The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: K9 & Company
K9 & Company: A Girl's Best Friend (28/12/21)
Well, that was... novel.
Nothing quite says Christmas like a confused investigation into witchcraft in deepest Mummerset! Given K9's popularity, it isn't hugely surprising that, having departed the show a year ago, he's been given his own Special, but teaming him up with a companion who'd never met him was, frankly, the first of a long line of mis-steps. The fact that Sarah Jane Smith hasn't exactly become any more likeable since the Doctor dumped her five years ago didn't help, either. It would have made more sense to have had him travelling the universe with Leela and Andred, or adventuring with Romana and the Tharils. Instead, the Doctor apparently dumped a third version of the metal dog at Sarah's house in Croydon in 1978 and she's ignored it ever since, only unboxing him when her Aunt Lavinia left it out for her to find while she went off galivanting at a science convention in America.
On the whole, this 50 minute special mostly revolved around Sarah and her inability to twig that practically every local in the village where her Aunt co-runs a Market Garden was part of a coven intent on sacrificing Lavinia's slightly annoying ward, Brendan, on the Winter Solstice whilst dancing around and unconvincingly chanting "Hecate"!
The script was pretty atrocious anyway, but making Sarah suspicious of almost everyone didn't help, and her complete disregard of Brendan until the morning after he'd been abducted didn't make her particularly endearing, either. Really, taking characters from a popular Science Fiction TV series and putting them in a poorly written tale about witches (which is completely devoid of magic and therefore like a sub-par episode of Bergerac) seems like the height of folly! For those characters to be a largely unpleasant, pretty rubbish journalist and an underused robot dog is just plain dumb.
That said, the theme tune and opening credits were hilarious. Unlike the rest of the episode, these elements were the epitome of 'so bad they're good'. Overall, though, it's hard to see what the new Who production team were trying to achieve with this mess. I really hope it's not indicative of what we're to expect from Season 19! At least neither Sarah Jane nor this new K9 seem to be scheduled to appear. I, for one, hope this is the last we've seen of both of them!
Terence Dudley was just about the worst choice of writer for the pilot of a potential new series like this. It's all just so bland and uninvolving, and as you point out, features so little K9 that he might as well not even be in it. God knows what the show would have turned out like if somehow, off the back of this misfire, a full run had been green-lit.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite a long time since I last watched this story but I was looking forward to watching it in context to see how my (rather negative) opinion might change. Suffice to say, my view hasn't altered at all. It's a very poor K9 story, for a start. After he's finally unboxed, he has some fairly nonsensical techno-banter with Brandan in a seeming attempt to get the nerdy fans who know a lot about computers on side, shoots the gardener's son, has an incident with a garden gnome and a greenhouse, then sits under some stairs until Sarah comes along to use him as a satnav!
DeleteAnd Sarah comes across even worse. Rude, suspicious, presumptuous, self-involved, and at times wilfully ignorant (okay, these are all elements of her character which were already readily apparent from her time as a companion, but they're never more clearly defined than here), she isn't the most sympathetic of access characters. She also has more costume changes in this one episode than in her entire time in Doctor Who! Maybe. I personally think the downward turn in her character may be something to do with the obvious alcohol problem she has which is underlined in the opening credits!
But Sarah isn't the only poorly served character. Frankly, everyone is pretty badly characterised. It's almost impossible to believe that Tracey would honestly think K9 was a fire-breathing hound from Hell - maybe if he'd only caught a fleeting glance when K9 shot his son, but surely not after watching him trundle amongst the greenhouses! Peter Tracey fairs a little better, but the development he gets has absolutely no pay-off. The reveal of the cult leaders had me wondering who the woman was - oh, is that the Postmistress? And by the time the (frankly diabolically directed) Pagan ceremony has revealed that the Bakers and the remaining policeman are the only ones not involved in the cult, Sarah Jane is sat having yet another drink and K9 is failing to sing 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas'!
It really is quite a mystery as to what JNT was trying to achieve. The story, the whole atmosphere of the episode, goes against much of what Season 18 was about, although I suppose having characters spouting random bits of science at each other against a backdrop of attempted atmosphere and mystery in a story where the plot falls to pieces if you poke at the threads too much means it actually fits incredibly well into JNT and Bidmead's vision of the show. But it doesn't really feel part of Doctor Who at all. Perhaps they were trying to recall the Gothic feel of the Hinchcliffe era? Or make an attempt at replicating some of the popular Folk Horror of the preceding decade? Alas, The Quatermass Conclusion and The Watcher In The Woods it is not. Nor is it The Dæmons. What it is is a poorly thought out, poorly scripted muddle.
I really want to like the story, but I just spent the entire 50 minutes wondering why it had been commissioned in the first place!
Not being like Doctor Who at the time isn't necessarily a bad thing - can you imagine if it had been?! - if what they'd made instead was in any way good...
DeleteA world with a Bidmead-inspired K9 & Company TV series? It doesn't bear thinking about!
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