The Invisible Enemy - Episode 4

Well I never thought that I would write this but I am quite sad about reaching the end of this release. However the episode doesn’t get off to the best of start with the reprise of the prawn. The prawn has a difficult moving and has to have help which makes it the worst villain and design in Doctor Who history (at this point in time). I am perhaps being a bit cruel on the prawn but when its standing still then it doesn’t look too bad but its when it does then it just looks crude. The idea of the nucleus is quite good and visually its striking but I think a bit more time could have been spent to make it more mobile than it was.

As it’s the final episode, the story has to try and reach a conclusion in 25 minutes and it does this quite well. The race is on to stop the prawn/nucleus and stop the eggs from hatching. This means that the story moves to Titan where the story started and I think that it feels like a nice bit of closure because they could have just discarded Titan and kept the action on the hospital asteroid but now we end the story in a decently lit group of sets and my eyes could rest.

I like how the Doctor doesn’t mind the nucleus existing but just has a problem with the grand plan that it has. The “everything has a right to exist” line is particularly good. It’s been a good performance from both Tom Baker and Louise Jameson. I think that the addition of K9 is one that the show would go on to regret. It worked during the course of this story but every so often it would have to stop and at one point it had to be dragged to the TARDIS and when it has to board the TARDIS, the camera cuts away to hide the fact it couldn’t climb up.

“I only hope he’s TARDIS trained” is one of those lines that just makes me grown with embarrassment because its such a rubbish joke but it ends the episode on a rather fun note. I am quite surprised at how much I have enjoyed this story. Yes the prawn does undermine the story but the idea in principle is sound and the comedy works rather well in this serial and as a result I am looking forward to the next story a lot more than I was at the beginning of this serial. Maybe ‘Image of the Fendahl’ might be a better story than I previously thought.