So... I took ten days off. That was weird. After crossing the finish line last Monday, the next day was all prepping to leave on a trip. Then I flew to Las Vegas for work, spent several days running around like a madman (I registered 22,000 steps one day, going back and forth between Aria and Bellagio), then got home a couple days ago and still kind of avoided the treadmill. But this morning I was too antsy to ignore it any longer. This morning I started in on Doctor Who spinoffs.

So let's talk about that.

K9 & Company: A Girl's Best Friend

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Christmas, 1981. Earlier that year in the spring, Tom Baker had finally left his epic seven-year run as the Fourth Doctor at the end of Logopolis. Peter Davison had appeared briefly as the Fifth Doctor in the closing seconds, but his new episodes had not quite begun airing yet (not for another week yet). Of course there was a great deal of angst around the BBC as to whether the show would succeed with this new, and very young, Doctor. I expect there was a feeling that they needed some familiar faces to fall back on, And so, they reached back to the most popular human companion of all time, Sarah Jane Smith, and the most popular non-human companion of all time, K9, and figured they could carry their own show together. The fact that they had never traveled together was no barrier, all it would take was one minor bit of hand waving and the stage would be set. 

And so, K9 & Company was born. A pilot episode was commissioned and aired a week before the start of the Davison era of Doctor Who. The presumption was that the show would be a smash success, a compliment to the main series that could air the other half of the year to keep the gravy train rolling.

How did it go? Weil... just take a look at these opening credits. They tell you absolutely everything you need to know about the show.

So, look, when I mentioned last night that I was going to be watching this show today, the biggest Doctor Who fan I know had this to say:

"Oh. I .... Oh. You know it's -- it's not good, right?"

He's not wrong.

The premise, in and of itself, is not bad. About three years previously, the Doctor boxed up K9 MkIII and shipped him off to Sarah Jane Smith as a present. Except, she never got the box because she was off doing journalism or something, so it wound up with her acentric aunt. Three years later the acentric aunt is leaving on an extended working trip to America and asks Sarah Jane to house sit while she is out of the country.

The good news: Sarah Jane arrives and fairly quickly finds the crate, opening it to reveal K9 in all his prissy robotic glory, and a new Dynamic Duo is born.

The bad news: the acentric aunt lives in a mansion in a small farming community infested with witches. As in, a literal coven that believes they need to make a human sacrifice in order to appease Hecate and to get the crops to grow properly. Said human sacrifice turns out to be the acentric aunt's youthful ward, who had been entrusted to Sarah Jane's care. Oops.

Thankfully in the end K9 is able to compute the location of the witches, and to laser stun all of the bad guys with his nostril gun. The youthful ward is saved, the witches all go to jail, the acentric aunt calls from America to see how things are going, and everyone has a good laugh at how wacky those hijinks were.

Look, it's not awful. I mean, yeah, the opening credits are wretched and the theme song needs to die in a fire, but the story itself wasn't offensively bad. it is noteworthy as being the first Doctor Who universe story ever broadcast with a running time longer than 25 minutes.  The longer running time allowed for plenty of setup time at the beginning in order to get Sarah Jane and K9 together, and to give the story a bit of depth.

Even so, it just didn't light a fire in the viewing public. It was mostly ok, which just wasn't enough to demand an ongoing season. And so, the first Doctor Who spinoff died an ignoble death, and both Sarah Jane and K9 disappeared for another twenty five years until School Reunion. Ultimately they did finally get their spinoff series, but I won't get to that for a while yet.

For the next few weeks I plan on re-watching the Fourth Doctor's first season, with the newly remastered episodes on BluRay. So, I get to spend some more quality time with Sarah Jane, which is really nice. Plus I get to re-watch both Genesis of the Daleks and Revenge of the Cybermen, which is arguably the best back-to-back story sequence in the classic era. So, cool.

And that's it. I'm back, baby. The Time Treadmill rolls onward.

STATS:

Doctor(s): none
Companion(s): Sarah Jane Smith, K9
Episode(s): K9 & Company
Steps Walked: 7,315 today, 3,638,288 total
Distance Walked: 4.06 miles today, 1,901.50 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,747 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 249.98 lbs (five day moving average), net change -57.32 lbs