Say Something Nice – Doctor Who: The Enemy of the World

In an effort to find something quick that can be written as part of Daily Doctor Who, we are continuing with Say Something Nice, where I look back at each of the Doctor Who stories and pull out one or two cool things about it.

(Daily Doctor Who #335)

Read the previous entry (chronologically) here–I accidentally skipped over this post and went to the next story originally, but I’ll use these links to keep things in order.

Today, we continue with the fourth story of the show’s fifth season…

The Enemy of the World

The story stars the same cast as the last one…Patrick Troughton as the Doctor and Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon and Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield. Patrick Troughton pulls double duty in this one, playing both the Doctor and the story’s villain, Salamander.

The serial is written by former script editor David Whitaker, and directed by future producer Barry Letts.

Say Something Nice…

(Named for Missy–aka the Master–and her catchphrase from her first full appearance in Dark Water).

The intrigue and espionage plot works quite for Doctor Who, thanks to the novetly of having Patrick Troughton play the villain as well as the hero. Troughton does a great job as Salamander, really showing how good of an actor he is. Colin Douglas is also good as Bruce, the apparent villain who becomes one of the story’s, and the revelation that Giles Kent is a villain is well handled.

But because we’re equal-opportunity fans here, we’re not going to only be sycophantically complimentary.

You craven-hearted spineless poltroon!

(Another cry from the Master, but not exactly a catch-phrase, this time from The Deadly Assassin)

There seems to be a desire to make Mary Peach’s Astrid into a kind of Avengers-style action hero, but she doesn’t really pull it off. The idea of the society of people that Salamander has fooled into thinking that the earth has suffered from armageddon is inventive, but underdeveloped, with those characters being notably less interesting than everyone else. The last moments of the story seem needlessly abrupt.