Is ‘K9 and Company’ a coda to the Tom Baker era, or prologue to Davison’s Doctor?
The pilot episode for the attempted spin-off, bringing back Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and John Leeson as the voice of K9, was broadcast in December 1981, only a few days before Peter Davison’s debut in January 1982. However, Davison had already been introduced to viewers as the Doctor in the regeneration sequence at the end of Logopolis, earlier in 1981. So technically, it interrupts the very start of the Peter Davison era. But as Sarah Jane and K9 are both Fourth Doctor companions (briefly appearing with the Fifth Doctor in the 1983 twentieth anniversary special ‘The Five Doctors’), the story feels more like a throwback to Tom’s era. There are at least a thousand problems with ‘K9 and Company’, every one enough reason on its own to justify why it never went any further than a single fifty-minute pilot episode, but one of the primary reasons is that it feels old-fashioned, even for 1981. Perhaps it’s better not to consider ‘K9 and Company’ part of the ‘Doctor Who’ chronology at all. My only advice is don’t watch it immediately after ‘Logopolis’, unless you don’t mind being bored and depressed, and left questioning what it ever was that you loved so much about this show.
