Doctor Who A-Z #40: The Enemy of the World (1967-8)

The Enemy of the World is famously the odd man out in Season Five’s run of monster-driven stories. That’s true, but how unusual is it as part of the Second Doctor’s era in general? Troughton’s second story, after all, was the last of the ‘pure’ historicals, while it’s seldom noted that Season Six is full of stories where monsters are a side dish (The Dominators, The Mind Robber) or absent entirely (The Space Pirates, The War Games). Yet none of those feel out of place in this run of the show. The thing that makes The Enemy of the World really stand out is the steps it takes towards the next Doctor’s era.

Judged as a pilot for the show’s future direction, The Enemy of the World is a triumph. It’s not just because it’s good; The War Games and The Mind Robber are solid fan favourites, but part of that is because they’re so unique – the show couldn’t use them as a template. Just a couple of years later, though, Doctor Who would be a little bit like The Enemy of the World every week, as this serial’s director Barry Letts took over as producer (and frequent writer and director) and set about turning its gadget-driven action-adventure feel into the series’ house style.

The first reason why The Enemy of the World works is very straightforward: it is simply a great idea. As ideas for monster-free Doctor Who stories go, “Doctor Who does James Bond” is pretty much unimprovable; it allows writer David Whitaker to keep the action and spectacle at the usual flamboyant level without having to invoke anything interplanetary. The revival series returned to this concept with Spyfall, which did have alien villains. As such, its Bond borrowings were more surface-level, a few tuxes and roulette tables to set the scene for something very different. The Enemy of the World sticks with the Who-does-Bond concept throughout, although Who-does-Bond doesn’t mean the Doctor is a James Bond figure.

In fact, as the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria enter the story, there’s already a Bond figure and a Bond girl set up. The former is the suave spy Giles Kent, played by Bill Kerr, and the latter is Astrid Ferrier, played by Mary Peach (wife of Hammer Studios’ regular screenwriter Jimmy Sangster – Letts’ camera seems rather taken by her arse). This is a counterintuitively brilliant idea. 1980s Doctor Who would frequently come a cropper trying to fit the Doctor and his friends into off-the-peg action-movie scenarios, only to realise the Doctor is not an action hero – at least, not in the way Sean Connery or Arnold Schwarzenegger are. Adding Giles and Astrid ensures there are characters here who can do conventionally Bondian things, while freeing up the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria to solve problems with subterfuge, wit, empathy and ingenuity rather than brute force.

Giles and Astrid are archetypal enough to work in these roles, while also well-characterised enough to be memorable in their own rights. The supporting characters here are every bit as good as the ones in the two Dalek scripts Whitaker wrote the year before, except this time Carmen Munroe’s complex, tragic Fariah and Reg Lye’s amusing, grouchy Griffin don’t have to compete with Daleks for the viewer’s attention. The scene-stealer they do have to reckon with is Patrick Troughton – not just as the Doctor, but as the titular global nemesis, the Mexican clean energy tycoon and secret supervillain Ramon Salamander.

Again, the brilliance of this idea is not just that the production team have decided to do it – Troughton is perhaps the most technically skilled actor to play the Doctor, so this was always going to be a winner – but that they do it here. Season Five is the first season of Doctor Who where a story without monsters is really going to draw attention to itself as something unusual. Without a monster, what carries enough weight for us to believe in it as a threat to the Doctor? The answer is the Doctor, or at least someone who looks like him. Troughton’s dual role is fabulous, and the character himself is weirdly prescient. A look at Astrid’s pilot’s license in the first episode tells us this story is set prior to December 2018, and the most powerful man in the world is a hybrid of Elon Musk (complete with a literal cult devoted to him) and a kind of evil Carlos Slim.

This is notable because The Enemy of the World’s depiction of the early 21st century seems designed to fit in with the ice age-stricken future of the preceding story, The Ice Warriors. In any other science fiction series this would be an unremarkable attempt at establishing continuity, but Doctor Who is notoriously resistant to such things, particularly when they involve predictions of Earth’s future. It is noticeable that, when Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor touches down in 2018 for stories like The Woman Who Fell to Earth or Arachnids in the UK, she is utterly unconcerned about Salamander and his volcano machine. So what’s going on here?

Obviously everything that happens in Doctor Who is factually accurate. We know, too, that powerful people watch it – during the 2001 UK election, it was revealed that Tony Blair is a Jon Pertwee fan, while William Hague is more of a Hartnell man. Given all this, might the world’s rulers have taken heed of the show’s warning about Salamander and acted accordingly? We know that Salamander’s wealth derives from solar power and trade with Canada, so the global elite would need to employ an implacable opponent of both green energy and the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership against him. If he also had an irrational hatred of Mexicans, so much the better – but he must only be deployed for the amount of time it takes to derail Salamander’s plans. The rest of the glowing future Doctor Who predicts for the human race must be delayed, rather than averted, so it would be best if this agent was so personally repellent as to cause the public to reject him once his job was done. It seems like the kind of plan that could backfire easily. I wouldn’t have bothered if I was them.

Next: The Web of Fear (1968)

Graham’s Archive – The Enemy of The World

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