Written By: David Whitaker
Directed By: Barry Letts
Hello All. Welcome to another Doctor Who review.
With the show not coming back for a while, I continue to look back through Doctor Who's past and review my favourite story from each of the twelve doctors.
For the Second Doctor it's the fourth story of season five David Whitaker's spy drama "The Enemy of the World". This is an interesting one because most fans of the second doctor like "Tomb of the Cybermen" or "Web of Fear" the best. And to be fair, those are two excellent stories. However for me I like Enemy of the World for the reason that it is so different to anything else you see in that season of Doctor Who. It's different to the the 'base under siege' plot line that viewers who watch season five are used to.
This is the only attempt in the fifth season of Doctor Who, not to do base under siege. If anything to go everywhere around the world and do a James Bond / The Night Manager style spy thriller.
This story was actually one of the stories to suffer from having episodes missing from the BBC's archives. However thanks to archivist Phillip Morris the remaining episodes were recovered and returned to the BBC. Until their discovery in October 2013, only Episode Three existed in the BBC's archives. With this return Doctor Who fans, myself included were delighted to see this story recovered and complete once again, because today, not many of Patrick Troughton's 129 episodes are completed stories. I can remember at the time it was tremendously exciting to see new 'old' doctor who for the first time. I did know about what the story was about having watched the reconstructions of it on You Tube but to actually watch the live film, was splendid and I really did LOVE it!
The story itself is basically The Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield getting mixed up in an unfortunate chain of events which make The Doctor having to impersonate an evil dictator known as Ramón Salamander. It is believed that Salamander has been causing disasters all over the world and is basically up to no good. Gyles Kent, a man who used to work for Salamander but was later dismissed has become suspicious of him, as has his accomplished Astrid. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria have arrived on Earth in 2018 to go skinny dipping and have a nice day at the beach but three men confuse the Doctor for being Salamander and try to kill him, luckily Astrid saves them before the three men catch up with them.
They meet Gyles Kent, Kent tells The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria all about Salamander and how he is a bad person and that he should be stopped, then Donald Bruce turns up and is surprised to see Salamander in Australia and with Kent when he supposed to be in a conference at the Central European Zone. The Doctor, pretending to be Salamander manages to shrug this off and tells Bruce that 'he likes to deal with matters in his own way'. Bruce leaves, and this leads into Jamie, Victoria and Astrid having to travel to the Central European Zone where Salamander's headquarters is based to get some 'dirt' on Salamander that would expose him as a traitor, black mailer and murderer. They have a contact in the zone which is Denes, controller of the zone, but Salamander sets him up and tries to replace him with a man called Fedorin. Fedora fails to carry out his task to kill poison Denes and Salamander kills him.
Later Bruce tells Salamander that he saw him with Kent, Salamander denies it which makes Bruce suspicious, which leads Bruce into starting to answer some very important questions and he manages to work out what Kent, The Doctor and Astrid are up to. But rather than dob them in to Salamander, he choses to help them. Not because he hates Salamander, but because The Doctor manages to persuade him to go along with their plan and get all the proof he needs to convince Bruce that Salamander is a bad guy.
Into that you have something else going on which I won't spoil for people who haven't seen the story, but that is a pivotal part of the story which later reveals a certain twist that I certainly wasn't expecting when I watched the recon for the first time and listened to the audio tracks.
If this isn't enough to convince you alone, that this story is worth watching? I don't know what is.
There are some slight odd choices in terms of the costumes. Obviously it was the 60's and so you are going to have 60's based themes on how they think the future was going to look like but when you see something like this for instance:
I mean come on! For Doctor Who standards this is pathetic. It looks like she is wearing a bin bag over whatever it is she's wearing. Poor production values shown there! :(
However as a story, its excellent. I love it. I love it because its politically thrilling. I like all the conspiracies and back drop to this that makes it allow itself to have enough story to progress naturally throughout the six episode structure that it has. It would have been an excellent four parter, but for six episodes I think it works very well. It doesn't drag, the pace of it is great and it all just happens very coherently and of its own accord.
The acting in this is superb. Particularly from Patrick Troughton because he had to play the Doctor but multi role as the villainous Salamander, he had to look Mexican, do a Mexican accent which is a bit iffy at times but all the same, it did create a nice contrast to see Patrick as The Doctor being very nice, and witty and friendly and then he changes into nasty Salamander. It's brilliant, but then Patrick's a very good actor so he differentiates the differences between the two characters really nicely.
For a sixties production it is what it is, and I think the 60's style theme really gives out in this and obviously the future will not look how it looks in this story clearly, considering that the world today is pretty modern in terms of clothes, buildings, political attributes all of those things are not at all like the way they are set up in this story. Just as the world is not like it is how it is the Ridley Scott film 'Blade Runner' which is set in 2019. We do have a warped view in terms of how we see the future and what it will look like? It does perplex me as to why people think they'll be flying cars and bright lights and flamboyant fashion sense. The only accurate thing about that is the advanced technology.
Overall I give "Enemy of the World" 8/10. Very good story, go and watch it.
NEXT WEEK: Day of the Daleks.
