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 — Horror of Fang Rock (1977, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on October 20, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

The first serial of the 15th season of Doctor Who finally allowed viewers a glimpse of an alien race that they had previously only heard about.

The Rutans are the mortal enemies of the Sontarans. Their war has gone on for centuries, with neither race getting the upper hand (or tentacle, as the case may be). Nearly every episode in which the Sontarans appeared involved an attempt to turn Earth into an outpost against the Rutans. In Horror of Fang Rock, a Rutan travels to Earth and tries to do the same thing against the Sontarans. Luckily, the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) are there to stop it but not before every other character in the serial has been killed.

Horror of Fang Rock takes place early in the 20th Century, at an isolated lighthouse on an island in the English channel. Other than The Doctor, Leela, and the Rutan, the characters consist of two lighthouse keepers and the four survivors of a shipwreck. They’re all noble English stereotypes, with names like Lord Palmerdale, Colonel Skinsale, and Adelaide Lessage and none of them survive the horror of Fang Rock.

When I first saw this serial as a kid, it actually left me feeling rather depressed. It certainly didn’t seem like everyone deserved to die. Even my mom, who rarely watched the show with my dad and me but who did sit through the first 25 minutes of Horror of Fang Rock before finding something better to do, was surprised when I told her that no one had survived.

When I recently rewatched this serial, I better appreciated just how efficiently Horror of Fang Rock is put together. It mixes traditional gothic imagery (like the fog-covered island and the dark lighthouse) with aliens and it does a good job of it. The Rutan itself turns out to be a glowing green mass. It looks convincingly evil and extraterrestrial. As soon as it appeared, I understood why the dull-witted Sontarans never seemed to be sure how to defeat the Rutans. The Rutan was a creature totally unlike the usual humanoid aliens that populated Doctor Who. It also made sense that only the Doctor and Leela would be able to survive a confrontation with the Rutan because the Rutan was so alien that rest of the inhabitants of the lighthouse had no idea how to respond to it.

At the end of this serial, the Doctor causes the Rutan mothership to explode. Leela looks straight at the explosion and, as a result, her brown eye turn blue. Louise Jameson’s eyes were always blue but they weren’t considered to be the right color for the savage character she was playing so, for her first few serial, she had to wear extremely uncomfortable contact lenses. One of her conditions for returning for Season 15 was that she would no longer have to wear them. The show’s producers gave in and that was the right decision. By the time Horror of Fang Rock came along, Baker and Jameson had moved pass their initial awkwardness and were now a strong team.

holds up well as one of the few Doctor Who stories to actually be as scary as the show’s critics claimed. Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are at their best and the Rutan proves to be the rare Doctor Who alien to live up to the hype.

Doctor Who — The Talons Of Weng-Chiang (1977, directed by David Maloney)

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

The TARDIS materializes in Victorian-era London. Accompanying the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) is his new companion, Leela (Louise Jameson). After returning Sarah Jane Smith to her own time (more or less) and saving the Time Lords from being destroyed by the Master, the Doctor meet Leela on an unnamed planet in the far future. Though Leela, with her short animal-skin outfit and her very large knife, seemed like a savage, she was actually the descendant of a group of Earth astronauts who had crashed on the planet centuries before. Leela insisted on traveling with the Doctor and the Doctor reluctantly decided to try to civilize Leela or, at the very least, get her to stop carrying that big knife around with her.

Hence, the trip to London. The Doctor wants her to see where her ancestors came from. The Doctor’s plan is to take her to the Palace Theater, owned by Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin), so that they can see a performance by the magician Li Hi’sen Chang (John Bennett). Instead, they end up getting caught up in a series of murders that involving Chang, a giant rat in the London sewers, a miniature killer named Mr. Sin (Deep Roy) who snorts like a pig, and a 51st century war criminal named Magnus Greel (Michael Spice).

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is not only one of the best of the Fourth Doctor’s adventures but it’s also one of the best Doctor Who serials ever. Victoria London, with its foggy streets and its collection of eccentric rogues, proves to be a perfect fit for Tom Baker’s Doctor, allowing Baker to try out the Sherlock Holmes persona that he would later use when he played the great detective himself in a BBC production of Hound of the Baskervilles. Louise Jameson is also a delight in this story, with Leela’s naturally independent nature befuddling all of the very proper Victorians that she comes into contact with. Louise Jameson had the unenviable task of trying to follow in the footsteps of the beloved Elisabeth Sladen. (The show’s writers helped out by making Leela the opposite of Sarah Jane is almost every way.) Supposedly, Tom Baker had not wanted a new companion and initially treated Louise Jameson very coldly, though he eventually warmed up to her. With her performance in this serial, Louise Jameson proved that she definitely deserved to be a part of the Doctor’s adventures.

Of course, for many, the real highlight of this serial is the chemistry between Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Lightfoot (Trevor Baxter), the coroner who has been investigating a number of strange murders in London. The blustery Jago and the reserved Lightfoot are almost as important to defeating Magnus Greel than the Doctor and Leela and the scenes in which they become an unlikely detective team are so enjoyable that it’s not a surprise that the BBC considered giving them a series of their own. (From 2010 to 2017, the pair did star in an audio drama, one that imagined them investigating other mysteries and even teaming up with other Doctors.) Of course, when I first saw The Talons of Weng-Chiang, I was just happy that Jago and Lightfoot managed to survive all six chapters. After you watch enough Doctor Who, you learn not to get to attached to any of the supporting characters. That Jago and Lightfoot did not fall victim to Mr. Sin was cause for celebration.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang actually has a pretty interesting story, one that justified its 6-episode length. Magnus Greel is one of the great Doctor Who villains, a time traveling war criminal who pretended to be a God. For the most part, Michael Spice was convincing as Greel, though his over-the-top delivery of a threat to “rip your flesh,” is one of the serial’s few unintentionally funny moments. Another false step was the “giant rat,” which was clearly a normal-sized rat shot on a miniature set. The rat looked bored. When the rat has to interact with the Doctor and Leela, it becomes a giant rat dummy that looks very little like the normal rat. And finally, a stuntman had to do a few scenes inside a rat costume. All of the rat stuff doesn’t do much other than leave you wondering whether the story really needed a giant rat at all. Of course, it’s really not Doctor Who if there isn’t at least one notable case of special effects failure.

The rat aside, there is another thing that has to be discussed when it comes to The Talons of Weng-Chiang. When I was a kid, I didn’t really notice it because I was too busy enjoying the action set pieces, Tom Baker’s tongue-in-check performance, the Jago/Lightfoot team-up, and everything about Louise Jameson. Rewatching The Talons of Weng-Chiang as an adult, the thing I immediately noticed was that, for an episode that featured a lot of Chinese characters (the majority of whom were not presented in a particularly positive light), there weren’t many Chinese actors in the cast. The most prominent Chinese character was played by John Bennett, in full yellowface. Reading about the production of the serial, I was not surprised to see that one of the inspirations was Sax Rohmer’s notoriously racist Fu Manchu novels. While The Talons of Weng-Chiang may not be as flat-out racist as Rohmer’s novels, it still has its share of negative racial stereotypes. (Of course, the story’s main villain is not Chinese. Magnus Greel is described as being “the butcher of Brisbane,” make of that what you will.) The Talons of Weng-Chiang is well-acted, well-directed, and well-written and there’s no way it would be made today, at least not in the same way that it was made in the 70s. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing or a good thing. It just a reminder of how much things have changed since 1977.

The final serial of the 14th season, The Talons of Weng-Chiang was a triumph and also proof that the Doctor could still have worthwhile adventures, even if he was no longer traveling with Sarah Jane.