Who Review: The Enemy of the World

You really miss something when you only get a dozen episodes of Who a year. Everything is just flung at you with no time for the plot to breathe organically or for the Doctor to really get involved in the setting into which he's been deposited.

The Enemy of the World is from Season Five of the classic series, which means it's in black and white and stars Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor. You might find a bit of Matt Smith in his characterization, especially at the beginning as he strips down to his long johns just to have a bit of a splash in the water. This harmless bit of characterization is probably overdone, but it works nicely because Troughton pulls double duty in this serial and also plays the villain.

Without giving too much away, the Doctor is approached by a resistance group that wants him to impersonate the villainous Salamander so that they (or he) can kill him, although a) not everything is as it seems, and b) the scheme seems to be overly complicated, given that Jamie at one point breaches Salamander's security all by himself. Despite that rather glaring plot hole, the script does move along at a solid pace, drip-feeding you information, innuendo and plot twists at just the right pace. You can watch the entire thing in one sitting without feeling its two-and-a-half hour runtime.

Obviously, goes the usual yarn, you have to make allowances for the shoestring budget and rushed schedule of the classic Who production. To be sure, there is a little bit of that here, but it shows up shockingly late in the serial. No, I'm not talking about the bit where they stick George Pravda in a hallway because they couldn't afford to build a prison cell. That's glossed over about as well as it is in any other serial. No, I'm talking about the underground fallout shelter, about which more later. But while I'm on the production values, I want to praise the team for taking the time to set up a complicated effects shot at the very end of the story, where both of Troughton's characters are in-shot at the same time.

Another amazing thing about this serial is the lack of black and white morality that certain other adventures, both classic and modern, have fallen prey to. To be sure, Salamander is an evil man. The show can never come right out and say this, but it's pretty clear from the subtext that he's taking sexual advantage of his food-taster. But his security chief turns out to be a decent human being, while his bitterest enemy is not quite the saint you might expect him to be. (Of course, the Doctor's suspicions are spot-on from the start.)

The script in general sings, crackling with little bits of characterization to breathe life into ordinarily dry info-dumps. It's astonishing to watch the first episode of this and think that it's written by the same man who wrote The Edge of Destruction, possibly the most boring Doctor Who serial ever. And Barry Letts slips behind the camera and delivers the goods - there's an amazing handheld POV shot from a helicopter taking off that looks like it belongs in a film, not in a notoriously cheap television show.

The pacing is unusually good for a black-and-white serial; it's basically the Doctor Who equivalent of Casablanca, or perhaps The Third Man, given the ambiguous morality of one of the main characters and the fact that a protracted sequence takes place in a tunnel. 

And that brings us to the one significant problem with this otherwise-magnificent gem of a serial. It turns out there are a bunch of underground proles that Salamander has duped in order to carry out his plan (because it's so evil he can't entrust his minions to do it - see what I mean about the unusual morality of this serial?). The problem is, we see these "oppressed underground proles" too often in other serials, and neither their costumes nor their performances are up to par with the rest of the serial. 

The action also gets a little bit confusing towards the end, mainly because they try to pull two switcheroos in a row, making us think in one scene that the Doctor is actually Salamander, and that Salamander is the Doctor in a subsequent scene. The first scene is utterly brilliant and so quintessentially Troughton, but I'm not convinced the payoff is worth the attempt to confuse the audience. The second time, it's pretty obvious what's going on given that "The Doctor" won't speak (Salamander speaks like Speedy Gonzales, and the Doctor mentions a few times that he's concerned he won't be able to master Salamander's accent in time).

These are ultimately minor quibbles. It's great to have this back in the archive after 35 years. Bravo to the people who found it, and double bravo to the people who made it. Final grade: A-.