The Invasion
With this column, I am going to start to review and comment on the Reconstructions. I'm going to try to separate the review of the Reconstruction itself, as well as talking about the story. I'll also try to use this to explore my own opinions about what is probably the last, best chance to hold onto Doctor Who stories that would otherwise completely vanish.
My first bias is that as far as I'm concerned, the most important piece of the reconstruction is the audio track. I haven't bothered to collect the missing stories on audio, and I prefer storing them on video tape even if it *is* just the audio. [I did this with the only audio I bothered to collect, "Evil of the Daleks".]
I started with "The Invasion", because I of course had the BBC Release and am familiar with the story. It is one of my favorite Troughton stories, with a delightful villain in Tobias Vaughn, unquestionably one of Doctor Who's finest. The elements of this story are part of the standard imagery of the series, familiar even to fans who haven't seen the original story (as I hadn't until the BBC release)
The two episodes that are only available through pictures, episodes 1 and 4, are fortunately two of the least important episodes. Obviously, this is somewhat of a bias based on several years of *not* seeing these episodes -- but considering that you can make sense of the story without them, clearly there is some padding. Of course, we miss out on the tension built during the first four episodes while we wait for the Cybermen to be revealed. We all know that it is the Cybermen, after all.
The reconstruction is in general excellent. The audio is outstanding, and the pictures are nice and clear. The pictures help to guide through the audio -- which in my mind, is what a good reconstruction should do. As was pointed out to me when I posted the original version of this review to rec.arts.drwho, the photos for this story aren't telesnaps [photos taken from the TV screen] but instead are other press photos and from other episodes where the scenes are very similar. [ie, other times where the Doctor and Jamie are in Vaughn's office]
The only scene that left me somewhat confused -- and this may be an inevitable side effect of using photographs -- is the helicopter rescue in the first half of episode 4. I think [and from what little I've seen of the more recent Web reconstruction] that the action sequences could use the captions. (That said, I think the quality of this telesnap is such that the effort is better spent on other stories that haven't been reconstructed.)
As I had heard when I first heard about the reconstructions, the Reconstructionists [sounds like a story title!] are doing an important job in Doctor Who fandom -- while the authors writing the novels are creating a future for Doctor Who, the Reconstructions are holding on to our past, and coming as close as possible to rebuilding the past.