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).
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| 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 |
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.