‘THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast Dec ’67/ Jan ’68
Written by David Whitaker
Beware the standard PLOT SPOILERS

DOCTOR: But isn't there another way out of this?
KENT: Only one. Be Salamander.

The Doctor Doubled (Twice)

In the distant year of 2018, Salamander poses as a public benefactor. But his plot is to set off volcanoes (and the like) around the world, blame the Governor of that region for not doing anything about them, depose him and replace him with his own man. Perhaps closely followed by laughing cruelly. And by coincidence he happens to look exactly like you-know-Who…

The initial impetus for this story was the same as for ‘The Massacre’. Feeling confined by always playing the same role, the lead actor asked if he could also do a villainous double. (And unless I miss my guess Troughton’s next words were “and I’d like to try an Italian accent… no wait, Mexican.”)

With ’The Massacre’, this was turned into an existential drama about the meaninglessness of identity and futility of existence. Mostly conveyed by making no sense whatsoever. This time its taken it as an excuse for a rip-roaring adventure story, with action babes in helicopter chases. Things had changed, it seemed, over those last few years…

This has come to be known as the ‘*Who’* does Bond story. But patented Bond motifs don’t appear - the over-elaborate execution attempt, the steady supply of gadgets, the penetrating of the villain’s secret lair and so on. It’s more Spy-Fi in general, which was after all a very Sixties genre.

Take for example rebel agent Astrid. She’s more Avengers woman than Bond girl, to the point you’re not surprised to hear Mary Peach subsequently auditioned for the show. Dressed throughout like a principal boy from a panto, she somehow refrains from slapping her thighs. It’s notable that she has relatively minimal screen time with the Doctor, and least of all when she’s being at her most kickass.

(Though the Guards seem graduates of Incompetent College even more than usual, perhaps even rivalling those of ‘The Space Museum’. No wonder she kicks her way through them with such impunity.)

The Bond comparison may be because that’s the best-known example of the genre. Or perhaps because some explosion footage is filched from ’From Russia With Love’. But it leads to this story’s reputation as the one that broke from the base-under-siege rule.

And indeed, sometimes it seems to exult in doing this. There doesn’t seem any real reason to relocate the action from Australia to Hungary other than to say that they’ve done it. Or more accurately, to say that they did it via rocket ship in under two hours. (Maybe Astrid knows a short-cut around Polynesia.)

And there’s the strangely unusual feature that the cliffhangers aren’t actually cliffhangers, and more like chapter endings. Episode four even picks up elsewhere from episode three’s ending. With all the running and shooting going on, it sometimes feels like everything that happens is a cliffhanger bar the episode endings themselves. (Bizarrely, another point of similarity to ’The Massacre’.) 

Okay, Bond to Spy-Fi, it might not sound so much of a shift. But once made you realise the Troughton era has been here before. With ‘The Faceless Ones’, ’The Evil of The Daleks’ and (perhaps to a lesser degree) ‘The Power Of the Daleks’ were all stuffed with espionage, treachery and surveillance. (‘The Highlanders’ is the notable exception, and that was essentially imposed upon the production team.)

But let’s take the bait and say the brief was ‘Bond on a budget’. The problem here’s the obvious one. It’s a bit like saying “pyramids, but small”. Remember the most recent Bond film when this was broadcast hadn’t been ’From Russia With Love’, but the somewhat more lavish ’You Only Live Twice’. Even ’The Avengers’, though another TV show, was granted a higher budget by commercial rival ITV.

The first episode gets going quickly, and soon turns into a chase involving hovercraft and helicopters. Okay, one hovercraft and one helicopter, still one more than you might expect. But you start to suspect the budget was spent on luring us in. Episodes two and three feature, among other delights, a display of villainy by smashing the good guys’ crockery, not quite on a league with killer lasers.

We’re all now used to the show staple of running round corridors as a way of filling time. Here someone sits down in a corridor and has a bite to eat. When Salamander exultantly tells a rumbled Jamie “ingenuity requires a constant stream of new ideas”, it seems almost an auto-critique.

Plus, it soon becomes obvious that showing two Troughtons is a logistical challenge that has to be saved for the final episode. And the solution’s to keep the Doctor out of the action. He keeps demanding proof of Salamander’s no-good nature. Whether for his own benefit or to show the world who their enemy is, that isn’t made terribly clear. But, seen from our ‘post-truth’ era, it all seems somewhat naive.

(I’d have been tempted to introduce a farce scenario, where the Doctor and Salamander keep narrowly missing one another. So one orders his men to all stand on their heads and leaves the room, only for another to enter and demand to know what they’re up to.)

For Evil to Exist, Good Men Must Be Credulous

And we’ve grown wearily used to this. An episode of set-up, and episode of resolution, and a whole bunch of running round in the middle. But just when we’re sunk into this, in episode four… yes, four… Whitaker throws in a curve ball.

Admittedly this answers a narrative question no-one’s been asking. Salamander’s power comes largely from his ability to manipulate the weather, like a one-man form of climate change. But we’ve been told he’s a diabolic mastermind, a type we’ve grown used to, and besides this is all futuristic stuff with rockets anyway. So no-one, within the tale or without, has wondered just how he achieves this. (Weather control seems a feature of this era. It has already appeared in ‘The Moonbase’, and shows up in the Avengers episode ’A Surfeit of H20’, 1965, and the Spy-Fi film ’Our Man Flynt’, 1966.)

It turns out Salamander has a team of patsies, who he’s hidden in an underground bunker for years, telling them nuclear war rages up above and they need to stoke up the weather against imagined foes. He’s a Devilish figure, more often seen manipulating or disposing of others than doing stuff himself. But the surface Salamander mostly worked by blackmail. While this Salamander, someone who brings out the good in people but then twists it for his own nefarious ends, seems more narratively interesting.

But more, the evil doppelganger trope is widely thought to be about the elements you most repress in yourself coming back in the guise of another person. And this is more the stuff an evil un-Doctor would do. There’s something almost Christ versus Anti-Christ about it. Against the Doctor who was the most quiet and unassuming, Salamander is a charismatic public figure who has the world idolising him.

For much of the time, he exists in a kind of double vision. We’re prompted to see him as a set of villainous signifiers, all scheming, swarthy and foreign. (And Not At All Racist, Just of Its Time.) Whereas the great world public all see him as a kind of saviour. (“A public benefactor. Quite a speaker too.”) So the bunker becomes a correlative to being trapped inside Salamander’s concocted worldview.

In the end there’s precisely one shot of the two Troughtons, the thing we came here for. But Salamander almost immediately then getting thrown out the Tardis, there is something satisfying to that - like they’re two magnetic poles which repel one another.

Moreover it turns out that, when it didn’t look like he was up to much, Whitaker’s been adept with some smart set-up. First a question mark is thrown over Giles Kent, leader of the rebels, who tips off Salamander’s guards to force the Doctor into impersonating him.

We then meet black-clad, stern and abrasive Donald Bruce, who looks to be Salamander’s right-hand man. But this is followed by supercilious Benik, who manages to be unpopular even among his own men. (There’s multiple good performances, but Milton Johns excels in the love-to-hate-him department.). And Bruce turns out to be the ‘good German’, the one good man stuck in a bad system, willing to turn against his boss. (Apologies to any German readers. It’s the term popular use has stuck us with.)

As much as James Bond has a moral, it would be an anti-moral, that it takes a killer to kill a killer. Whitaker instead brings back a classic ’Who’ moral, that power will destroy itself. Benik orders his men to shoot to kill, then is laughingly told by a dying woman he’ll never be able to get the needed information from her now. Salamander is the one who dematerialises the Tardis, hoping for escape, instead extruding himself.

All in all, there is much to enjoy in this story. You just need to get over the hump of the second and third episodes. (Small wonder it’s reputation increased from the time when only the third was available.) But it’s also an odd mixture of protracted with bumpily elliptical, the latter particularly a problem in the last episode. Salamander meets his demise so late its as if he was trying to hang on for the final bell. Which means, after the absence of cliffhangers throughout, the final episode has one. Go figure!