The Invisible Enemy

Contact has been made.


Many of the things I have heard about The Invisible Enemy have been less than stellar. It also seems to take on a specific tint based on your feelings towards K-9, who is introduced in this story. I happen to like K-9, despite his overpowered abilities at times, so I've been somewhat curious about this story, even with it's flawed reputation. This story also happened to kick off the Graham Williams era. Horror at Fang Rock was the first story to air, but this story was the first to be shot, so it also is fair marker of what to expect in the non-holdover stories from the Philip Hinchcliff era.

Plot Summary

A trio of men from Earth is flying to Saturn's moon Titan to relieve the base crew there. They pass through a cloud and become infected with a virus which takes over their minds. They land on Titan and kill the base crew. The base manager, Lowe, becomes aware of the attack and sends out a distress signal.

The Doctor and Leela, traveling in the TARDIS, pick up the distress signal and head towards Titan to help. Leela is immediately on her guard as she senses great evil and danger. The Doctor dismisses this but while examining the console, becomes infected when the TARDIS passes through the cloud. He is able to resist complete mind control, but has space out moments.

They land on the base where they discover the dead crew. Lowe, resorting to guerilla tactics, has killed one infected crewman but was locked in an airlock. Leela frees him before he freezes to death. She is able to bring him back around but when the Doctor comes to examine him, Lowe is infected as well. After the Doctor leaves, Lowe warms himself for another moment before running down the corridor. Leela pursues him.

The Doctor, having been identified by the Swarm as the carrier of the nucleus for the clouds plan to propagate itself, is bent to the will of Swarm by the two remaining crewmen. He is then sent to kill Leela. He comes up behind her but manages to fight the control of the Swarm long enough to warn her to get out of the way of his shot. The Doctor then puts himself into a meditative state to preserve his mind.

Leela finds Lowe, who has hidden his eyes behind blast goggles to disguise his infection. He pretends to have been wounded in a firefight. Leela shows him the Doctor and Lowe suggests taking him to a medical base on an asteroid. Leela manages to coax the Doctor out of his state long enough to get the coordinates to this base so that the TARDIS can land there.

After landing, the medical team take the Doctor to be examined by Professor Marius and his diagnostic computer, K-9. Lowe, still faking eye injury, is sent to a different medical bay where he infects the duty doctor. Leela stays in the lobby for a bit before wandering down towards the bay where the Doctor is being examined.

Marius determines that the Doctor is suffering from a neurological virus that feeds off intellectual stimulation. The Doctor revives briefly to agree with this assessment and reasons that Leela, relying mostly on intuition and instinct, was rejected by the virus. The Doctor requests that clones be made of him and Leela. Marius agrees but notes that the clones will only last ten to twelve minutes due to their instability.

The Doctor dismisses this and requests that the clones be made. Sensing danger, the swarm orders Lowe to accelerate plans of taking over the station. He and the duty doctor infect two others and then push out more. The cloud meanwhile infects a shuttle and causes it's crew to hurtle toward the asteroid.

The clones are made and the Doctor clone leaves the room. The out of control shuttle forces Marius and his assistants to evacuate the bay leaving the real Doctor, Leela and her clone and K-9. The shuttle crashes into asteroid, destroying part of the corridor leading to the medical bay. With Marius temporarily out of the way, Lowe and his men attack but Leela fends them off. Leela fights them until her gun runs out of power and retreats into the room. K-9 takes up the fight and drives Lowe off.

The clearing allows Marius and his team back in along with the clone Doctor, who brings trans-dimensional equipment to shrink the Doctor and Leela clones. Marius does so and places them in a syringe. Lowe comes over the com and orders Marius to surrender or be destroyed. Marius ignores him and injects the Doctor and Leela clones into the real Doctor's head.

Lowe threatens to destroy the base but Marius agrees to surrender the Doctor. Once Lowe is off screen, Marius warns Leela and asks her to buy time. She and K-9 prepare a defense and fight off Lowe and the other infected personnel for a time. However, Lowe infects K-9 and K-9 stuns Leela before rebooting.

Lowe and his men enter the medical bay. They kill one doctor and infect Marius who informs them of the Doctor's plan. Lowe has a clone of himself made, shrunk and injected into the Doctor. Meanwhile, the nurse who had also been in the medical bay but hid by Marius, sneaks out. She finds K-9, who has purged himself of the virus by rebooting, reviving Leela and tells them what happened. Leela takes the nurse's outfit and makes up her face to make it appear she is infected as well.

In the Doctor's head, the Doctor and Leela clones make their way through his brain, following a trail of damage. Leela begins to sense danger and doubles back while the Doctor presses on. She discovers the Lowe clone following them. He wounds her with his gun but she damages the brain tissue around him, causing the Doctor's antibodies to attack and destroy him. Leela returns to the Doctor, who has discovered the sentient nucleus. The Doctor destroys it's outer covering but time expires and the Doctor and Leela clones die off and are absorbed by the Doctor. The unprotected nucleus flees to the Doctor's tear duct where it is collected by Marius and increased to humanoid size.

From the remains of Leela's clone, the Doctor absorbs her immunity factor and return to normal. The nucleus, now realized as a large crustacean, orders the return to Titan and to bring the Doctor with them as food for the new hatched enlarged swarm. Leela joins the party and quietly undoes the Doctor's straps. As they enter the lobby, they leap up and dash into the TARDIS, although it is unable to go anywhere with the dimensional modification unit in the lab.

As the nucleus leaves with Lowe and other infected parties, the Doctor and Leela slip out. They knock out Marius and tie him down while the Doctor examines blood samples from him and Leela. He is able to isolate her immunity factor that he has absorbed and injects it into Marius. Marius returns to normal and they use it to cure anyone else on the base that has been infected. Marius also cultures the factor to create a stronger serum for the Doctor to use against the nucleus.

Once the serum is ready, the Doctor and Leela prepare to leave in the TARDIS. They take K-9 with them with permission from Marius. On Titan, the nucleus is sealed in an isolation chamber and prepares to fertilize and hatch the next brood cycle of the Swarm. The Doctor and Leela land and shoot down the control room guard. Leela discovers that the Swarm is adapting to her gun and the power required from K-9 is draining his batteries.

The Doctor takes K-9 and neutralizes another guard while Leela heads off to find others. The Doctor attempts to release the serum into the system but is stopped by Lowe. K-9 uses the last of his reserves to take down Lowe and the Doctor seals him in the chamber. With the serum lost, he finds Leela who had just killed another guard with her knife. He has her take K-9 back to the TARDIS while he searches for the nucleus.

The Doctor finds the nucleus in the chamber and jambs the release mechanism to seal it in. He then disables the piping and begins to pump pure oxygen into the air. He also releases vents, allowing unfiltered atmosphere into the base. He runs back to the TARDIS, nearly leaving Leela and K-9 behind. The nucleus, sensing danger, attempts to escape but is trapped in the chamber. The oxygen and methane begin to mix and when the nucleus forces the chamber door, it sets off the trigger of Leela's gun, which the Doctor had booby trapped and ignites the mixture, causing the whole base to incinerate.

With the destruction of the nucleus, the rest of the Swarm dies. The Doctor and Leela return to the asteroid base to take K-9 back. However, Marius informs them that he is scheduled to return to Earth soon and will not be permitted to take K-9 back due to his weight. He offers to let K-9 go with the Doctor and the Doctor agrees, although much less enthusiastically than Leela.

Analysis

So this is Doctor Who does Fantastic Voyage long before Into the Dalek. It was a real up and down story for me. It started on a bit of a wrong foot for me but improved as the virus development continued. It reached a high point during the segments where the Doctor and Leela clones were searching the Doctor's brain to find the nucleus. However, once the nucleus was extracted, it became a regular monster fight and it fell off rapidly at the end.

First the positives. I enjoyed the Doctor in this one. It's always interesting when you see the Doctor at a disadvantage and having him taken down so that he's really only his old self in Episode Four is enjoyable. There was a little bit with the clone Doctor in Episode Three but those scenes were a bit limited so you don't get a full Doctor experience until the following episode.

Unlike a few fans out there, I like K-9 and enjoyed him in this story. Of course, it also exposes one of the primary complaints about him in that while the Doctor won't use a gun, he has K-9 to gun down anyone who opposes him. Of course, you could say that about Leela too given that she stabs one infected man in the neck with her knife, so I don't buy that as a reason to dislike K-9 overtly. He is also much more computer-like in this story and I thought that a better read on his personality than the friendly servant persona he takes on later.

I also enjoyed the set up for this story. It's very easy to do a monster or aggressive alien story but trying to fight a virus is a bit more of a challenge. I enjoyed Fantastic Voyage and for Doctor Who to do their own spin on it is an interesting idea. Throwing in a little traditional outside action with infected crewmen was also entertaining if not overly stimulating. That the virus fed off intellectual activity and could also pass through computers was an interesting addition that gave the Swarm just that much more potency.

Now the less than good. I was almost immediately put off on how this story characterized Leela. The idea that Leela would either cower in fear at any point is contrary to the development of Leela in her previous stories. I also strongly disliked the fact that she is characterized as being intellectually inferior, to the point of having a less developed brain. This is also contrary to the Leela we have seen in other stories where she is shown to be highly intelligent but simply ignorant of the universe outside her planet. The story actually switches in the middle, suggesting first that she is immune to the swarm because of a psychological reliance on instinct rather than intellect to an actual biological factor that keeps her immune. It would have been better storytelling and less insulting in general to keep her intellect as had been developed previously and explain away her immunity by exposure to other contagions on her home planet, producing an inherited immunity.

Despite all the problems with Leela, I was more or less enjoying the story up until Episode Four; then things deteriorated. While it was good to have the Doctor back to his normal self, the nucleus of the Swarm was not an overly impressive monster. It had no intellect and needed help moving around due to the limits of the costume. All it did was rant megalomaniacally and act like any other generic villain. In a way, the enlarged nucleus reminded me of Mestor the giant slug from The Twin Dilemma and all the limitations seen there.

I also didn't care for how easily the infected crewmen were dispatched when back on Titan. One goes so far as to back out of the control room to allow the TARDIS to land, giving up a proper defensive position against the Doctor and Leela coming out of the TARDIS. All three guards were taken out badly in my option. The first backed out of the room, allowing K-9 and Leela to shoot him coming through the door. The second chased after K-9 when he drove by, allowing the Doctor to drop him from behind. The third is stabbed by Leela, after fending her off briefly, despite her having the drop on him when he should have seen her. All three were lazy writing and lazy directing.

Nearly as annoying was the overall resolution. Leela suggests several times that they simply blow up the base but the Doctor overrides her for a more intellectual answer. He fails there and ends up blowing up the base. Similarly, after dispatching the first guard and they are showing more resistance to the guns, the Doctor states they will have use their intellect more. But they never do. It's more gun fights and brawls with the only intellectual activity being how the Doctor sets up the bomb on the base and even that is pretty simple chemistry.

I don't mind a good shoot-em-up here and there, but generally I expect the Doctor to have to think his way out of situations more often than not. This goes double when the Doctor and his companion's militant actions are shown to be less effective and the Doctor emphasizes the need to outthink the enemy. But in this case, there was very little outthinking. The closest we had to that was when Leela disguised herself to rescue the Doctor. The rest was a standard brute force approach that just left things a bit wanting.

It's a bit of a mixed bag on production. On one hand, the story is on film and that always makes things look a bit better. It has a nice feel in the view. On the other hand, there are a number of things that look very cheap and not all of them are due to the limitations of the time period. I suspect that Graham Williams was almost immediately feeling the budget pinch after the fallout of The Talons of Weng-Chiang and that forced the production team to cut corners.

The sets were minimal but that didn't bother me, although the TARDIS control room didn't look right as it had a small, cramped feel. The sets of the Doctor's brain looked pretty good, even if you could tell they were cheating in a few places, when they used real sets. The moments where CSO was used did not look so good. There were also a few other dodgy moments. There is a point where K-9 blasts a wall to produce a barrier and you can see the points where the base was chiseled away to make it fall. This is more than just a precut outline, it actually had parts of the wall missing making it look very cheap. There were also a couple of points where laser effects were not added. You would hear the noise, the actor would double over, but there was never the added red line that you saw in other shots. Again, it gave the effect of a story that had run out of money at the end.

Finally there is the design of the Swarm nucleus itself. What bothered me most about this was that the Swarm was supposed to exist and breed like a virus, infecting a host and multiplying that way. However the nucleus, especially once grown, acted more like a bacterial infection where all was based on the power of the central life form. Without the nucleus, the rest of the Swarm died off where a true virus would be able to recreate itself if most of it were destroyed. I also had mixed emotions on the nucleus' appearance. It had many aspects of a microscopic organism and I appreciated that. But it did bother me that it had bulbous eyes. Why would a microscopic organism have eyes to begin with. It made it look more shrimp-like in appearance and less threatening in a way.

Overall, I'd have to say this was a less than middling story. It's not bad as there are good elements to it and good moments as well, especially in concept. But a lame conclusion, lazy writing and production shortfalls drag this story below the average. At four episodes, it zips along fairly well but the disappointing ending leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I could watch it again but I wouldn't go out of my way to.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5