Doctor Who: Revenge of the Swarm

I have a guilty confession to make: when it was first broadcast, The Invisible Enemy was one of my favourite Doctor Who stories. Now that I'm no longer ten years old, it doesn't really stand up at all, and it's scarcely surprising that it took nearly four decades for anyone to bother doing a sequel. But still it's there, lodged in my memory in a way that some other stories of the era are not.

This sequel, in fact, adheres a fair bit to the plot of the original, albeit with the details updated for the modern day. The setting is the same one, starting out on Titan, and rapidly moving to the Bi-Al Foundation in the asteroid belt, where most of the action takes place. The first half of the story, set 80 years before the events of the TV serial, is largely exposition, providing, for the first time, an explanation of what The Swarm really is, and setting up the second half, which takes place a couple of hundred years later.

What's perhaps the most memorable sequence in the original gets a re-working, now pastiching Tron, rather than Fantastic Voyage, but it's still essentially the same idea. Other elements of the plot are mirrored as well, and one can certainly argue that Morris isn't really stretching himself on this one. By having Hex be infected by The Swarm for much of the story, we also don't get any significant follow-up from the (literally) life-changing events of Afterlife, either, although they are referred to more than once.

On the other hand, one of the strengths of this story is that it doesn't shy away from the some of the inherent absurdity of the original, acknowledging, for example, that the main villain is, in fact, a microscopic prawn. There's even a meta-joke about the poor quality of some of the serial's effects. At times, of course, it's own plausibility suffers as a result, notably in its insistence that biological and computer viruses are basically just the same thing... but at least one can argue that this is in the spirit of the original.

Revenge of the Swarm is a hokey bit of fun, and was likely written with no intention of being any more than that. I'll admit that it's likely that it's only the memories of my ten-year old self that nudge this (narrowly) into four-star territory for me, along with the fact that, while it's no comedy, it isn't trying to take itself too seriously. I can well understand that others will feel differently, but I quite enjoyed this one, whatever the reason.