The Invisible Enemy

Chapter The 225th, where a character arrives that really goes viral.

Plot:

The solar system in the year 5000: a shuttle craft progressing through space on a journey to Titan flies through a cloud of gunk in space and the crew get taken over by a sentient virus. Meanwhile in the nearby TARDIS, the Doctor is also infected; he's been selected by the Nucleus of the Swarm to be its host. For some reason, Leela is immune. The shuttle arrives on Titan, and the infected crew kills the base crew, except for the supervisor, Lowe. The TARDIS materialises there too. The Nucleus telepathically instructs the infected to kill the reject Leela, but the Doctor resists control and doesn't hurt his friend. Lowe is infected by one of the shuttle crew, but pretends not to be and suggests Leela and the Doctor go to a nearby medical station on an asteroid, the Bi-Al foundation, where the Doctor hopes he can be cured, and the Nucleus believes its host will be best protected. The three of them travel to the foundation in the TARDIS - presumably Leela pilots the TARDIS after having been given the coordinates by the stricken Doctor, and Lowe doesn't take any opportunity to kill her, and he must have had several; but, this all happens off-screen. (I think there's ample opportunity for someone to write a story of that journey, much more intriguing that the rest of The Invisible Enemy, if you ask me; maybe Big Finish have already done it, or maybe Terrance Dicks smoothed it out in the novelisation).

One of the shuttle crew remains on Titan guarding an incubation chamber for lots of virus blob eggs getting ready to hatch. (Is this really how viri work? Oh well, never mind.) At the foundation, the Doctor is examined by Professor Marius and his robot computer in the shape of a dog, K9. Lowe goes on the attack, infecting people, but Leela and K9 hold him off. The Nucleus attacks another shuttle craft making it crash into the foundation. Meanwhile cloned forms of the Doctor and Leela are miniaturised using the TARDIS dimensional stabiliser and injected into the Doctor's brain. Lowe breaks in, infects Marius, and a mini-clone of Lowe is sent into the brain after them. The clone Doctor confronts the Nucleus but does not get rid of it before his and Leela's clones are absorbed into his blood stream, the Doctor getting Leela's immunity because of this. The Nucleus follows the Doctor's original plan to escape via a tear duct, and is then expanded to human-size. Helped by Leela and K9, the Doctor escapes the Nucleus, and works to create antibodies extracted from Leela's blood, which he uses to cure Marius. Marius and his staff cultivate more, which the Doctor, accompanied by Leela and K9, takes to Titan to kill the virus. Lowe tackles him and the antibodies are destroyed, so he blows up the incubation chamber instead (it was Leela's idea). Everything returned to normal, Marius gives the Doctor K9 to look after, and the metal mutt joins our favourite Time Lord on his adventures.

Context:

One evening when the rest of the household were off in their own rooms doing their own things, I poured equal parts of gin, sweet vermouth and Campari over ice into a tumbler and stirred, then added a slice of orange. I settled down with the resultant Negroni on the living room sofa, turned on the TV and resolutely failed to watch The Invisible Enemy. The DVD was in the player and everything was cued up, but the effort of just pressing the Play button on a remote didn't seem worth it; visions in my head of a tatty prawn man, and silly scaly make-up put me off. Whether it was a good idea or not, I was stone cold sober the following evening when I did finally watch the story. I was on my ownsome again, as the family were still in the middle of watching the story I last blogged (except for the Better Half who's off Who altogether at the moment - I'm hoping Jodie Whittaker's regeneration story might tempt her back).

First Time Round:

I watched this for the first time with Zahir, childhood fan friend mentioned a few times before on the blog. It was one of a couple of stories that I first saw around the same time with him, on two separate occasions (the other being Underworld). Both had been recorded onto VHS from a broadcast on the Satellite and Cable channel UK Gold by one of Zahir's colleagues at work and lent to him. I went round to visit him and watched it one evening. I've scoured my memory to ascertain when exactly this was. It was definitely after we both finished our degrees (Zahir was one of two other school and college friends whom I knew that went up to Durham University at the same time as me). We were both living and working in Worthing, Zahir in his family home, and - if memory serves - I was by then in the little studio flat I'd moved into with the Better Half. This means it was sometime between 1996 and 1999; my money's on the latter end of that date range. Like all Tom Baker stories, I'd previously seen one clip of The Invisible Enemy on the Tom Baker Years VHS compendium (a two tape set of Tom Baker reacting to clips from each of his stories) that had come out in 1992. The clip used did not show the story at its best, so I was pleasantly surprised by the visuals, even by the Nucleus of the Swarm's cumbersome and impractical prawn outfit. It was a few years later in autumn 2002 when the story finally came out on VHS, and I got to own my own copy.

Reaction:

The clip chosen on that Tom Baker Years tape was the scene of the Doctor's clone in his own brain, talking to the Nucleus of the Swarm, where the antagonist character is depicted as a black-draped lump with a feeble claw poking out. If you've never seen The Invisible Enemy, I'd recommend watching this clip first to emulate my initial watch. It's the story's most threadbare moment, and watching it out of context set very low expectations for the 1990s me still to see the full thing such that I enjoyed the story as a whole when I finally saw it perhaps more than I would have otherwise. The prawn-man version of the Nucleus revealed later may be a little ridiculous, and more than a little immobile, but it looks like a million dollars if you're expecting just a lump and a claw. Had they selected a clip of some of the better model work of spaceships, base stations, asteroids and such, I might have been a lot more disappointed. For every very good effect, costume, set or prop in The Invisible Enemy, there seems to be another waiting - often revealed in the very next scene - that's sub par. It's frustrating; there was clearly a big budget for the model work compared to stories before this in Who's history, but the story as a whole still looks cheap because of the lapses. There's an obvious root cause: the script is utterly, recklessly, hilariously ambitious. The people realising this script are rushing to keep up, and succeeding half the time, but it was beyond the scope of what was feasible with their resources.

There's a moment in episode two for example where the Swarm virus impacts a random shuttle that's not been part of the action before that point, and it collides into the asteroid housing the space hospital where our heroes are adventuring. It provides minimal plot complication, but might provide spectacle if it was delivered to the screen effectively (it isn't); one wonders why the script editor didn't encourage its excision. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin were known to never let the budget stand in the way of a grand idea, but by this 1977 / 1978 season (Tom Baker's fourth, and the first for new producer Graham Williams) they do seem to have taken things up a notch. They pen two planet-hopping space operas during the run, each crammed with difficult-to-realise action. The latter story Underworld demands a planet be formed in a rush of gravity by cosmic bodies colliding together, staged in Television Centre. That was Baker and Martin reining it in, though, as in this their first story of the year they choose to have an episode set within the Doctor's brain. The resources of Who's production team of the time would have been stretched doing a whole story inside someone's brain, but here it's just one episode of four, a detour to keep episode three interesting, just one of many immense explosions of imagination in the script.

An assumption someone might slip into making, looking back from the present day at rough timings, is that this visual envelope-pushing was prompted by the seismic impact of Star Wars arriving in cinemas in 1977. The inclusion of a small, cute robot sidekick along with all the space opera would seem to confirm so; but, it's all a coincidence. The UK release of Star Wars was far in the future when the story was written and made; the model work was filmed before Star Wars had even premiered in the US. It's another example of Doctor Who getting there first. Baker and Martin put a lot of ideas into Doctor Who, put a lot of ideas just into this one story, but the ideas were often good. None were more so than the one that arrived in this story - K9. This creation tapped into the zeitgeist in a big way, predating R2D2 and C3P0 and the many imitations that followed in lesser sci-fi shows in following years. K9 is like an amalgam of the two robot stars of George Lucas's saga, really, but none of this was intentional, I'm telling you. The design work was a crucial input as well as the clever idea. Robot dog on paper could be handled in many different ways, and Tony Harding's eventual design is iconic and so durable that K9 was still a feature of kids' TV and kids' toy collections 30 years afterwards. If you want an example of how that brief could have been interpreted in a less good way, do a google image search on "Battlestar Galactica Muffit" and thank your lucky star systems that K9 looked as good as he did.

There are other things to commend the story other than just K9 and an expanded amount of model work (most of which is good). It's a refreshing switcheroo that the Doctor, rather than the companion, is the one being taken over by the malevolent force, and the companion, rather than the Doctor, is immune. The cliffhanger scene of Tom Baker's Doctor looking like he's going to shoot Leela is thrilling, and the following struggle, as he temporarily overpowers the virus controlling him, is very effective too. The "Contact has been made" catchphrase parroted by anyone taken over, is nicely done. There are some trippy visuals during the fantastic voyage into the Doctor's brain, and some nice production design elsewhere - the very 2001: A Space Odyssey spacesuits are striking, for example, as are the green PVC fetish outfits of the nursing staff, for perhaps different reasons. Overall, the positives outweigh - just - the sometimes rubbish effects and outsized comedy performances (Frederick Jaeger as Professor Marius, I'm looking at you!). Still, the unevenness is down to ambition. I hate that I've boxed myself in to the position where I'm asking my favourite TV series to be less ambitious, but production values might have been better overall if there were fewer things going on in the narrative. Having said that, though, if Doctor Who's reach does not exceed its grasp, then what's a heaven for?

Connectivity: 

Both The Invisible Enemy and World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls have a significant amount of the action take place in a hospital, and both feature events leading to the Doctor having a companion who's mainly made of metal.

Deeper Thoughts:

Contact Tracing Has Been Unmade. Even as little as a few months ago, a story like The Invisible Enemy, about a virus, would have seemed very fitting, with a viral pandemic ongoing. Watched in late March 2022, though, it felt for me like old news. This isn't because many aren't contracting the Covid-19 virus, and isn't because too many people aren't still dying after doing so. It's just because it is currently being pretty much ignored by those in power where I live (the UK).  All precautions are now up to the individual and nothing is enforced by the state. It leaves me, an overweight, middle-aged man with asthma, exhausted (more than normal, given my overweight middle-aged asthmatic nature) wondering daily exactly how much risk I should be taking. As an example, I have tickets for a Pet Shop Boys concert at the O2 arena in May, their greatest hits Dreamworld tour. My obsession with ver Pets is almost equal to my fanaticism for Doctor Who, so I'd really like to go. The tickets were originally purchased in the autumn of 2019, the original date for the performance was in the first half of 2020, and the gig has been rescheduled - I've lost count now - twice or maybe thrice over the course of Covid lockdowns and restrictions. When all that lifted and it was finally possible to go to such an event again, it should have been a moment of joy and liberation. But a lethal or debilitating (in the case of long Covid) infection still casts a long shadow, and it has turned out to be a time of confusion and doubt.

There are logistic concerns too, of course. The tickets I have are for myself and the Better Half, but the new date is a Sunday, with the following being a working and school day. This reduces our chances of being able to get home from the O2 arena on public transport that evening to zero. Overnight babysitting has to be a family affair, but the only people conveniently able to look after the kids are their grandparents who are old and immunocompromised; I don't want them put at risk by being with kids who are every day going in to schools that still have high Covid rates. The eldest is old enough that he could potentially look after the other two overnight at a push, but because of the rescheduling bumping things along two years, he's now in the middle of his GCSEs - exams disrupted enough by impacts of the virus on his schooling over the last couple of years - so that wouldn't be fair. These sort of headaches are what we all have to face doing certain activities; I don't know how anyone can plan a foreign holiday yet, for example. It seems to be pot luck as to whether an airport will be staffed when one arrives at it, or whether it will be heavily impacted by Covid-related absences. As difficult as it is, I accept, just about, that this is what we have to endure as part of learning to "live with Covid".

Even if all the logistic issues could be overcome for our O2 arena date, though, do the Better Half and I want to be in a "crowded and enclosed space" with thousands of people for an extended period of time, when those people - because of government decisions - will only have to wear masks if they feel like it? Do we want to risk catching Covid because anybody attending can ignore any symptoms they might have and come along without any consequences? Is everyone going to test in advance of coming along, when the government has now made that an expensive activity, rather than a free one? Covid denial was not so long ago restricted to online radicals; now, it is state-sanctioned. This is disappointing; but, disappointment seems to be the best I can expect from my current government. In the days since watching The Invisible Enemy, while I've been turning my viewing notes into this blog post, there have been so many negative stories about the government in the media, that it's hard to keep up. It was proven, for example, that the Covid denialism ran long as well as deep, with fines being issued for parties happening in the corridors of power while everyone else was forbidden to do such things by instruction from the same administration that was organising the parties. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the UK's chief financial minister and as such responsible for raising revenue through taxation, appears to not have even been officially resident in the UK for a good portion of the early Covid period (he held a green card in the US for some of that time), and his wife - whose interests are of public import according to the ministerial code - has not up to now paid UK tax because of her non-domiciled status.

Finally, at least for now, the government want to sell off Channel 4. This broadcaster is state-owned, but not - no matter what any government minister might think or say - public funded, and it is still doing great, innovative work. A public consultation saw a majority were not in favour of privatisation, but they are pressing ahead with it anyway. A fast buck would be made, and a public jewel lost to private ownership, and would no doubt then quickly become tarnished. Would any privately-owned broadcaster have made a series like Russell T Davies's It's a Sin, for example? Clearly ideology is driving this action, but whether it is the ideology that the state should be as small as possible, and own and control as little as possible, or the even less defensible populist regime ideology that media critical of the government should be silenced (Channel 4 News has been very unpopular with this government for highlighting its many failings) is less clear. Again, the delusion that the media in the UK is left-leaning used to be confined to online trolls; to see it become policy is dispiriting. If they come for Channel 4, then the BBC and the licence fee will no doubt be next. A programme like Doctor Who, with a strong history and big fan base, would probably survive, but what else would be destroyed? One can hope for an election to get rid of such a dysfunctional government, but then one sees the news of nasty Hungarian populist Viktor Orbán getting a fourth term in office, and it's tempting to give in to despair. Prime Minister A. Johnson still has his vocal supporters, despite everything that's come to light. Most of these scandals have had exactly zero consequences, despite being out in the open, with no attempts to disguise what's going on. The 'enemy' is all so sadly visible, but that doesn't mean everyone can necessarily see it.

In Summary:

All together now: one man and his dog, went to blow up a giant virus... one man, a savage girl, a comedy scientist and his dog, went to blow up a giant virus...