"The Enemy of the World" - Episode 5

Doctor Who
Airdate: January 20, 1968
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Deborah Watling
Written by David Whitaker
Produced by Innes Lloyd
Directed by Barry Letts

Bruce is surprisingly receptive to the allegations against Salamander, but believes that the Doctor plans to assassinate the leader. The Doctor angrily denies this, and insists that he only wants to rescue his friends and learn the truth. Swann, the leader of Salamander's underground community, finds a newspaper that seems to contradict Salamander's claims of nuclear holocaust, and insists that he accompany Salamander to the surface to see for himself. Salamander reluctantly agrees. Bruce, meanwhile, agrees to give the Doctor a chance. The two of them enter the Research Station, leaving Kent and Astrid behind, and the Doctor proceeds to interrogate Jamie and Victoria under the guise of Salamander. This goes a long way toward convincing Bruce. Frustrated at being kept out of the action, Astrid and Kent escape from Bruce guards. As Astrid runs, she hears a faint voice calling for help. She follows the voice into a nearby cave and discovers a dying Swann, who claims that he was attacked by Salamander...

The downside of the fairly radical plot twist we discussed yesterday is that the new story is actually quite a bit less interesting than the old one. While nothing that we saw in the first three episodes has been superceded by the developments revealed in Episode 4, the complex political story has been supplanted by a pretty thin sci-fi angle. On the one hand, our suspicions that Salamander was causing the earthquakes have been confirmed, but in a pretty superficial way. And now we're subjected to this episode, which is basically just us watching and waiting for Salamander's dupes to catch up to what we've known all along. It's not terribly exciting, frankly.

And while all of this is happening, the story of Salamander's slow take-over of the world has effectively ground to a halt. Sure, this episode does feature a delightful sequence where the Doctor, while posing as Salamander, interrogates Jamie and Victoria. This is an ingenious way to convince Bruce that Salamander is the real threat, and it's also a lovely scene of the three regulars interacting together in a very different way. And having the Doctor finally prove his identity by whistling "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and then bitching out Jamie for making him leave his recorder in the TARDIS is just lovely.

It's also nice to see a character like Bruce. He's head of security in a borderline fascist society, but he's honest and reasonable. He allows himself to be persuaded by the Doctor's evidence because he's ultimately interested in justice. Bruce is a terrific counter-weight to Benik, Salamander's sadistic henchman who fulfills the requisite faux-Nazi interrogator role.