The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Invisible Enemy'

One of the fascinating things about future histories is their nearly limitless ability to get the future wrong. Nothing the Bishop knows of predicted the Internet until William Gibson, by whose time it already existed. Metallic catsuits have yet to become the must-have item amongst the couture set, let alone replace the business suit. And, while, according to most sci-fi authors of the mid–twentieth century, we should soon be able to get a good second-hand spaceship, faster-than-light compatible and reasonably priced, they could usually imagine little more sophisticated than an electronic typewriter with which to design it. But the Bishop's favourite example is Dune, which sees the art of cloning perfected just a shade over 8,000 years too late.

‘The Invisible Enemy’ is only about half that far off. Except this isn’t cloning as we know it, with flocks of suspiciously identical sheep (if you were going to show off the wonders of modern biology, surely you wouldn’t pick a species famous as the very metaphor for being ‘all the same’). This is cloning of the sort the Star Trek universe could easily introduce, if they’d only spend two minutes looking at how those teleporters actually work. These ‘clones’ come complete with detailed memories, not to mention clothing, though surprisingly little rising panic at the thought that they have, according to the script, only fifteen minutes to live.

Serious Who fans will know, of course, that the finer points of genetics aren’t the only thing that writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin have ever gotten wrong. In ‘The Hand of Fear’ they showed they understand nuclear energy about as well as George W. Bush pronounces it, and in ‘The Three Doctors’, their particular brand of antimatter demonstrated a rather fickle reluctance to blow up on contact with the very matter-rich air. Presently, their script for ‘The Invisible Enemy’ reveals that, as microbiologists, their virology wouldn’t stand up under a monocle, let alone a microscope; and while the Bishop has no more experience with shrinking things or growing things than our dynamic duo do, he’s pretty sure there’d be a little more to it than that.

But this is Doctor Who, and none of the above would matter if what we had here was a rollicking tale of full of drama, humour, or just about anything else besides padding. Who fans regularly point out that this or that six-parter could have been four, or four two, but genuinely next to nothing happens in this story, and what does does so at a pace roughly that of the Equatorial Guinean Olympic swimming squad. The clones last but for fifteen minutes; if only this little ge(r)m of a story could have been over so soon.