The Invisible Enemy Part Two

The one where we first meet K-9...

"I'm fighting for my mind," the Doctor confides in Leela, who he managed not to shoot dead after all. The Doctor is in mental turmoil, battling with an alien organism for control of his mind, and it's actually quite heartening to see this most independent of Doctors asking Leela for her help. He seems helpless and afraid, which is unusual for this incarnation. And of course, the ever-faithful Leela is determined to support her mentor in any way she can.

I must confess, I don't really understand the logic of the Nucleus's plan, or "purpose". It seems unnecessarily obsessed with trying to destroy the reject (ie, Leela). Why is it so important to destroy the reject, why not just ignore it, unless it tries to interfere, then destroy it? A lot of energy and time is spent trying to destroy Leela.

Something else I don't understand is why the Nucleus insists on taking the Doctor/ host away from the otherwise secure Titan base, the very place it's setting up to act as a hive? It's only because Lowe is trying to convince Leela he isn't possessed by the Nucleus that they think to take the Doctor to the Bi-Al Foundation in the first place. Why - when the three of them are in that corridor at the start of the episode - doesn't Lowe just kill Leela, and carry on with the hive preparations? Why does he go along with the need to get the Doctor to a hospital? Taking the host away from the hive, and into more potential danger, is illogical.

And why on earth is the Bi-Al Foundation, a medical facility, located in the middle of an extremely dangerous asteroid belt? It's hardly the safest location for anybody to visit, especially if they have sick people to admit. Admittedly, the model looks splendid, but the logic of its location puzzles me.

Barry Newbery continues to impress me with his sweeping, clinical, spacious sets for the Foundation, which looks pretty much exactly how you might expect a 51st century hospital to look. It's very white and clean, populated with random pot plants, and very few places for people to sit and wait, which is extremely realistic. The scene where Leela has to assist in the Doctor's admission is wonderful, as she tries to understand the questions being thrown at her by a pretty severe receptionist (played by Nell Curran, director Derrick Goodwin's future wife). The receptionist asks where the Doctor is from, and when Leela tells her Gallifrey, she replies: "Ireland?" To which Leela responds: "Oh, I expect so." More than 40 years later this occasional running joke about Gallifrey being in Ireland would take on a much more substantial place in the canon!

The receptionist is actually really well kitted out with PPE (personal protection equipment), boasting a face mask and gloves. She tells Leela that the Doctor has been taken to see Professor Marius, their specialist in extraterrestrial pathological endomorphisms. Sadly, when we meet Professor Marius, he's being played with zero subtlety by the usually dependable Frederick Jaeger, who seems to be sending the entire thing up as if he's in a schools programme for the under-fives. He's trying to do "eccentric", but achieving little more than embarrassing. I really dislike Jaeger's performance.

We're also introduced to Marius's robot assistant K-9, which takes the form of a rather angular tin dog, and so Doctor Who history is made. K-9's first word is "affirmative". It's always astounded me that the production team went to all that trouble for a prop that was originally only going to appear in three episodes. It's typical of the ambition of writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin to create K-9, but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect the producer to say yes to. Nevertheless, new producer Graham Williams did just that, and although K-9 obviously goes on to hang around for much longer than three episodes, it must surely have felt a little extravagant at the time. K-9 is also very noisy, his motors whirring constantly even though he remains pretty motionless throughout. Grumps aside though, K-9 is a wonderful invention, a fantastic design and very cleverly realised.

The Doctor, despite retreating into himself, seems able to come in and out of consciousness at will in order to tell people what to do, and ascertains that the organism inside his mind feeds off intelligence and brain activity. He claims that this is why the Nucleus rejected Leela, because she's "all instinct and intuition", but this does not make her unintelligent, which is the inference. I think Leela is actually very intelligent (surely instinct and intuition form part of a person's intelligence?), and the writers (and so the Doctor) have confused intelligence with education. Leela is uneducated, but in no way do I think she's unintelligent.

Meanwhile, Supervisor Lowe is playing a game of his own devising. Why does he insist on pretending he has an eye infection? He doesn't need to masquerade as a patient. Surely his prime motive is to protect the host (the Doctor), and shouldn't really care about anonymity in doing that. After infecting several more medics, he explains that his two priorities are to guard the Nucleus, and to make contact with the best minds in order to swell their ranks. But if Lowe hadn't suggested bringing the Doctor to the Bi-Al Foundation in the first place, they wouldn't have to worry about guarding the Nucleus. Titan base was perfectly safe. Why don't they just kill/ infect everybody, grab the host and return to Titan? Their whole reason for being there is stupid!

And as if all this didn't seem illogical enough, the virus then attacks another passing spacecraft, causing it to crash into the Bi-Al Foundation, risking countless lives, including the host's. The virus apparently causes the accident "as a distraction" to prevent Marius from operating on the Doctor, but this is pretty damn extreme, and actually places the host in even more danger. IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!

Lowe and his men try to infiltrate Marius's lab in order to get the Doctor back (well, it's your own fault, Lowe...), and we're treated to one of the most pathetic laser battles ever seen in Doctor Who. The laser effects are utterly unconvincing, the pace and blocking of the battle are all wrong, and the proximity between Leela and K-9 and Lowe's men is ridiculous. It's like little kids playing cowboys and indians in the garden, peeping out from behind trees and pointing prop guns randomly. All that's missing is the actors actually saying "Pew, pew!" The one time we see K-9 use his defensive capabilities, he half-heartedly zaps/ dribbles at his target in the groin (who almost knocks over the set as he falls)! And what's "kalaylee" all about, some sort of attack command used by Marius to activate K-9's "defense mode"? Why would a robot dog designed to assist a professor of medicine have a deadly laser, and an attack command? Thankfully, it's only used in this story before being forgotten about.

The occasionally conscious Doctor tells Marius to create clones of himself and Leela, so that these clones - which only last 10 minutes - can be miniaturised and then injected inside the Doctor in order to seek out an antidote. Yet again, these are big ideas from Baker and Martin (obviously directly influenced by the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage), but it's all a bit garbled. If the clones only last 10 minutes, how can they be of any use inside the Doctor's body? And why doesn't the cloned Doctor also host a cloned Nucleus? Maybe it is all explained in the torrent of technobabble that Marius fires at Leela, but I'm as much in the dark as Leela after that exchange.

Things have taken a definite downturn since events moved to the Bi-Al Foundation. I was loving all the spooky stuff on Titan, then it was all ruined by relocating to the wobbly world of Bi-Al. And what gets me most is that we didn't need to go to Bi-Al at all. Everything the virus needs to succeed unhindered is back on Titan!

Bah!

First broadcast: October 8th, 1977

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Barry Newbery's Bi-Al sets are well designed (although they do wobble occasionally).
The Bad: That laser battle between Leela and Lowe's men is embarrassing. Even Louise Jameson can't get away with that forward roll convincingly. Derrick Goodwin is much better at mood than he is action.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 08

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-invisible-enemy.html

The Invisible Enemy is available on BBC DVD as part of the K9 Tales box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Tales-Invisible-Enemy/dp/B00153NOQS/