Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (60 page)

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.

The problem with this demonstration of Jamie and Victoria’s fear is that it still doesn’t provide any proof that Salamander is a wrong ‘un. And it’s now become frustrating – we’ve seen he’s a corrupt murderer right from episode two, so here we are, two hours into the drama, and we’ve known something for ages that makes the Doctor look at best overcautious, at worst rather stupid. He’s been in the same room as Giles Kent now for five
weeks –
I genuinely cheered out loud when he behaves in character at last, giving Bruce his gun back to win his trust, and leaves to take part in the action. But it’s perhaps indicative of this tale that when the cliffhanger is all about Salamander finally leaving evidence of his crimes, it’s an assault on a man the Doctor has never met, from a part of the plotline no series regular has had a part in, and is discovered by a guest character. There’s only so long you can sideline the Doctor before it begins to look a bit embarrassing.

Lots of good things about this, of course. Salamander’s attempts to dissuade Swann – one of the underground dwellers – from reaching the surface are those of a man who doesn’t want the extra blood on his hands; it’s hard to tell from the telesnaps, but there seems to be almost a weary resignation as Troughton picks up the crowbar to brain him with. And Colin’s despairing anguish when he realises that Salamander has taken someone else away from the bunker is very affecting.

T:
I appreciate a cliffhanger that deviates from the “Kill them, kill them now!” mould, but throughout this story, David Whitaker seems almost hell-bent on daring us to find a single one that’s even remotely exciting. It’s as if this was shown in the UK as a feature-length adventure (which it wasn’t, of course) that was then chopped into 25-minute chunks for the American market, and thus given extremely arbitrary cliffhangers imposed by timing necessities (as happened all the time when Season Twenty-Two hit the US market). And yet, I still quite like them – the one here entails the gravely wounded Swann identifying the man who betrayed him, and there’s something arresting about hearing nothing but the baddie’s name (“Salamander!!”) from a dying man’s lips as we go to the credits.

Troughton continues to play Salamander as an extremely plausible villain – a weaker actor would have been winking to us, aware that we know he’s playing the bad guy, but I completely buy Troughton’s commitment, and the forceful yet almost desperately pleading way he says, “Because I am right and you are wrong!”, when Swann pushes Salamander about taking him to the surface, which threatens to undo Salamander’s plans. It’s great work too from Christopher Burgess, who as Swann hits the correct notes of a righteous anger tinged with an inner decency.

If anything,
the Doctor’s
characterisation seems a bit harder to accept. He decides that Bruce is an honest and reasonable man – on very little evidence, and in spite of him being a total git to everyone in the caravan in episodes one and two. But then, this sort of reversal seems to be going around – by the end of episode, Bruce himself is convinced that Salamander is corrupt, even though he’s been given no actual proof to that effect. Still, that means he was about four times quicker than the Doctor in working this out!!

But I would have to judge that this episode belongs to Milton Johns as Benik. I suspect we have a tendency to latch onto actors such as Norman Jones, Bernard Kay and Johns because of their recurring good service to Doctor Who over the years, but I honestly think that we’ve seen them all do acting of the highest order. And
what
a riposte Benik gives, upon confirming Jamie’s suggestion that he was probably a very nasty little boy. Yes, Benik concedes, but he had a most
enjoyable
childhood. Creepy.

April 7th

The Enemy of the World episode six

R:
This doesn’t end tidily. But then, that seems quite appropriate for a story that has so stubbornly refused to follow the familiar Doctor Who template, and has been keen to ensure there’s an ugly ambiguity to everyone’s motives. The underground prisoners are resolutely
not
saved at the episode’s end; Astrid has determined that she’ll keep her promise to the dying Swann, and she’ll be helped by Bruce – and that the two of them combine forces after years of enmity is in itself quite positive. But it’s made very clear that the operation will be dangerous and the outcome uncertain. And the Doctor isn’t allowed to help; it’s ironic, that in a story where for six episodes everyone’s been asking for his aid, it ends with his resemblance to Salamander being an obstruction.