closes on Sundays’ – was this ever really a British thing?
‘Really, Sarah! I take you in the TARDIS to Outer Space, to another Time in the history of the Universe, and what really excites you?— Woolworths!’ – Amen to that