Season 15, Story 2 (Overall Series Story #93) | Previous - Next | Index
Painfully dumb. Notable for introducing K9, this story has precious little else to recommend it. (And, if you're a K9 hater, well ... you're in real trouble now.) Not that it's unwatchable; it's not malevolently bad, it's just not trying very hard. Somebody did yeoman's work on the models, and K9's design is appealing ...
But, now I'm about of nice things to say.
This isn't what Hinchcliffe and Holmes would have called TV made for intelligent 14-year-olds. This is for the littler kids, and the rest of us suffer for it. "The Horror of Fang Rock" got our hopes, we were in good hands after the big changes behind the scenes. Then this happened and things didn't seem quite as certain.
The Laundry List:
- At some point, they had to recognize they needed to stop trying to make sleek, modern spaceship bridges. They couldn't compete. The inability to measure against Star Wars makes them look desperately cheap.
- Titan with Saturn in the background doesn't look half bad though.
- Newberry's refurbished design of the TARDIS is a bit sterile, disappointing after the wood-paneled room. It'll do, but rather wish they'd put the budget into making the alternate control room bigger, more filled in, and put a little more into the center console.
- I somehow keep forgetting that K9 debuted after Sarah left.
- Of all the stupid packed into this one, the miniaturized clones of the Doctor and Leela journeying into the "mind-brain interface," is utterly rubbish. You can do clones, if you put some effort into it. Likewise you can do Fantastic Voyage, if you get your ducks in a row. "Into the Dalek" managed it with much greater success. But to do both of those poorly on top of making a mush of anything like credible neuroscience is inexcusable.
