Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 481: The Invisible Enemy, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I genuinely love it when Doctor Who can still really surprise me. I’ve watched an episode every single day for well over a year now, and I’ve watched as the programme’s style has developed from a police box in a junk yard, via Moonbases and Ice Ages, through the Doctor’s exile on Earth and back out into the stars. I’ve watched as it makes progressive leaps forward with effects work - improving the model shots and monster costumes as they go. But because I’ve got a fairly good overview of the show’s history from even before starting on this journey, there’s various things that I expect to find. I know that Season Fifteen is hit by money troubles, and I know that one of the complaints often levelled against it is that it looks so cheap. I also know from bitter experience through the Pertwee years that CSO effects tend to not be so great on the budget Doctor Who can give to them.

So imagine how much I sit and smile to myself (genuinely, a big, broad smile right across my face, sat alone in a room watching a 30-something-year-old piece of television really do something that leaves me not only a little bit impressed, but actually floored by the effects. I’m talking about the vast use of CSO during this episode to help give a kind of scale to the Doctor’s brain. He and Leela make their way down various neural pathways (I’ll ignore the various science anomalies this causes!) in shots CSO’d onto (presumably) models… and it looks really good. Someone told me recently that I should be weary of the effects in this one - I’ll come to that in a minute - but I’m really impressed by this. Mostly, I’m in awe of the way it works around their hair, as that’s usually a tricky area (Heck, the last story showed that up whenever the Doctor stood in the lamp room in the lighthouse).

Of course, this being Doctor Who, there has to be something along to snap you out of it before you have a chance to get too involved with how good things are looking. There’s several instances in this episode where things don’t quite work out as well as I’d like them to, and coming in an episode that’s been impressing me so much, they tend to stick out more than they otherwise might. There’s obviously the shrimp creature - this is the focus of most warnings about the story - but I think I’ll come to that tomorrow. I can’t really bare to think about it too much right now, and I’ve got a whole 25-or-so minutes in its company to look forward to yet.

For me, the biggest let down is K9’s gun. It should be great - not only does this new companion (not that he is one yet) have that ‘cute robot’ element that became so popular in the late 70s, but he’s got a weapon in his nose. He can team up with the warrior Leela and hold a battle in the corridor of the hospital to give the Doctor more time. It should be impressive when he blasts a chunk out of the wall to give them a barrier to shield themselves with… but you can clearly see where the set is supposed to break away before they’ve even decided what to do with it. Then you’ve got him being possessed by the virus and having to attack his new friend… but his gun completely misses and Leela drops to the floor much too early anyway. It just sort of feels a bit botched, and really takes away from the whole drama for me.

This particular episode isn’t much helped by a fault on the DVD, which causes the end scenes to skip about a little bit - I’d forgotten about this error, and it did leave me a bit confused for a moment while I tried to piece together exactly what had happened. Going back and watching it again didn’t really make it much clearer, though, so maybe it would have been a bit of a shame in any case. So yes - I think The Invisible Enemy is one of those frustrating stories that gets so much very very right, but then an equal amount very, very wrong. The final episode could end up being the decider for me, and with a giant shrimp about to burst out of the cloning chamber, I’m not holding out much hope…

…Actually… While I’m thinking about it. They’ve got a cloning chamber. They’re all worrying that Leela and K9 won’t be able to hold off their attackers for very long. Just clone them! We’ve already got one clone Leela running around inside the Doctor’s skull, so clone another ten of her to fight in the corridor! And assuming you can clone a robot dog, get a whole army of K9’s out there to help defend yourselves, too! I thought it was a bit odd in yesterday’s episode when Marinus claims that there’s no real use in cloning - but even if they do only have a lifespan of ten minutes or so, they’d come in handy as an extra line of defence during this situation, surely?