190 The Enemy of the World: Episode Five

EPISODE: The Enemy of the World: Episode Five
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 190
STORY NUMBER: 040
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 20 January 1968
WRITER: David Whitaker
DIRECTOR: Barry Letts
SCRIPT EDITOR: Peter Bryant
PRODUCER: Innes Lloyd
RATINGS: 6.9 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Enemy of the World
TELESNAPS: The Enemy of the World: Episode Five

"Why not me? WHY NOT ME???? Salamander, take me with you! TAKE ME WITH YOU!!"

Bruce steps into the caravan and this time he does not fall for The Doctor pretending to be Salamander. They tell Bruce they have evidence on Salamander. He tells them that Farriah is dead. Benik is holding the unconscious Jamie & Victoria at the research centre. The Doctor talks Bruce into taking him to the research centre to get evidence. In the Underground base Colin is wanting to go outside. Swann finds a scrap of newspaper stuck to a crate "holiday liner sinks with the loss of many lives" He knows they have been lied to about the war. He accuses Salamander of being a murderer and forces Salamander to take him to the surface. When Salamander announces Swann is coming with him to the surface Colin is distraught that it wasn't him who was chosen. Benik interrogates Jamie and Victoria but is interrupted by "Salamander" and sent away. This turns out to be the Doctor. Salamander takes Swann into the tunnels above the base, but Swann wants to go to the surface. Astrid distracts the guards and flees allowing Kent to escape. While outside she hears cries for help and finds the injured Swann lying in a tunnel mouth. She asks him what has happened and he says he was attacked by a man named Salamander.

I'm still bowled over as to how Salamander's pulled this deception off especially as it comes crashing down so easily here from two different directions. Swann's discovery of Salamander's duplicity leads to him stepping outside for a while so he can be disposed of. Has this happened before? Here's Colin & Mary in episode 4:

MARY: Are you going to ask him?
COLIN: You bet I am. He'll take me, too.
MARY: Colin, I couldn't sleep a wink last night thinking about you making the trip. None of the others have come back.
COLIN: Don't stop me now. I've got to see the surface, Mary, I've got to.

Did the other people see through Salamander's lies and have to be taken to the surface to be disposed of?

Then there's Bruce. all through the story he's come over as a very hard man. When confronted with mounting information that indicates something isn't right with Salamander he does something about it. Bravo!

Appearing throughout the story as Donald Bruce is Colin Douglas. Douglas will return to the program 10 years later as Reuben in Horror of Fang Rock. Despite me only knowing him from Doctor Who his his imdb entry shows him to have been a very busy television actor in the 60s and 70s! I'll need to dig out my The Sweeney DVDs as he has a repeat role as the Flying Squad Commander in that appearing in Ringer and Contact Breaker. I know for certain I saw all the episodes of God's Wonderful Railway as a child so I would have seen him as George Grant in Fire on the Line, the final Second World War set segment of the production. I found an episode on YouTube and instantly recognised him!

His 1967 self however looks and sounds like the actor Rupert Vansittart who was General Asquith in Aliens of London and World War Three. Compare and contrast for yourself. The same pompous manner that Bruce has is familiar in a lot of Vansittart's recent roles.

And on the other hand there's Milton Johns' Benik. He is very nasty and sinister during this episode, it's a top performance so you can see why they got Johns in to do the Who Talk Enemy of the World commentary for this episode!

BENIK: So you've brought them? Good. Any trouble?
CAPTAIN: No, a light drug saw to that.
BENIK: Let me know the moment they wake up.
CAPTAIN: Yes, sir.
BENIK: I'm looking forward to questioning them. I have a feeling they're going to be stubborn. It's so much more interesting when our prisoners are stubborn.

The nastiness comes out especially in the sequence where he interrogates Jamie & Victoria, summed up by this exchange:

JAMIE: You must have been a nasty little boy.
BENIK: Oh I was. But I had a very enjoyable childhood.

Pulling Victoria's hair to get her and Jamie to reveal information shows him up to be the very worst sort of playground bully!. Fortunately Victoria is saved further pain by the arrival of Bruce and Salamander, actually the Doctor!

So there's plenty happening here and this episode rolls along nicely and you can feel things warming up for the story's conclusion.

According to Barry Letts in his autobiography Who And Me this episode had to be re-written after it was discovered there were no scenes featuring guest star Mary Peach who plays Astrid. Barry had a usually reliable memory, but I'm trying to picture how this episode would have worked without Peach's Astrid in it as her distracting of the guard on the caravan and discovery of the injured Swann forms the climax of what we see on-screen this week. A brief location shot of her hiding from a guard, presumably filmed close to Climping Beach near Littlehampton, helps set these scene nicely for that sequence,

Remember Fraser Hines' cousin, Ian Hines, appearing as a guard, and Barry Letts' nephew as Benik's sergeant in earlier episodes? Well in this and the next episode we have David Troughton, son of Patrick, also as a guard. He'll be back in a bit part in The War Games plus a starring role as King Peladon in the Curse of Peladon. He famously was Doctor Bob Buzzard in A Very Peculiar Practice (which has finally got a complete DVD release at long last) with Fifth Doctor Peter Davison before returning as Professor Hobbes in the 2008 New Series episode Midnight. One of my favourite actors he can do an excellent impression of his late father which he does to good effect narrating several of the Target audiobook readings. IMDB (and every other Who publication I've read) reckons this is his first Doctor Who appearance but my friend Ralph heard David Troughton speak at a recent convention where he claims to appear in episode 1 of this story as one of the thugs on the beach, specifically the one that jumps Jamie!

Other actors in this episode who I've been unable to find include Valerie Taylor as a Shelterer who was a Parisian Woman in The Massacre episode 1: The War of God and Blair Stewart who was a test dummy in The Dominators: Episode 1.

OK back to our geography. There's a tunnel leading from the shelter to the surface. The tunnel comes out near to where Kent's caravan is located: Astrid stumbles across Swann who can't have got far from the entrance in that state. The tunnel doesn't seem to be at a huge incline yet we know the shelter is some way bellow ground - maybe it comes off a level that the travel capsule can stop at closer to the surface?

In fact you can see the travel capsule in the back of this shot (There was already a poor quality telesnap that we didn't realise had the travel capsule in), and Swann make a point of asking what's directly above them, so the level closer to the surface theory is a good one.

And speaking of poor quality telesnaps....

SALAMANDER: Now what's the matter, huh?
SWANN: What's this? What is this?
SALAMANDER: What?
SWANN: Newspaper. It's a piece of newspaper.
SALAMANDER: So?
SWANN: Well, go on, look at it. Read it. Last year's date. Look at the bit of headline there. There!

Here's the blurry telesnap of the piece of paper Swann found that's confounded Who fans for years by being too out of focus to see the date! Fortunately the recovered episode reveals all:

The date on the paper, said to be "last year's date" is Friday August 16th 2017, which clearly dates the story to 2018, the same as the year on the plate in Astrid's helicopter in episode 1. Publicity at the time put the story "50 years in the future" and Lance Parkin's History of the Universe dates the story to 2017, 50 years after the first episode was broadcast. Close, it's 50 years after *most* of the story was broadcast: the first two episodes are in 1967 but the remaining four are in 1968!

There's only one small problem with the date on the paper: 16th August 2017 is a Wednesday!

Another thought: if it's approaching the 5th anniversary of them descending to the shelter in 2018 then they'd have been hiding down now in 2013 when this episode was found!

More power panels!

The panel on the left in Salamander's office in the shelter is new. We saw the one on the right in the previous episode, here the Danger warning at the top left is very clear.

We get quite a good look at this one over two different shots this episode and a pretty clear look at the other one we saw last episode too while everyone is walking around!