K9 - ''The Cambridge Spy''

Spoiler Level: High

A very good episode of K9!  Professor Gryffen is playing about with his Space Time Manipulator, and Jorjie gets zapped back into the past, arriving in 1963.  There she meets Darius's great-grandfather (also played by Daniel Webber) who's a very nice stand-up kind of guy.  Unfortunately she interferes with his timeline, so Darius is starting to pull a Back to the Future and fade away.  Starkey and K9 have to enter the Space Time Manipulator, go back to 1963, rescue Jorjie, and try to repair the damage to the timeline.

It works great.  Dairus is brusque but not whiney, cowardly or otherwise annoying, and Daniel Webber does a great job of coming across as a completely different person playing Darius' grandfather Bill.  Most of the dialogue works well, even K9's attempts at 1960's slang.  (Well, most of them.  A few are cringe-worthy, but a few of them work great, especially when he gets them wrong.) And there's even an implication made that Thorne's ancestor is partially responsible for the totalitarian state we see as England's future.

The kids also recognize Thorne's ancestor, who's played by Jared Robinsen, the same actor who plays Thorne.  Since Thorne was only brought in at the end of the previous episode on a viewscreen with Jorjie's mother I originally thought that this episode must somehow be out of order;  but after doing a search on Thorne to find the actor's name I realized they met him way back in episode 2, "Liberation."  So even that works.

So this episode goes firmly in the win column, making K9's score to date 10 wins, 6 losses.

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Sadly, K9 is still not available in the US, but Amazon has now started listing import DVDs. While they are region free, these are in PAL format, so you'll need a player that can convert them to NTSC to play them here in America. Oh, and they're out of stock. But hey, it's a start.