Day 233 — August 21st 2021
The Invisible Enemy Parts One and Two
The Invisible Enemy — Part One
There are some Doctor Who stories which don’t have great reputations, and sadly Season Fifteen is home to several of them. The worst-performing story of the season in the 2014 Doctor Who Magazine poll was Underworld, which ranked 236 out of 241 stories. Season finale The Invasion of Time charted around 50 places higher at 188, and this story fell between the pair at 196. I think it’s because of the reputations these stories hold that I’d been so cautious about starting on this run of episodes.
But I’m feeling at least cautiously optimistic because this opening episode is actually pretty decent, and it’s filled with lots of things which work incredibly well. The most obvious of these things is probably the model shots, which are in plentiful supply early on in the episode and continue to pepper the rest. I’ve spent loads of time banging on about models lately so it should be taken as read that the production team knows what they’re doing, but this episode takes it to a whole new level. It’s the same hyperbole I use all the time, but these really do feel like the best model shots the series has ever done.
It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, to read in The Complete History that when this story was made (as the first production in the new season, and therefore the first story helmed by Graham Williams as producer), it was the single most expensive Doctor Who story of all time. It seems mad to me now that only a few days ago I went on about how lavish The Talons of Weng-Chiang looked and said that this season might have to pay the price. If anything, they’ve gone the other way to try and compete!
While the design of the spaceship here isn’t anything special, it’s what they do with the model that makes everything work. When it first gets trapped in the Swarm it’s such an unusual effect that I know it would have totally captivated me as a child. Heck, it captivates me now! Even better, I can’t work out how they’ve produced the effect, and I love it when that happens. It looks sort of like web, sort of like oil on water… it’s fab. I could do without the seemingly hand-drawn lightning bolts which overlay the wider image, but I can’t moan when it looks this good.
The really impressive part of the model work, though, is when the ship arrives on Titan and is lowered into the base. There’s a revolving platform which takes the vessel underground and then it’s moved along a fantastic corridor. They even go so far as to overlay the effect of the corridor model on the windows in the spaceship which helps to tie it all together more than usual.
It’s not only the models which are impressive here — the full-scale sets are pretty incredible too. The corridors on Titan feel far more expansive than real, and they all interconnect in a way that makes the whole thing feel far more like a real location than a collection of sets in a studio. Some real thought has been given to making the place look more like a location where usually they wouldn’t bother — the best example is the selection of pipes that are rigged up as a ‘ceiling’ for the base. It’s rare that we get that sort of attention to detail, and it’s not gone unnoticed here.
All these sets only work as well as they do because of the direction in this episode, which is a cut above the norm, and includes the kind of inventive camera angles which allow us to see the detail that’s gone into things like the ceiling. It feels fresher and more modern than the series usually manages, and I’m saying this having come off the back of some very well directed stories in the last week or so. This is Derrick Goodwin’s only Doctor Who credit and I’m gutted about that because I think he’s shaping up to be a top-tier director for the show.
There’s some especially nice shots where the camera follows the actors down the corridor, and they feel so totally unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the programme before. There’s points in this episode, with the camera moves lighting and framing of the shots, where I wondered if we were cutting between video and film because it looked too good to have been done in a tight time frame in the studio — but no, it was all done at Television Centre as usual.
There’s only a single set in this episode which doesn’t work for me, and it’s the TARDIS Control Room. We’re back to the traditional white version of the room now (despite fan lore for almost fifty years the wooden one didn’t ‘warp in storage’), but it looks a bit pokey and dirty… I think this is the worst version of the Control Room yet. I long for the days of the gorgeous Three Doctors rendition, or the original 1963 model. Thankfully we get out of the ship pretty quickly, and it is home to one of my favourite images of the episode — Leela wearing Doctor Who’s hat makes my heart fill with joy.
I’m going for a 7/10 on this one, and I’m thrilled with a start as strong as that for a story which I wasn’t expecting much from.
The Invisible Enemy — Part Two
For all my praise of Part One you may have noticed that I only really talked about the visuals of the story, and said nothing about the script. I find Bob Baker and Dave Martin somewhat frustrating as writers on this show. Their first outing — The Claws of Axos — was fab, and it’s still sitting high up in my ratings with an 8/10. Since then, though, their work has been incredibly hit and miss for me. The Three Doctors did pretty well with another 8 but their two stories for Tom Baker’s era so far have left me a bit cold, with The Hand of Fear sinking right down to 2.5/10.
It’s probably unfair of me to not have said more about the writing in this one yet, because there’s some really nice moments in here. The catchphrase introduced when the Swarm possesses new people (‘Contact has been made’) is suitably sinister, and it’s the kind of thing that Steven Moffat would go on to do repeatedly in the programme to great effect. And then there’s Doctor Who’s description of humanity in Part One which manages to tread a different path to the one from The Ark in Space but is rather nice in its own right;
Doctor Who: ‘The year of the Great Breakout. When your forefathers went leapfrogging across the solar system on their way to the stars. Asteroid belt’s probably teeming with them now. New frontiersmen, pioneers waiting to spread across the galaxy like a tidal wave. Or a disease.’
Leela: ‘Why disease? I thought you liked humanity?’
Doctor Who: ‘Oh, I do, I do. Some of my best friends are humans. But when they get together in great numbers, other lifeforms sometimes suffer.’
And I know it gets mocked a bit but I love the phonetic spelling of the signs on Titan — it’s a sign that some thought has gone into creating this future world. I’ve not got a copy of the script to check if this was something intended from the start or if it came along while Barry Newberry was designing the sets, but I like it either way. Oh, and this episode sees the return of the Bristol Boys’ favourite joke, this time given to Leela;
Leela: ‘Gallifrey.’
Receptionist: ‘Ireland?’
Leela: ‘Oh, I expect so.’
On the whole, though, I have to confess that I’ve found less to enjoy in this episode, even in spite of K9 making his first appearance in the series. We move very quickly from the nicely-lit sets of Titan and off to the sterile white environment of the Bi-Al Foundation and although they’re quite fitting for a space hospital, they’re just not as interesting to look at. I realise, too, that a lot of what I enjoyed in the first episode was the sense of a creeping chase — the infected astronauts stalking the hallways. We get that here, but as more people become possessed by the Swarm it becomes a little bit less claustrophobic, and it doesn’t feel like it’s been shot in quite interesting as the opening episode was.
One area that does stand out as rather nice is the make up to indicate that contact has been made — the scales on the face and the furry hands look brilliantly effective, managing to remain just the right side of silly. It looks especially good on Tom Baker towards the end of the episode as he starts to lose the battle to keep the threat at bay.
As ever, Baker is a real winning presence here, and it’s through his performance that the threat remains as credible as it does. We’ve had lots of instances in recent seasons of Doctor Who being scared by the enemy he’s facing but I think this might be the best example yet. Early on in the episode when he confesses to Leela that he’s struggling in the fight it’s genuinely quite moving.
Sadly Baker and some bushy eyebrows aren’t enough to keep the scores up on this one, and I’m going with a 5/10.
