“The Dominators” is a story which sadly, by today’s standards has aged pretty badly. The Dulcian’s outfits have to be some of the most ridiculous costumes ever seen in Doctor Who, and poor Wendy Padbury spends her first proper story as a companion stuck in one of them! Even the Quarks, which tend to be remembered rather fondly in fan circles (and recently were nostalgically mentioned in the Big Finish audio drama, “Flip-Flop”) are at best amusing – they certainly aren’t any sort of convincing threat. The two Dominators themselves are the best thing about the story; their costumes are almost respectable (which helps) but more importantly they are entertaining villains. I really enjoyed their constant bickering; the subordinate Dominator’s blood lust and his commander’s more rational, focused attitude clash splendidly and make for some good drama, especially in the final episode.

Renowned ‘Yeti’ creators Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln requested that their names be taken off this story after Derrick Sherwin had finished script-editing it. This serial certainly isn’t a patch on “The Abominable Snowmen” or “The Web of Fear”; but a few pacing issues aside, Sherwin can’t be blamed for what is basically a very bland storyline. The plot is good vs evil at its most basic. The Dulcians are pacifists – so annoyingly so that the viewer almost wants the Dominators to win! – and the Dominators are warmongers, plain and simple. They plan to fire rockets down bore holes, causing an eruption of the molten core of Dulkis turning the planet into a radioactive mass - fuel for their space fleet. Admittedly, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds – the utter cruelty of the Dominators combined with some very amusing performances from Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines give the story a bit a life, but at the end of the day it is hardly classic Doctor Who. The story’s greatest triumph (except maybe the Doctor using the sonic screwdriver as a flamethrower!) is the writers having Jamie save the day, only to be ridiculed by his disbelieving companions!

“Jamie! It’s a brilliant plan! I just can’t see how you could have come up with it!”

After five episodes, “The Dominators” mercifully ends on a surprisingly effective cliff-hanger; a volcanic eruption on the island engulfing the TARDIS, leading directly into a much, much better Doctor Who serial…

“The War Games” is one of those stories that will always be talked about. A ten-part epic that draws to a close not only Patrick Troughton’s reign as the Doctor but the whole monochrome era of the programme, this amazing story is also famous for being the one that finally reveals just where the mysterious Doctor came from…

“Time travellers. I wonder…”

Whilst it’s universally acknowledged amongst fans that “The War Games” is far too long and padded to the hilt, it’s also thought of by most fans as an absolute classic and I would agree wholeheartedly. My initial encounter with Pat Troughton’s swansong was via Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of the story which I enjoyed immensely, but left me curious as to just how this plot (the novelisation was about 150 pages, if I recall correctly) had stretched across ten twenty-five minute episodes. Years later, I finally got to watch all ten episodes and my question was answered – repetition. Escape, recapture, escape, recapture, escape… The multi-layered plot is peeled away very slowly, one layer at a time. A viewer could be forgiven for thinking that Major Smythe is the villain of the piece from watching the first few episodes, as the War Lord himself doesn’t show up until half way through, and even his introduction is pre-empted by that of the War Chief. Much of the plot (all the ‘resistance’ stuff, for example) could have easily been cut-down to make this story a pacey five or six-parter, but there was a ten episode gap in the schedule and so ten episodes were produced! Even so, “The War Games” remains to this day one of my favourite Doctor Who stories, books and audios included. In one way, the story’s length works to its advantage as it completely sucks the viewer into the story and the characters, in a sense making it more like a novel than a TV show. Ironically, the experience of watching this serial is more like reading a novel than reading the novelisation of it is! I certainly wouldn’t recommend to anyone sitting themselves down and watching all four hours of “The War Games,” but viewing it in either in two-halves (as I tend to watch the story) or even episodically is something every Doctor Who fan should do.

The War Lord’s plan is fantastic material for a great Doctor Who story - take an alien planet, split it into different war zones, gather soldiers from different parts of Earth’s history, brainwash them and then let them kill each other until all you have left is an invincible army of hardened veterans that you can conquer the Galaxy with! It also allows for a wonderful opening to the story – what could be better than the TARDIS materialising in the middle of no-man’s-land on a Great War battlefront in France? It provides so many wonderful opportunities for storytelling (and believe me, in ten episodes Dicks and Hulke exploit them all), and due its predominantly ‘historic’ setting the production value also seems higher than that of contemporary stories. The sets of the trenches and the chateau are beautifully created; were it not for them being shot in black and white there would be nothing to distinguish them from programmes like Blackadder Goes Forth, made almost twenty years later! However, the superb design of “The War Games” isn’t limited to the various historical time zones. Never before have I seen a set that cries out “1960’s” as much as the War Lord’s domain does. Psychedelic doesn’t even begin to describe it… if you’ve ever seen any of the Austin Powers movies, you can imagine the setting. It makes a fantastic change from the grey corridors and flashing lights that Doctor Who so often used to depict ‘futuristic’ settings, though I’m not sure about the weird glasses…

One of the major driving forces behind making “The War Games” so compelling is the brilliance of its characters. Carstairs (David Savile) and Lady Jennifer (Jane Sherwin) are likeable enough to have become successful companions were the circumstances different, and the more nefarious characters like the intimidating General Smythe and the deplorable Security Chief are both interesting enough to have supported their own (shorter!) serials. The War Lord himself is wonderfully brought to life by Philip Madoc. His calm performance imbues the character with a real sense of power – he doesn’t need to throw his weight around too much, he is already as feared and respected as he possibly could be. The War Chief, however, is the most interesting character by far. Episode eight sees the series’ first mention of the Time Lords as, like the Doctor, the War Chief is revealed to be a renegade Time Lord on the run from his people. He wants the Doctor to help him overthrow the War Lord so that they can rule the galaxy together. I found myself quite amused by the War Chief’s dialogue when he speaks to the Doctor; it is uncannily similar to Darth Vader’s in The Empire Strikes Back, a film which was still over a decade away when “The War Games” was written! Like all good villains, the War Chief completely believes his hair-brain scheme for galactic domination is right and just. The Doctor, however, is far from convinced and for the first time since leaving his homeworld, he finds himself in a situation that he cannot resolve… without help. 

Enter the Time Lords.

“You have returned to us, Doctor. Your travels are over.”

Episode nine of “The War Games” ended with the ultimate deus ex machina; answering the Doctor’s telepathic message in a box, the Time Lords’ wave their magic wand and the soldiers are all returned to their customary time and place, the War Lord is in their custody and the War Chief is dead (or is he…?), killed by his former associates. Episode ten is very nearly a different story all together, and arguably contains the biggest reveal in the history of the entire TV series - certainly the biggest reveal overall until Marc Platt’s controversial 1997 novel “Lungbarrow.” The Doctor’s people are introduced to us as a nearly omnipotent race who have not merely gained mastery over time and space but also appear to have god-like powers (which one of them uses to physically punish the War Lord when he refuses to testify in his trial.) Although they have a policy of strict non-intervention, the Doctor’s summons forces them to try the War Lord for his crimes and eventually sentence him to temporal dissolution – he’s not just executed, he’s wiped from history! However, their strict policy of non-intervention is one that the Doctor has constantly flouted, not to mention his ‘borrowing’ of a TARDIS. Like the War Lord before him, the Doctor is tried for his crimes and found guilty, however the Time Lords take into account his good intentions and his role in the battle against evil and therefore decide to punish him by exiling him to 20th century Earth and forcing him to regenerate.

The Doctor’s goodbye to Jamie and Zoe is a real choker, and the blow is made even crueller by the Time Lords’ erasing their memories of their travels with the Doctor. The Troughton Era ends (at least on TV) with the Doctor’ face contorting as he disappears into the ether…

Of course, the novels speculate that “The War Games” wasn’t the end for the loveable second Doctor - Gallifrey’s C.I.A. intercept him en route to Earth and give him limited freedom in exchange for him doing certain missions for them. This is the older second Doctor that we see in “The Five Doctors” and “The Two Doctors” - he even gets Jamie back, memory restored!

In short, “The War Games” is an epic masterpiece. The bulk of the story is hugely entertaining and the introduction of the Time Lords and the Doctor’s (as yet unnamed) homeworld is purely the icing on the cake. It is packed with fantastic cliff-hangers (the Doctor up against a firing squad, for example), superb characters, and some wonderfully memorable scenes like the escaped Doctor strutting into a military prison, shouting his mouth off in outrage about how the person in charge there isn’t giving him enough respect and thus being accepted by him as an authority figure whilst having absolutely no credentials! It is a must-see story, and I’d also strongly recommended its sequel – the New Adventure “Timewyrm: Exodus” by Terrance Dicks, one of the best Doctor Who novels I’ve ever read.

The Pirate Planet gets on my tits. It has a Douglas Adams script that's playing with huge SF ideas and including deliberately crap stuff for ironic effect, which would have worked a lot better had the production team had a clue. Take the Pirate Captain, for instance. In the script, he appears to be another stupid shouty Doctor Who villain until we discover that's just a front and that underneath the bluster he's brilliant. That's a clever idea. It's certainly far too subtle for Bruce Purchase, who latches on to the shouting and never gives us a performance that could even be called one-dimensional. I didn't believe a word of it. That's not a genius. It's not even a Pirate Captain. What assaulted my eyes and ears was blatantly nothing more an annoying so-called actor who's putting nothing into his lines but his lungs. Admittedly the script gives him an awful lot of ranting, but even that sometimes has a kind of poetry. "Why am I encumbered with incompetents?" should have been a lovely line, but on the screen it's nothing.

Admittedly it's nice that he's having fun. I'm pleased for him. I can't even put all the blame on Bruce Purchase, since there's barely a tolerable performance throughout the entire show apart from the regulars. Tom Baker and Mary Tamm got a head start by playing pre-established characters who'd furthermore just been working with fantastic guest stars in The Ribos Operation, but even Mary Tamm isn't completely immune to the general incompetence. (I believe the technical term is "Pennant Roberts", but I'll leave him aside for the moment. He deserves a paragraph of his own, if not an essay.) But that acting... Nobody has a clue. Ouch ouch ouch. It's just embarrassing. It makes the likes of Tegan, Adric and Nyssa look like Lawrence Olivier, by virtue of being capable of actual line delivery. Mr Fibuli gave me cancer of the retina. There's a crowd scene with a "hooray" so lame that you practically need to invent a fan theory to justify it. I didn't mind the cameo guy in part one who gets given jelly babies, but I had some trouble typing that sentence because of a horrid scraping sound on the bottom of my barrel.

Have I bashed the acting enough? Not at all, I've barely started, but it's time to focus on the real villain: Pennant Roberts. The directorial incompetence on display here is breathtaking. That he ever worked again in any capacity beggars the imagination, let alone helmed six Doctor Whos (including both stories to boast Douglas Adams's name as scriptwriter). The Face of Evil, The Sun Makers, The Pirate Planet, Shada, Warriors of the Deep and Timelash. There's a litany of horror if ever I saw one. Admittedly his two JNT stories hardly had the world's best scripts, but Pennant Roberts certainly didn't redeem them... and bad acting is at the rotten heart of everything he's done. I've been bashing Tom Baker's performance in The Face of Evil (not to mention the Tesh) for years without realising that Pennant was the director, while in Warriors of the Deep and Timelash it's as if no one's even trying. I'm having trouble believing that Pennant even cared.

Despite everything he's done, I think The Pirate Planet was Pennant Roberts's nadir. He was working with sow's ears from the start in the 1980s, but here he's butchering a Douglas Adams script. Even before I took the trouble to look up the director's name, I'd described this story in my notes as "Timelash but wittier". The Pirate Planet has better regulars and some nice location filming, but everything else is on a par. Both stories feature lacklustre rebels, laughably lame guards and a vicious but stupid dictator with multiple layers of hidden identity. Both are set on blandly unconvincing alien planets with the same camp aesthetic and the same level of cliche, except that Timelash lacks Douglas Adams's playfulness. Both even have space-time connections with Earth and age their villains to death. In fairness both also have some genuinely clever ideas and time-related SF concepts, although not enough to salvage the overall train wreck.

However despite all that, I'm about to put the case for incompetence. In a story that's deliberately playing with crap Doctor Who cliches, it adds an extra dimension for the production to be as bad as anything we've ever seen. I can't pretend that this justifies it, but it does at least add a little interest. I'm not being entirely frivolous either. Douglas Adams makes so many comments on Doctor Who and its conventions as to make it practically an unbroadcast Hitch-Hikers instalment. Look at the Doctor sympathising with guards: "Must be very wearing on the nerves." Or perhaps his question to the Captain: "What do you want? You don't want to take over the universe, do you? No, you wouldn't know what to do with it. Beyond shout at it."

It goes further than that, though. Like Gareth Roberts at times, Douglas Adams is being deliberately crap... but with irony. That's the difference. If you didn't know that the writer was also in on the joke, this would be unwatchable. The Captain for instance is an assortment of pirate cliches transferred with painstaking literalism, e.g. a hook, an eye patch, a robot parrot etc. Unfortunately this combination of deliberate cliche and an unsympathetic director produces a planet that feels as if it's been cut-and-pasted from BBC stock rather than being a world that exists in its own right. It's bland. I couldn't believe in it. For example it has guards who exist only as parodies of other stories' guards... the whole world only works as a knowing parody of SF rather than an original creation.

"This is a forbidden object."

"That is a forbidden question."

"Strangers are forbidden."

Yes, okay, we get the point. It's a witty scene, but it's not even trying to be believable. However I don't blame Douglas Adams, since I'm sure he understood as well as anyone that this kind of joke works so much better with an edge of reality. The guards are funny, but they'd have been so much funnier if the Doctor's comments had been true, i.e. directed at them and their lives instead of at the general concept of "guards in Doctor Who stories".

The script has good stuff beyond its irony, though. I liked the sinister undertones. Underneath the comedy, there's the question of what's happening to planets? Where's Callufrax? Where's Bandraginus V? I like the unfolding of the SF secrets, with all the scary hints and references. These are huge ideas. Part two's revelations alone would be enough for any other story's climax. There's also the mental wrench of seeing silly people doing horrific things. Earth is nearly destroyed! It's extremely clever, although one problem is that the only way to defeat amazing technobabble is with even more amazing technobabble. Admittedly if you're concentrating then it all makes sense, being better than Timelash's "I'll explain later", but it's still a mish-mash of macrovectoid particle analysers and omni-modular thermocrons.

Interestingly Tom for once definitely lies about the TARDIS's capabilities. He tells the Pirate Captain that its lock requires two people. After all my hypotheses about the TARDIS's unnecessary and possibly spurious abilities in other Tom Baker stories, I was amused to see a concrete example of Tom telling porkies to gain advantage over a foe.

There are things I like about the production. I like the location filming. Power station, mines, caves... it looks great. It's so big! There's a real sense of scale, with a planet that for once feels bigger than a broom closet. I liked the pretty girl, even if she can't act. I also liked the Doctor and Romana, whose relationship has warmed since in The Ribos Operation but is still a rich source of comedy. Tom Baker in particular single-handedly redeems the production, with occasional flashes of seriousness of which we needed more from the other actors.

Overall, this story is the last thing you'd expect: bland. Even as it stands there's plenty of interest, but the incompetence of its production is a greater crime than Warriors of the Deep and Timelash. It's painfully unconvincing. Tom Baker and Douglas Adams are always worth watching, but the Pirate Captain in particular is utter bollocks. In fairness I enjoyed watching it. It's witty, subtle and full of ideas. I wouldn't dream of arguing with anyone who said it was their favourite story. However it also drives me crazy.

Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Douglas Adams just isn’t like other writers. A manic energy mixes with a dazzling imagination that skirts the edge of believability, carried by its natural verve; you might disagree with that, of course. As his first story, this has more claim to be television history than the average episode, and most of Adams’s later trademarks appear here in embryonic form. Watching The Pirate Planet for the first time is like being kicked in the balls by an insanely beautiful woman; it makes your eyes water at the time, but wait until your friends hear about it!

The opening scene takes no prisoners. Right from the start the viewer is hit with one of the strangest characters ever presented, a half-cybernetic (proto-Cyberman, really) space pirate yelling about devilstorms and sky-demons at the top of his voice, while the fawning Mr Fibuli lopes around like Igor. Can you imagine if Russell T. Davies had written this? I’d rather not. But it somehow works, because Adams’s writing style just floors the accelerator and sticks a massive two fingers up at detractors, and what happens next is up to you: either hold on, or get left behind. I love it, but I can appreciate the opposite view.

Opening TARDIS scenes are rarely very good, as without a plot to be talking about yet dialogue often falls flat. Tom Baker tries his best, but he’s fighting a losing battle with Mary Tamm on screen with him; she’s like a lightning rod that sucks all quality from the scene away and into the ground. However, the Doctor’s brilliant line of “I’m perfectly capable of admitting when I’m wrong, it’s just that this time I’m not” makes it worth watching.

We’re back on the bridge before too long though, and once you get over the shock of the Captain and start to think about him properly he becomes quite spooky; one of the strongest features of this story is the contrast between humour and serious moments that make the jokes funnier and the serious stuff darker. Just one thing though: the Captain is blatantly far more intelligent than Fibuli, so why does he need him at all?

Initially the Mentiads come across as quite atmospheric and distract from the fact the main city of Zanak seems to consist of about twelve people. However, their whole expressive dance routine becomes even sillier when presented alongside David Sibley’s pathetic acting; the guest cast is what really lets this story down, as only David Warwick as Kemas and Bruce Purchase as the Captain really put up a fight. It is a shame though that the characterisation of Kemas treads some very familiar ground as the iconoclast who breaks free of the social order and leads his people to freedom.

“This planet wasn’t here when I tried to land…” Now we’re getting somewhere. One of my favourite aspects of the original series is that the length and slow pace of the stories allows them to build up a sense of mystery, and this makes a good start with a planet not where it is supposed to be, with various precious stones just scattered about. This could be presented better though, as they are strewn rather strategically where the Doctor should have spotted them earlier. The scene where the Doctor is ignored by the locals is fun, but slightly odd when next time they all seem to be utterly terrified of him: the people of Zanak have this strange habit of changing their customs depending on the narrative requirement, although I could watch the scene of the citizen taking four jelly babies again and again.

The film-recorded shots of the Mentiads walking over the hills look great, which is handy since this is about all they do apart from that massive exposition scene in part three. It’s nice to see Baker so energetic too, as he uses the other wooden actors as a springboard to rescue scenes in danger of going under, such as the tedious soap-opera exchanges between Mula and Balaton. 

That Polyphase Avatron, although appropriate to the Captain in tone, is really pushing it but the special effects in the story are actually quite good and the idea of a robotic parrot is handled well, all things considered. The air car also looks quite good, although I do wish Mary Tamm would shut her mouth for once and the cars need a bit more effort to make them look like speedboats with some bits stuck on.

We’re almost halfway through the story now, and there’s been very little narrative progression since the initial mystery of the disappearance of Calufrax. This is what stops the story from being a classic: the plot is poorly paced and is released in short bursts after long gaps, which allows the tension and interest created by each little bit of exposition to dissipate. However, the Doctor’s line of “I save planets mostly, but this time I think I’ve arrived far, far too late” is brilliant.

The realisation that the Captain is the complete bitch of his pretty little nurse is a good moment of characterisation, and the Doctor’s message of advanced technology being vulnerable to a primitive attack makes a straightforward open-the-door problem an interesting scene. Kemas running on the spot looks stupid, although I do like the idea of an inertia-dampening tunnel and the special effect is very good.

That scar on the Doctor’s lip does look much more prominent on film, and the hasty piece of writing to excuse this that he bashes his face on the console doesn’t quite wash – especially since his injury is also clearly visible in the previous story The Ribos Operation. However, the engine room scene is fantastic as it really sets the story down a new path – we realise that the Captain’s blustering and the Doctor’s humour are all acts as the two men circle each other trying to outwit each other; this allows for the sillier moments to be forgiven. There is also a little bit more of plot that comes trickling through, but again the interest is lost since it is followed by a badly-handled generic shoot-out featuring guards that can’t shoot straight; the story’s fairly gentle mortality rate of 33.3% is confined pretty much entirely to the villains.

Once they hit the mines though, the revelation of the true nature of Zanak is outstanding; The Pirate Planet has probably the best core idea of any story that just about compensates for the disappointing way it is handled. The concept of entire worlds being wrecked to feed another planet is breathtaking, although Kemas’s routine of “verily, thou shalt be avenged” adds some unnecessary cheese.

I never really got the weirdness of K9 referring to the Doctor as “the Master” before. Did you?

The Captain’s cry of “with the Mentiaaaads!” puts me in mind of the guy in The Simpsons who screams “yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessss!” all the time. On this note though the story slows right down for a massive info dump partially designed to refresh viewers’ memories of the previous episode; it probably would have worked better if I watched this story on a week-by-week basis. Baker makes it interesting, but Tamm sounds like a patronising Blue Peter presenter.

The thought of Earth being in danger seems a bit tokenistic since by part three the audience already cares as much as it’s going to and in any case Earth doesn’t really sit well with this episode. It is followed by another exposition scene where the Captain explains what happens to Zanak’s prey – it is saved by a brilliant idea and also the performances of the two actors; the Captain’s line of “I come in here to dream of freedom” adds some good characterisation to boot.

K9 really gets to show off now, and if you don’t like that character (I don’t) then it’s not necessarily a good thing. Adams gets away with a lot, but a robot dog with a laser in its nose is a bad idea at the start and to pit it against a robot parrot with a laser in its, er, tail feathers sees him overdo it. That said, I can’t really fault the effects. Another great plot revelation follows that of Xanxia; since she’s supposed to be in stasis, the scene would work better if she kept still though. The cliffhanger is appalling largely through a lapse in Baker’s acting, although none of the cliffhangers of this story are particularly good.

The plot has really taken a while to come along, but it’s going strong in the final episode when the nurse’s true identity is revealed. The big sabotage scene amounts to little though apart from plugging stuff into other stuff and blowing it up, and there’s little I can think of to say about it apart from that whacking a console with a spanner is a bit simplistic for this story.

The death of Fibuli is poignant due to Purchase’s acting. However, the big technobabble resolution spoils things a bit since Adams really pushes his luck, and his writing does come across at times as rather smug. He does have the consideration to treat us to a good bit of pyrotechnics at the end though.

Really this is an average story, but the strength of its core idea warrants it being bumped up a grade making it the best of the Key to Time season. The Pirate Planet is a very strong story, but it speaks volumes that the best story of the season doesn’t get a maximum rating from me.

The Ice Warriors are one of the best-known monsters in Doctor Who but somehow, up until today, I had managed to see (or hear) every single episode of Doctor Who except the original Ice Warriors story! Now, thanks to the BBC Video boxset, my Doctor Who collection is complete and I can hold my hands up and say “I’ve seen ‘em all!” Born of the same year as the Yeti, the Ice Warriors would make an immediate impact on viewers, putting a brand new spin on the done-to-death science fiction clichй of ‘Martians.’

Inspired by a news report about a woolly mammoth found preserved in a Russian glacier, Bryan Hayles set his serial in the far future (3000AD I believe), where thanks to mans’ ingenious idea of getting rid of most plant life, the excess carbon dioxide has blocked out the sun and caused a second ice age. A team of scientists, charged with halting the flow of a dangerous glacier, find a single Martian – Varga - entombed in the ice and set him free…

Sadly, “TWO” and “THREE” are both still missing from the BBC Archives, but the Restoration Team have once again done a fantastic job in bridging the gap with a fifteen-minute reconstruction of the missing episodes. They’ve even worked it into the narrative as an ‘interruption of service’ caused by the events of the story! By virtue of this, we can now actually see Varga as we hear his rasping voice for the first time in “TWO”! Originally intended to appear far more Cybernetic, the Martians ended up being realised as reptilian humanoids and interestingly, the ones that we see in this story (who are christened ‘Ice Warriors’ by the scientists; it is not their ‘real’ name) are all ‘regular’ Ice Warriors – even Bernard Breslaw’s Varga who seems to be their leader.

I have to say though, I wasn’t all that impressed with things. There are some good things about “The Ice Warriors” – Miss Garrett and the rest of the women’s costumes, for example! – but I didn’t find the story to be worth all the hype. Varga and his men want to conquer the world, so the Doctor uses the scientists’ glacier-stopping ioniser to blow up their spaceship, and that’s about it. 

There are some great performances in there, not only from the regulars but also from the unusually sinister looking Peter Sallis, who plays the amiable scientist Penley (with a drawn on beard? I’m still not sure); Peter Barkworth as the chief scientist Clent; and also Angus Lennie (who I recognised from “Terror of the Zygons”) as Storr. Moreover, some of the stock footage of the snow and the glaciers looks brilliant; they could get away with using tons of stock footage in the black and white days and it would still look great! In all though, it’s not a patch on “The Seeds of Death” or the Peladon stories, but if for nothing else, this story is worth watching for the short skirts and unique TARDIS landing!

“It was you… or someone like you

“The Enemy of the World” is a thoroughly entertaining Doctor Who adventure, most famous for being the one story in the 1967-1968 ‘Monster’ season not to feature any alien menace. David Whitaker’s script is a sort of ‘future historical’, a six-parter with the old ‘historical’ format but set firmly in the future. If anything, this espionage thriller is reminiscent of many of the early James Bond films – Salamander would have been one hell of a Bond villain! Of course, to be able to enjoy the story at all you have to be able to swallow the co-incidence that just as the first Doctor had his doppelganger in 16th century France, the second Doctor has his very own twin hell-bent on world domination…

For me, the most memorable thing about this story is how it exudes expense. The first episode begins with an amazing chase across an ‘Australian’ beach featuring hovercrafts and helicopters that many feature films of the time would have been envious of. This serial was also the first to be shot with a picture resolution of 625 lines instead of just 405, which also helps give it that little bit of extra sheen. Even the story’s ambitious number of sets – it is quite literally set over the whole world – sets it apart from a lot of Earth-bound adventures that are grounded in one location. In fact, in terms of the production “The Enemy of the World” has but two flaws. Firstly, the need to avoid recording breaks ruled out frequent costume changes for Patrick Troughton, with the result that the Doctor featured rather less in the action than would normally have been the case. Of course, Troughton’s thoroughly deplorable Salamander more than makes up the cosmic hobo’s absence; that cod foreign accent is magnificent! Secondly, we are left waiting until the closing moments of Episode 6 before we get to see the Doctor and Salamander meeting face to face – earlier on in the story, the film jammed in the camera being used to shoot the split-screen effect!

“Which is good, and which is bad?”

Episode 2 is very well written, with the Doctor and his companions facing an interesting dilemma. Do they believe Giles Kent and Astrid’s assertions that Salamander is a tyrant and help them bring him to justice, when all available evidence seems to point to the contrary? It is also this episode that first brings the wonderful sense of scale to the story as we see what has become known as the ‘Central European Zone,’ as well as the ‘Australasian Zone’ and we also meet Salamander’s food taster, Feriah (Carmen Munroe), as well as the man himself! 

“Some people spend their time making nice things, and other people come along and break them.”

Generally speaking, the third episode of “The Enemy of the World” is the one that fans will be most familiar with as it still survives today and was recently released as part of the ‘Lost In Time’ DVD collection. Sadly, the extant episode is completely studio-bound and has to be one of Victoria Waterfield’s most horrendous outings! She brings a new meaning to cheesiness in this episode! More positively, the episode features awesome performances from two actors who would go onto play Gallifreyan Castellans – George Pravda, who plays the (unjustly) disgraced politician Denes, and the superb Milton Johns who plays the nefarious Benik.

Oddly, as with the missing episodes from “The Space Pirates”, there aren’t any telesnaps in existence from Episode 4, meaning that the only way to enjoy it is via the BBC Radio Collection CD with Frazer Hines’ linking narration. Judging purely by the audio, it doesn’t seem like the best episode in the world. Both Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling are absent, the episode is set almost completely underground and it features a hell of a lot of exposition – Salamander’s heinous plot is finally revealed…

The last two episodes are much better as they bring the story towards its sensational climax. There are lots of twists and turns – I was delighted to see one character in particular ‘turn good’, finally won over by the Doctor and his companions, yet on the other hand I was appalled to learn that one of the ‘goodies’ was in with Salamander all along! 

“The Enemy of the World” is certainly a fine example of some of David Whitaker’s best writing. The final scene, where the Doctor and Salamander finally come face to face in the TARDIS is electrifying, and dovetails beautifully into the next story, yet another Troughton classic…