Hating to Love: Re-Assessing the 52 Worst Doctor Who Stories of All Time by J.R. Southall

Author:J.R. Southall [Southall, J.R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Enemy of the World

by J.R. Southall

The black and white years of Doctor Who are filled with magnificent failures, stories such as The Edge of Destruction, The Web Planet and The Celestial Toymaker that break the rules even as they are being written, or stories such as The Myth Makers and The Space Pirates, that have scant regard for those rules so go ahead and break them anyway. Thereafter, for two decades there are the occasionally valiant experiments, stories like Inferno, Logopolis and Revelation of the Daleks, that poke at the edges of what it means to be Doctor Who.

Then there was The Enemy of the World. Arriving just as the series’ format was finally being glued into place, The Enemy of the World has always been an odd fish – and until recently, in spite of it featuring a dual role for the most fan-loved of Doctors, the serial has generally been either disregarded or discounted by a following which might like to think it favours a more “grown-up” approach in the series, but at heart still prefers monsters besieging bases in its Doctor Who.

What is The Enemy of the World, then? It is perhaps the series’ first conscious example of a story that looks to contemporary culture for its most obvious influence. Earlier stories like The Daleks had clearly taken inspiration from the likes of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, but by 1967 the adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories had already become a regular – and incredibly popular – attraction at the cinema. And there’s no question of the serial’s Bond influence, from the tech-heavy opening episode to the introduction of an underground base two-thirds of the way in (similar to the one which appears in the same year’s You Only Live Twice, but for budget), whereabouts the final showdown with the arch-villain will be expected to take place. There is even the self-sacrificial death of a spirited female character, often the sole source of any compassionate reaction in the early Bond movies. But The Enemy of the World simplifies the concepts for a child-heavy audience, playing out (much like those films) largely via characters of fewer than two ambiguities, with any ambiguities that do exist very much skewed towards the comprehension of an audience still in single figures. Though the plot and dialogue touch upon some quite adult concepts (“Perhaps we’ve landed in a world of mad men!” “They’re human beings, if that’s what you mean”), it does after all start with buckets and spades. And while the acting and the characterisation is very much in shades of grey, they’re shades of grey that are frequently and deliberately rather more colourful than they might be in a series aimed squarely at the adults. The Troughton era is Doctor Who targeted more obviously at a children’s audience than at any other period in the series’ history, more so even than those first two overtly Reithian years, and although The Enemy of the World stands out as

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