The Invisible Enemy: Ranking - 214

 The Invisible Enemy

(Season 15, Dr 4 with Leela and K9, 1-22/10/1977, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Robert Holmes, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Dereck Goodwin)

'I'm ringing from the space hospital to say that sorry there's been a delay with your operation. What's the excuse this time? Under-staffed? Yes you could say that, as most of them are dead but that's not the actual reason why. Run out of funds? Well, one of our professors does seem to have siphoned off a lot of funds into the creation of a robotic dog but surprisingly it's not that either. No, there's a bacteria that's grown to life-size that's attacking everyone and they're running for their lives right now. What does it look like? Well, you'll never believe this but it's a bit like a giant prawn...Hello? Hello? Are you still there?' 

Ranking: 214

 

 Contact has been made!

Ah dear reader, sit yourselves down and hear a tale whereby one of the silliest and stupidest bits of scifi ever to make it to a television screen is actually quite deep really. No wait come back, it’s not brainwashing honest! It’s just that ‘The Invisible Enemy’ is one of those stories that where so much goes visibly, obviously wrong that it’s hard to miss the small quiet moments at the heart of it that actually go right. I mean, you know things have gone a bit weird when the big bad is actually a small bad, an enemy that isn’t so much ‘Invisible’ as ‘Invisible To The Naked Eye’ (although I guess that’s not quite as catchy as a title), a virus so intent on universe domination that it…grew big. And for some reason best known to the writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who actually left the description in their notes for the designer, it grew into…a giant prawn that, even by 1970s Dr Who standards looks utterly and totally ridiculous (did they mean to write that he was selfish and accidentally write ‘shellfish’?!) To save it the 4^th Doctor has to look deep inside his own mind…quite literally by (along with Leela) being shrunk to a microscopic side and entering his own brain. Yes, just like the film ‘Fantastic Voyage’ – so close, in fact, that BBC head of serials Graeme McDonald made a note on this show that he hoped the screenplay writer of the film’s adaptation, one Isaac Asimov, wouldn’t sue (and he had grounds to feel picked on, what with ‘Robots Of Death’ aping his entire writing style…) That’s a stick often used to beat this story up with but that was a Dr Who tradition in the 1970s, particularly the Phillip Hinchcliffe era that often stole from (out of copyright) sources so liberally it was sometimes hard to work out what the writers actually had added. Copying ideas was never ever a Baker-Martin failing (quite the opposite: it was containing ideas that no one else would ever have that was often their problem) and they use that idea well, in an entirely different context. This is, for instance, one of the very few 1970s Who stories that doesn’t just repeat something direct from ‘Quatermass’ (not in the script anyway, though funnily enough some of the shots at the every end of this story were filmed for ‘Quatermass IV’, Nigel Kneale’s big television comeback, during which he fell out with the BBC and hopped over to ITV leaving lots of unused shots like the one of virus antidotes being brewed in a vat. Even more than normal with a Baker and Martin script, there are so any ideas here that they were never ever going to be able to put on screen properly in 1977 on a Dr Who budget you don’t know whether to applaud the sheer bravery or cry at the result (especially given that they’ve been writing for the show and seeing it come up short with their ideas for seven full years by now!)

Beneath that though, buried in this script somewhere at a microscopic level, is a really good idea. There are few things that are probably universal to all alien life but the idea of a medical hospital setting like the Bi-Al Foundation, however different it might look like, is surely one of them. There are surprisingly few of these in Dr Who and the other (‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’) is hopeless; at least this one feels plausible as something humans would actually have (and want). Odds are that if Humanity is going to die out for real then it’s either going to be at our own hands (see all the many, many Dr Who stories about nuclear annihilation and cold or hot wars – i.e. most of them) or at the protein spikes of germs. You only need to look around at the chaos of the covid pandemic to see how much effect microscopic viruses can cause (and the sneaky way they do it, causing such brain damage that most people seem to have forgotten they were ever infected by 2024 and how dangerous it is and continues to be). It’s humbling, the idea that our entire complex civilisations can be held to account not by a cyber army of billions of six foot tall silver giants but by something we can’t even see and think we’ve out=-evolved with our technology and opposable thumbs. A virus doesn’t care for all our great achievements, they just want a host to spawn in and kill off, so they can live and multiply. Just imagine what power that virus would have if it could somehow (through scifi means) grow to be man size. What a threat! It’s a neat twist on the usual ‘Dr Who wears its influences on its sleeve’ syndrome, too, in that like so many stories it borrows heavily from the first ‘proper’ science-fiction work, HG Wells’ ‘War Of The Worlds’. Only it’s not the unstoppable alien tripods from Mars that collapse when they meet our Earth germs, its humanity spreading out into space and hitting alien germs. They’re a threat that’s actually quite a big one, all in all, not something to be sneezed at (not least because that might well be a sign of infection), a ‘monster’ that really doesn’t care for humanity and is quite happy to wipe us all out.

This is the era, too, when people started to talk about biological warfare as something that might happen, that germs built in laboratories might escape and wreak havoc, cutting down humanity at our supposed peak of research for daring to ‘play God’. It’s a fear that a lot of series tap into during this era (not least Terry Nation’s ‘Survivors’ from 1975 where the plague wipes out all but one out of every 5000 Humans and reduces mankind to toiling in the fields and starting over again). Most of ‘Survivors’ gets its drama from the fact that we might be ‘next’ and it could plausibly happen at any time;  my one big regret in the script is that, in an era when the Doctor kept landing in contemporary Britain, this story wasn’t set somewhat closer to home – instead we feel a bit removed from this story, watching scientists in the future who can do magical things with clones and space travel your first instinct is that a germ isn’t going to do much damage and they’re bound to have found a way of wiping germs out by then (that said, I thought the same about covid when it was happening for real). I mean, Marius is a Professor of Extraterrestrial Pathological Endomorphisms: you’d think they’d be able to wipe out a gigantic cold with ideas above it’s station wouldn’t you? I love the idea though that even though the Doctor might discuss ‘The Swarm’ with the offhand comment ‘you megalomaniacs are all the same’ that, actually, they’re not: the virus wants to spread and multiply because that’s what viruses naturally do and they’re no different to other life forms in that regard. Even the Doctor has the decency to say that’s reasonable, before a discussion (not a rant, an actual honest to goodness discussion) about the fact that it’s then reasonable for him, as one of the people the virus is intent on wiping out, to stop them. The Swarm Nucleus has the goodness to say that’s reasonable too. The script then asks big questions: where do you draw the line at a being’s right to survive, especially if they’re a swarm being that needs to multiply in numbers to feel ‘whole’? When it’s rights impact on someone else’s? When it can be ‘alive’, can walk or talk or think? After a run of stories with ranting shouting villains and arrogant demi-Gods isn’t just having this discussion nice for a change?

Especially because so much of ‘The Invisible Enemy’ compares the germs to mankind. We’re in the year 5000, the ‘time of the great breakout’ when man left his solar system to go and explore and colonise other worlds – which is news to the settlers in ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Ark In Space’ for two, but I guess in a series like Dr Who where humanity rises and falls we can repeat this cycle a few times over. So much of the first episode is meant to praise Humans, to say look at all this great stuff we’ve built in our own solar system, such as the Titan hospital space station in the middle of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which (at least on paper) is the pinnacle of human engineering. But then the Doctor starts calling Humanity a ‘disease’, spreading out across the stars just like the Swarm, never knowing when to stop. We know we would too: a ot of Dr Who stories (especially the many ones set in the Victorian period) have difficulties coming to terms with Britain’s past as a colonial power doing to natives what aliens so enjoy doing to us (but without the Doctor around to stop them). One story, ‘Demons Of The Punjab’, even comes close to saying we should never have interfered in the affairs of countries that have nothing to do with us (though Robert Holmes got there first with ‘Carnival Of Monsters’, in which our colonisers turn out to be just animals in a miniscope zoo). Every argument you can make to stop the germs with ideas above their station can be used against us. It’s all setting itself up for a really good and interesting denouement, following discussions on a par with the celebrated ‘have I the right?’ speech in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ about whether life ever has the right to end other life…and then The Doctor wipes them out with a big gun anyway. Oh.     

Even before then there are signs that something has gone badly wrong. Titan is meant to be the pinnacle of Human existence some three thousand years in advance of our technology… and it looks like the sort of place that, even in 1977, you’d take one look around and walk out of again going ‘I’m not going to let them operate on me, the place is falling to bits!’ Most stories of brainwashing in Dr Who are games of intergalactic hide-and-seek, of trying to work out who the possessed person hiding in plain sight is: not this time. A lot of this story too relies on stealth, of the virus possessing Humans without anybody realising…but for some reason the makeup artist reads the words ‘infected by a giant virus’ and decides to give everyone a complete and total makeover that would make even the Cybermen in ‘The Moonbase’ blush, with ginormous crystalline eyebrows. The script doesn’t help matters much in that regard either, what with the Humans wondering round with blank expressions on their faces and intoning ‘contact has been made’. Nice going germ-brains, that’s blown your cover ever so slightly! The big danger in the Doctor’s brain are his antibodies, which look like gigantic inflatable ping pong balls (and clearly based on ‘Rover’ from ‘The Prisoner’): it’s hard to be scared of an inanimate object you can just avoid by ducking or walking slightly to one side away from. There’s an interminable gunfight in episode four too, filmed on the last day when – almost uniquely – the story finished filming with time to spare so, to pad out an episode that seemed to be under-running, cast and crew enjoyed a ‘last day of term’ frenzy running around hiding and dying in all sorts of ways to get edited together later. This include such delights as people falling down clutching various limbs and over-acting their death scenes and the commander of the base hiding behind a yukka plant. Suddenly all that depth, all those important points about a germ’s right to live, feel a long long loooong time ago. There’s the infamous moment K( seems to blast at a wall that magically falls apart…even though there’s a whacking great crack in the middle (because the film wasn’t rolling in the camera on the first take and it had to be rebuilt at speed). Given that this is a story that’s, at least in part, about communication (it even starts with Leela learning to write) and trying to meet in the middle between two cultures who have such opposed differences, the writers have spent a lot of time thinking about their futuristic setting and have decided that writing would be simpler, so this is a culture that just use phonetic spelling on all their signs: there’s an ‘imurjensee egsit’, an ‘isolayshun’ ward, a ‘Kayzulti’ department’ and a ‘Kryojenics Sexshun’. If this was a spin-off novel where our eyes were trained to look for words this would be clever and, indeed, seems entirely more plausible nowadays than it did in 1977 thanks to ‘text speak’ and abbreviations. But this is TV, nobody refers to it (not even the Doctor) and you spend your time desperately trying to ignore the giant prawn at the front so you can read all the signs and get lost in the story, while secretly wondering to yourself if the signs are meant to look like that or whether the production team had forgotten how to spell.

Nobody but nobody in this story takes it seriously. You know when people talked, particularly back in the ‘wilderness years’ of the 1990s when Dr Who was so unfashionable it hurt, about ‘Dr Who acting’ as if it was a specific style full of camp exaggeration and absurdity? It’s not generally a thing – right up to 1989 it tended to be an individual actor who didn’t get the series and was sending it up (Richard Briers in ‘Paradise Towers’) or a story where the whole point of the world was that it was fake and artificial (‘The Happiness Patrol’). But it is in this story. The guards, who should be spending most of this story running for their life in terror, seem to be sharing a personal joke. The nurse, played by the director’s wife, fluffs most of her lines (to be fair she is rather distracted by the fact her nurse’s outfit seems to be a giant green binliner that’s amongst the least fetching ever seen in the series – a brave move by the costume department all round, given the director is nominally their boss for the next month). Even reliable old hands aren’t immune: Michael Sheard is terrifyingly real in his roles in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ ‘The Mind Of Evil;’ and ‘Castrovalva’ but here? He’s just trying not to laugh, especially when possessed by a virus that gives him a glam disco makeover. Worst is Frederick Jaeger as Professor Marius (the single best thing in ‘Mind Of Evil’ and ‘The Savages’ both), around whom so much of this story revolves. He should be a sympathetic part, a Doctor who went out into the universe to do good – just like our Doctor – and who had to give up his home and his dog to cure the sick. He’s great in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation, an eccentric in authority that no one listens to (I love the description of him as ‘too senior to bother to care about things like appearance’), the one person on the base who understands the danger everyone is in and we ought to be feeling his panic as the people around him ignore his warnings and get infected, afraid he’ll be next. In practise? He decides Professor Marius should have a cod-German comedy aczhunt (despite being at odds with a script about how Earth has spent 3000 years putting aside regional differences to come together as one), leers at Leela in a way that’s very 1970s but makes modern viewers feel…uncomfortable (‘I’d like to have you data-scanned!’ suggests chat-up lined don’t get any better by the year 5000) and spends the whole episode acting as if it’s all the big joke the story looks, rather than the serious drama it’s trying so hard to be. Even Tom Baker is putting a shade too many jokes in and sending the whole thing up even more than usual (just check out his intergalactic co-ordinates, which were written as numbers in the script and changed to the phone numbers for Scotland Yard and the BBC complaints switchboard!) Only Louise Jameson is taking this story in any way seriously and that’s despite spending half the story bullied or insulted by the Doctor and Professor and getting none of the good lines for herself. Had all the actors had just a little less fun in rehearsals and really got to grips with these scripts (and had they had a director who made them) and had the writers not thrown a (prawn) cocktail  into the mix, ‘The Invisible Enemy’ would be remembered as one of the most gripping and dramatic of stories. Instead it’s a mess, a comedy played for laughs that isn’t actually meant to be funny.  

Not even when the Doctor and Leela are shrunk to microscopic size for a whole episode which is…weird. I mean, a chance to actually literally get inside the Doctor’s brain, a chance to see his inner workings, ought to be great. I mean, these writers were truly ahead of their time in their idea that an infected mind can affect a body and vice versa. But it…isn’t. There’s an awful lot of padding in these sequences, both metaphorically in that the tense time-is-running-out plot comes to a standstill while we’re asked to look at the deeply weird scenery and the padding on the walls of a model of Tom Baker’s brain. The original plan was great and something like ‘The Invasion Of Time’ crossed with ‘Warrior’s Gate’, a series of exotic impossible locations the Doctor and Leela could walk through like shadows: fields, woodlands, University wooden staircases. Only that got rejected early on. The Graham Williams era, so tight on their budgets, often tried to save money by using Colour Separation Overlay, of building models and then putting the real-life actors inside them using post-production trickery. It was always a bit of a wonky process but, or my eyes at least, better than simply cutting the bolder ideas out or having them happen in a bland white room. The scenes of walking round the Doctor’s neural synapses though are, well, odd even for 1970s Dr Who. Few fans would have guessed that it was made up of so many beige walls and tunnels or had so many purple bits floating around (the story’s best line and almost the only one that’s designed to be funny, as one flies overhead ‘What was that?’’Just a passing thought’ The story’s second best-gag, the descriptin of the Doctor as a ‘space-nik’, a beatnik in space. The story’s best gag: clone-Leela asking ‘what does this do?’ while the real Doctor’s leg flies up in the air in a highly theatrical way – no other series but Dr Who would add wither of these touches!)

There’s a fleeting moment when it feels like proper Dr Who, the Doctor walking a tightrope bridge between the logical and artistic sides of his brain (and if that isn’t a metaphor for this series nothing is) but then they mess it up with some weird cod-psychology about the ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ being two distinct separate things (it isn’t) and playing up the dark matter inside the Doctor’s brain as if it’s something scary (it’s not).  It’s such a waste because these scenes ought to be such high-stakes drama: the Doctor and Leela have cloned themselves and gone wandering round the Doctor’s skull in search of a cure and if they don’t get back in ten minutes everyone dies! Thanks to Marius’ work in cloning they’re not just empty copies of the Doctor and Leela but mini-persons with all the same memories and capable of free will, beings who know that they have been credited specifically for this problem with a finite time-span. Do they cry in horror and fight to live on at all costs, the way the virus is? Do they realise their noble sacrifice for the greater good? Do they run around in a mad panic, the fate of the universe on their microscopic shoulders? No, the Doctor mostly stands around pontificating to a bored Leela, who gets her own back by kicking bits of his anatomy. You feel nothing when they die, the story making next to nothing of it. In the words of the 10^th Doctor it could have been so much more…so much more! It was for a while too: the script has a scene with a fading clone-Leela comforting a decaying clone-Doctor as they both crumble into dust before the shocked eyes of their real selves (they probably took this scene out for being a bit too ‘strong’- remember, though, the story before this one is ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’ where everyone except these two meet horrible and gruesome deaths and the next one is ‘Image Of The Fendahl’ where a woman morphs with a human skull to become a giant killer slug that kills indiscriminately. I think the nation’s children could have coped). For a story that goes out of its way to be at least a little bit plausible too it’s all hopeless in scientific terms with so much left unexplained: how does the Doctor even know where to go? Why don’t his own antibodies wipe him and Leela out rather than play table-tennis over their heads? How the heck do they breathe given that the particles whizzing down the Doctor’s bloodstream are now bigger than he is? And why are they wearing clothes – were they cloned too? (Actually that point was raised in the script where the writers proposed the actors doing it nude, an idea quickly changed for Saturday morning teatime decency – even so a flood of letters came in pointing this out. The producer’s comment, that they weren’t technically clones but ‘photocopies’, only confused matters further because that’s patently not what’s said in the script). In the end it’s all a waste of time when the giant prawn gets out through the Doctor’s tear ducts anyway (hey, maybe that explains why the 15^th Doctor cries all the time? He’s trying to flush out the Nucleus!) 

Ah yes, the giant prawn. John Leeson (the unsung hero of this story) is doing to best to dig into his inner bacteria with a gruff malicious voice, treated with all sorts of clever modulation ring thingamies to sound really threatening and The Nucleus actually gets some really good speeches, but you don’t listen to any of them because you’re too busy laughing at what it looks like. Even if you’d never seen a prawn, even if you grew up thinking they were an alien monster rather than a flavour of crisps, you’d still kill yourselves laughing rather than run away in terror. It’s one of the flimsiest beings ever seen in Dr Who (which after the Myrka and Ergon is really saying something), like a stiff breeze would blow it over, with all sorts of crazy fibreglass appendages that kept coming off and interrupting takes (the cameras had to be cleaned all the time and the production managers had to wear masks rather than breathe the hazardous stuff in). Tom Baker, usually so good at acting scared when the plot demanded it, really struggled to take the Nucleus seriously, as well he might, interrupting takes and entertaining the cast by singing renditions of the song ‘Prawn Free’. It’s not the costume department’s fault though: Baker and Martin wrote in the simple but deceptive words that the Nucleus ‘looks a bit like a giant prawn’ and really should have known how it was going to turn out on a Dr Who budget. Legend has it that designer Raymond Hughes took one look at the script, gulped, spent the time he would normally be doing meticulous research out of books and calling up experts to go round to his local fishmongers and buying up a pint of prawns, which he drew and then shared out between the production team on their lunch-break. It’s one of those ideas that, with all the love and hope and faith in the world, was never ever going to work or even come close.

Overall, then, this is a daft inconsequential story that few people come out of well. It would be easy to forget if not one for one thing: the introduction of K9. Future Dr Who writers will never quite know how to use him properly and sometimes make him irritating (some treat him as a ‘real’ dog, some as a sort of mobile sonic screwdriver, neither of which are quite right), but his creators Bob Baker and Dave Martin make him the perfect companion for the 4th Doctor by treating him as the surrogate family of a clever professor who never married and had to leave his beloved dog at home and who needs someone to talk to in order to stop being lonely, which is pretty much what the Doctor uses him for when Leela or Romana aren’t around too. Everything about K9 in this story is judged just right: rather than being a clone of owner Professor Marius he’s got a personality all of his own, fussy and pedantic as robots tend to be but he’s also cheeky and funny and already brave and loyal to the Doctor even when debating with and correcting him (it’s worth pointing out that, the occasional timelord aside, nobody else ever gets the better of the 4th Doctor, who generally waltzes into a room and takes over – having someone point out his mistakes is such a change in protocol). The writers came up with him as a one-story gimmick, creating him partly because Dave Martin had just lost two beloved dogs in traffic accidents and was still grieving, putting forward the idea of a dog that was somehow ‘indestructible’ that would never have to be put down – he seemed a good alternative to the usual banks of plain computers and added a nice touch of character to their eccentric professor.

John Leeson gets the tone exactly right from the first, making K9 naturally funny while being completely oblivious  to how funny he really is. The design is the perfect blend of real robot and real dog, down to the wagging antenna-tail, the waggling sensor ears and the mouth that belches ticker-tape (oddly analogue for the future but alas, short of time-travel, the production weren’t to know about the digital revolution round the corner, which is also why every computer from the future are the size of a house rather than ones that fit in your pocket) and though easily mocked in the future when he has to cope with anything outside that isn’t flat ground he’s perfectly designed for the sterile laboratory corridors he was built for here. Designed by Tony Harding at the BBC Visual Effects Department from a paragraph outlined by the writers, he was built in co-operation with Nigel Brackley, an outside contractor who specialised in radio-controlled devices and was discovered through the yellow pages (how I’d love to have heard that conversation ‘we were thinking of building a robotic dog…’) K9 is the perfect Dr Who counterpart to the sort of robots being popularised by Star Wars and Disney’s ‘The Black Hole’ et al around this time too: he’s cuter than the lot, yet oddly more sophisticated and cerebral too and definitely far more Human. Very Doctor Who, in fact. Although he’s not exactly built for speed or stealth and makes a whacking great noise here (they’ll find a way of making his motors quieter when he becomes a full-time companion but they are super-loud here and tend to drown everything, even important bits of dialogue you need to follow the story), not to mention the fact that the radio-control technology meant that he kept interfering with the signals of the cameras, so they kept strobing while K9 kept running off randomly into walls. The hi-tech solution: film K9 from a distance and try not to get too close! Not every story will make the best use of K9 to say the least and turn him into a walking lazerbeam, but here he’s an obvious winner. Script editor Bob Holmes realised it from the first draft and rang the writers up to congratulate them on such a great idea (although he did make them change the original name FIDO: Phenomenal Indication Data Observation. Not as catchy really is it?), while it was producer Graham Williams who pressed for him to become a proper companion, seeing him as a fun way to regain the pre-teen audience he wanted to grow for the show (and who were mostly off watching other things by 1977, put off by all the horror and Leela’s thighs their elder siblings watched so intently). K9 alone earns this story several quadzillion points, however hopeless everything else might be.

Only it isn’t that hopeless, not really. Not in script form anyway: there are some really great ideas here, about germ warfare in a big and very Dr Whoy way. Even on screen it isn’t all bad: the effects department win all the accolades this story not just for K9 but for some of the best model work on the series, with lots of gorgeous scenes of the Titan base in space both at the start and at the end when it comes under attack, celebrated at the time as the biggest amount of model-work ever done for a single Dr Who story thus far. Made by Ian Scoones with the assistance of Matt Irvine using their newly purchased stock (leftover from Gerry Anderson’s company that was about to go bust and needed to sell their models off at speed) they go the extra mile and throw everything at this story. Only to find out at the end that it was BBC policy to only put one model-maker’s name on the end credits and in the Radio Times, so it was Tony Harding who got the credit for his work on K9 and all their hard work went unrecognised (at least until Dr Who guidebooks started being written). 

Had the life-size things in this story looked as good as the Human-size things in this story ‘The Invisible Enemy’ would be remembered an awful lot better. Like a lot of Baker-Martin stories there are simply too many ideas to fight into one story, while simultaneously there’s still not quite enough to flesh out a four-parter; when the production team are in a good place they can get round those problems and make a great story anyway (‘The Three Doctors’ ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ 3/4s of ‘The Hand Of Fear’), but they’re not in a good place in this era and all the silly things that would normally be kept in check are exaggerated and made to feel worse than they really are. This is a story that beneath it all asks lots of interesting questions – it’s just unfortunate that most of those questions can be met with ‘because it’s just John Scott Martin in a prawn suit’. The result is, perhaps, the downside of the Graham Williams years, a time I always defend as being less silly and more intellectual than they’re ever given credit for: the BBC had asked him to tone down the horror and make the stories more child-friendly and so, what with the giant prawn and the robot dog, this ended up being a story taken to extremes and made for very young children, despite being written as a horror story for adults. It is, perhaps, the one Williams story I wish had been made in the Phillip Hinchcliffe era because there’s a really good dark and scary story in here somewhere, with so many big ideas and philosophical arguments along with a threat that, for once, really does seem unstoppable. Until a really weak ending where it’s suddenly stopped all the same (‘Everything has it’s place otherwise the delicate balance of the whole cosmos is destroyed’ explains the Doctor. ‘I still say we should blow it up’ counteracts Leela. Unusually she gets her way). Oh well, this wouldn’t be the first or last Dr Who story where the, ahem, ‘germ’ of an idea was brilliant but they messed up with the execution; even by Dr Who standards, though, the gulf between what this story is and what it could have been is big enough to drive a lifesize Sutekh through.

POSITIVES + I don’t know how Louise Jameson does it but she turns Leela from being potentially one of the blandest and simplest Dr Who characters on paper into a living, breathing, believable being with a whole range of emotions. Though a tough streetwise uncivilised savage, who runs on pure instinct, coping mostly with ending up on civilised streets on civilised planets that have long forgotten instinct, Leela somehow ends up as one of the most vulnerable, gentlest, kindest and noble companions during her run too and you see that a lot here, while the Doctor’s running round being Doctory and mad. In many ways they change places this story, with him off to fight while all too often she’s caring for the people the virus has left behind and while that’s not so good for adding to the 4th Doctors characterisation it’s great for hers. Even when the Doctor is being oddly mean and snappish (never that polite to Leela as a character anyway, Tom Baker’s real life antagonism towards his co-star is really running away unchecked in this story and it’s a rare one where you want to give the Doctor a slap. I mean, Leela’s his ‘pupil’ trying to learn – and the message of Dr Who, as in life, is that you can’t learn without asking questions. Leela is the heroine of this story after all: The Doctor talks up how much he needs her instincts and hunting skills when searching for the Nucleus (even though, ahem, I think even I could have spotted it not-really-hiding in a corner) – this is a story that’s actually thought about Leela’s savage background and used it, with a story that wouldn’t make as much sense with practically any other companion (though Kamelion would sure have been handy). Making Leela a double-act with K9 is a great idea too: Leela was partly based by Louise on her dog Bosie and how she always lived off her instincts and in the present – K9, though, is kind of Leela inside out, looking as like a dog as bits of metal can but really he’s a computer in a canine shape. Between them they make up the perfect canine, the ‘joke’ being that she’s more animal than he is. As good as the later stories sometimes are for K9 with the two Romanas their partnership is never quite the same, with K9 treated as an equal rather than yet another thing Leela doesn’t quite understand but accepts at face value.   

NEGATIVES -  Once again, it’s the title. Look, it’s not invisible OK, just very very small. Until it isn’t and everyone is being chased by a giant prawn in one of those ‘no other series would ever try this’ moments. And is the Nucleus really an enemy in the usual Dr Who sense? Enemy suggests a vendetta, a deliberate policy of annihilation because you hate what somebody stands for. It’s a bacteria. I mean it’s not being nice to humanity by any means but it’s a bacteria doing what bacterias do best, multiplying, without the this-time-its-personal kill-all-humans stick of most conquering alien parasites/monsters/politicians/parasitic monster politicians. That’s just…being insensitive to bacteria.

BEST QUOTE: ‘It is the right of every creature across the universe to survive and perpetuate its species’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Tautology’ (1992) is one of the ‘Brief Encounters’ published in Dr Who Magazine,  the page-long short stories that more often than not told a story from a person’s point of view other than the Doctor’s. This one, by Glenn Langford, is Professor Mariuses’ diary entry from the days before the events of ‘The Invisible Enemy’ and the building of K9, based on an old computer of his niece’s fiance. After being posted to his new position aboard the Titan space station he discovers to his horror that there are strict weight requirements and he will have to leave both his computer and his pet dog behind. Deciding to turn them both into one he travels to an electronics specialist to have K9 made and the story follows his joy when his canine companion is first switched on. Nothing you wouldn’t have already guessed from the story but rather sweet.

An alternate yet very similar version is told in ‘One Man And His Dog’ by K9’s own co-creator Bob Baker and included in ‘The Essential Book Of K9’ (2015). Once again told from Professor Mariuses’ point of view, it features more detail about K9’s creation with the detail that he took six months to build and that the Professor built the dog himself, from a combination of a medical computer, a specially built brain app, anti-radiation cladding, a voicebox and antennae he had lying around. Again nothing you wouldn’t have guessed from the story and oddly not quite as sweet, but as it’s from K9’s creator this version is arguably more ‘canon’.

‘Revenge Of The Swarm’ (2014) meanwhile is a sequel to the ‘other’ half of this story. Number #189 in Big Finish’s main range, this is a 7^th Doctor, Ace and Hex story with John Leeson reprising the voice of the Nucleus for the first time in thirty-seven years. It turns out that the Nucleus has been living at the heart of the Tardis for three regenerations – oopsie! What with Sutekh and Mandragora and goodness knows what else in there I’m amazed the Doctor has room even in a machine that’s infinitely large on the inside. Taking over the Tardis, it takes the Doctor back to Titan base for some unfinished business where it establishes its own version of the internet (or the Matrix if you’d rather), where it downloads everything it can about the human race. Of all the TV stories I expected to get a pretty straightforward sequel in the long-running Big Finish range, this one wasn’t it. After all this story features all the aspects that most people agree didn’t work – the Nucleus itself and the idea of a germ taking over people – without the plusses like Professor Marius or K9. The idea of talking bacteria does work rather better on audio than it did on screen, however and it’s interesting to see such a straightforward foe up against the complex and mysterious 7^th Doctor. The script is cleverly divided into two, a ‘prequel’ and a ‘sequel’ to the finished story – the latter works better simply because the Doctor is in it more but both are worth hearing, if not amongst the best in the run.

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