The Enemy of the World part 1

[Craig @craig Emperor]

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive on a beach on Earth in the future. The Doctor wants to have fun in the waves but they soon find themselves in danger, due to a case of mistaken identity.

Missing for years, this story was recently rediscovered and restored. We’re discussing this story as a tribute to our sadly departed contributor @htpbdet who was a big fan of Troughton and used an image from this story as his avatar.

I’ve always been a bit taken with Victoria, despite her slightly wet ‘damsel in distress’ character. As a Scotsman it’s nice to see she’s obviously quite taken with Jamie and his tartan kilt!

[Juniperfish @juniperfish]

@craig Oooh thanks for posting.

Well, this is just gloriously sixties – the wallpaper design, Astrid’s wonderful thigh boots, the skin tight rubbery uniforms and the received pronunciation. I have a huge soft spot for sixties design, so I’m swooning.

The musical score is pretty great too – listen to that anxiety inducing electronica as the Doctor and companions run from the hover craft on the beach. 2018 must have seemed so far in the future then, and now it is three years away!

Patrick Troughton is a very handsome man in his craggy way and I like his Doctor’s chirpy charm (and indeed flirtation with Ms Astrid) a great deal. It’s well known he based his performance in part on Charlie Chaplin.

Salamander is a sci-fi twist on Stalin, of course, and Troughton creates a menacing dictator with glee.

What great TV – the black and white just makes it more gorgeous. Yummy!

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

@juniperfish – it’s not so much the thigh high boots as the strange shape of the cream section of the jacket. From the back, Astrid looks like she’s in a neck brace. 🙂

Then there’s the reveal that the Doctor likes a vest and long johns. In fact, we’ve seen that so often (twice for the Smith Doctor), that I suspect Gallifreyan underwear tends to the thermal. You can take the boy out of Gallifrey, but not the Gallifreyan underwear off the boy…

Yes, there’s some definite flirting going on. Astrid is very obviously the Doctor’s type. She’s beautiful, she’s adventurous, and she may be mixed up in something dodgy; even at this early stage, the Doctor falls for the bad(ish) girls.

Troughton does indeed create a quite menacing dictator; the accent provides an easy marker between Salamander and the Doctor, but his menacing and confident dictator is quite different to the diffident and clown-like Doctor. I look forward to seeing more of this.

[lisa @lisa]

That was fun! I like the dictator hair a lot better on Troughton – the beatles hair do was more
don’t at least for me. This was a shy guy doctor guessing from the swimming scene [and not like our
Matt Doc] I also liked the 60’s esthetic too. Thanks for putting this up for us great Emperor!
Cant wait to see more

[ScaryB @scaryb]

Well at least I managed to view and post before the 2nd episode 🙂

I agree with the above comments, lots of fun, and love the 60s Avengers/Man From Uncle/James Bond vibe.

Also loving the cleaned-up look – Philip Morris may take some stick from certain quarters, not all of it undeserved, but his company have done a great restoration job on this (and on Web of Fear).

Patrick Troughton is great (have I said that before…?!) – so full of mischief and yet those little sideways looks that hint that he’s not half the buffoon he makes out to be, that his brain is functioning, very Doctor-like, on many levels. (And very different from when he’s being Salamander, but hinted at when he’s being the Doctor being Salamander 🙂   It really highlights how subtle and detailed his Doctor characterisation is).

He’s also delightfully physical, showing off in the opening beach scene.  Re the similarities with Matt’s underwear – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was a deliberate reference, there are a lot of similarities between 11 and 2. @bluesqueakpip –

 but not the Gallifreyan underwear off the boy…

And thank goodness (and the directors!!) for that 😳

And yes, doesn’t he seem to have  a wee thing for Astrid, bad girl that she is, even if she hasn’t quite got the same flair for fashion as Mrs Peel. Not just the jacket, those boots are just a tad on the baggy side. Great hair tho. (@Lisa Patrick’s Beatle “hair-don’t” (haha) is very much part of his clown persona – don’t be taken in by it)

I like that there was so much location work in this. No wonder they didn’t have much budget left for costumes or a decent security system round Astrid’s house.  A hovercraft (how did it climb the hill from the beach…? Never mind catch up with a helicopter quite so quickly. (Maybe it has secret jet propulsion!). A helicopter indeed! And an exploding one at that. 😈

Victoria’s very sweet so you can’t really get annoyed with her, although she’s very much a throwback to the Susan-style screamy, damsel in distress type companion for a lot of it. My favourite female BG companion was Zoe, but Jamie works pretty well with all of them. And he’s very much in the Ian role of “Mr Muscle”.

The 2018 settng – that seemed such a long way away on the original viewing.

 

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