Tag: Network Ten

Over K-9’s objections (and under his watchful eye), Starkey and Darius attend an open house at the London headquarters of the Department. The boys aren’t there for the official tour, however – they’re at Department HQ to gather intelligence. The absence of ever-present CCPC patrols seems almost too good to be true, but there are other dangers inside: Starkey looks at an unusual framed picture and is sucked into the frame. Darius steals the frame and escapes from the Department as quickly as possible. At Gryffen’s lab, K-9 identifies it as a holographic “library card” from the planet Ukko, a world whose librarians can compress a snapshot of an entire planet into such a card. But it will take a librarian from Ukko to free Starkey before he starves on the isolated planet preserved in the picture…

written by Deborah Parsons
directed by Mark DeFriest
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Inspector Thorne), Cathey Robinsen (Librarian)

Notes: Inspector Thorne mentions that the Department is a presence in the UK, the Americas and “the Pacific Union”.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Starkey stokes the fires of a protest gathering against the Department, but the CCPCs present are simply too slow-witted to find him. But Starkey, K-9 and Jorjie are surprised when they find a CCPC who’s even dimmer than his fellow cyborgs: he’s too busy birdwatching to apprehend potential agitators. When this particular CCPC helps the kids hide from the other CCPC patrols, Jorjie is certain that this particular cyborg is somehow evolving into something more than the average robotic thug deployed by the Department. What they don’t know is that this CCPC – nicknamed “Birdie” by Jorjie – is the result of an experiment to see if the CCPCs can be made more ruthless with the addition of human emotions and instincts. All Birdie knows is that he doesn’t want to go back to being like the rest of the Department’s henchmen, and K-9 and his friends risk everything to help him escape.

written by John O’Brien
directed by James Bogle
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Inspector Thorne), Thomas Calder (Marcus), Josh Norbido (Birdie), Peter Kent (voice of Birdie)

Notes: Starkey says that he “used to be known as” Stark Reality, his nickname from the pilot episode, a further indication that the series writers are attempting to distance themselves from the darker premise of the early episodes. Peter Kent, who provides Birdie’s voice, is also the drama and dialogue coach for the series’ young cast.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Across Britain, millions of kids fall victim to a popular massively-multiplayer virtual reality game, whose headsets first render their victim “players” comatose and then begins to mutate them with alien DNA. Never one to fall for trends, Starkey remains unaffected, and he and K-9, along with Inspector Turner, pay a visit to the game’s makers. There, they find a powerful telepathic being is behind the addictive game – and that the creature has seized control with the full knowledge of some of Turner’s cohorts at the Department in a bid for total mind control of the population. But even the Department can’t control this intruder.

written by Shayne Armstrong & S.P. Krause
directed by James Bogle
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Thorne), Dash Kruck (John: The Custodian), Josh Norbido (CCPC), Jason McNamara (CCPC), Dane Paltman (CCPC), Tarek Beheiry (Etydien)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Professor Gryffen takes it upon himself to right a wrong for which he feels responsible: at some point in the past, he helped the Department with a project involving a time-sensitive being known as Taphony. Despite the warnings from K-9, who has a bit of time travel experience, Gryffen uses his dimensional gateway to bust Taphony out of her cell at Department headquarters. She hides out at Gryffen’s lab, but K-9 warns that to survive, Taphony will have to siphon off another person’s life force – namely Jorjie. With only a momentary touch, Taphony ages Gryffen several decades. Jorjie and Gryffen have only hours left unless K-9, Starkey and Darius can convince Taphony to leave of her own free will.

written by Anthony Morris & Graeme Farmer
based on a story by Shayne Armstrong & S.P. Krause
directed by Mark DeFriest
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Inspector Thorne), Maia Mitchell (Taphony), Josh Norbido (CCPC), Jason McNamara (CCPC), Eugen Bekafigo (CCPC), Michael Donnet (CCPC), Tyler Rostedt (CCPC)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Darius and Starkey hatch a plan to take down an old rival of Professor Gryffen’s, a man named Freddie who long ago stole Gryffen’s secret advances in robotics to create a breed of fighting robots that now feature in no-holds-barred, pay-per-view competitions. While Gryffen has been unable to get the authorities – including the Department – interested in the theft of his secrets, Freddie has become a rich man. But Darius has a robot warrior of his own to help him take down Freddie’s empire and expose the crime: K-9. What Darius and his cohorts don’t know is that Freddie has very highly-placed allies of his own who are willing to bet against the robot dog.

written by Jim Noble
directed by James Bogle
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Jared Robinsen (Thorne), Gareth Harris (Freddie), Remi Broadway (Chuckles), Michael Donnet (Boris), Josh Norbido (Pain Maker), Peter Kent (Lomax), Eugen Bekafigo (CCPC), Jason McNamara (CCPC), Josh Norbido (CCPC), Tyler Rostedt (CCPC)

Notes: K-9 himself hasn’t encountered robotic clowns before, but his former time traveling cohort the Doctor did in 1988’s The Greatest Show In The Galaxy; fortunately, the ones K-9 meets aren’t homicidal. This story, in which Thorne reveals that he knows about K-9’s regeneration capability, and will do anything necessary to induce the amount of damage necessary to force another regeneration, is the beginning of a story arc that leads up to the season finale. Robot Gladiators is one of the only season 1 episodes not to feature Robyn Moore as June Turner.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Professor Gryffen discovers, to his great dismay, that K-9 has been performing unauthorized experiments with the interdimensional equipment that first brought him to Gryffen’s lab. But instead of restoring K-9’s lost memories, the latest experiment renders him dangerously unstable and he even fires on Gryffen. Starkey and Gryffen have to convince K-9 to restore his own recent memories and discontinue his experiments.

written by Bob Baker & Paul Tams
directed by David Napier
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Thorne), Connor Van Vuuren (Drake)

Notes: a “clip show” consisting of a few “framing” scenes meant to link clips from previous episodes, Mind Snap was intended primarily to keep the production schedule on track without leaving a dent in the show’s budget. As such, the only new footage filmed for this episode features Keegan Joyce as Starkey and Robert Moloney as Gryffen, with new K-9 lines recorded by John Leeson; all other cast members (including those credited as guest stars) appear only in scenes from past episodes. This is also the first time that K-9 co-creator Bob Baker has been credited as a scriptwriter in the spinoff series.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

An unusual disturbance in space and time is detected, affecting everything in Gryffen’s lab – everything except K-9. The epicenter of the disturbance is in the northernmost reaches of Canada – near the crashed spacecraft from which Gryffen salvaged the interdimensional transport equipment in his lab. Despite his phobia of setting foot outside his lab, Gryffen contacts the Department and all but begs to take an expedition to Canada, hoping to find the final piece of alien technology that will bring the interdimensional transport under his control, and perhaps even send K-9 home. Inspector Thorne agrees to Gryffen’s request – perhaps too eagerly – and joins the Professor on his journey. K-9 and Starkey decide to go to Canada by other means in case Gryffen needs help. When they learn the identity of the alien race whose technology Gryffen has been researching, everyone will need help.

written by Bob Baker
directed by James Bogle
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Thorne), Craig Lee (Canadian Dept. Inspector #1), Emma Gibbs (Canadian Dept. Inspector #2), Matthew Reimer (Korven), Josh Norbido (CCPC), Jason McNamara (CCPC), Eugen Bekafigo (CCPC), Manuel Savdie (CCPC), Tyler Rostedt (CCPC)

Notes: This episode establishes that, like the actor who portrays him, Professor Gryffen is from Canada.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

A wave of incidents spreads through London, often involving CCPCs being disabled by a group calling itself the Last Precinct. CCPCs raid Gryffen’s lab, blast K-9 and take hostages, but they’re not looking for evidence – in fact, some of them aren’t CCPCs at all. Two humans remove CCPC uniforms and reveal themselves as members of the Last Precinct: the last London Metro Police officers remaining when the Department relieved all human police of duty to replace them with CCPCs. Pike is also Darius’ father, though the two barely acknowledge one another after years of estrangement. Pike has an ace up his sleeve, however: a computer virus that will put all of the CCPCs in London under his control. But who engineered that virus… and will deploying it actually help his aim of demonstrating the unreliability of CCPCs to the public, or will it only unleash an even more dangerous situation?

written by Shayne Armstrong & S.P. Krause
directed by James Bogle
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Thorne), Chris Betts (Pike), Lloyd Morris (Halloran), Jason McNamara (Green Hand), Josh Norbido (CCPC), Eugen Bekafigo (CCPC), Tyler Rostedt (CCPC), Simon Preston-Barnes (CCPC)

Notes: The CCPCs are revealed to be cyborgs – cybernetic organisms – in this episode, and mention is made of cloning centers that produce the CCPCs. Even more menacing is the fact that someone has been integrating alien biotechnology into the latest round of CCPCs cloned. As the CCPC raid on the last police precinct in London happened only two years ago, back when Gryffen’s lab was that police station, it’s reasonable to assume that Gryffen’s occupancy of the building is very recent, despite enough clutter to suggest that he’s been there for years.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Darius is awakened by Inspector Thorne – a bit of a shock, since Thorne is on Gryffen’s property – who tries to sway Darius’ loyalty with a chance to see how his father is handling a stay in the Department’s virtual reality prison. Thorne’s price for this favor seems simple: he wants a piece of K-9’s circuitry, a piece he claims won’t be missed. And Thorne has something to tempt K-9 into cooperating as well: a memory chip that K-9 is missing.

But the circuit Thorne wants is the regeneration unit that restored K-9 in his new form. Even with his father’s freedom on the line, Darius knows this isn’t an even exchange. K-9 makes the trade anyway, and when he accesses the chip that supposedly contains his missing memory, the trap is sprung: a trojan horse program that takes over K-9’s programming, turning him into a mobile bomb dedicated to taking out an enemy of the Department’s choosing. And it can hardly be a coincidence that a lone Jixen has returned to Earth to find Starkey…

written by Shayne Armstrong & S.P. Krause
directed by Mark DeFriest
music by Christopher Elves

Guest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Jared Robinsen (Thorne), Chris Betts (Pike), Jandardan Kewin (Jixey), Stephen Sourris (Dept. Technician), Josh Norbido (CCPC), Jason McNamara (CCPC), Eugen Bekafigo (CCPC), Michael Donnet (CCPC), Tyler Rostedt (CCPC)

LogBook entry by Earl Green