Day 95 — April 5th 2021
The Enemy of the World Episodes One and Two
When I did my last marathon, a friend who’d enjoyed Doctor Who as a kid but hadn’t seen it in years decided he’d like to do a marathon of his own. Not constricted to doing a set number of episodes in any given day he soon raced ahead of me, and really enjoyed rediscovering the series, and catching all the stories he’d never seen before.
One day when I saw him he told me that he’d got a ‘new favourite story’. I did some quick working out in my head of where he must be in the marathon and told him that yes, The Web of Fear was considered one of the greatest stories of all time, and that I couldn’t wait to reach it because I’d not heard it before.
‘Oh no,’ he corrected me. ‘Web of Fear is the next on my list. My new favourite is The Enemy of the World’.
Reader, I boggled.
The Enemy of the World? Really? I’d seen the surviving Episode Three and couldn’t remember a lot, and although I’d not heard the missing episodes from the story it was one so rarely even mentioned that I was surprised to hear it was an automatic favourite for him.
And then, miraculously, it turned up! And only a few months later! It turned out that my friend had been ahead of the curve in discovering the brilliance, because almost everyone was taken aback by how good this one was. The return came slightly too late for me to watch it in sequence on the blog, so I dipped back into the recoveries when Troughton popped up for The Three Doctors a few weeks later on for me.
But briefly, oh so briefly, I’d been hoping to be the first person in almost 45 years to watch the story fully in context of other Doctor Who. Towards the end of June another friend who works at the BBC phoned me up. ‘They’ve found Enemy and Web,’ he explained. Big announcement to come shortly. He asked if I’d like ‘advance’ copies to watch for the marathon, as the releases wouldn’t be out in time.
I was amazed! Of course I wanted copies to watch! I’d been dreading Season Five. At that point there was a run of six six-part stories, of which only nine of the 36 episodes existed in the archives. I’d been enjoying the Narrated Soundtracks, but this was going to be a hell of a slog, I felt. And now I was being offered the chance to double the number of episodes available to actually watch. Brilliant!
A month or so later, with the days I needed to watch The Enemy of the World closing in, I gave my friend another call to ask about the copies of those ‘new’ stories… and he claimed to know nothing about it! He said they’d not recovered anything that he knew of, and if they had then he’d certainly not got copies he could share. I did the episodes as the Narrated Soundtracks (with the surviving orphans in the appropriate places) and that was that. I even found that The Web of Fear in particular worked brilliantly on audio, so perhaps it wasn’t the end of the world at all.
Fast forward to October, the finds are announced and the episodes released the same day. Ooh, that was exciting! I managed to hold off until I could fit them into the marathon itself, but God it was an exciting time. To this day my friend claims he didn’t know the episodes had been found. I text him this morning to ask about it and he swears he found out the same time as the rest of us. Which makes me wonder if I dreamt his initial phone call!
Whatever happened, although I saw the episodes around the end of the year, it was long after I’d moved on from the Troughton era, so it was almost impossible to appreciate them in context of all the other stories around them. And, of course, I’d only heard the tales a few months earlier, so the twists and turns weren’t as fresh for me as I’d like.
So here we are, eight years on from their return, and I’m finally getting the chance to see them in context. I’ve not seen either of these tales since the end of 2013, so it really is going in fresh. And even after all this time, isn’t there something really brilliant about being able to say ‘The Enemy of the World? Oh, I’ve not watched that one for years…’
The Enemy of the World — Episode One
You can sort of see why this first episode was such a revelation when it turned up.
The first five minutes are largely dialogue-free, and the tele-snaps for it seem even more blurry than usual. They don’t showcase the great wide shots of the location, the sheer joy in Troughton’s performance as he runs off to have a paddle in the ocean, and the energy that the location work has. I was tempted to give the Narrated Soundtrack a listen so I could see how well it holds up in comparison to the full episode, but I think I’m still too busy simply revelling in being able to actually watch the story. The soundtrack can wait!
There’s other visual flourishes in the episode that are complete revelations, too. The tele-snaps showcase the shot from a helicopter as we fly away from two men shooting at the camera… but they give no sense of just how impressive that shot is in the finished episode. Certainly, the camera script gives no indication of the scale here, and I was so taken aback by it when watching today that I actively had to skip back and watch it again. We’ve never seen anything quite like this in the series before, and it really feels like something fresh and new.
The Enemy of the World is the first involvement of Barry Letts with the programme — here on directorial duties — and if he’s going to keep injecting this kind of energy into the show then I’m more than happy to know he’ll be popping up a lot more in this marathon over the next few months.
The other nice thing about all the location shooting in this one is that we’re not spending very long in studio sets at all. It’s a full ten minutes before we see Troughton and his friends in the studio, and even before that we’ve only a couple of very brief scenes of the guest cast shot on video. It gives the whole production a very slick feeling. I’ve said plenty of times how much I wish all of Doctor Who had been made on film, and this might be the closest we’ve got at this stage.
And this isn’t anything in particular about the location filming, but I really love this photo taken during the recording of the episode. There’s something about it which is really exciting, and I feel more ‘involved’ by it than by most behind the scenes images!
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed doing in this marathon so far is comparing the finished episodes to the camera scripts to see how they differ. Often it’s a good opportunity to spot where the cast have added little bits of business — like Troughton’s panic at seeing an Ice Warrior — or to add a bit more of a relationship between characters as with ‘Hobby’ in The Moonbase. Today, though, I knew I had to see the script because some of the dialogue felt a little off.
Late in the episode, when Giles Kent is trying to convince Doctor Who of Salamander’s evil, he lists off people who’ve died in mysterious circumstances;
Kent: You remember Michael Assevski? He was Controller of the Eastern European Zone. He was drowned at sea a mile from shore. Hockingham, murdered. All of them were seen with Salamander, or a man known as his deputy, shortly before their deaths.
Astrid: All of them were replaced by men known to be in Salamander’s power.
It seemed strange to list two people and then say that ‘all of them’ were murdered and replaced. I wondered if they’d cut some people out, and it turns out that they did.
As scripted, Kent originally listed the mysterious deaths of four people, including a suicide. I wonder if that’s the reason for that particular cut, because for a show that features so much death a suicide feels oddly out of place at this point in its history.
Also cut is a comment from Astrid about Assevski being ‘an Olympic swimming champion’, which certainly helps to explain why his death was so mysterious. It’s a shame to have lost so much of this exchange, I think, as it sticks out on screen as being a slightly clumsy removal.
This episode also includes two lines from Doctor Who which I find myself quoting often. The first is his response to being hated by people who’ve never met him (‘Me? I’m the nicest possible person’) which I usually say shortly after saying something mean about someone. The second is the closing line of the episode — ‘Why, ‘allo, Bruce. What are you doing here, huh?’ — which I like to quote, complete with dodgy Mexican accent, when my wife enters a room.
And while I’m on the subject of dialogue, it made me smile to see the subtitles for this episode on BritBox give Jamie’s (unscripted) battle cry of ‘Creag an tuire’ as ‘Brigadoon’!
A solid start to the story, and an episode I’m so pleased we can see. It really is the perfect example of how much is gained from the recovery of these episodes. I don’t know what score I gave this one when I first did the audio in 2013, but I’ll wager it wasn’t as high as the 8/10 I’m giving it here.
This episode’s recovery also allows us a really good look at a couple of TARDIS prop details. When the ship first arrives we get a clear shot of the ‘Pull to Open’ panel on the wrong door, and while said door is wide open the bright sky helps to show off that the ‘Police Box’ signs on the front and back of the props were transparent. It’s only a little thing, but not something you often see so clearly on screen!
The Enemy of the World — Episode Two
One of the areas where The Enemy of the World has fallen apart for me in the past is that there’s so many characters, and they’ve all got their own distinct motivations and goals. It makes it surprisingly hard to keep track of who’s who. This episode is especially packed, introducing several new characters. By my reckoning in the story so far we’ve got;
- Doctor Who, Jamie and Victoria. Travellers in time and space. Doctor Who is the spitting image of…
- Salamander. The Shopkeeper of the World. Some people love him and think he’s a saviour who’s going to end world hunger. Other people believe he’s evil, including…
- Giles Kent. Former (Deputy) Security Chief (of the Central European Zone), Kent is now trying to expose Salamander with the help of…
- Astrid Ferrier. We don’t really know a lot about Astrid, apart from the fact that she flirts with Doctor Who quite a bit. She and Kent have help from…
- Denes. The Controller of the Central European Zone, and an obstacle to Salamander’s plans for global conquest. He’s due to be replaced by…
- Fedorin. The Deputy Controller of the Central European Zone. He’s being blackmailed with the help of…
- Fariah. Salamander’s food taster, who works for him alongside…
- Bruce. Salamander’s Overall Security Chief. His suspicions are already raised by seeing Doctor Who impersonate Salamander, and he’s voiced these concerns with…
- Benik. Salamander’s assistant.
When I type it all out like that it doesn’t sound as many people as it feels, but I think what complicates things is the interpersonal relationships between them all, and that they’ve got varied (though similar sounding) job titles, and are spread out across the globe. We’ve moved from Australia to Hungary in this episode, and I think we might even see some other locations before the story is through.
In The Ice Warriors the set up was pretty simple, and the relationships between each character were simple enough to keep track of without much effort. This feels like a different situation, and I know it’s tripped me up before. Especially because of the similarity in names between Astrid Ferrier and Fariah. That’s the kind of thing that you feel should have been caught by the script editor to avoid complication.
It also doesn’t help that I think the painting of Astrid on the cover to the Target Novel of this story looks like Jo Grant, and so the first time I saw it really confused me!
Today, though, I’ve been able to keep the characters all separate in my head, and I’ve not had as much trouble trying to keep track as I expected to. I don’t know if it’s simply a case that third time around I know roughly the story I’m watching, or if I’ve just paid more attention on this occasion. I suspect it might be a mixture of the two.
It’s another strong episode, this one, and another example of why being able to really watch it is such a good thing. Barry Letts is famous for his love of CSO when he takes charge of the programme a couple of years after this, but you can see those ideas developing already in his direction for this story. Obviously you can’t do blue/green/yellow screen for black and white material, but he puts back projection to work here in a way we’ve never seen before. There’s a couple of sequences where it really works — Jamie throwing the bomb off the balcony and seeing it explode in the distance is great, for example. It’s perhaps a little less effective when we see Jamie strolling down a path later and then jumping into shot in studio at the appropriate moment.
But all the same it’s interesting to watch. There’s really no need to use back projection in either of the situations — There’s easier ways to do these things which would require less set up and surely save time in studio and pre-filming, but it’s appreciated that Letts has attempted to do something different, and it’s just another occasion of the programme evolving as time goes on.
The script continues to impress me in this one, too. My absolute highlight is the description of Fariah’s job as Salamander’s food taster;
Fedorin: ‘What on Earth made you take a job as a food taster?’
Salamander: ‘She was hungry. Only thing is, now she has all the food she needs, she’s lost her appetite.’
I’m also particularly fond of another exchange between these men in which Salamander reveals his plans;
Salamander: ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Denes is going to die mysteriously. An assassin. Terrible.’
It provides a nice counterpoint to Giles’ suggestion in the first episode that this is exactly how Salamander operates, and it’s the kind of gorgeous dialogue I’ve come to expect from David Whitaker.
I was hoping to have another dig around in the camera script to find out if Doctor Who’s ‘disused yeti?!’ comment was scripted, but strangely the camera script omits that entire scene. There’s not even a reference to it in the breakdown of sets for the episode! It transpires that there’s some debate over when this scene was recorded, as it doesn’t appear in any of the camera scripts for the serial, or on any of the surviving paperwork. General consensus is that it was recorded alongside Episode Four, when the set for Giles Kent’s office was next constructed.
Or maybe I’ve imagined that scene, too…!
Another 8/10 for this one.
