April 12: "Regeneration" / "Liberation" (K-9)

One of the interesting ways in which the BBC works is that authors writing for the corporation often retain the rights to the characters they created.  (Terry Nation owning the rights to the Daleks is the best-known example in Doctor Who circles, but see The Dominators for an instance where confusion over who actually owned the Quarks led to all sorts of fallout.)  This extends to the character of K-9, originally created by Bob Baker & Dave Martin for The Invisible Enemy.  The fact that it was the authors who owned the rights to the character meant that they could shop the character around to put into their own, non-BBC production.  (Again, Terry Nation had tried to do something similar with the Daleks back in the '60s, but nothing had come of that.)  Bob Baker had apparently been trying to launch a K-9 show for years (along with a gentleman named Paul Tams, best known as...er...the artist of the cover of the Target novelization of the sixth Doctor radio drama Slipback), but the difference is that he finally succeeded in Australia (with British coproduction), and the result is the efficiently titled K-9, the pilot of which, "Regeneration", aired the day after The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith.

The result isn't great.  Rewatching this, it wasn't as mind-rendingly horrific as it seemed the first time, but there's still something off about it.  The storyline of "Regeneration" has some pretty interesting ideas floating around, with an attempt at a working time portal, a police state in future London (well, maybe; we don't actually have a lot of direct evidence for this yet), and a detention center for aliens.  The problem is that most all of the actors here feel stilted, as if they're all still uncomfortable being in this show.  The only one who comes out largely unscathed (well, besides John Leeson as the voice of K-9) is Robert Moloney, as the agoraphobic Professor Alastair Gryffen, who seems quite comfortable as a slightly neurotic scientist.  Unfortunately, the "rebellious" Starkey and Jorjie feel less like dangerous (or even mischievous) teenagers, and more like drama school students.  It's stereotypical "children's TV" acting, and it's especially obvious in comparison with The Sarah Jane Adventures, which largely manages to avoid this.

It's not all bad; John Leeson is as good as ever, and there are a couple subtle nods to K-9's parent show -- with the original design right at the beginning (because Bob Baker might own the character but the BBC owns the design) and an incredibly subtle reference to the Doctor on K-9's regeneration pod thing: δ³Σx², the Gallifreyan name of the Doctor according to the 1972 book The Making of Doctor Who, is printed on the side (and this is absolutely something Bob Baker would remember -- note his tendency to keep giving Time Lords Greek letters as names).  The new design isn't too bad, even if it's obviously targeted towards kids, and it does allow K-9 to be a bit more mobile.  There's also some really lovely direction from David Caesar and Mark DeFriest, with lots of interesting angles and such.  I also really like the way they've made the Jixen look not quite right, with a sort of shifting shimmer effect that makes it hard for the eye to focus on them.

Still, there's not really anything particularly exciting about "Regeneration"; it does its job of giving us a brand-new K-9, and it sort of sets up the world of the show, but too much time is spent on situations we're not given enough information about for us to care, and the stilted nature of the main actors is a severe drawback.  But this is a pilot; hopefully things will get better.

Jorjie, Professor Gryffen, K-9, Darius, and Starkey. ("Liberation")
©Screen Australia, Pacific Film and Television Commission Pty
Limited, Park Entertainment Limited, Cutting Edge Post Pty
Limited, and Metal Mutt Productions Pty Limited

Next up²⁰⁸ is the second episode, "Liberation", which picks up where "Regeneration" left off.  It's still largely the same as the first episode; the main things of note are that Daniel Webber, as Darius Pike, already seems far more comfortable and natural here than he did last time, and that we get a large parade of aliens in the detention centre that look like they just slapped some odd masks on people -- it screams low budget.  It certainly doesn't help that there are some silly "jokes" scattered through this, such as calling one of the aliens "Mr. Wiffy", apparently in reference to his smell -- it's very much children's TV humor.  There's also the "shocking" twist that Jorjie's mother is high up in the secretive "Department" that Jorjie and Starkey are rebelling against; it doesn't seem to make much of a difference in the narrative scheme of things, and by the end we seem to be more or less back where we started, with the one difference being that the alien detention centre has been closed down.

These two episodes have their moments, but so far K-9 is largely a disappointment, veering from barely watchable to simply tedious with alarming regularity.  Hopefully we can put this down to the growing pains associated with a new series, but K-9 has a long way to go before it can compete with even the least of its step-siblings.







²⁰⁸ Up to this point I've been able to more or less view everything in the order it was broadcast (the sole caveat is "The Infinite Quest", which was broadcast in short pieces week by week until they re-broadcast the complete story right before "Last of the Time Lords"), but the British airdates of K-9 screw things up by being occasionally broadcast in the wrong order.  Thus "Liberation", explicitly the second episode of the series, was actually the 20th episode broadcast for some reason, and thus technically aired on 9 October 2010 -- two days before The Nightmare Man Part One, the series 4 opener of The Sarah Jane Adventures; I've elected to view it in its proper place, however.  I'll note other oddities as we go.