Day 234 — August 22nd 2021
The Invisible Enemy Parts Three and Four
The Invisible Enemy — Part Three
Everyone calls out Underworld for spending vast swathes of the story with Doctor Who and Leela running around slightly dodgy CSO environments, but if anything this episode feels like a dry run for it. The vast majority of sequences inside Doctor Who’s head are achieved via CSO, and while you have to admire the ambition that goes into something like this, I’m nor certain that it’s an all together successful experiment.
As I said during Horror of Fang Rock, we’re past the issue which plagued the Pertwee years; you don’t tend to get a mass of hideous yellow fringing around anyone any more. Unfortunately when you spend too long watching people on CSO you end up with almost the opposite problem where they’ve been cut out too sharply. There’s once shot in particular as Doctor Who and Leela enter ‘the land of dreams and fantasy’ which looks half-finished, and I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m supposed to be seeing. In that same shot, I’m not sure if they’ve missed keying out a bit of the background, or if the blue bit across the screen is an intentional part of the design.
It’s telling that the material inside Doctor Who’s head is far more interesting and easier to follow whenever we get to watch it taking place on a real set, and the sets we do get are fantastic. They’ve got more than a shade of the jungle from Planet of Evil to them, and they’ve been lit just as interestingly as that story. Lighting effects don’t pair well with the CSO process, which means that these scenes stick out all the more.
I think the biggest issue I’ve got is that I’m just not all that interested in the idea of shrinking down our heroes (or clones of them) and watching them running around inside a brain. It’s a solid enough idea, but somehow it just feels a bit too silly for my liking. It doesn’t help that the writers can’t seem to work out what’s going on either. Although we’re watching clones of our heroes and not the characters themselves, there’s a whole sequence in which Leela’s clone feels the pain from the real Leela hitting her head — and Doctor Who explains that it’s because of the link between Leela’s ‘outside self’ and her ‘inside self’. It’s not touched on again, but it felt entirely out of place in the moment and made an already confusing situation all the harder to comprehend.
Outside of Doctor Who’s head there should be a lot more to enjoy. We’ve got a battle taking place with Leela and K9 fighting off the attacking soldiers of the Swarm. It should be a really exciting moment, but everything feels so flat. They talk about building a barricade, but end up with only a single tiny bit of wall between them. It’s not helped that the effect of the wall being broken off by K9’s weapon has clearly had to be shot a second time, meaning the pre-cut crack in the wall isn’t so much obvious as staring you in the face.
There’s a similarly awkward moment later on when K9 shoots Leela, but the effect has been put in so out of place that I thought Leela was faking it to play along with K9 — it came as a bit of a surprise later on to discover that we were supposed to think she’d really been hurt. I will say that the moment where K9 first becomes infected and gives us the Swarm’s catchphrase — ‘contact has been made’ — was brilliant, and I’d totally forgotten about it. That was a rare moment in this one which made me sit up and take notice.
It’s a 3/10.
The Invisible Enemy — Part Four
Any discussion of this final episode is always going to be dominated by talking about the monster. It’s often described as being ‘a giant prawn’ and while I’d love to leap to its defence and say that’s an unfair description… well, it’s a giant prawn, innit? I’m not sure that’s necessarily an insult either, as the script calls for exactly that.
The thing is, I don’t think it’s actually an awful design. The concept is nice enough, and even the execution isn’t awful. It’s certainly well enough made, and it fits in well with the look of the scales and hair that people develop when possessed by the Swarm. It’s a little thing, but I like it when bits of design tie together like that. It makes the whole thing feel like so much more part of a whole.
The real problems come when putting the prawn into shot with literally anything else. It looks a bit unusual when growing to full size as the cliffhanger for Part Three, but they should have kept it in the chamber for a little longer, because when it has to share the screen with other characters it looks laughably pathetic, far too diminutive in stature to match the ‘universe conquering’ speech it gives in the same screen. Moments later they’re forced to have two people help the creature along because the poor actor inside clearly can’t handle walking in this costume.
It shows up the flaws in the CSO process, too. I spent some time in the last episode praising the fact that they’d finally overcome the limitations of ‘fringing’ around objects during the process, only for this episode to showcase that it’s still an issue in certain situations. Clearly the process isn’t quite advanced enough yet to handle prawn whiskers…
On the whole, the direction in this story has taken a massive downward turn in quality since Part One, which I praised massively for being shot in unique and interesting ways. There’s some flashes of a return to form in this episode which make it clear that the set of Titan inspired the director in a way that the Bi-Al Foundation sets simply don’t. We get to see a few more gorgeous shots which really showcase the scale and design of the sets, and it makes me long for an entire adventure set in this one place.
I’ve also made it remarkably far through this story without mentioning K9. Oh I love K9. I think he’s such a brilliant idea, and a great addition to the programme. There’s something a bit lovely about Leela being the one who’s desperate to have him join the TARDIS while Doctor Who himself remains unsure about the idea. Although the effects haven’t always helped (there’s some more examples in this episode of K9’s laser hitting wildly off the mark) it’s been a good showcase for his abilities, and I’m looking forward to having him as part of the series going forward.
I’ve agonised over the score for this final episode, shifting it up in recognition of the flashes of beauty in the direction and down every time the prawn costume proves itself unsuitable. In the end I’ve settled on a 2/10, and I can tell you now that the thing which swung it downwards was the terrible ‘TARDIS trained’ joke they end the story on. Truly awful!
There’s something quite sad about this story’s fall from grace in my ratings. The opening episode had so much promise which just didn’t hold up across the whole story. This is much more the kind of thing I had in mind when thinking about Season Fifteen, and that’s a shame.
