| Production Code: 4T
Cast
Crew
Plot Outline from Wikipedia In the year 5000, when man is spreading himself across the solar system, a shuttle crew on their way to Titan encounters a cloud in space that infects them with an intelligent virus. When the Doctor answers the distress call, he is infected as well. As the virus spreads, the only way to stop it is may be to enter the Doctor's body and fight the nucleus directly. Mankind is colonizing space at a fantastic rate. Some human space travelers are cruising near the outer planets of the solar system with their ship on autopilot. The ship's computer, and soon the human crew, is possessed by a strange virus. Reaching their destination, Titan Base, they proceed to take over the base as a breeding ground. The station manager, Lowe is able to send out a distress call. The TARDIS is traveling through the same region, and is infected by the virus. The infection passes to the Doctor, but he is unaffected for the moment. He and Leela hear the distress call and go to investigate. While there, the Doctor is overcome by repeated infections and is chosen, due to his incredible powers as a Time Lord, to be the host of the Nucleus of the Swarm. Leela is unable to be infected. The Nucleus declares her a reject and orders that she be killed. The Doctor manages to break free of his infection and tells Leela how to get the TARDIS to the nearest medical centre. Accompanying them is Lowe, who has been infected, although the Doctor and Leela don't know this. At the medical station, the Doctor's doctor, Professor Marius, introduces the group to K-9, a robotic dog he made to replace the real dog he had to leave on Earth. Professor Marius is baffled as to how to treat the Doctor's strange infection. Meanwhile, Lowe has been infecting the staff of the hospital. Leela and the Doctor decide on a last-ditch strategy. They create clones of themselves, which can only survive for ten minutes due to problems with the technique. The clones will then be shrunk and inserted into the Doctor. There they will destroy the Nucleus and escape through the tear duct. In the meantime, Leela and K-9 fight off the infected staff of the hospital. After a hazardous voyage through his mind, the Doctor's clone and Leela's clone are separated, and the Doctor's clone reaches the Nucleus. He has no weapons with which to destroy it, and it learns the intended escape route of the Doctor's clone, since the Doctor thought of it. Prof. Marius faithfully retrieves something from the tear duct and expands it to human size. It turns out to be the Nucleus. The Doctor is cured of his infection. The Nucleus and the infected staff leave for Titan Base so the Nucleus can spawn. The Doctor realizes he is cured since Leela's clone introduced into his blood stream her immunity factor. He replicates it and gives it to Prof. Marius. The Doctor and Leela and K-9 proceed to Titan Base in the TARDIS. They just barely manage to fight off the infected humans, but are again without sufficient weaponry to destroy the Nucleus, or its many children which are about to hatch as "macro-sized" beings, like the newly macro-sized Nucleus. The Doctor manages to jam the door they are behind and rigs a gun to fire into a cloud of hydrogen gas he is releasing and escapes. As intended, when the Swarm finally forces open the door, the blaster fires, igniting the hydrogen and destroying the Swarm and the base. When they return to the hospital, they thank Prof. Marius for the use of K-9, who has ably assisted them. Prof. Marius makes a surprising offer. He must soon return to Earth, and weight restrictions now prevent him from taking K-9 back. He offers him to the Doctor, with some sadness, but knowing K-9 will have a good home. The Doctor and Leela gratefully accept, and K-9 himself is eager to learn more about the TARDIS. Prof. Marius, with teary eyes, watches the TARDIS disappear, commenting, "I only hope he's TARDIS-trained."
Analysis by Cuisle There was a film from 1966 called Fantastic Voyage in which a submarine and crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into a body in order to save the patient. That film endeavoured to be anatomically accurate as far as it could. The people didn’t step outside the submarine and acted as if in an aquatic environment, which the body generally is. So was the 1987 variation on the theme, Inner Space. Inbetween we had The Invisible Enemy, which used a similar idea of miniaturising people, but in this case, they through realism out of the window. The Doctor and Leela – or miniaturised clones of the same – wandered around the inside of the REAL Doctor’s brain as if it was a rather strange fun house. And having seen Fantastic Voyage several times when it was on TV, and finding it, for its time, a good film, I just didn’t buy into this version of the theme being presented on Doctor Who. It was more like The Numskulls, the people who lived inside a man’s body in a strip cartoon in what was, in the 1970s. the Beezer. It had that kind of unreality to it, and I felt cheated as a fan who liked Doctor Who best when the things happening were on this side of possible. I had by then accepted the Doctor is an alien of however many hundreds of years old, that he has special powers, though he doesn’t often use them, that the TARDIS can travel in time and space and is bigger on the inside than the out. And several other impossible things. But this I just couldn’t swallow, and that spoilt it for me. On the plus side, the sequences in The Doctor’s head were at one and the same time funny, dramatic and tense, and the fact that The Doctor’s clone ‘fails’ essentially is a good touch. Essentially the two short lived clones die and are absorbed into The Doctor’s bloodstream. But the ‘nucleus’ which is the cause of the trouble uses The Doctor’s plan to escape his body, and at the same time the clone Leela passes on her immunity to the nucleus. The recovered Doctor is able to fight the nucleus as a real, full sized creature while at the same time he can cure the other infected people with a replicated serum based on his own blood. Reality returns to the story with that perfectly logical and scientific method of treating the people infected by the nucleus. Meanwhile, we are introduced to K9, the robot dog who didn’t seem half as impossible to me as the microscopic wanderings. Robots were pretty much passé in science fiction in the 1970s. A robot dog was easy enough to accept. I didn’t really fully appreciate him at the time, though. I really only came to appreciate K9 after he came back in 2006 and I watched a couple of these episodes in retrospective. At the time, and this is still a valid point, it seemed as if he had been introduced simply to attract an even younger audience, who would find him funny and amusing, whereas I have always wanted Doctor Who to be more grown up and intelligent. All those criticisms aside, this episode was entertaining. It never failed to do THAT. But it could have been better. If anyone should GET the mad idea of shrinking The Doctor again, I think they should look to the way it was done in Inner Space and be more realistic about it. The modern audience really WON’T swallow this.
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