Customer Reviews

Doctor Who: The Invisible Enemy - Story 93) & K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Invisible Enemy.
A mysterious cloud is causing havoc in space, infecting all those who pass through it with an intelligent virus, the first victims are a crew of a shuttle heading for Titan base.(One of Saturns moons)
The Doctor and Leela try to come to the rescue, but the TARDIS passes through the cloud itself, leaving the Doctor infected with the nucleus.
He and Leela then try to find help at a medical station situated inside a Asteroid, where they meet the eccentric Professor Marius and his pet robot K-9.
According to this story written English in the future will be spelt phonetically, look at the wall signs. Interesting concept.
(Air date:~01/10/77-22/10/77)
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This was an ambitious story that was unusually given more sfx shots then was usually allowed for a Who story. And once again the Beeb was thankful for it's supplies of old Gerry Anderson models.
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DVD extras.
Commentary. With actors Louise Jameson and John Leeson, visual effects designer Mat Irvine and co-writer Bob Baker.
Dreams and Fantasy - artistes and production crew recall the making of this story and even take the original K9 for walkies. With actors Louise Jameson and John Leeson, director Derrick Goodwin, co-writer Bob Baker, visual effects designers Tony Harding and Mat Irvine, K9 operator Nigel Brackley, journalist Gary Gillatt.
Studio Sweepings - a rare opportunity to go behind the scenes on the recording of this story, courtesy of a timecoded Shibaden videotape recorded for production use.
Visual Effect - Visual effects designer Mat Irvine meets up with his old colleague Ian Scoones at Bray Studios to talk about the visual effects for 'The Invisible Enemy' and other stories.
Blue Peter - K9 meets John Noakes and Shep in this extract from the long running children's magazine show
CGI Effects - this gives the viewer the option to watch the story with many of the original video effects sequences replaced by CGI versions. Trailers and Continuity, Photo Gallery, Coming Soon, Easter Egg, Radio Times Listings Programme subtitles, Subtitle Production Notes.
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K9 and Company.
Sarah Jane Smith pays a Christmas visit to her Aunt Lavinia's house in the village of Moreton Harwood. She discovers that Lavinia, a noted scientist, has yet to return from a lecture tour of the USA. She does however meet Brendan (Lavinia's ward) and Commander Bill Pollock*, her partner in a small market garden business.
Also in the house, is a box sent to her by the Doctor, in it she finds K9.
The luckless Brendan is kidnapped by a local coven of witches who want to sacrifice him to the goddess Hecate. Sarah, with K9's assistance, set out to try and foil their dastardly plan.
This was a pilot for a possible spin-off series from Doctor Who. Alas, it was not to be.
(Air date:~ 28/12/81)
(*Bill Pollock is played by Bill Fraser, he played General Grugger in Meglos.)
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Once passed the annoying and severely dated eighties theme and credits this is an okay story for the undemanding viewer. The more discerning Who fan will probably be impatiently waiting for "Seeds of Doom" and other such stories.
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DVD extras.
Commentary - With actors Elisabeth Sladen, John Leeson, Linda Polan and script editor Eric Saward.
The K9 Files - key production personnel look at the making of this story and K9's subsequent life in books and comic strips. With actors Elisabeth Sladen, John Leeson, writer and co-creator of K9, Dave Martin, script editor Terrance Dicks, director John Black, visual effects designer Mat Irvine and journalist Moray Laing.
K9 - A Dog's Tale - K9 himself answers a selection of questions about his life.
Pebble Mill at One - K9's appearance on the Christmas 1981 edition of the BBC1 lunchtime magazine show.
Trails and Continuities, Photo Gallery, Coming Soon Trailer
K9 Stories - four books for younger children - 'K9 and the Beasts of Vega', 'K9 and the Missing Planet', 'K9 and the Time Trap' and 'K9 and the Zeta Rescue' - plus the K9 annual on PDF for Mac and PC.
The K9 Radio Times Listings
Programme subtitles, Subtitle Production Notes.

Look, Doctor Who is never going to win any awards for special effects. In addition, the fight sequences occasionally leave me in stitches; I'm afraid everyone in the Doctor Who universe is easily felled with a stiff kick to the shins or a slight nudge to the back of the neck.

Once one gets past these rather inconsequential shortcomings, however, Doctor who is generally a combination of both acting and teleplay brilliance!

The Invisible enemy is no different. Amongst the excellent focal points of this "episode" are: the introduction of K-9 (who preceded even R2-D2 in the cute robot milieu), Leela at the top of her form, Tom Baker - brilliant as always, and a rather interesting plot involving a microorganism with intelligence.

Furthermore, this DVD includes K-9 and Company. As a kid, I always wanted, but was never able to see this quirky chapter in the Doctor Who canon. To be honest, I thought it was quite fun. The theme song, by the way, hilariously embraces the kitzchy-ness of 1970's techno-disco. All in all, Sarah Jane is always fun, K-9's neither over or under-utilized, and the side characters are more than adequate.

My verdict? A fantastic introduction to the Doctor Who collection of DVD's!

"The Invisible Enemy" marked a subtle transition in Doctor Who as producer Graham Williams, still in his first season, was pressured to veer the show away from grittier, horror-centered stories, such as the previous "Horror of Fang Rock," toward brighter, more fun-filled scripts. "Invisible Enemy" is also remembered as the story that, for better or worse, introduced a robot dog named K9. Love him or hate him (and fans did both), K9 would remain a regular feature of the program for four years.

Sadly, the gothic horror of the Philip Hinchcliffe-Robert Holmes years produced some of the best shows in the series' history, including the previous season's "Talons of Weng-Chiang," but also led to somewhat of a public backlash that the stories were too scary and violent. "The Invisible Enemy," by contrast, juggled some interesting sci-fi concepts, such as cloning, but was pretty much a shameless ripoff of the 1966 sci-fi movie classic "Fantastic Voyage." With the introduction of a new, radio-controlled robot character, the story was also plagued with special effects problems.

The crew of a shuttle to Titan is infected by an interplanetary virus that wants to establish a hive on Saturn's moon. The Doctor is infected with the "nucleus" of this unseen foe, which we will later learn looks like a giant prawn. At a nearby space hospital, clones of the Doctor and Leela are miniaturized and injected into the infected Doctor's brain in hopes of finding an antidote. The story copies "Fantastic Voyage" down to the smallest detail, including the clones' planned escape through a tear duct.

The voyage into the Doctor's brain required Tom Baker and Louise Jameson to work in both colorful, imaginatively designed sets created through color separation overlay and actual physical sets that proved less convincing. The sterile, laser-pistol shootouts look ridiculous, with actors firing in one direction and the resulting laser blasts lighting up somewhere else. K9 keeps crashing into things, sometimes becoming wedged in scenery or breaking down altogether. In one scene, he is required to shoot out a section of wall to create a barrier. The first take didn't look quite right, so the crew shot it again but didn't have time to cover up the seam where the wall broke away in the first take or even to sweep up debris left on the floor from the earlier shot.

This two-disc set also includes "K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend," a TV special broadcast in 1981 that was hoped might spin off into its own series featuring the robot dog and former Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith. Elisabeth Sladen looks great here, but after four years, K9 had clearly expended whatever magic he might have once had, and a new series was not to be.

typically hokey, fun, wonderful dr who in the classic Baker style. The introduction to k-9, with lots of overacting and cheesey special effects - its great

The first adventure with K9!!! you can see the origins of this lovely character in a adventure similar to Fantastic voyage.

as a bonus, you can see the pilot of the spin off of K9 and Sara Jane Smith...way before her current CBBC show!!!
If you like K9 team up with the Doctor this is a must have item.

In startling contrast to the minimalist scale of the story preceding it (Doctor Who - Horror of Fang Rock (Episode 92)), "The Invisible Enemy" is an outrageously ambitious "Doctor Who" tale daring to span the expanses of both inner and outer space, flaunting all the pesky restrictions on the show as it does so. With predictably mixed results, but the brave successes well outweigh the few embarrassing flops in the final analysis. And as for the latter, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained--why let them deter one from enjoying this fine science fiction adventure?

And fine it is, with a brilliant premise: a microscopic organism with predatory intelligence lingers in the outer reaches of our solar system, waiting dormant for humankind to reach it, be infected and effectively controlled by it, and by so doing manage to proliferate across the stars carried along by their ultimately disposable hosts. It's the old biological game of survival of the fittest with an ugly interstellar twist. And of course the moment of crisis happens as the story opens somewhere near a refueling base on Saturn's moon Titan around the year 5000--the first humans are infected, as is the Doctor (by the virus's nucleus, its reproductive core and commanding conscious force, no less), since the Tardis just so happens to have materialized nearby. Most of the story then transpires on a medical base built into an asteroid, where temporary clones of the Doctor and his companion Leela are engineered by a certain Doctor Marius and his canine-formed computer, shrunken to microscopic size, and injected into the Doctor's brain to seek out the invisible enemy and destroy it--and one of the chief peculiar highlights of the story is this "fantastic voyage" through bizarrely organic landscapes.

The plot's twists and turns include the virus nucleus growing to macroscopic scale towards the end, which as it happens is the story's main downfall. The enemy was sinister and creepy when unseen and undetectable, and most of that evaporates immediately as he plops out awkwardly into the harsh hospital (i.e. studio) lights. The cloning idea is interesting, but both clones spring into existence fully clothed and (in the case of Leela) armed, which strains plausibility past the breaking point--as does the whole idea of shrinking people and things (including laser pistols) down to a microscopic scale without hindering their functioning. There are a few other gaffs of this nature, too, but still the overall drama holds one's interest nonetheless. Tom Baker is in top form as the Fourth Doctor and gets some particularly good lines from the script, Leela is beautifully aggressive, and Doctor Marius makes for a nicely memorable supporting character. And last but not least, this story marks the introduction of an iconic if pleasantly childish part of the Doctor Who mythos: his annoyingly clever pet computer K9, entrusted to him by Marius at the last minute. Love him or loathe him, here's where he rolls into the picture.

This DVD set thus also comes with the very first Doctor Who spin-off, "K9 and Company"--the inclusion of which makes sense then despite the four years or so intervening (1977 and 1981, respectively). I'm not much for spin-offs personally, and I'd most likely not have set out to obtain this on its own, but since it's included anyway I found it a pleasant enough little diversion and an interesting blind alley in Doctor Who history (and, in retrospect, the forerunner of the current spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures - The Complete First Season). In any case, is this bit of an oddity plus the admittedly flawed yet ultimately wonderful classic Doctor Who story "The Invisible Enemy" worth your hard-earned credits? Affirmative!

K9 & Co.'s theme music make it outdated. Invisible Enemy is a nice story. But, you have to be prepared for a dozen minute count down to last longer than 2 episodes. They are both the 1st K-9's episode and the prequel to the Sarah Jane Adventures...

The Tom Baker era story entitled "The Invisible Enemy" takes place thousands of years into the future. Mankind has just begun to explore the solar system and beyond. A spaceship from Earth is making its way towards Jupiter's moon Titan where the crew will replace the current staff and help those crafts going beyond. Along the way the ship enters a strange nebula and within seconds the crew of three become infested with a space borne plague and with it the first of many to begin to serve the swarm.
The ship lands and those who were celebrating the arrival and there time spent on Titan was short lived as they themselves become infected and the base controller sends a distress signal to anyone who can help. Meanwhile in the TARDIS the Doctor is moving back into the main control room since they have been in the secondary control room for sometime. Leela watches the Dcotr and for a brief moment she watches as the Doctor becomes infected with the swam parasites. Even worse the swam's leader has taken over the Doctor's body. However due to the fact that the Doctor is a Time Lord and not human it will take more time to take over his body and begin the process to convert to the swarm.
The Doctor realzing he needs help tries to fight it and with the aide of Leela travels to an asteroid hospital. There they meet a professor in charge who specialies in exotic diseases and finds what the Doctor has fantasitc. The professor is also aided by his robotic dog K-9 who serves him with logic and a laser that is dead on. The swarm hears the mental commands of the swarm leader they travel there to infect more and retive the leader. The Doctor is losing time with no real help through the professor. So he asks him to clone him and Leela for a plan he has. With a clone of the Doctor using componets of the TARDIS he shrinks himself and clone Leela and inject into the Doctor to fight the parasite from within. Can a clone of the Doctor racing against the clock save the real Doctor and stop the swarm before it begins to spread? Why is it that Leela is immune to this illness? Will they find a cure and stop the swarm? Or will mankind become hosts to something that will rule the universe?
The second disc entitled K-9 and company is a special cerated at the time to be a spin off featuring Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and her first encounter with her dog K-9 mark III. After her time with the Doctor she travels to her Aunt's house where she finds a large package has been waiting for her for sometime. Once she opens it she discovers K-9 a gift from the Doctor to keep her safe and to be of help. During the holidays her Aunt is away and she staying with her aunt's ward to keep him company. While in the town itself strange things begin to happen. A coven has arised and wishes to plunge the world into darkness and scarfices are needed. They also say they command a demon hound that is bound to ther coven's leader and with it are unstoppable. Sarah along with her new freind K-9 is going to show those that practice magic that its nothing compared to resourceful reporter and a dog made from the future.

I don't have a lot of time to do this review so I'll make it short.

Doctor Who: The Invisible Enemy

I have the VHS version that only features the original special effects, not the new special effects, so when I comment on the special effects, I'm referring to the original ones. Special effects at times are great, and at other times are lame, but the story, plot, acting, and directing are all great! The Doctor's taken over by an intelligent space virus that wants to conquer all of space and time. This is truely a great story, and is highly recommended! Five stars.

K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend

Not much here to offer except for the return of K9 and Sarah. Two stars.

In all, I would highly recommend this DVD just for "The Invisible Enemy". And even with "K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend" you at least get to see how Sarah got possession of K9. Highly recommended!

The miniature work done in the Invisible Enemy in the first episode are up there with Gerry Anderson, beat only by the stuff in City of Death, holds up well even today!