August 18: The Invisible Enemy Parts One & Two

So the first effects shot (the one of the shuttle weaving up and down through the asteroids) is rather dodgy, but after that they get much better -- the shots of the shuttle landing on Titan and being taken underground are particularly good.  And while the space shuttle interior isn't terribly exciting (though it's certainly not bad), the interiors of the base on Titan are quite lovely -- the bits that look like they've been hewn from the rock being especially nice.  Oh, and look, we've back to the old-style white console room -- no more wooden paneling (for practical reasons, it turns out -- the panels had warped while in storage and thus were no longer usable).

The plot isn't too shabby here, either -- that shuttle flies through an organism that sort of looks like a thundercloud in space, complete with lightning, which ends up infecting the shuttle crew.  We can tell because they've got some interesting-looking white scales/fungus on their faces, and they all utter another Bob Baker/Dave Martin catchphrase: "Contact has been made."  But what's more exciting than that is that the TARDIS also passes through the organism, and the Doctor is also infected.  So not only do we get a possession story, but we get one in which the Doctor himself has been compromised.  Of course, it being the Doctor, he's able to resist it somewhat, but even he's not totally immune.  Thus as we see the Doctor and Leela exploring the Titan base in response to a mayday signal, we see him losing the struggle against the Nucleus of that space organism as he prepares to shoot down Leela...

Leela, for some reason, is completely unaffected by this creature, and so she's able to help the Doctor, even as he continues to struggle against the Nucleus (he's able to stop himself from shooting down Leela, for instance).  His only help lies at the Bi-Al Foundation, on an asteroid in the main asteroid belt.  It's not as nice a set (being another one of those white "space" sets we tend to get in future stories), but it's still all right.  That said, the "reformed" English spelling on everything -- so, for example, the word 'exit' is realized as 'egsit' -- is not only rather poorly thought-out (such as with the letter 'i' representing two or three different sounds) but it's not even consistent -- Titan has an 'airloc', while Bi-Al has an 'airlok'.  So it's a nice idea but it hasn't been properly worked out, and thus the result is either just strange or simply awful (depending on your point of view).  Oh, and all the dialogue refers to things like "level X4", while the signs say '4X'.

Leela is told about K-9 by his owner, Professor Marius. (The
Invisible Enemy Part Two) ©BBC

However, Bi-Al is where we meet Professor Marius, Bi-Al's "specialist in extraterrestrial pathological endomorphisms", and his robot dog, K-9.  There's something slightly off about K-9's introduction, to be honest -- he's sort of presented as a fait accompli, a way for the effects people to say, "Look what we can do," and thus is a bit hard to take seriously.  It also doesn't help that this is Doctor Who's first "cute" robot since the Chumblies in 1965, and that at this point in the story K-9 doesn't have anything worthwhile to do.  There's a bit of action toward the end, as Marius sends him out to protect the lab with the Doctor in it from the attacking possessed humans (who are trying to save the Nucleus from being destroyed by Marius and his people), but in general K-9 just sits there being vaguely smug and irritating -- declaring he's smarter than Marius and yelling repeatedly at Leela (but not doing anything else) until Marius tells him to stop.

There's also some stuff about "circus" cloning tricks ("circus" because the clones don't last very long) and using this to make duplicates of the Doctor and Leela that can be shrunk down and injected into the Doctor to take the fight to the Nucleus; a bit of confusion about why Leela is immune (the Doctor thinks it's because Leela is all instinct, and the organism needs intellect to thrive, while Marius seems to believe it might be a simple antibody); and the possessed humans smashing a shuttle into the Bi-Al Foundation (yeah, that will keep the Nucleus safe).  It's decently exciting, even if not particularly inspired -- we'll have to see what happens in the last two episodes, to learn if they achieve or squander the potential that this set-up has.  That said, injecting the Doctor and Leela clones into the infected Doctor isn't the most encouraging sign...