5️⃣🔼 = MIDDLING!

Barking through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“THE GRYFFADDAMS FAMILY!”

The title certainly sounds promising for Dull Professor!

Now there's a big, bad storm coming and forcing everyone to stay inside! And that’s very bad for everyone, of course!

So this episode intends to give character stuff to Dull Professor, but it’s all too shallow and flat to have any real impact.

Villain Mother is suddenly overprotective; I’d also be annoyed.

I have to admit that they manage to build a somewhat atmospheric mood here with the dark surroundings, strange noises, stormy weather, eerie music, and child ghosts lurking about. The connection to Gryffen’s family also gives everything a logical reason.

Not that it helps much; the performances are as flat as ever, and the script utilities every old trick in the haunted horror book.

The ghost versions of the Gryffen family members are some of the better monsters this show has featured.

We also get a surprisingly good finale to the episode.

Honestly, you'd think with all the other things that have managed to come through, he'd've learnt to take the device down when not using it by now.

That said, I'm glad he didn't, because it gave us an actually pretty compelling story. We get a little more about Gryffen, we knew his family had gone, but he gets some solid character moments. We get an inkling of his past with Darius and the other characters get to learn about his family. We get a pretty funky haunted house story, the best looking aliens in the series so far (because it's people with makeup but still). The characters here actually feel like people and not just like they're just pieces of the plot.

It's a low 6, but it's a 6 for me. Tempted to go lower because K9 loses at chess, but he is on a team with Darius who probably just ignored what K9 said.

6/10

This episode made me realise something that's been stealing on me for a little while now - that the show really doesn't need K9. It's supposed to be all about him, and yet he doesn't add anything, he's not at all necessary for the structure/format of the show - he's really not important at all. And, even the writers seem to forget what they're trying to do - here, they have Starky, a kid Gryffen met maybe two weeks ago, max, acting as his 'real son', while Darius, the kid who's been taking care of Gryffen for years and knows everything about him, what he needs, how to take care of him, is literally sitting Right There, not objecting to being ignored in favour of this kid he hates. What is happening.

The episode itself was fine - another pretty boilerplate concept for this kind of show, without any interesting take.

Good writing in this one, helped in part by leaning on some effective “spooky Gothic” tropes, featuring the ghosts of children, who turn out to be the Professor’s, which gives the story an effective personal touch and actual character development (very rare in K9!)