Friday, 6 October 2023

The Enemy Of The World: Ranking - 48

 

The Enemy Of The World

(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 23/12/1967-27/1/1968, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: peter Bryant, writer: David Whittaker, director: Barry Letts) 

Rank: 48

   'Was Salamander also the lizard (sorry, wizard) behind The Chameleon tours in 'The Faceless Ones'(featuring Iguanannekke Wills)?'


‘Hang on that bad pun wasn’t mine, I blame my imposter who writes just like I do, honest!’







Back in 2013 the Dr Who world was all excited for the 50th anniversary and the return of ‘Web Of Fear’ after 45 years of being underground (Yeti! Brigadier! London’s Tube System!) but for me, while I liked what I knew of that story from the surviving photos and audio too and was excitedly waiting to see what Steven Moffat would come up with just like everyone else, the big event of the year I was really excited for was the return of ‘Enemy Of The World’. You see, after I discovered there were ‘missing’ episodes, wiped by the BBC in the 1970s to make room for taping more exciting timeless programmes to have better repeat value like (checks notes) game shows, soap operas, sports events and The Royals doing something incredibly boring, I got hold of as many Target novelisations as I could of all the ‘missing’ stories I would never be able to see. Back in the days when the TV soundtracks were murky audio mush on twentieth-generation bootlegs rather than shiny CD soundtracks and telesnaps were still something that your television did when there was a programme about crocodiles, this was the best way of getting to know what the gaps in my growing collection were like. There were three novels that I adored above all the others and, unlike ‘The Myth Makers’ and ‘The Massacre’, Ian Marter’s (yes the Harry Sullivan actor was a writer too) adaptation of ‘Enemy’ was both a futuristic story and an actual novelisation of the actual story as it went out (not a novelisation of an earlier draft that got changed a lot before ending up on TV to keep it within budget as my other favourites were). And this was the missing story I was desperate to see the most: so visual, so exciting, so utterly unlike anything else Dr Who ever tried. The other vanished stories I could sort of picture based off what I knew of the stories around them that had survived, but this one? ‘Enemy Of The World’ was unique, an anomaly and even the surviving episode was (as I knew from the book) the light relief in the middle of a tense six parter, not a faithful representation of it. Of all the missing stories this was the one that seemed impossible to imagine on screen: a book that spanned the globe (pretty much!) With a parallel underground world! Patrick Troughton fighting his own worst enemy (himself!) A beloved cuddly Australian comedian in Bill Kerr playing a (spoilers) collaborator turned back-stabber, a world away from his usual character...whose basically Griff the chef (were the roles swapped because it wasn’t big enough for such a high profile name? What with Terry Nation writing for the Daleks after being sacked by Tony the Dr Who world owes Hancock’s Half-Hour considerably). How could they even begin to pull this off on screen? Even my bonkers imagination couldn’t quite handle it. 


Often with returned episodes you’ve imagined in your head for years they can be disappointing and yes, parts of ‘Enemy’ do indeed look as if it was made in a cramped BBC studio in 1967. However for the most part its one of the slickest Whos of the 1960s, made with location shoots, exotic costumes and a real sense of global catastrophe as we visit Australia, Ukraine, Hungary and beyond (even if salamander has the age-old tyrant trick of having offices in all corners of the Earth that look remarkably like one another). Who’s producer Innes Lloyd had directed the first time the UK ever hosted The Eurovision Song Contest in 1960 (we hadn’t won it yet, we were just filling in for Holland who couldn’t afford it – this is the year we came second with bryan Johnson – no, not the AC/DC guy – singing ‘Looking High High High’) and that might account for the sense of an interconnected world that was joined up in ways that it simply wasn’t in 1967. Generally Dr Who stories, particularly in the 1960s, are having so much fun playing around with creatures from outer space that they forget to make the most of this one but not ‘Enemy’, the closest thing to an international story in the original 20th century run. Yes, alright, ‘Enemy’ isn’t quite as exciting all the way through as Ian Marter’s breathless rush of prose makes it sound (reportedly one that went so far over the word count the editors cut all the ‘descriptive’ moments out) but one that is nevertheless pretty darn brilliant in most every way. I still look at this DVD on my Dr Who shelf sometimes in the middle of the night and assume I’m hallucinating – I spent a quarter century more or less dreaming of what this story might look like that I can’t quite believe it’s there and I don’t have to imagine it anymore. Before there was Ian Marter, though, there were two men key to the Dr Who movement who made this story special, one of them near the end of their time with the series and one at the very start. There are a lot of David Whittaker stories in my top 100 for several very good reasons. Who’s first script editor, the other ‘DW’ shaped the early idea of what this series was more than any single person and his stories contain some of the richest characters and best dialogue of the whole run. Notably this plot fits to the writer’s strengths of people and situations over monsters and science, being practically unique in future-set Dr Who for not having an alien presence anywhere and being more about human society pushed to its limits. And appearing as director is the future producer of the Jon Pertwee era, Barry Letts, with his first credit on a Dr Who story – although as director rather than as producer or writer as he’ll become best known for (he was an actor too!) What I hadn’t fully realised from the book was how much like a prototype 3rd Dr story this one feels like, even more than ‘Web Of Fear’ with the Brig and pre-UNIT soldiers already there actually: its big on action sequences, features half an episode in a helicopter, has the Doctor clashing against authority figures who refuse to listen or change the way they do things and has a moral message front and centre about what bad people do to people who, left to their own devices, would probably have been good (poor Fariah: in any other book she’d be a baddy too, the mistress of an evil dictator, but here she’s just trying to survive and stay out of trouble, while Giles Kent goes from hero to villain to hero again across the six parts as we uncover more about his background and changed loyalties and whether he’s trying to bring salamander down out of the kindness of his hearts or the mess of his bruised ego). I wish Barry had directed more: as a producer he’s a safe steadying pair of hands, as a writer he’s the show’s quiet Buddhist moral compass, but as a director he’s as exciting as any Dr Who ever had, turning this complex morality tale into one as exhilarating and pacy as any in the ‘old’ series. 


 ‘Enemy’ is a thing of beauty in both versions: a fast, pacy, spacey, action-thriller with thrills, spills, chills and kills (but, alas, no Rills). It is, as many reviewers have said, the most James Bond of Dr Who stories, the one story that doesn’t just look at an invasion of one particular place on Earth or heads off into space but treats The Earth as a global entity, with a scary and all too plausible near-future dated fifty years after transmission (2018), where all people are in the thrall of an evil dictator whose pretending to be their saviour. ‘The Enemy Of The World’ even sounds more like a James Bond title than a Dr Who one (with Grace Slick singing the title track against a futuristic Jefferson Airplane raga maybe?) Which is odd, because I can’t stand James Bond (‘You Only Live Twice’? Ha! The Dr’s lived 13 times and counting!) Only, being written by Who’s original script editor David Whittaker, the closest to a poet in the pantheon of great Who writers, it’s a cut above any spy thriller: these people feel like real people doing real things for real reasons, desperately trying to keep their head above water in a changing landscape where every move you make means that someone else drowns. There’s a shade of documentaries about Latin American dictatorships in there too which makes this all but unique for a series obsessed with both the Cold War and WW2. Generally speaking Who writers tend to write from either British history or their imagination – at most they look to near neighbours France or Germany for inspiration. This story looks further afield to the so-called ‘Mexican Dirty War’ which ran from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Like the Cold War there were no actual gunfights and it was more a war of pr: most wars, of course, depend on propaganda and the victors getting the chance to record events in the history books, but this was something new with the victors painting themselves as the good guys even when they embraced their reputation of being bad. The Institutional Revolutionary Party held a tenuous grip on power by on the one hand telling everyone at home and abroad how Mexico had never had it so good and was a beacon of virtue and freedom, while in secret they were coming down hard on every pocket of resistance they could, especially in universities and colleges. People just used to disappear if they protested too loudly, with torture (officially banned internationally by the 1960s) an open secret amongst those who were allowed back home. As the years grew the gulf between what the government said it was doing (and all the scared people nodding along with it) and what they were actually doing was growing bigger all the time to the point where, to anyone studying international politics, it began to look positively schizophrenic. If the small pockets of people who kept resisting had worked together to pull the government down they might have had a chance, but they were too isolated in a country full of citizens just wanting to go about their lives and not get involved, so that all the splinter groups ended up fighting against themselves instead. ‘Enemy Of The World’ is just like that only worldwide, with Patrick Troughton playing everybody’s friend/fiend Salamander with an outrageous Mexican accent just to ram the point home (perhaps the one part of this story that doesn’t feel real but, hey, maybe people from Mexico do talk like that in the Whoniverse version of Earth?) 


 This a story about shifting perceptions, of people in power trying to cover up the truth and half the people under them believing in it while the other half are too scared to speak out. The characters in this story have one arm outreached to give everyone a hug and the other ready to stab you in the back, with the line between goodie and baddie never thinner than here. Whittaker seems to have been inspired by his knowledge of the past (he knew his history inside out), his observations about the present and his fears of the future all rolled into one. To start with the future world is remarkably like a royal court from the middle ages, only in fancy dress. There’s no King but there is a dictator who acts like one, surrounded by ‘favourites’ who are always being played off one another without ever being allowed to get too close to the throjne or indeed the ‘real’ truth. Salamander has something on everyone in this kingdom and can have them taken out with a single word – and everyone knows it, even if they never talk about it. Griffin the chef is the court jester, Fariah is the ex-lover effectively sentenced to the dungeon and there are food tasters to check for poison (the preferred murder weapon of choice in this era). Most of all everyone is pretending to love Salamander and wish him a long and happy life, while secretly they all hate him – without necessarily knowing that everyone else hates him too. All except the people who take his words at face value and fight in his name, who are perhaps the biggest victims of all. 


 Like many stories set in the near-future (‘The Tenth Planet’ ‘The Wheel In Space’ ‘Dalek’ and if you were very good and ate all your vegetables at a stretch ‘The Moonbase’ and ‘Warriors Of The Deep’) the thrill comes not from how imaginative and different the world is but how it feels like a logical extension of where we were in first transmission. The children watching this the first time round in 1967 could expect to still be alive when this story came to pass in 2018, with the added frisson that this story is like a warning sent backwards through time, for us to stop before we got there (Marter, picking up on this, updates the novel to be fifty years after that was published, in 2030). The date is an eerie one for two reasons: one that the story was returned to the archives just five years before (leading the people who first saw this story as children to think even more deeply about whether they managed to prevent the world on this story from coming to pass or not) and because of the similarities with our own era of ‘fake news’ and lies that blatantly aren’t true but acolytes have been brainwashed into believing despite all he evidence of their own eyes. Salamander is so much like Donald Trump, then midway through his – pretty please – only term in office; a lot of this story feels like the Trump associates going to jail because their boss told them to do bad things and they were too scared of him to say no. Even the worries about over-population and food shortages and fighting over dwindling resources, which seem so normal in a script now, were only really a thing in fiction by the 1970s not the 1960s and is another rather eerie bit of fortune-telling. 


This story may also have been inspired by the Nuremberg Trials, another of the big political events of the early 1960s as Nazis were finally caught and punished for their role in WW2, revealed to the world at large as a squabbling bunch of despots stabbing each other in the back for power rather than a unified force of military precision. It’s a fitting place for a series whose biggest success was based on the Nazis to look, trials that reminded me of any scene where the casings of the big bad all-powerful Daleks are opened to reveal the scared little child inside terrified of someone taking something away from them. The biggest revelation of the trials for many watching wasn’t necessarily the atrocities but the different reactions to them – the way some Nazis gloated while others were horrified at the evidence they’d been doing their best to suppress, while Hess for one actively cooperated with the investigation to give the world a warning and prevent anything like this happening again. The Nazis were no longer a united foe that had to be stopped but ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events that over-powered them when all many of them wanted was a job and some pay. Most of them didn’t comes across as evil so much as naïve and impressionable. So it is here. And indeed so it is now. I reckon future historians will have a field day comparing the parallels between the two and how oddly cowardly right-wingers become without their leaders to hide behind. 


 Most fans remember ‘Enemy’ as the story in which Patrick Troughton talks to himself, in a dual role as both hero and villain. This isn’t the first story to do that (‘The Massacre’ proved just what a great actor William Hartnell was he becomes The Abbot of Amboise) while most Doctors get their chance to play other roles somewhere in the same story (Tom Baker turning nasty in ‘The Invasion Of Time’, Peter Davison plays Omega inhabiting the Doctor in ‘The Arc Of Infinity’, Cassandra inhabits David Tennant in ‘New Earth’ and Matt Smith gets a Cybermen makeover in ‘Nightmare Of Silver’ – Jon Pertwee never got one but everyone else around him played their doppelganger selves in ‘Inferno’) but in that regard this is the best.Troughton always wears the cuddly, silly 2nd Dr so well that sometimes I forget how much it’s actually an acting job until I see him in something else and in this story we get to see his two extremes close up (and before Who he was more famous for playing baddies than goodies). While I’m not entirely convinced by the dodgy Mexican accent in every other way he’s impeccable: he makes Salamander truly scary, a villain who threatens with a subtle raise of the voice at the right time and who takes over every room he enters, while staring everyone down, in stark contrast to the 2nd Dr’s love of staying on the fringes and rushing into rescue everyone only at the end, while avoiding eye contact with everyone. It’s a sign of the man’s greatness that he somehow ends up being the most memorable supporting character of his own era as well as a beloved leading man. Mostly the scenes have Troughton playing one or other character, but I have to say the showdown at the end, when they’re both on screen together, looks amazing for 1967 standards (they struggle to get two Matt Smiths look that convincing on screen together over forty years later). Legend has it that Barry, still new to directing a show with so many special effects, ‘messed up’ the ending by recycling the same videotape for the scenes of the two Patricks, breaking a cameras as he tried to add them over the top of the same footage, instead of shooting two scenes with a gap on each side to be edited in post-production (the ‘usual’ way for doing such trick shots in 1967). That’s why the ending seems a little rushed, because extra scenes of talking were panned but couldn’t be salvaged. However it’s a worthy sacrifice; this feels ‘real’ in a way that few other shows of the 1960s using doubles ever do (and you’d be amazed at how many shows from the 1960s try this somewhere down the line). I have to say, though, it’s a bit odd that no one ever says to the 2nd Doctor in any of his journeys to the 21st century and beyond that he looks just like the most famous and powerful person of the era! 


With the monsters removed this story is even more complex than usual, with characters who keep changing sides and playing on people’s fear and gullibility instead of their aspirations and best selves. For four episodes it’s a tense game of cat and mouse, as everyone from the Doctor down goes undercover and is forced to act against type (people rightly give kudos to Patrick Troughton in this story but what about Frazer Hines playing a version of Jamie pretending to be a hardened criminal type? Superb!) Like most of Whittaker’s Who stories it’s a morality play, a world where everyone – even Salamander, whose quite pitiable as dictators go, deep down you sense - hates what they’ve become but are too afraid of the repercussions to put things right and where you can understand everyone’s point of view even when you don’t always agree with them. Everyone in this world is struggling, with the highly reasonable motivation to do what they do through survival. Some people act the way they do out of fear, others are easily duped and genuinely believe Salamander when he explains how he’s saved the world from earthquakes and natural disasters (which – spoilers – it turns out he’s responsible for creating). Every character shines in this story: the ambitious and sadistic Benik desperate to be next in the chain of command and have some of salamander’s power but who doesn’t quite know what’s going on (choice dialogue: Jamie’s harrumph ‘You must have been a very nasty little boy’ Benik’s reply ‘Oh I was – but I had a very enjoyable childhood!’), Bruce the good man who takes everything Salamander says on trust but who won’t take the Doctor at his word, Giles Kent the former friend whose emotional and highly-strung in public but secretly cold and calculating, the opposite of his old rival in so many ways and the - spoilers – revelation that he’s plotted salamander’s downfall in the final episode after being painted as the ‘goodie’ for so long is delicious, Fedorin scared for his life, Fariah the jilted mistress seeking revenge for her own reasons and Astrid the international kick-ass spy who gets all the action and all the blokes in the most Bond-like part in the story (and to think some fans still say Chibnall all but invented feminism in this series!) All are superb and all are perfectly cast and well played, especially Bill Kerr whose so against type but so utterly believable as Kent. There are some real blink and you miss them members of the cast too: that’s Patrick’s son David Troughton as a guard in episodes 5 and 6, our future leading light in the profession taking his first acting hob out of college. Not to be outdone Frazer Hines gets his cousin Ian Hines a gig playing another guard. Barry gives his nephew Andrew Staines his big break as the minor character Sergeant after the actor due to play him had to drop out at the last minute. And that’s the production assistant Martin Lisemore’s daughter Sarah as one of the underground cave-dwellers. 


 Whittaker doesn’t forget the regulars either: he invented Victoria in ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’ and has her and Jamie revert to where they were at the end of that story, as something closer than the usual companion and as close to being a ‘couple’ as any outside Ian and Barbara or Amy and Rory. In Whittaker’s hands Jamie shines as much as he did in ‘Evil’, the one loyal reliable person in a world full of shifting priorities and changing positions, entrusted with doing what everyone else in this shady world is doing, pretending to switch sides and befriend the baddy by becoming his bodyguard, putting himself in more danger than usual. Victoria, too, never gets to have as much character as this again as she’s an innocent fish thrown into a tank of piranhas whose still brave enough to keep swimming (while other writers just make her out to be a bit wet). Mostly, though, this is a story about people we don’t know, with Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling on holiday for episode four (concussed and in transit to Australia) while the Doctor’s not himself for a good half of it too. Throwing the Dr and companions into this different world full of people who aren’t quite what they seem and seeing how they float against people who have effectively ‘won’ and have control of Earth already has scope for a much bigger, dramatic story than, say, throwing them at the London Underground or a bunch of quarks. And unlike other stories without the regulars it doesn’t fall flat, because the characters we get instead are so vivid. 


 And then, just when things tend to fall apart in six parters near the end, we get another whole boost when it turns out Salamander has been keeping scientists alive in an underground bunker, making them the secret source of his power (earthquakes!) all while pretending to be the hero keeping them all alive by braving nuclear fallout. He’s been feeding them lies about the wars on the surface for so long that everyone has become conditioned to accept his views without question, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. After all, it’s such a brazen lie, it can’t possibly be real…can it? That’s the thing with a lie big enough – you’ve invested so much in it, fitted your personality and life round it so much, that you’re so invested it just has to be real. You see it all round us today, with Trumpies who still think the US election was rigged in 2020, or people who think covid has gone away even though they’re terribly ill with covid-like symptoms all the time, because surely the government would tell us if it hadn’t (as opposed to a government trying to avoid the economic fallout of another lockdown and the cost of sick pay). Of course the way Whittaker writes it even the people above ground are no better off, even though they can see what’s going on; they’re just as much in the dark and still worship Salamander, just out of fear rather than love like the people below ground, both tricks of a manipulator tyrant’s trade. ‘The Enemy Of The World’ is a story that’s always shifting and playing with our perceptions of people but it never feels confusing or cluttered. There is no other Dr Who story quite like it in that regard, that takes such a simple plot and weaves such a complex web of lies around it, while the dialogue is as rich and vivid as you’d expect from one of the show’s best writers. 


 As strong as the script is though the way it’s put across on screen is really impressive too, with really strong sets (even if the money runs out in episode three and leaves Denes ‘arrested’ in a corridor rather than a prison cell). Most reviews of this story run along the lines of ‘what were they doing, thinking they could compete with Bond on a BBC budget, but it’s really not too shabby. Especially if you compare it to 1960s Bonds that splashed the cash a little less (‘You Only Live Twice’ is the most contemporary Bond film, released a few months earlier). Letts brings a sense of style and action to the script, with shots you just don’t see in other 1960s stories (especially the helicopter, which Letts perched in himself while cameraman Fred Hamilton dangled from the door by his feet with his camera, despite the fact that the pilot had been having a very merry time down the pub night before (and admitted after they got down that he’s forgotten to compensate for the weight of the camera and was a second away from crashing. The 3rd Doctor era would have been very different without Letts there, if indeed the series had been allowed to continue at all after such a heavy accident!) There’s some lovely location filming I episode one in Littlehampton, still rarity in this era when location sequences and particularly the travel to them were costly and they use it a lot. We’ve had many a cave or tunnel set in Who before and many afterwards but these might well be the most convincing: they feel as if they stretch out forever and are like a maze rather than a single set re-used. Whittaker even correctly guesses the rise of video-phones (or very nearly anyway) fifty years in the future, with a sort of space-age skype (that settles it: David Whittaker had a time machine of his own. That’s the only explanation for how he came up with the Tardis too! Though I’m still waiting for hovercrafts as everyday transport). Even the music score is on a bigger scale than normal and is unique in Dr Who terms by being used entirely from stock – and not the BBC library but the collective recordings of Bartok, a sound that adds to the exotic ‘European’ flavour of this story (erm, even when a lot of it is set in Australia. And I still say Holst is the obvious space-age composer to pick if you’re going to do this sort of thing, as well as the most tuneful). 


 Not everything in this story works, mind. For decades all we had was episode three and that’s the jokey ‘filler’ episode where not much happens according to the show’s own director (who sadly died just before the other episodes were returned), which maybe accounts for why there wasn’t the same kind of fuss around this story when it was missing there was for other inferior ones. Astrid, is the story’s one weak link too, written to be Emma Peel from the new re-launch of ITV rival ‘The Avengers’ but even though Dr Who is the better, darker, more realistic and disturbing series in every way (which one was made for ‘children’ again?!) Mary Peach is no Diana Rigg. You don’t really get the sense of scale of the book on screen either, given the budget-saving device of having Salamander’s headquarters look the same whichever country he’s in. Unusually for Whittaker, too, the cliffhangers in this story are pretty poor: they’re turning points in the story rather than moments of jeopardy that have you turning in the following week to see how they get away with it and, it has to be said, taken as a whole it’s pretty wordy even for me, with most of the action confined to the beginning and end, while the most exciting moment that happens in the middle is a bunch of Gestapo like soldiers breaking some crockery (while the Doctor is hiding below). The finale, too, feels as if it needs to run an extra ten minutes: from the point of view of Earth Salamander is still a hero when he ‘disappears’ and there’s nothing to stop, say, Benik stepping in and taking over and making things worse, while the people down the caves still don’t know the truth (does anyone ever find them when the only people who know about them are all dead?) It’s as if Whittaker ran out of time to fit everything in the last episode (oh for this to be a seven parter – and I don’t say that about many six parters I can tell you!) Still, though, it would be wrong to say this is a story where nothing happens – it’s all going on in gradual shifts of character and changes of pace, a slow burn where small revelations have big implications until the big showdown at the end. 


 This was, as it turned out, the story being transmitted when show creator Sydney Newman stepped down from the BBC into retirement after a long career. A gritty character drama about morals, which teaches the audience a lot about human nature and with no B-movie monsters getting in the way, it’s exactly the sort of thing he would have loved. For me ‘Enemy’ is one of Dr Who’s unsung masterpieces, a classic that doesn’t get the sort of love and attention it deserves both before and since being returned and one that takes Dr Who to far darker places than usual – so many supporting characters die heroic deaths for instance, while the baddies are positively sadistic in this story; Milton Johns is an actor made for playing bad, including several other DW roles, but this is his best by far: Benik is pure evil and all the worse for being just the big baddy’s assistant trying to get his attention). No it doesn’t feel like other Dr Whos, particularly slap bang in the middle of the formulaic ‘base under siege’ 2nd Dr era (which is brilliant beyond all measure, but does get repetitive watched back to back) but that’s the whole point: we know the Doctor can win against Daleks and Cybermen, but an evil doppelganger who holds all the cards? Perhaps not. It’s a close run thing too: after all that moralising, all that tension and switching sides, it all comes down to a simple physical fight in the Tardis, as good and evil stare each other in the eye before (spoilers) Salamander finally succumbs to the one thing even he has no power to control: gravity. By the end the doctor’s shaken – but Salamander, left helpless in the time vortex, is stirred. I had wondered if it was just the book that was special, that this story might end up being a mini-disappointment the way ‘Web Of Fear’ and ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ were once we could see them as well as hear them, but no – if anything it looks even better than I imagined it. I am beyond thrilled that in the last decade this story has started to get just a little of the recognition it always deserved though still nowhere near enough. It’s about time: how nperfect that it was recovered (along with ‘Web’) from a near-abandoned Nigerian TV station just a little ahead of its future setting of 2018 where it feels like even more of a warning to us in the present and closer than even as visionary a writer as David Whittaker might have imagined when he wrote it, just like one of those Dr Who lessons from the past we used to have back when he was script editor. Whittaker was always a great observer of human nature and seeing him guess so much about the future and get so much right is quite sobering. There’s a lesson in there about dictatorships and trust in the early 21st century for us all and I hope we learn it quick or the events of this story might yet end up being just a few years out. 


 POSITIVES +This is, for the most part, one of the very grimmest of Dr Who stories, where practically everyone we meet (who say lines anyway) die horrible deaths. There is, however, one rare character written in just to be funny and he’s hilarious. Reg Lye plays the sarcastic chef Griffin, who has to put up with raging tyrants, poisoner saboteurs in the kitchen and Victoria whose been assigned to his staff, who if anything seems to cause him the most problems when all he wants to do is keep his head down and get on with his job. He tells it like it is, even in a world where not going along with the status quo gets you killed and may well be the smartest and most observant person in this story, Doctor aside, despite being the mere chef. Best line: “Dinner tonight's going to be a national disaster! First course interrupted by bomb explosion. Second course affected by earthquakes. Third course ruined by interference in the kitchen. I'm going out for a walk. It'll probably rain…’ Had this been any other story I’d be describing him as a ‘Bill Kerr’ type… 


 NEGATIVES - My but we wear some strange things in this fictional 2018! Even more than in our real 2018 amazingly. It’s hard to take the evil dictator of the universe seriously in an elaborate unruffled tunic with ruff shirt that makes him look like he’s auditioning for an ‘Adam and The Ants’ video (again, this really seems like the 3rd Dr’s era a couple of years early) while everyone else is in shiny ill-fitting nylon jumpsuits that make them look like employees at a space-age Walmarts. Two people stand out though: Fedorin is dressed like Austin Powers and Astrid is dressed like, well, what is she dressed like? In a Radio Times feature on this story she claimed to be a ‘highwayman via Napoleonic France’ but even that doesn’t prepare you for just how crazy her outfit is. Actually I’m quite glad I fell in love with this story from the book first – had I come to it the other way round I’d have struggled to have imagine these characters in these clothes without laughing You know something’s wrong when the baggy-trousered 2nd Dr, a Scottish highlander and a Victorian lady are the most ‘normally’ dressed people on screen... 


 BEST QUOTE: ‘Sad really, isn't it? People spend all their time making nice things, and other people come along and break them’ 


PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Heralds Of Destruction’ (2016-17) is a highly entertaining comic strip written by Paul Cornell set sometime after ‘The Three Doctors’ when the 3rd Doctor and Jo again meet the 2nd Doctor during an adventure where they’re tracking down a race of killer robots who’ve invaded the Earth. Inevitably The Master turns out to be behind it all and it’s a rare chance to see the Troughton Doctor running rings around the Delgado Master and generally being annoying in the way only he can. Something about this regeneration isn’t quite right though: he’s oddly rude when he thinks no one is watching and seems to have real memory losses. The Master, meanwhile, is adamant that he’s not behind this latest scheme and someone else is using him. Could it be?...Is that really?...(spoilers) Salamander impersonating the Doctor?! (Hint: yes it is). Good fun, although goodness how the tyrant escaped his fate at the end of this story (not sure I quite buy the explanation for how he survived floating in the time vortex) or why he wants to be prime minister of a backward country in a backward period of time so badly when he once ruled the whole world (The Master has a go at the job too, in preparation for ‘The Sound Of Drums’!) One of the better modern comics featuring past Doctor(s). 


 Previous ‘The Ice Warriors’ next ‘The Web Of Fear’

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The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death: Ranking - N/A (but #130ish)

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