From the people who brought you Flight Through Entirety.

Saturday 22 November 1975

The Android Invasion

Slutty Title

Taranium Core, Episode 10
Sunday 18 October 2026

In a sleepy English village on a distant planet, a small group of robots and pachyderms are preparing to invade the Earth, but in a fun and memorable Terry Nation kind of way.

Nathan quickly mentions El Sandifer’s take on this story, suggesting that Letts and Nation were a safe pair of hands, and that this allowed Hinchcliffe and Holmes to focus on the other stories of this season.

Brendan quotes a line from the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of?. As Captain Kirk is being scanned as a template for an android replica, he mutters an uncharacteristically racist line to himself (“Mind your own business, Mr. Spock, I’m sick of your half-breed interference.”), a line that the android replica repeats later, alerting Spock to the fact that he is not the real Kirk.

The Android Invasion was shot in the village of East Hagbourne, south of Oxford, near Didcot. Like Devesham, this story’s fictional village, it has a 17th-century pub called the Fleur de Lys. It turns out that The Avengers never used it as a location, but Steven mentions similar villages in the episodes The Town of No Return (set in Little Bazeley-by-the-Sea) and Murdersville (set in Little Storping-in-the-Swuff). He also mentions Metro-land, a name given to suburban areas built northwest of London in the early 20th century, which were frequently used as locations for The Avengers.

Max Faulkner plays the UNIT soldier who goes off a cliff at the start of Part 1, only to turn up at the pub later in the episode. He also plays a UNIT soldier in The Ambassadors of Death, where he is killed in Part 4, only to appear again (accidentally) at the end of Part 6.

The Stepford Wives was a 1975 thriller set in the town of Stepford, Connecticut, whose female residents are being replaced by subservient robot replicas. The movie poster depicted parts of a disassembled robot wife, including her head.

Steven mentions a number of locations with strange histories that are relevant to this story. Firstly, the towns of Imber in Wiltshire and Tyneham in Dorset, which were evacuated in 1943 to be used by the British Army to train soldiers for the D-Day invasion. Secondly, Survival Town and Doom Town in Nevada, fake towns populated by mannequins, used to assess the likely effects of a nuclear explosion on a populated area. And finally, Inverlair Lodge, used to house foreign intelligence agents during World War II.

According to friend-of-the-podcast Johnny Spandrell, Gary Gillatt is the original source of the phrase squabbling rubber, used to describe scenes in Doctor Who where rubber-headed aliens argue with one another. (According to Peter, Gary credits his mother with inventing the phrase.)

And here on Lance Parkin’s blog, a comprehensive list of every Star Trek story.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Android Invasion in Episode 40: Just Full of Nazis, released on Sunday 16 August 2015.

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You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page.

We’ve got no new episodes to announce right now, for the first time ever, but if you love original Star Trek you might want to check out the Untitled Star Trek Project Star Trek: The Original Series commentaries. If you want to hear Joe and Nathan gushing about vintage television, we can recommend our episodes on The Doomsday Machine and Spectre of the Gun, or if you want to hear us screaming into the void, you should listen to our episodes on The Empath and The Savage Curtain.

Taranium Core, Episode 10: Slutty Title (The Android Invasion)

Recorded on Sunday 26 July 2026 · Download (47.0 MB)
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Transcript