Re-running through corridors: The Invisible Enemy

4 Episodes
Aired between 1st October 1977 and 22nd October 1977

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Derrick Goodwin

Synopsis

The Doctor and Leela hear a mayday call near Titan. As they investigate, they run across a sentient alien virus that invades the TARDIS, infecting the Doctor (Leela is immune).

The Doctor recovers and they go after the distress call, landing on an outpost.

Three of the relief crew for the outpost have been infected by the virus and are trying to track down and infect the remaining base member.

They also try to make the Doctor loose control of his mind to the sentient virus, seeing as he is now host to the nucleus of the virus.

Because Leela is immune, they see her as a huge threat and try to get the Doctor to kill her. He manages to keep control of himself enough to warn her that he's being dominated and asks her to get him some help.

Meeting up with the surviving station member, Lowe, Leela manages to take the Doctor to the Bi-Al Foundation, an inter-galactic medical asteroid where the top scientific minds deal with alien viruses.

Leela tries to get Dr Marius and his robot dog, K9 to help the Doctor whilst she holds off the virus-laden hosts (of which Lowe is revealed to be one).

Marius ends up helping the Doctor by creating clones of Leela and the Doctor, shrinking them and injecting them into the Doctor's body. Once inside, they move up to the brain.

They eventually find the nucleus and take it to the tear duct, but end up dying before they could be extracted (because they cannot live past 12 minutes). Marius accidentally extracts the nucleus and enlarges it, forcing the virus to become an even bigger threat.

Marius is taken over and the virus hosts along with the nucleus go back to Titan to prepare to multiply. The Doctor is meant to go too, but he is rescued by Leela. As the virus heads to Titan, the Doctor manages to cure Marius and uses the facilities to create an antidote before heading off to Titan with the help of K9. The Doctor, Leela and K9 eventually stop the virus by blowing up methane tanks and thereby the entire base.

The Doctor tries to return K9 to Marius, but he is asked to adopt the robot dog and look after him.

Trivia

So apparently this story was a riff on an old tale called Fantastic Voyage that was all about miniaturised people running around inside the human body and exiting via the tear duct. To everyone who grew up in the 80's this will no doubt be more reminiscent of Inner Space

This was one of (if not the) heaviest use of models in Doctor Who to that point. Apparently the surface of Titan was a model salvaged from the Space: 1999 set.

As noted in The Robots of Death, the old console room was ruined as the wood warped, so this story sees the new TARDIS console room. It stays like this until the end of the Seventh Doctor's run (with minor changes).

The Nucleus costume was worn by none other than John Scott Martin, one of the original crew members that wore the first Dalek costumes.

Oh, alright, let's give mention to K9. The story goes that Dave Martin's dog died not long before they wrote the story. He asked if he could make the character to sort of deal with his grief and have something of a super-dog that couldn't get run over and really was man's best friend.

The model work on K9 was sort of innovative and the crew / public loved him so much that he ended up staying on for the next three years despite his radio control signals getting mixed up with the TV camera signals, causing him to go out of control and run into walls half the time

It should also be mentioned that John Leeson, the voice of K9 took his role to the extreme, crawling around on all fours during rehearsals. Tom Baker loved this and the pair soon had a great friendship, to the point of doing the times crossword together between takes.

The Review

Given the long run of highly successful gothic stories that came out of Phillip Hinchcliffe's run, its only right to expect the writers to lay an egg at some point. This I'm afraid to say is that egg; a huge, rotten specimen of a story.

From what I've read, the production was severely rushed because it was shifted up to be shot sooner than they wanted because of other stories falling through, that's why spaceship pilot seats look like they were bought from Ikea, the door signs look like they've been cut out of paper and stuck on, and the guns don't have a lighty-up bit or moving part on them.

I'll not say too much more about the visual stuff because as with so much of classic Doctor Who, we are expected to use our imaginations; however, bland interior sets and a giant shrimp notwithstanding (it's better than the Ogron-eater or Alpha Centauri at least), it's the infected humans cause the most problems. The bottom line is that the make up is horrible and just not at all scary. It's fluffy white feathers and pretty scales. How can you take that seriously when it's only sitting a few feet away from Michael Sheard's bald head and bushy tash? At least the special effects guys did their best with the huge amount of spaceships and planets.

Taking it to the plot in general, this story feels like it's all over the place. Writers have tried to use this 'Doctor being attacked from within' before and since, and I'm not certain that any of them work, or that they did at the time they were shown. In this story, Leela has nothing in the way of skills or ability to tackle this threat going on inside the Doctor, so she has to get help from the most implausible duo we've seen in a long time. The space station is excruciatingly designed just to get us from A to B and K9 is similarly just in there for a whim that serves no real purpose at all. What makes it infuriating is that these things have been created for the story, but yet there's no real effort been made to get things making sense from a plot point of view.

For example, Marius injects clones into the bloodstream - how are they not drowning? Come to think of it, he even says about them not having time to give the clones full experiences that the Doctor and Leela have and yet...they clearly do have them anyway!!! Why do they feel pain when their other selves get hurt? Why are they totally fine with only living for twelve minutes? How does Marius even know the time limit. It's random!

The story is full of these instances where we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and go with it, but when you have to do a whole lot of it, I start to question whether it's up to the standard we're used to. I can't blame it all on Bob Baker and Dave Martin. Robert Holmes is still Script Editor at this point and I have come to the conclusion that he's phenomenal at stories set in the past, but pretty bad at ones in the future. The Invisible Enemy is close to the Space Pirates in parts, with Marius being just as stupid and farcical as Milo Clancy.

The one saving grace for this story is the introduction of K9 into the show. Well, that's if you happen to like K9. At the risk of alienating some of you, I don't and never have. But despite what I think, Graham Williams and thousands of people across the UK did. Graham Williams also made it clear that he'd had enough of prancing around Baker Street and wanted more futuristic outer space adventures for the Doctor, despite the budget being as tight as it had ever been. Buckle up, there's going to be more where the Invisible Enemy came from.

Rating

3 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

2 out of 10

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