After spending a long day trying to retrieve some of K-9’s lost memories, Professor Gryffen grudgingly gives in to Starkey’s idea of taking K-9 for a walk to jog those memories. While out, the two pass an out-of-control ferris wheel surrounded by Department guards – and Inspector Drake is standing by, claiming that a dissident bomb well go off if the ferris wheel is slowed down. But Starkey and K-9 suspect that Drake is stalling until more news cameras arrive before he disarms the device, and they do it themselves and win the dissident movement a little bit of positive publicity in the process. The time portal in Gryffen’s lab is activated remotely, and a bounty hunter emerges from the year 50,000, hot on K-9’s trail. When he spots K-9 and Starkey in the news coverage of the ferris wheel incident, the hunter decides to make the Department an offer that it can’t refuse: if the Department will make its manpower and technology available, the bounty hunter can rein in a robot dog who’s wanted for murder in the future.
written by Ian McFadyen
directed by James Bogle
music by Christopher ElvesGuest Cast: Robyn Moore (Inspector June Turner), Connor Van Vuuren (Drake), Brad McMurray (Bounty Hunter)
Notes: There’s no indication of where in K-9’s timeline the incident with Zanthus Pia falls, but since the heads-up display from K-9’s point of view shows the post-regeneration K-9, it may – paradoxically – be from K-9’s future – either that, or it’s a memory recorded by the pre-regeneration K-9 and the HUD is merely showing K-9’s current form as a default. The “news ticker” at the bottom of the Department-approved TV news broadcast includes a reference to “NX-2000” making its first test flight; this may or may not be an in-joke for SF fans of a certain age, who would know that NX-2000 was the original registry number of the brand-new U.S.S. Excelsior in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock. Maybe K-9 has slipped into more of an alternate universe than we imagined – one in which a ferris wheel is controlled by an early 1980s-model television production switcher.
LogBook entry by Earl Green