And as you’ve touched upon, the Doctor is even more mercurial in this adventure than normal, isn’t he? He seems to be in a bad mood in Kent’s office, but he was previously sweet, mysterious and charming with Astrid, and prior to that he was hoping to happily scamper about on a beach with a bucket and spade. Just to make matters even murkier, when the Doctor is asked if he’s a “doctor” of law or philosophy, he (delightfully) twinkles, “Which law, whose philosophy?” Mary Peach is slightly odd as Astrid, though, especially when she states matter-of-factly that the Doctor’s helping her would probably involve his death, before opining that it’d be worth it, in a tone of voice that suggests that his not doing so would be about as disastrous as arriving five minutes late for the village fete.
And Troughton gets to indulge in a trait that will become much more frequent once he’s left the show, when the Doctor claims that humanity’s favourite pastime is “trying to destroy each other”. You tell us, Doctor! Why, the political back-and-forth we’re seeing here could only get shocking if we saw the Doctor himself turning nasty... oh.
April 5th
The Enemy of the World episode two
R: 1967 ends with Doctor Who behaving very out of character. There’s a joke about a disused Yeti, but besides that, you’d really hardly know it was the same programme. This is fascinating stuff, and after the claustrophobia of the last few stories, it’s almost disconcerting to have a plotline that leaps back and forth between Australia and Hungary quite so freely. I don’t honestly know how good Troughton’s Mexican accent is while he’s playing Salamander, and I suspect it’s rather all over the place – but that doesn’t matter a jot; he’s clearly having tremendous fun being a tyrannical villain, and, not unlike within his “darker” Doctor moments, he is at his most dangerous when he downplays the role. The scene in which Salamander coolly blackmails his associate Fedorin into becoming a murderer is superbly handled. It is quite an accomplishment all told that, even saddled with the sort of outrageous accent he used in Season Four for comic relief, he comes over as someone who’s in full authority. Indeed, in the one scene this episode where Salamander interacts with Jamie, Troughton’s performance is so different you can honestly forget that he and Hines have ever met before.
And that’s the nub of the matter, really; in The Massacre, the whole plotline of a Doctor’s double seemed entirely out of place amidst the more sober machinations of the Catholic conspiracists, and a strange irrelevance to keep William Hartnell out of the action; in The Chase, the double was even played by another actor altogether! This is a story all about there being a doppelganger – partly to showcase Troughton’s versatility, of course, but also to make the Doctor too seem a little more disturbing and unknowable. The sequence at the top of the episode in which the Doctor impersonates Salamander, then switches back to his familiar affability once Bruce leaves, is very telling – this Doctor suddenly looks a bit fake and threatening as well in his smart suit, someone who could become another man entirely within a trice. This all works because the Doctor has become so central to the series once again. By the end of Season Three, I’d become so used to Hartnell taking holidays or being written into minor parts so often, at times his presence on screen seemed rather out of place, a throwback to a style of story that Doctor Who had moved away from. But since he was introduced in The Power of the Daleks, there hasn’t been a single episode in which Troughton hasn’t been a major force. He’s refined and reshaped his Doctor over the stories since then until we now have a performance in which we can have total confidence – he never looks out of place as Hartnell often could, he never seems to fluff his lines or seem unconvinced by the genre he’s being asked to play. So that’s why now, halfway through his tenure, giving him a different costume and a different accent is so effective. When Hartnell appeared as the Abbot of Amboise, it always served to remind you that this figure might be the Doctor. When Troughton appears as Salamander, the shock is that he never could be.
It’s not untypical over the Christmas season for children’s TV stars to dress up in different costumes and play against what the kids at home would be expecting. It’s what Blue Peter and Crackerjack would always get up to. This could so easily have been a variation on that theme – but Troughton here is resolutely not giving a pantomime performance, in a story so cynical and dirty that it feels about as unseasonal as it could get.
T: If you’re acquainted with the Doctor Who novelisations as much as I am, the most notable absence from this episode is the word “bastard” – which Ian Marter shockingly added while writing the book version of this story, in the scene between Salamander’s head-thug Benik (who is brilliantly given the first name of Theodore, I think) and Bruce. Oddly enough, I was someone who always wanted my Doctor Who to be grown-up (I was obsessed with telling people that it wasn’t a children’s programme, despite my being the ripe old age of ten at the time), but this left a bad taste in my mouth. There was something very un-Doctor Who about that swear word, and the televised scene certainly doesn’t miss it, largely thanks to Milton Johns (as Benik) being so silkily threatening.
Bruce also gets a cracking character moment at the top of the episode, when he collars Jamie and tells him to watch his step – despite the fact that the poor lad hasn’t said anything. It’s a terrific example of impotent bullying that illustrates Bruce’s anger magnificently. Indeed, most of this story is about the people involved rather than the action – both cliffhangers have entailed people putting themselves at risk (or, Fedorin’s case, not having the courage to do so) to get involved. With only the telesnaps to guess from, I think it’s safe to assume that the protracted silence at the end of the episode concentrated on Fedorin looking all guilty, and the disgraced Denes being inscrutably noble.
There are a few other things of note here... Salamander gets a splendidly horrible line about why Fariah became a food taster – “She was hungry” – and he calls the guards “boys”, an interesting touch that brings him further away from the Doctor, who’d never be so matey with thugs. And it increasingly becomes obvious that the time travellers need to be extra cautious with regards altering the political balance of power at this point in Earth’s history. Why, if they’re not careful, this sort of incorrigible meddling is going to catch up with them...
The Enemy of the World episode three
R: In his one scene as the Doctor, Troughton is a joy, lamenting the destructiveness of man as he holds up a broken piece of crockery. The problem is, he’s still finding reasons not to take part in the main action – come on, we’re halfway through the story! It’s very strange, after a couple of stories which have been about the dangers of inaction, to have an adventure which is pretty much all a quest to give the Doctor enough reason to get involved. Jamie and Victoria going undercover as spies is strange as it is – like Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines seems almost a different character out of his standard uniform – but when you consider that they’re facing these dangers just to get information sufficiently lurid to prompt the Doctor into lifting a finger, it’s all the stranger. And then you remember that this is by David Whitaker, script editor of the first season – and then this throwback to the style of those early Hartnell adventures which were more about running away than taking any responsibility makes more sense.
And that’s one of the reasons why the tone here really does seem so downbeat. Jamie and Victoria have a plan to save the life of Denes – and it fails, completely and profoundly, and Denes is shot in the back. It’s a shocking moment, all the more because Barry Letts rather throws it away – we don’t even see Denes fall down as he’s shot, he’s not even given the dignity of a decent death scene. So all the initiative the companions have shown to get taken into Salamander’s confidence was for nothing, and they’re led away dismissively by guards – not even to appear in the following episode. It almost feels as if they were operating by Doctor Who rules, and the story rather sharply has tripped them up to tell them they’re appearing in the wrong show. It’s impres
sive and startling, certainly, and unlike anything we’ve seen for ages – but it does leave something of a bad taste in the mouth.
Thank God, then, for Reg Lye as Griffin the cook. It’s a terrific comic performance of such deliberate pessimism that it makes all the sour drama around him feel lifted as a consequence. It’s Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh transplanted into a James Bond thriller. It’s rare for a character in Doctor Who to come along where every single line is a gag – and even rarer for an actor to make every single one of them count. Griffin is never mentioned before this episode, and he’s never to appear again, making this one of the oddest cameos ever in the series – and one of the best.
T: See, this is why I think that complaints about a story being “padded” are often overstated. Entertainment is about adventure, plot and character, as evidenced here. Griffin contributes absolutely nothing to the overall storyline of The Enemy of the World, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s thoroughly enjoyable. If he hadn’t been so dourly amusing, his presence might have been an irritating diversion, but he’s fab. It was once suggested that The Underwater Menace episode three escaped the archive purge because it was kept to preserve the majesty of the Atlantean Fish People Dance for future generations. If so, I’d like to imagine that they slapped a preservation order on this orphaned episode, purely so my children could savour the splendour of Reg Lye in this delightful role.
Otherwise, it’s interesting how much people dismiss Troughton’s performance as Salamander as a “comic turn” – is it because he’s putting on a funny accent? – but I think he’s rather more magnificent than that. He shapes his face to fit the part – his upper lip is drawn back, flat and terse; his lower jaw is stiffened; and even his cheeks contrive to be sleeker, less baggily humorous. Troughton also simultaneously endows Salamander with a coldness and a burning intelligence – just look at that superb final close-up, as his eyes dart about whilst his brain weighs up the implications of Bruce’s confused claim that he met with “you... or, someone like you”. Contrast this with the Doctor’s lovely wistful mourning of some broken crockery, and his (ad-libbed, one suspects) line about there being enough air in the box in which he’s hiding, and you can tell that this isn’t just an actor showing off. There’s a real sense that we’re dealing with two different characters.
It’s a very enjoyable episode, although it’s very oddly cut (especially when compared to Letts’ work in future). We chop in and out of scenes quite messily (Denes, denied a death scene here, at least has the honour of one in the book), and the decision to hold Denes prisoner in a corridor is so bonkers, it’s more surreal than anything in The Celestial Toymaker. “It’s easier to guard him there,” we’re told – easier than what, exactly? A room? With a door? Four walls? And a lock? And Letts went along with this? Was there not a room available, at all, in which to film these scenes? It’s barking, absolutely barking.
One final remark: I can’t help but notice that the actor playing the Janos the guard is EastEnders scribe Bill Lyons, who was nothing like as lovely when he was one of the judging panel on a horrible and exploitative reality show called Soapstars. (Well, perhaps I’m just mistaking him for his evil alter ego.) I almost wish I didn’t know this – sometimes, too much high geekery can be a bad thing.
April 6th
The Enemy of the World episode four
R: The cynicism of the episode’s tone is a lot more consistent here, helped in part by the absence of Jamie and Victoria; they’re not around to remind us what Doctor Who should be like. Giles Kent’s attempts to blackmail the Doctor into killing Salamander are as amoral as Salamander’s own blackmails we’ve already seen; it begins to feel that the Doctor isn’t so much wanting the proof he’s been asking for after all, but just playing for time as he struggles all the more feebly to avoid being part of this rather squalid little adventure. Certainly, his insistence that he will never be an executioner, but only bring the dictator to justice via proper legal means, feels somewhat idealistic in a world as brutal as this one. And the emphasis upon brutality here is honestly startling – it’s achieved in part by the use of the word “kill”, a word used rather sparingly in Doctor Who, with “destroy” or “exterminate” being far more colourful synonyms. Benik’s attack on Kent’s base has a hysteria about it that is actually frightening, and there’s a real sense of events spinning out of control into violence. Fariah’s death is sick and nasty – Benik threatens to kill her for information even as she’s dying from a gunshot wound, and her response is to spit in his face – and it’s only tempered by the obvious horror his own soldiers feel towards the carnage. (I love the way the guard captain is so disgusted by the soldier who shot her, demanding to know whether he always follows orders; it’s a subtle but heartening moment when you realise there’s still a humanity to some of these thugs in uniform.) It’s hard to believe that only last week, Benik’s threat was confined to breaking plates.
And then, at the halfway point of the episode, it pulls off a real coup de theatre. When Salamander reveals futuristic technology hidden in his records room, and goes down deep into the Earth, it is as startling as when the First World War generals will start talking on television screens in The War Games. We’ve bought into the thriller format so completely (and it has become its most credible only minutes previously) that the shifting of styles is quite dynamic. The underground society who have been tricked into believing the world above has become a radioactive waste is a lovely idea; we get to see Salamander treated as another sort of saviour altogether. And we go from a world in which characters seem truly cosmopolitan, with names plucked from all over the world like Denes and Fedorin, to one that’s jarringly British. We’re now hearing from people called Colin and Mary – in contrast to the world above their heads, which is run by cynical politicians and gun-toting soldiers, they sound deliberately fey, a bit like tea-drinking Radio Four listeners. They’re extremely gullible, of course; they’ve been in their underground bunker for five years! But Whitaker is making a satirical point. Having shown us a world stage which is so relentlessly cold, he now wrongfoots us by presenting the people who’ve so passively allowed that world to come into being – and they’re not Eastern Europeans hiding behind exotic names, they’re us.
T: Oooh, Benik is as horrible as you say – you really get the impression that his wardrobe is full of rubber, whips and gimp masks. Milton Johns has been a vaguely camp menace up till this point, but here he’s a disgusting, slimy sadist of the highest order; he gives a performance that exquisitely veers between purred smugness to screeched psychopathy. Top marks too, to Elliott Cairnes as this week’s guard captain – he’s in no way important to the plot, but the genuine (albeit limp) way he apologises to Fariah for her fatal shooting is a fine piece of acting. And when Benik shoves the gun in her face, the captain snaps him out of his sickening fervour by pointing out that she’s already dead... making the scene quite remarkably bleak and horrible. It’s all capped off with Benik treating the news of her demise with a curt and frustrated “good”, as if he’s been denied his money shot.
Much of the rest of this episode is oddly sci-fi, as Salamander gets into a pod that goes deep into the Earth, and goes through seemingly endless procedures before unveiling himself to his mates sheltering underground. It’s a neat plot twist that takes the story in another direction (something that is always worth doing, particularly in a six-parter). And it’s also bizarre to hear chilling music that I normally associate with the following story – it’s so effectively used in The Web of Fear that it almost cheapens it (to my ears, anyway) to use it in a scene that merely introduces some scruffy people living in a bunker. In my world, this should be reserved for the creeps and shadows of Web and the menace of The Shining – it shouldn’t be wasted on this spangly speculative future. I’m quite relieved when it fades out.
This adventure is moving along nicely, but there remains a couple of odd lapses – both Fariah and Bruce asked a pretty reasonable question (how she was blackmailed
, why he’s visiting Salamander) and each brushes it off with a that’s-not-important-right-now dismissal, the ultimate “I’ll tell you later” sort of writing. And by this point, the Doctor’s insistence on waiting to take action against Salamander has become something of a joke – it’s the end of episode four, and he’s only just now decided to become proactive. In that regard, The Enemy of the World seems to be starting at the point when most Doctor Who stories have already finished.
The Enemy of the World episode five
R: That scene where Benik prepares to torture Jamie and Victoria is a bit near the knuckle, isn’t it? We don’t often get depictions of real sadism, where someone seems genuinely stimulated by cruelty to others – Milton Johns plays it very credibly, but the almost sexual thrill he gets from the anticipation of making the Doctor’s friends suffer is very disturbing. As is what follows it – the Doctor interrogates Jamie and Victoria whilst posing as Salamander, in order to convince Bruce that their fears are genuine. After the way Whitaker had the Doctor manipulate Jamie in his last script, here he is again presenting our hero as a man quite prepared to use companions for the greater good if he has to. When he’s finally driven Victoria to the point she needs to assault him physically, he says in his normal voice, “You wouldn’t hurt your old friend, the Doctor!” It’s as contrived a line as you can get, and deliberately so – referring to himself in the third person like that suddenly makes him more distanced, and we suddenly see Troughton playing the Doctor, just as he’s been playing Salamander, and playing the Doctor playing Salamander. It’s unnerving.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 55
