Talk:K9 (Kept Safe and Sound)

Merge
In the Decalog 3 short story Comeback, Sarah Jane Smith's K9 is shown to have completely broken down and is stored in a cardboard box in her attic. This continuity was picked up in the Sarah Jane Smith series: in particular, in Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, Sarah Jane mentions some broken electronic equipment which they don't make the parts for yet, and this equipment is later stolen by the villain (who describes it as Sarah's "pet") and dismantled.

This audio was released by Big Finish in November 2002, and six months later, Big Finish published Short Trips: Companions, which included Kept Safe and Sound. The robot dog in Kept Safe and Sound is found in a random stall of electrical equipment where it's similarly being dismantled for parts: it has "a whole side missing, exposing a mesh of scrambled circuitry inside."

I expect this connection has been clouded in hindsight by the differing account in School Reunion et al., but given the dates, I can't help but wonder if some continuity is intended here. Of course Kept Safe and Sound is a dreamlike thing: its robot dog talks nothing like K9 (or, for that matter, the robot dog in the Festive Diary), almost inviting the reader to wonder if the lonely boy is imagining the robot dog's dialogue, set somehow in the technological past but also 16 years after the dog had last spoken. For this reason I'm merely raising the possibility rather than adding the merge template outright. But at minimum this seems like something that should be mentioned on K9 Mark III, even if the pages should separate. Thoughts? – n8 (☎) 15:15, 12 June 2023 (UTC)


 * That is really interesting! I knew the pre-SJA stories had toyed with a partly dismantled K9, but I didn't know it was in such a way it seems to narratively "fit". I'm not sure they should be merged, however, as I feel Mark III sounds like he had become completely non-functional whereas KSaS K9 seems to still be operational, and I do still really like the idea that the KSaS K9 reappears in Magrs's other works. But I do agree, at the least, some mention of this K9 should be on Mark III's page. Seems logical to do. 15:42, 12 June 2023 (UTC)