May 7: "Vincent and the Doctor"

"You're being so nice to me," Amy says at the beginning.  "Why are you being so nice to me? ... These places you're taking me.  Arcadia, the Trojan Gardens, now this.  I think it's suspicious."  "What? It's not," the Doctor replies defensively.  "There's nothing to be suspicious about."  "Okay, I was joking.  Why aren't you?" Amy asks, but the Doctor has no response.

So here we are in our first post-Rory episode, and it's also a celebrity historical, as we get to meet Vincent van Gogh, thanks to the Doctor spotting an alien in the window of one of van Gogh's paintings.  But what writer Richard Curtis (yes, that Richard Curtis, the one behind things such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, and various Rowan Atkinson projects like Mr. Bean) cleverly does is contrast Vincent van Gogh's moments of depression and insight with the loss Amy has suffered:

AMY: I'm sorry you're so sad.
VINCENT: But I'm not.  Sometimes these moods torture me for weeks, for months.  But I'm good now.  If Amy Pond can soldier on, then so can Vincent Van Gogh.
AMY: I'm not soldiering on.  I'm fine.
VINCENT: Oh, Amy.  I hear the song of your sadness.  You've lost someone, I think.
AMY: I'm not sad.
VINCENT: They why are you crying?  It's all right.  I understand.
AMY: I'm not sure I do.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - Vincent and the Doctor)

But because Amy doesn't remember Rory, this isn't a road they can travel very far down -- yet this means that they have to be far subtler, which works tremendously in this episode's favor.  Because what this does is focus the episode in favor of Vincent van Gogh, presenting us with a character who's incredibly in tune with his surroundings, who sees more than the average person can see but who's also tormented by his own personal demons.  Everything else serves this purpose -- even the presence of the Krafayis, a creature that only Vincent can see unaided, is ultimately there to reinforce the theme of loss and misunderstanding.  The Krafayis isn't inherently evil (despite the Doctor's (oddly prejudiced) comment during the cold open), it's just frightened and confused and alone, a victim of its circumstances.  The episode invites us to make the comparison but, pleasingly, doesn't feel the need to underline it.

Vincent shows the Doctor and Amy the night sky. ("Vincent and
the Doctor") ©BBC

The best moments, however, come after the Krafayis has died, when the three of them are reveling in the feeling of being alive.  Vincent points out how the night sky isn't dark and empty but full of color and light and beauty, and the effects shot, as the night sky is turned into something that looks like van Gogh's The Starry Night but isn't a slavish representation of it, is possibly one of the Mill's finest ever on the show.  It also leads to the most obviously emotional moment, as the Doctor wants to give Vincent a gift in return, and so he takes him to the present day, to see just how highly regarded his works have become.  The entire production is unabashedly going straight for the heartstrings here, as Vincent looks at his works on display, all the paintings he's dismissed as being not very good, and listens to Doctor Black (Bill Nighy, in an uncredited role) describe van Gogh:

To me, van Gogh is the finest painter of them all.  Certainly, the most popular great painter of all time.  The most beloved.  His command of colour, the most magnificent.  He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty.  Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world.  No one had ever done it before.  Perhaps no one ever will again.  To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - Vincent and the Doctor)

It's a beautiful moment, as Vincent sees how his memory lives on, but to my mind the best part is the payoff, where Amy learns that that knowledge wasn't enough to stop him from committing suicide.  It's a touching, bittersweet scene: van Gogh may have learned how much he would be loved, but that wasn't enough to help him through what he was experiencing that moment.  It's a smart and brave decision to end on this note, and it makes perfect sense; just as van Gogh's works display the full gamut of emotions, of sadness tinged with joy and happiness mixed with melancholy, so too does "Vincent and the Doctor".  As the Doctor says, "every life is a pile of good things and bad things.  The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant.  And we definitely added to his pile of good things."

In the end, "Vincent and the Doctor" is a brief look into the life of Vincent van Gogh, with an exquisite performance from Tony Curran and the alien monster almost irrelevant in some ways.  This is instead about beauty and sadness and light and dark and color and loneliness and everything in between, and this is a theme that runs through the entire piece.  It's one of the most gorgeous and emotional episodes of Doctor Who ever, and it's also one of the best.

May 6: "Cold Blood"

So the resolution of this two-parter isn't quite as magnificent as it perhaps could have been, but it's not exactly a disappointment either.  Chris Chibnall's turned in a hodgepodge of old Who and turned it into something solid rather than spectacular.

Broadly, this is little more than a remake of Doctor Who and the Silurians, with human activities underground inadvertently awakening a dormant group of Silurians, who decide they want the planet back.  We get the same sort of infighting among the Silurian factions, and the problem is ultimately solved by sealing the tunnels back up.  But where it differs is in the emphasis, and in some of the human characters.  The biggest difference is probably represented by the character of Ambrose, who's terrified at the thought of losing her grandfather after having lost her husband and son to these strange creatures.  She's a desperate woman, and as a result she is, as the Doctor puts it, "so much less than the best of humanity".  Her actions, however, are carefully calculated so as not to appear ruthless or (sorry) cold-blooded, but rather as a situation that escalated too quickly and went terribly wrong in the death of Alaya (who, let's be honest, was probably looking for an excuse to be a martyr and thus provoke a war), and which she now has to try and make the best of.  It's not pleasant or comfortable, and I doubt anyone watching is on Ambrose's side, but you can see how she got to this point.

The Doctor asks the representatives of the Silurians and
humanity to negotiate a peace. ("Cold Blood") ©BBC

On the opposing side, the character of Restac (played by the same actress as Alaya, Neve McIntosh) fulfills the role of the young Silurian from the Pertwee serial, and she seems just as willing to wipe out the ape infestation on the surface -- albeit with a show of force rather than a deadly virus.  She even goes so far as to gun down the scientist Malohkeh, much how the young Silurian killed the old Silurian.  One does get the impression that, regardless of whether or not Alaya had survived and the Silurian elder Eldane (as played by Stephen Moore, the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android from the radio and TV versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) had been able to broker a peace, the result would have largely been the same, thanks to Restac's actions.  It does mean, however, that both sides, humans and Silurians, have differing factions that represent the best and worst of both -- which, one suspects, was the point of the exercise, that humanity can be just as much a monster as the "monsters" seen on the show.

So it's not a letdown, and as far as remakes go it does manage to provide some interesting new elements to make this story seem not wholly derivative (and it's streets ahead of the other remake this series, "Victory of the Daleks").  It also introduces the Silurians into the modern era, even if no one else to date has taken them up on this (save for the character of Madame Vastra, who pops up periodically after this).  For anyone who hadn't seen the stories this is based on, this likely had some interesting twists and turns along the way, and the revelation that there were dinosaur people on the planet before humanity evolved may have been intriguing to those viewers.  But for those who had, there's a sense of inevitability about the proceedings, and we never really believe the Doctor's claim that "this is an opportunity.  A temporal tipping point.  Whatever happens today, will change future events, create its own timeline, its own reality.  The future pivots around you, here, now."

It's perhaps not surprising then that this episode will likely be best remembered as the one where they killed Rory again, but this time for good (it seemed at the time), and then erased him from history just to add insult to the injury.  It's a testament to Arthur Darvill's performance that even after only five episodes people were upset by his death.  It's these contributions to the overarching plot of series 5 that "Cold Blood" in particular tends to be remembered for, rather than for the Silurian plot that took up the previous forty minutes.  That right there sums this episode up better than anything else.

May 5: "Mutant Copper" / "The Custodians" (K-9)

You get the feeling, watching K-9, that the only real problems faced by 2050s London are those created by the Department's Security Division.

Take "Mutant Copper", for instance.  While the rogue CCPC of the title isn't actually a danger to London, it is the result of an experiment that Inspector Thorne authorized, and none of this would have happened if he hadn't stuck human brain cells into the robot brain to see what would happen.  Of course, what did happen is that the CCPC became more interested in the world around it than in maintaining the Department's brand of justice, and it's only thanks to our heroes that Thorne doesn't simply kill this new lifeform.

Or take "The Custodians".²²¹  Here we have almost 20 million children being hospitalized due to some new virtual reality game that's shutting down kids' minds, and it's all sponsored by the Department in order to create a placid, unquestioning populace.  The fact that it might backfire because their eager alien volunteer might have other plans doesn't seem to have occurred to Thorne.

I'll say this about Thorne, though, he's certainly good at being sinister.  Even when he's stomping around Gryffen's home, looking for evidence that the mutant CCPC is there and failing to find any, he's still quite threatening -- he doesn't have any proof of wrongdoing, but he still seems quite formidable.  It's a wonder he's willing to back down in "The Custodians" in the face of June's appeals.

I'm focusing on Thorne and Department Security because the rest of these two episodes aren't particularly interesting.  To their credit, there's an effort to explore what it means to be human in "Mutant Copper", and more importantly, what it's like to be alone.  Birdie, the mutant CCPC, is neither fully human nor fully cyborg²²², and thus seems hopelessly confused -- or, more accurately, like a child who simply doesn't understand how the world works.  And rather than nurture this new creation, their solution is to turn him into a full cyborg again -- K-9 in particular seems distressed at the thought of Birdie not fitting in.  It's only because Thorne enters Gryffen's place, forcing Darius to take Birdie away and set him free, that stops him from being turned back into a full cyborg.  But that's about it for interesting things -- even their efforts to introduce another teenager named Marcus, to present as a potential rival for Starkey and/or Darius, fall flat because it's pretty clear that he's going to sell them out somehow, and so we're just waiting for that moment to happen rather than being surprised by it.

Starkey, Thorne, June, and K-9 watch as the Etydion dies. ("The
Custodians") ©Screen Australia, Pacific Film and Television
Commission Pty Limited, Park Entertainment Limited, Cutting
Edge Post Pty Limited, and Metal Mutt Productions Pty Limited

"The Custodians", meanwhile, has a potentially interesting idea in their alien race the Etydion, who have powerful telepathy that can transmit emotions (so "empathy", in the Star Trek sense) and can apparently slowly convert other beings into fellow Etydions, given the right conditions.  But because they have to wrap things up in 23 minutes and have their twist midway of "it's the Department who's behind the 'Little Green Men' game", this idea is given somewhat short shrift.  It's presented instead as a problem concerning Darius and Jorjie that needs to be solved, instead of something more interesting.  The way they solve the crisis, by June turning her full emotions on the Etydion regarding her daughter, is a good move, however.  And K-9's "Armageddon mode" is pretty wonderful:

JUNE: Thirty seconds before I order this lethal cyborg to level this place down to its foundations.  (quietly to K-9) Help us out here.
K-9:  Doomsday weapon online.  Armageddon mode activated.  (in a lower, doom-laden voice) These are the end of days.

That's the best part of a couple of episodes that are pretty middling by K-9's standards.  Everything else here is largely by-the-numbers, with little in the way of surprises or intriguing moments -- and those times we do get something beyond the norm, they have to quickly move on to get to the next moment without exploring the concepts much further.  These aren't bad episodes, but sadly they aren't particularly challenging or exciting either.








²²¹ Public service announcement: the Shout! Factory region 1 release of K-9: The Complete Series has a technical fault with the default audio of "The Custodians", dropping out completely at roughly 21:45 and lasting for the remainder of the episode.  The other audio track doesn't have this problem, however; you can switch to that one without any issues.
²²² It's never quite clear if the programme makers actually realize that "cyborg" isn't simply another word for "robot".  The way the argument about Birdie is framed, it's as if introducing this human element into his mind has completely changed everything -- nobody says anything like, "Hang on, he's already part-human, what's the problem?"  This is slightly worrying coming from an SF show, even a kids' one.

May 4: "The Hungry Earth"

This episode, more than any other in recent memory, may be the hardest to judge, simply because it's emphatically the first part of a 2-part story.  Other Part One's have tended to go for setting up a story and then exploring the setting along the way, electing to either change things or increase the stakes at the cliffhanger.  Even something like "The Stolen Earth", which is almost pure set-up for their climactic series 4 finale and thus probably the closest relative to "The Hungry Earth", has action sequences and loads of familiar characters for the audience to latch on to.

"The Hungry Earth", by contrast, is going for the slow burn.  It clearly has a lot of old Doctor Who in its DNA -- most obviously Doctor Who and the Silurians, but also stories like Inferno, Frontios and, to a lesser extent, The Dæmons and Warriors of the Deep.  There's nothing wrong with mixing and matching old stories to see what comes out, but because writer Chris Chibnall is delaying much of the action until the next episode, it's somewhat hard to judge how successful this remix is.

One thing that's a tad disappointing is the new look of the Silurians (or whatever we're calling them now²²⁰), as they look incredibly human.  I sort of understand why they did it (so that the actors under the makeup can use their faces to act), but it's frankly rather jarring to see a race that we've previously seen as looking only vaguely humanoid to go to almost full homo sapiens.  They don't even give us a third eye anymore, instead providing a long venomous tongue instead.  I'm sure this probably falls more under "grumpy fan" than an actual independent problem, but it's still a bit of a disappointment.

The Doctor and Nasreen gaze upon the Silurian settlement. ("The
Hungry Earth") ©BBC

Of course, countering this, the moments in the caves near the end of the episode are really good -- the caves themselves look good, and the cliffhanger reveal of the size of the Silurian settlement ("We're looking for a small tribal settlement," the Doctor says optimistically before he's confronted by the actual thing.  "Ah.  Maybe more than a dozen," he remarks) is cool, even if it's not exactly the most exciting cliffhanger ever.  The way Amy is sucked into the ground is also really well done, even if it's incredibly reminiscent of Frontios (but they do a better job here), and there's some lovely interplay among all the characters -- particularly the Doctor, as he chats with Elliot, speaks with Alaya the captured Silurian warrior ("I'm not going to let you provoke a war, Alaya," he tells her; "there'll be no battle here today" (so there's a touch of Battlefield here too)), and later exhorts Ambrose, Tony, and Rory to be "the best of humanity".  "No dissecting!  No examining!" he tells them.  "We return their hostage, they return ours.  Nobody gets harmed.  We can land this, together, if you are the best you can be.  You are decent, brilliant people.  Nobody dies today.  Understand?"

But ultimately, "The Hungry Earth" puts a lot of pressure on its follow-up to really deliver.  We can see a lot of homages to old stories and a lot of buildup for the second half, but there's not much else there.  That's not really a bad thing (after all, we don't judge, say, The Caves of Androzani based solely on its first (two) episode(s)), but it does mean that the pay-off needs to be worthwhile.  What is there isn't bad, so there's promise for "Cold Blood", but we'll have to wait to know for certain.







²²⁰ The Doctor here describes them as Homo reptilia, which on the one hand simply means "reptile man", but on the other hand suggests the actual genus Homo, of which humans are a part.  Of course, this would mean that this group of Silurians are descended from primates rather than reptiles (which are a different class from mammals), and thus the "primitive apes" are their distant relatives.  While it would explain why the new Silurians' faces look so human, it throws up so many other awkward questions (such as the cold-blooded thing) that it's probably best to assume the Doctor simply meant the "reptile man" meaning.

May 3: "The Cambridge Spy" / "Lost Library of Ukko" (K-9)

Is K-9 set in future Cambridge?  I'm not sure how else to make sense of the title of today's first episode...

Neither episode is particularly good, but "The Cambridge Spy" is probably the better of the two because it actually plays a bit with the time travel stuff that's been lurking in the background of the series since the beginning.  Due to a freak accident, Jorjie is sent back in time to 23 November 1963 (even the unofficial spin-offs can't resist the in-jokes, it seems), where Darius's great-grandfather is about to be accused of being a Soviet spy.

There are some things going on with time travel, but it rarely moves beyond simple Back to the Future-style logic, such as when Darius starts to fade away after history is changed such that his great-grandfather Bill is set to never have kids.  Some of the moments are clever, like Jorjie in the newspaper, but most of it is a straightforward runaround.  This might be OK, but the biggest problem with this episode, sad to say, is Daniel Webber, who seems woefully out of his depth when called upon to play Darius's great-grandfather.  I'm not quite sure why; he seems more or less acceptable as Darius, but here there's just something missing from his performance -- to the point where I briefly wondered if this was meant to be Darius undercover.  But no, it's apparently genuine.

There's another minor problem, in that the MI6 agent interrogating Bill is apparently the same actor as Inspector Thorne: "Does he remind you of anyone?" Jorjie asks Starkey.  This might be fine if Inspector Thorne had shown up in any meaningful amount of the show up to this point, but he was in one episode 14 episodes back and then briefly at the end of the last episode, so that's hardly enough time for us to make the connection -- particularly since here actor Jared Robinsen is wearing a false mustache, which only makes it harder.

So there's a nice effort to play with the time travel idea, but it's not actually original enough to maintain interest, and it's also hampered by some of the performances.  "The Cambridge Spy" is thus something of a mixed bag -- although it's a nice touch making the MI6 agent the actual spy (even if it's rather obvious).

Jorjie, Darius, K-9, Gryffen, and June watch Yssaringintinka
try to retrieve Starkey and Thorne. ("Lost Library of Ukko")
©Screen Australia, Pacific Film and Television Commission Pty
Limited, Park Entertainment Limited, Cutting Edge Post Pty
Limited, and Metal Mutt Productions Pty Limited

"Lost Library of Ukko", on the other hand, is just...strange.  It involves Thorne laying a trap worthy of Drake to get someone to look into this weird Ukkan library card that takes pieces of planets²¹⁹ (so, a lot like the CET machine from Nightmare of Eden -- and oh look, Bob Baker wrote that one) and then sucks in people unwary enough to look at the image on the card.  This is so Thorne can learn...something (it's not clear what -- funny how that seems to be a recurring theme on this show) that will enable him to turn the place into a prison for all the dissidents.

That part's not actually a bad idea, but what happens is that they bring this alien librarian in just about the least convincing alien makeup ever -- I realize K-9's a fairly low-budget show, but come on -- and she's a strange kooky character who ends up largely subverting the episode just by virtue of her performance.  There's nothing wrong with being deliberately offbeat, but because the rest of the episode seems so lightweight, the balance tilts too far in her direction.  (The purple Shutter Shades don't help with this.)  It also doesn't help that the production team seems to have injected Thorne into the script to do all the things Drake would do, almost like a find-and-replace action on their scripts.  He thus doesn't yet seem to have a distinct personality, and while Jared Robinsen gives a more naturalistic performance as Thorne than Connor Van Vuuren did as Drake, this actually makes Thorne less interesting of a character; at least Drake was sort of mesmerizing in his supremely melodramatic performance.  They really should have spent at least a little time exploring Thorne's character before they made him generically villainous.

So "Lost Library of Ukko" features an interesting idea lost in a lightweight script with a performance that shifts the whole episode perilously close to self-parody, as it often starts to look like they're doing these things because they're the sorts of things K-9 does rather than because of some internal logic at work.  It's not terribly hard to struggle through, but the final result is rather daft.







²¹⁹ Which incidentally makes K-9 the first Doctor Who spinoff show to (sort of) visit an alien planet.

May 2: "Amy's Choice"

This is a story that they've sort of been building to for a while now -- although half of the buildup has been off-screen -- but now, as the title makes clear, it's time for Amy to make a decision: the Doctor, who plucked her up the day before her wedding to show her the universe; or Rory, the man she intends to marry, the man who she's known for years and thus presumably has a pretty good reason for wanting to spend the rest of her life with?

The Dream Lord inside the TARDIS. ("Amy's Choice") ©BBC

It's really a quite clever script from Simon Nye, with its constantly shifting settings linked by a simple proposition: one of these settings is a dream and one is reality, and all they have to do is work out which.  It would be a clever idea even without the presence of Toby Jones's Dream Lord to spur things along.  But because Jones is there to needle our heroes with some sharp barbs and wonderful caustic wit as he appears and disappears like the Cheshire Cat, this becomes something special.  "If you had any more tawdry quirks you could open up a Tawdry Quirk Shop," he tells the Doctor.  "The madcap vehicle, the cockamamie hair, the clothes designed by a first-year fashion student.  I'm surprised you haven't got a little purple space dog just to ram home what an intergalactic wag you are."

One of the great things about "Amy's Choice" is about how they take a sleepy village and drop a zombie movie into it.  But, in a wonderful, gloriously mad twist, the zombies are all elderly pensioners, who're stumbling around like zombies not because they have aliens in their bodies, but because they're old, and so they just can't move very fast anymore.  Scenes like a group of them converging on Rory and Amy's cottage are simultaneously hilarious and more than a bit unnerving.  Making the Doctor, Amy, and Rory fall asleep at inopportune moments simply adds to the tension that this part of the plot provides.

Ultimately, however, this episode comes down to the choice Amy has to make.  She's presented with two different possible realities: one that appears to be the Doctor's ideal reality, aboard the TARDIS traveling the universe; and one that's Rory's ideal reality, happily married and living in a quiet English village (at least until the Eknodines show up).  But Amy doesn't play by the rules -- she chooses the Doctor's reality, but because of Rory, not the Doctor.  It's not that she doesn't want to be settled with Rory, it's that she can't bear the thought of living without him, after he undergoes what will prove to be his first death during the series.  And so she's made her choice: Rory over the Doctor.

The twist at the end, that both realities were actually dreams ("Star burning cold?  Do me a favour"), is a satisfying resolution, and it's also a good move to make the Dream Lord the darker aspects of the Doctor -- something the Doctor seemed to have already worked out ("Drop it. Drop all of it. I know who you are," the Doctor tells the Dream Lord.  "No idea how you can be here, but there's only one person in the universe who hates me as much as you do").  It provides some fascinating insights into the Doctor's character without explaining too much or seeming too dark; instead it's subtle, and it's better that way.

There are so many good elements going into "Amy's Choice" (the two dreams plot, the zombie pensioners, Toby Jones) that it's hard not to adore the final result.  This is a well-balanced script aided by excellent performances and some fine direction.  It's a shame that Simon Nye hasn't to date written for the series again, as this is a excellent episode in a series that's shaping up to be truly excellent.  "Amy's Choice" is charming and weird and great fun.

May 1: "The Last Oak Tree" / "Black Hunger" (K-9)

Boy, Drake's kind of a git, isn't he?

The metamorphosed Centuripedes fly away. ("The Last Oak Tree")
©Screen Australia, Pacific Film and Television Commission Pty
Limited, Park Entertainment Limited, Cutting Edge Post Pty
Limited, and Metal Mutt Productions Pty Limited

In some ways you sort of feel sorry for Connor Van Vuuren: the script writers have clearly decided that Drake's going to be their cypher to indicate nefarious goings-on, which means that he personally shows up for every evil scheme being unleashed.  Take "The Last Oak Tree", for instance; this is a tale of misdirection, as we learn that the alien which stole the last oak tree left in England from the London museum actually just needs the wood to make a sort of baby carriage for her young.  The alien, a Centuripede, doesn't want to harm humanity -- she just wants to help her young.  But because we need some sort of external threat, here comes Drake, clomping through the sewers again with some sort of explosive device designed to wipe the Centuripede out, regardless of how much sense it makes for him to actually go down there.

It's a nice little moment in a series that, like The Sarah Jane Adventures, has chosen to view aliens with a sense of wonder rather than dread.  There's not necessarily a deeper meaning than that; the fact that a large number of species of trees have gone extinct in England is treated more as background details for the future we're in, rather than as a warning or a major problem -- it's not exactly Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  But because "The Last Oak Tree" is about finding beauty in different guises and about helping people and creatures in distress, Drake's presence really sticks out.  He's only there to supply an external threat and that's it.

"Black Hunger", at least, uses Drake in a more reasonable context, as he's engaged in another covert operation that secretly uses alien technology to forward his agenda.  Well, sort of; he's made this special life-eating microbe supercharged so that he can use it to help steal more alien tech.  Or something.  It's not exactly clear.  What is clear is that Drake is supremely confident that nothing will go wrong with Operation Black Hunger.  Of course, something does go wrong; Gryffen calculates that the Hunger could wipe out all life on Earth in a week if it gets loose, and so naturally it gets loose, causing an apocalyptic crisis that's only averted because K-9 vacuums up all the microbes inside himself, ready to be discharged the next time he visits Atrios, as there's no carbon-based life there.²¹⁸

But the damage is done; once again Drake has operated without official permission and this time he nearly destroyed the world.  He's gone too far, and thus this, it seems, is Drake's final appearance on K-9, as he's replaced by Inspector Thorne (who you might remember was the prison governor in "Liberation").  I would like to say it's sad to see him go, but that wouldn't be true.  This appears to have been one of Connor Van Vuuren's first roles, and while he appears to have done what they asked of him, which sometimes seemed to essentially be a future Snidely Whiplash, he wasn't able to do much more than that.  Van Vuuren's certainly done better for himself since this (albeit more as a stuntman and in a behind-the-scenes capacity), so it does look like it was a lack of experience rather than talent informing his performance in K-9.  But as far as villainy goes, I guess we'll have to see how Thorne does in Drake's place.







²¹⁸ The last time we saw Atrios was in The Armaggedon Factor (which K-9 co-creator Bob Baker would know, as he cowrote that story), when it sure looked like there was carbon-based life there.  So either that took place in the long-distant future, or possibly in the long-distant past -- in which case, sounds like tough times ahead for Princess Astra and company.