The 1995 Yearbook

BBC Children's Books A Dog's Life Doctor Who Files 6: K9

Published

2006

K9's batteries are dying, and he's facing permanent shutdown.

• A Dog's Best Friend by Noe Geric

A Dog's Best Friend by Noe Geric 25/9/21

Aiming at a younger audience and only nine pages long, the Doctor Who files short stories weren't written with the purpose of changing the world of Doctor Who fiction. They're just little tie-in stories written with big letters so young children can read them easily. But I was surprised, while reading one of them, by the experimentation of the prose style. A story written in K-9 thoughts is quite unusual and was a great improvement. But of course, no one on Earth expected the Doctor Who files stories to be the new Human Nature.

Written by Justin Richards, we find Sarah Jane and her ''dying'' K-9 just before the events of School Reunion. Don't expect a great exploration of their relationship or a big twist because the plot is simple: K-9 awoke every six or so months to remind Sarah Jane that he is running out of battery. At one point he stops two bad guys from stealing Sarah's belongings, and the end is set during School Reunion to remind us that, after all, even K-9 can have happy endings.

The story is far from being interesting with its plot, but written from K-9's point of view reveals that nothing is impossible. The robot's usual ''personality'' is shown, misinterpreting most of what Sarah says, and who could've thought that a robot dog could be a perfect narrator? As it is his story, K-9 is the only one to have little characterization. That's the trouble with very short stories for children: characters tend to be forgotten. Sarah Jane is cardboard, the policeman and the two robbers are quite blank, as they're not really important. But K-9 works very well: his joy at meeting the Doctor again warmed my heart. Even if the Time Lord doesn't have any lines, K-9 manages to show how emotional their encounter makes him.

Far from being the useless short story for children, A Dog's Life had me wondering what a Big Finish companion chronicle narrated by K-9 would be like? As a Doctor Who story, it's pretty dull, but as an experimentation in writing, it manages to be quite refreshing, but that's actually the story's only great point. Recommended for those who wants to know how to repair K-9's self-repair system: 7/10