Doctor Who — The Invisible Enemy, Image of the Fendahl, The Sun Makers, Underworld, The Invasion of Time

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Having survived the Horror of Fang Rock, the Doctor and Leela resumed traveling through space and time. Along the way, they picked up a new companion named K-9. Here is the rest of the fifteenth century, which began in a British lighthouse and ended on Gallifrey.

The Invisible Enemy (1977, directed by Derrick Goodwin)

This the one where K-9 makes his first appearance.

As a story, The Invisible Enemy is no great shakes. The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) materialize on a spaceship that has been infected by a sentient virus. Everyone, except for Leela, gets infected. The virus wants the Doctor to lead an infection of the entire universe. When the virus orders the Doctor to kill Leela, he breaks free from its control. He and Leela go to a space medical center, where Prof. Marinus (Frederick Jaeger) uses Leela’s natural immunity to help create a cure for the virus. At one point, the Doctor and Leela are cloned and the clones are injected into the Doctor to fight the virus. It’s a fantastic voyage for all.

Prof. Marinus’s assistant is a boxy robot dog named K-9 (voice by John Leeson). Since Marinus has to go back to Earth, he gives K-9 to The Doctor and Leela as a gift.

How you feel about K-9 says a lot about how you will feel about the remainder of Tom Baker’s time as the Doctor. Some fans consider the introduction of K-9 to be the show’s jump the shark moment. A lot more, myself included, have always liked K-9 and view him — along with the sonic screwdriver — as being an essential part of the original show’s charm. Love him or hate him, K-9, who come figure out any puzzle and who could shoot a loser from his nose, became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Tom Baker years.

Image of the Fendahl (1977, Directed by George-Spenton Foster)

The Doctor and Leela are drawn back to modern-day Earth, where scientists, witches, and cultists are all being influenced by skull that is estimated to be at least twelve million years old. The scientists assume that the skull is human but actually, it’s the skull of a Fendahl, a race of psychic vampires who developed on the legendary “Fifth Planet.” The Time Lords tried to destroy the Fendahl but one escaped in the form of a skull. It first killed all the life on Mars. (But what about the Ice Warriors and the Pyramids? Doctor Who continuity rarely added up.) Then it landed on Earth, where it influenced human evolution to create a race that it could use to its own advantage.

Image of the Fendahl feels like a spiritual descendant of The Daemons, with the same emphasis on rural British atmosphere and paganism (Leela teams up with a white witch) but without the assurance of UNIT waiting on the sidelines to take care of the threat. Image of the Fendahl, with its suggestion that humanity was specifically developed to be food, is considerably darker than The Daemons and Tom Baker, so often criticized for playing up the humor of the Doctor’s character, gives one of his more serious performances. When one of the scientists who has been possessed by Fendahl seeks to kill himself and bring an end to the threat, the Doctor hands him a gun.

Image of the Fendahl is yet another Doctor Who serial in which the main threat is revealed be the result of the Time Lords meddling. The Fourth Doctor spent a lot of time cleaning up Gallifrey’s messes.

The Sun Makers (1977, directed by Pennant Roberts)

The Doctor, Leela, and K-9 materialize on Pluto, where they discover that colonists and workers are expected to pay exorbitant taxes to the Company or risk being exiled to the Undercity. The Company’s tax collector is the Controller, who turns out to be a quivering mass of seaweed.

The Sun Makers is Doctor Who at its most satirical, poking fun at the British tax system. Apparently, the original script was much more pointed in its attacks on the Inland Revenue services but the BBC, being the BBC, demanded that the script be watered down. In human form, the Controller still clearly resembles Denis Healey, the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Sun Makers is Doctor Who at its most straight-forward, an enjoyable diversion from the more serious episodes.

Underworld (1978, directed by Norman Stewart)

The TARDIS materializes on the R1C, a spaceship that has been on a millennia-long quest to find a missing ship that was on its away to Minyos 2 and which contained the genetic files of the original Minyans who lived on Minyos 1.

This is another story where the Doctor has to deal with the bad decisions of the Time Lords. Before adapting their policy of non-intervention, the Time Lords meddles in Minyan evolution and the end result was that the Minyans viewed the Time Lords as gods and the Minyans also used all of the Time Lord technology that they had been given to fight a civil war. The Doctor feels a responsibility to help the crew of R1C complete their quest.

The R1C eventually ends up going through a space nebula and crashing into a planetoid, where they discover the ship they were searching for. The crew of the ship is being used as slaves by the Oracle, a super computer.

Underworld is one of the more boring of the Fourth Doctor’s serials. The story feels slapdash and the idea of a supercomputer was a well that the Doctor Who had already gone to far too many times.

The Invasion of Time (1978, directed by Gerald Blake)

The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and assumes his position as President of the Time Lords. He also seems to go through a total personality change, exiling Leela and announcing that a group of psychic aliens known as the Vardans will be the new masters of Gallifrey.

Leela, even after being exiled, is convinced that this is all a part of some plan on the Doctor’s part and it turns out that she’s right. The Doctor is only pretending to be allied with the Vardans so that he can discover the location of their planet and put them into a time loop. What the Doctor does not realize is that the Vardans are themselves being used by the Sontarans, who are planning on invading Gallifrey.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the 15th season would end on Gallifrey. It also seems inevitable that the Sontarans would eventually try to invade Gallifrey. The main threat of the Sontarans has always been that they are so stupid that they will try to invade any planet. The most surprising thing about this serial is that Leela stays behind on Gallifrey so that she can marry Andred (Chris Tanchrell), the head of the Citadel Guard. The idea of Leela living with the Time Lords has been responsible for a lot of fan fiction and it does seem unfortunate that the show didn’t do more with the idea.

Louise Jameson had already decided to leave the show and originally, Leela was to die while fighting the Sontarans. This was changed because it was felt Leela’s death would be too traumatic for younger viewers. Instead, the younger viewers were traumatized by K-9 announcing that he would be staying on Gallifrey with Leela and Andred. Luckily, for them, the final shot of the fifteen season was The Doctor looking at a crate labeled “K-9 Mark II” and smiling.

Little did the Doctor suspect that the quest for the Key of Time was waiting in his future.

Doctor Who — Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Fresh from defeating an attempt by a Sontaran to disrupt British history, the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and his newest companion, reporter Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), return to present-day London and discover that it has been transformed into a ghost town. Dinosaurs are roaming the streets. The Doctor teams up with UNIT to try to figure out who has been monkeying with time but what he doesn’t know is that the trusted Captain Yates (Richard Franklin) is working with the people responsible for the dinosaur invasion.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the second serial of the 11th season. Like The Sea Devils, this was another case where I read the novelization long before I got a chance to see the actual serial. Well-written by Malcolm Hulke, the novelization really got me excited to watch Invasion of the Dinosaurs. It did not prepare me for how fake the dinosaurs would look.

It was to be expected, though. Classic Doctor Who was never known for its wonderful special effects. Instead, it was known for rubber monsters, torn costumes, and alien landscapes that were often made out of cardboard. For many of us, that was a part of its charm. The dinosaurs in this serial look like toys that have been unleashed on a still photo of London. I’ve read that the serial was criticized for its bad dinosaur effects when it originally aired 1974 and that was long before Jurassic Park made everyone take the idea of seeing a realistic dinosaur for granted.

Despite the very fake dinosaurs, Invasion of the Dinosaurs still has one of the better scripts of the Pertwee era. The villains aren’t the typical evildoers who usually showed up on Doctor Who. Instead, they are people who have convinced themselves that the only way to save humanity is to dial back time to what they consider to be the “Golden Age,” before technology and industry blighted what they believe to be the ideal landscape. Of course, they plan to take only the very best among the population to their golden age with them. The villains are elitist environmentalists, convinced that they and only they know what is best. This may be the first episode of Doctor Who where the main antagonist, Sir Charles Grover (Noel Johnson), is a member of Parliament.

Captain Yates’s betrayal of UNIT and the Doctor adds some emotional depth to this story. While Yates was never as important a character as the Brigadier or Sgt. Benton, he was still present for almost all of the Third Doctor’s adventures and the small scenes where he would flirt with Jo Grant were some of the most awkward moments of the Pertwee era. Captain Yates was a loyal member of the Third Doctor’s entourage and his betrayal was motivated not by greed or resentment but instead by a desire to make the world a better place. The novelization made it clear that it was actually the terrible things that Yates saw as a member of UNIT that convinced him that time needed to be turned back.

This was the final Jon Pertwee story to be set entirely on Earth and, though Yates and the Brigadier would return for Pertwee’s final serial, it was the last true UNIT story of the Pertwee years. Jon Pertwee had already decided that the 11th season would be his last. The 12 season would feature a new Doctor. And while the BBC considered actors like Graham Crowden, Bernard Cribbins, and Jim Dale for the role, the Fourth Doctor was ultimately be played by Tom Baker, an actor who was working as a construction worker when Invasion of the Dinosaurs first aired.

Doctor Who would never the same.

Back to School Part II #5: A Clockwork Orange (dir by Stanley Kubrick)

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It may seem strange, at first, that I am including the 1971 best picture nominee, A Clockwork Orange, in a series of Back to School reviews. Certainly, Stanley Kubrick’s iconic adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel is not usually described as being a film about juvenile delinquency but that’s exactly what it is.

Many viewers tend to forget that Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell, who was nearly 30 at the time) and his three droogs are all meant to be teenagers. (Only Michael Tarn, who played Pete, was actually a teenager at the time the film was shot. Warren “Dim” Clarke and James “Georgie” Marcus were both in their late 20s.) There’s even a lengthy scene in which Alex is interrogated by a social worker, P.R. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris). Viewers are usually so surprised when Deltoid suddenly grabs Alex’s crotch that they forget that the whole reason Deltoid even came to the flat was to find out why Alex had been skipping school. (“Pain in my gulliver,” was Alex’s oft-quoted excuse.)

So, make no mistake about it. Among other things, A Clockwork Orange is a film about both the problem of juvenile delinquency and the continuing debate concerning what the authorities should do about it. Stylistic and philosophical differences aside, A Clockwork Orange comes from the same cinematic family tree that’s given us everything from Rebel Without A Cause to Bully to Spring Breakers.

Of course, that’s not all that A Clockwork Orange is about. It’s a Kubrick film, which means that there’s several different layers to work through and multiple interpretations for what we see on-screen. For those who may not be familiar with the film, it takes place in a recognizable but futuristic England. (One of my favorite theories is that A Clockwork Orange was about what was happening on Earth while David Bowman was becoming the starchild in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) It’s a violent world, one where there appears to be significantly fewer people around than in the past. The streets are deserted and bombed out. Occasionally, when Alex returns to his home, he passes a mural of idealized working men creating a new world. This rather banal work of Socialist realism has been defaced by obscene drawings and mocking graffiti.

Teenage Alex spends his nights hanging out with his friends (or, as he calls them, droogs), Pete, Georgie, and Dim. They drink at the Korova Milk Bar and wear obscenely oversized codpieces, signifying this society’s obsession with outsized masculinity. When they speak (and when Alex narrates the film), they do so in a rhyming slang called Nadsat. Under Alex’s sociopathic leadership, they spend their nights raping women, beating the homeless, and fighting with other gangs. When Alex is not with his droogs, he enjoys lying around the house and listening to Beethoven (or “Ludwig Van” as he calls him).

After being betrayed by his droogs (who have tired of Alex’s cockiness), Alex ends up imprisoned for murder. However, Alex is offered an early release if he’s willing to take part in the Ludovico Treatment. For two weeks, Alex is drugged and forced to watch violent and sexual films while the music of Beethoven plays in the background. As a result of the treatment, Alex grows physically ill at the thought of both violence and sex but he can also no longer listen to Beethoven. Arguably, as a result of being cursed of his anti-social tendencies, he has lost the only non-destructive thing that he enjoyed.

Over the objections of the prison chaplain (who argues that robbing Alex of his free will is not the same as rehabilitating him), Alex is sent back into the real world and he quickly discovers that he now has no place in it. His parents have rented his room out to a boarder who is now more of a son to them than Alex ever was. The streets are full of men who were previously tormented by Alex and who now wants revenge. In perhaps the film’s most brilliant moment, Alex discovers that his former droogs are now members of the police force. Though they may now be wearing uniforms, Dim and Georgie are still as destructive and dangerous as Alex once was. The difference is that Alex was caught and cured whereas Dim and Georgie discovered they could do just as much damage as authority figures as they did as juvenile delinquents.

In fact, the only people who now care about Alex are the political dissidents who hope to use Alex to discredit the government. However, the dissidents aren’t particularly worried about Alex’s well-being either. He’s just a prop to be used for their own ambitions. Even worse, for Alex, is the fact that one of the dissidents is Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), a writer who lost both his ability to walk and his wife to an earlier assault committed by Alex…

(Interestingly enough, Mr. Alexander’s boyguard is played by David Prowse, who later become the ultimate symbol of government oppression when he was cast as Darth Vader in Star Wars.)

A Clockwork Orange is a brilliant film but it’s one about which I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, you can’t deny the power of the film’s imagery. How many times has just the opening shot — of McDowell staring at us while wearing one fake eyelash — been imitated on TV and in other movies? How much of the film’s dialogue — from “pain in my gulliver” to “the old in-out” — has lived on long past the movie? Regardless of how many times I’ve seen A Clockwork Orange, the film’s electronic score (from Wendy Carlos) never ceases to amaze me. Finally, it’s a film that argues that free will is so important that even a sociopath like Alex must be allowed to have it and that, as the chaplain argues, true goodness comes from within and cannot be manufactured or regulated by a government agency. (It’s also a film that suggests that the government would be just as quick to use the Ludovico Treatment not just on the evil Alexes on the world but on anyone who dared to dissent from the party line.) As I’m something of a “Freedom of Choice” absolutist, that’s a message to which I responded.

(At the same time, A Clockwork Orange does not argue that Alex’s actions should be free of consequences. If anything, the film’s message seems to be that things would have been better for literally everyone if the government had just left Alex in jail, as opposed to trying to “fix” what was wrong with him.)

And yet, I have mixed feelings about A Clockwork Orange. I guess my main issue is that the film doesn’t always play fair. Malcolm McDowell is allowed to give a charismatic and well-rounded performance as Alex but nearly everyone else in the film is directed and written as a one-dimensional caricature. Whereas Anthony Burgess’s novel emphasized the very real damage that Alex did to his victims, the film tends to surround Alex with comedic grotesqueries. By both making Alex the only fully developed character in the entire film and then casting the energetic and charismatic Malcolm McDowell in the role, the film seems, at times, to come dangerously close to letting Alex off the hook for his worst crimes. It also leaves the film open to the oft-repeated charge of glamorizing sex and violence. (According to Roger Lewis’s biography of the author, that was Anthony Burgess’s opinion of the film.) For the record, I don’t think A Clockwork Orange is an immoral film but I understand why some people disagree.

For that reason, A Clockwork Orange remains a controversial film. In fact, I’m somewhat surprised that this subversive and deliberately confrontational film was nominated for best picture. It was only the 2nd (and last) X-rated film to receive a best picture nomination. Though it lost to The French Connection, A Clockwork Orange continues to be a powerful and controversial film to this day. Perhaps the biggest indication of A Clockwork Orange‘s success is that it’s still being debated 45 years after it was first released.