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By Jessica Holmes

The year is 2018, disasters are running rampant, and there’s a dictatorial Doctor doppelganger at the centre of it all. The first half of this serial was excellent, but does the second half follow through? Let’s have a look at the last few episodes of The Enemy Of The World.

EPISODE FOUR

After the failed attempt to rescue Denes, Astrid flees back to Australia, where she meets back up with Kent and the Doctor. Fariah soon arrives unexpectedly, and offers her assistance to their cause. Her loathing of him, which was barely concealed in the first half of the serial, is now on full display. Whatever Salamander did to her, it must have been pretty awful.

In order to rescue his friends (who Fariah says will have been brought to Salamander’s base) the Doctor finally agrees to Kent’s plan to impersonate Salamander. However, there’s a catch. If the Doctor wants Kent’s help rescuing his companions, he’ll have to do more than just impersonate Salamander—he’ll have to kill him. The Doctor is vehemently opposed, of course. Kent, on the other hand, might be a little too eager. However, they don’t get to argue the ethics of the business for long.

Salamander’s deputy, Benik (Milton Johns), has been watching their movements, and is about to launch a raid. He doesn’t plan on taking prisoners. Benik very quickly establishes himself as a deeply unpleasant little man who enjoys his modicum of power far too much, using it to indulge some rather sadistic impulses.

Not everyone makes a clean getaway from Benik's troops. A soldier shoots Fariah as she tries to escape, and Benik, nasty little creep that he is, tries interrogating her as she lies dying. To her credit, Fariah goes out with real style. She refuses to tell him anything, and gets a fantastic line of dialogue:

“I can only die once… and someone’s beaten you to it.”

To punctuate her point she uses the last of her strength to slap him. Oh, why did they have to kill her off so soon? She was cool, clever, and was starting to take control of her own story—are we only allowed one female character with those traits per serial?

It’s a crying shame, but an excellent death scene.

At Salamander’s base, a smug Benik reports back to the man himself. A little unnecessary bloodshed doesn't bother Salamander, but it makes security chief Bruce uneasy.

Later on, it's revealed that the base's records room conceals the entrance to a hidden underground complex. What's Salamander hiding? About two dozen people who haven't seen the sun in five years. Salamander's been really smart about the whole deal. Not only are the captives kept secret from the outside world, they don't even realise they're captives! They believe the surface of the Earth to have been devastated by an ongoing nuclear war. Salamander goes to the surface to scavenge supplies, even though the radiation is (supposedly) slowly killing him. How brave of him.

They’re not just waiting out the storm, though. They’re trying to bring it to an end. How? By engineering natural disasters to bring down the aggressors.

Now that’s what I call an underground resistance.

I apologise.

In all seriousness, the captives are blissfully unaware that they’re killing innocent people, and are just grateful to be alive. Well, most of them. One of the youngest of the group, Colin (Adam Verney) is…how do I put this nicely? Whiny.  Every time he pops up he’s just banging on about wanting to go to the surface like a little brat who wants to go to Disneyland.

To be fair, he has been down here since he was a teenager. So has his friend Mary (who exists mostly to give Colin someone to moan and complain to. I suppose two cool female side characters was the limit!), but she doesn't whinge nearly as much.

Back at the surface, the Doctor has regrouped with the surviving conspirators at Kent’s cabin, and he is ready for his close-up. With a generous heaping of bronzer and a bit of a comb, he’s the spitting image of Salamander, but first he’ll have to deal with an unexpected visitor…

I’m not keen on the whole brownface-and-stereotypical-accent aspect of Salamander, even though I do like him as a villain. It’s bordering on caricature, serving as a distraction from Troughton’s otherwise very good performance.

EPISODE FIVE

The unexpected guest turns out to be Bruce, who has noticed their arrival at the cabin (wow, Kent and company are terrible at espionage), and would like to hear them out. He also brings them the news of Fariah’s demise. Though initially reluctant to trust one another (to put it mildly), the Doctor manages to calm everyone down and win Bruce over. He agrees to let Bruce accompany him on his infiltration mission, leaving Kent and Astrid behind.

Down in the secret bunker, the captives are unloading food.  One of them, Swann (Christopher Burgess) finds something troubling stuck to one of the boxes. It’s a scrap of newspaper, something about a holiday liner sinking. But why would there be holiday liners in the middle of a nuclear war? Realising something is amiss, Swann immediately confronts Salamander in his private quarters.

Caught in the lie, Salamander has no choice but to dig himself deeper. He ‘admits’ that the war is over, but the people left behind on the surface are evil mutants ravaged by radiation. It’s still too dangerous. As for the disasters, Salamander tells Swann that they’ve been targeting the mutated surface-dwellers. They’re unfit to live, it’s a mercy if anything. It’s a familiar fascist talking point, and Swann doesn’t buy it.

There’s actually a couple of cases in this serial of minor characters questioning authority. Earlier, when Benik was giving orders to shoot to kill, the leader of the soldiers was uneasy—but ultimately passed down the order, and it got Fariah killed. Here, Swann pushes back against Salamander’s genocidal rhetoric. He insists on seeing the surface for himself. Who knows how many lives that might have saved?

Starting to panic a little, Salamander tells Swann to inform the others that they’re taking a trip to the surface. Of course, Colin whines that he doesn’t get to go.

On the upper floors of the base, Jamie and Victoria awake to find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings and in unwelcome company. The slimeball Benik has come to interrogate them, and he is going to enjoy himself. I cannot overstate the sheer creepiness of Benik. Salamander might be a supervillain, but Benik is the one who makes my skin crawl.

It’s lucky for them that the Doctor and Bruce arrive to dismiss Benik. Of course, they don’t know that, and start screaming at him for killing Denes and kidnapping them. When ‘Salamander’ informs them that their ally Fariah is dead, Victoria snaps. The Doctor finally breaks character to dive under the table and pathetically (and quite hilariously) wail at her not to hit him.

Meanwhile, Benik has a strop at the guards for not letting him know that Salamander was on his way. This comes as news to the guards, who haven’t seen him leave the records room. Uh oh.

Outside, Astrid and Kent start to get a bit impatient. Rather than wait for the Doctor and Bruce to come back, Kent plays dead, then Astrid runs off, leading the guard away—and leaving Kent unattended. Wait,they only had to deal with one guard? Astrid could have taken him in a fight any day.

Still, the trick is pretty clever, faking Kent’s assassination by sniper with a broken window and some ketchup.

As Astrid leads the guard on a merry chase, however, she comes upon something unexpected. It’s Swann, abandoned and bleeding. Salamander left him for dead.

EPISODE SIX

Back at the base, the Doctor keeps up his ruse, which leads to him discovering that the base’s provisions are far more than enough for the number of people stationed here. There must be other people hidden on the base.

Not as many as there were yesterday, sadly. Swann only lives long enough to learn from Astrid that there was never any war, and to tell her to rescue the other captives. His death scene isn’t as good as Fariah’s. No swan-song for Swann.

Following his guidance, Astrid finds her way into the tunnels and discovers the secret bunker for herself. The inhabitants are just as surprised to see her as she is to see them, and a little hostile. After all, they’re frightened. Colin calms them down (pretty much the only useful thing he does), and Astrid proves that Salamander has been lying about the surface radiation. The machine he was using to measure the radiation is a fraud. Furious, the captives start clamouring to come to the surface. They’d like a few words with their 'saviour'.

As Salamander, the Doctor gives orders for Jamie and Victoria to be released and escorted to the perimeter of the base. Things are likely to get more dangerous, and he’d rather they were out of harm’s way.

As for Kent, he successfully makes it into the base and sneaks into the records room, where he confronts his enemy at long last. Rather than just getting on with it and shooting Salamander where he stands, Kent milks the moment. Locked outside the room, Benik and Bruce can only watch the situation unfold via a security camera.

Even at gunpoint, Salamander continues to taunt Kent. He tells him he’ll never get out alive, but Kent reveals a little secret: he knows about the tunnels under the base. And furthermore, he knows about the cache of explosives stored down there, so he can stop anyone following him.

It’s then that the Doctor drops his ruse, thanking him for this new information. The dumbfounded Kent then finds himself face to face with Astrid, and she’s not at all happy to see him him. Kent didn’t just know about the tunnel and the secret lab—he helped set it up. Like the pied piper, he led all those people down there in the first place. At some point, Kent and Salamander had a spat, and went their separate ways. Kent’s enmity with Salamander isn’t based on moral principle, it’s professional rivalry. He's not saving the world from Salamander, he's trying to take his place.

Well, he was, but now all he can do is flee into the labyrinthine tunnel network.

With the secret beneath the base revealed, Benik tries to make a run for it. Bruce promptly places him under arrest. Well, he certainly deserves it, but it’s not as cathartic a comeuppance as I would have liked.

As Kent flees through the tunnels, he encounters Salamander again, but this time it’s the real McCoy. In an attempt to save his own skin, he proposes to Salamander that they team back up again. However, Salamander only keeps assets that are useful to him, and Kent certainly isn’t. Salamander shoots him, but Kent gets his own back. Before dying, he manages to set off the explosives, rocking the base and collapsing the tunnel on both of them… Or so it appears.

At the TARDIS, Jamie is very relieved to see a familiar face show up, but little does he know that it doesn’t belong to the Doctor. It’s a very battered and quite badly hurt Salamander. The Doctor’s done such a good job impersonating him, why not have a go himself? However, it seems he can’t pull off the accent, so he wisely keeps his mouth shut. However, Jamie soon realises that something is amiss, and the real Doctor turns up in the nick of time to set things straight.

Finally coming face to face with his double, Salamander attacks the Doctor. It’s a pretty well done effect, though it’s only brief so we don’t get time to properly scrutinise it. In the fight, Salamander activates the dematerialisation switch—but the TARDIS doors are still wide open!

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria hang on for dear life as the TARDIS lurches onto its side, but Salamander isn’t so lucky. Losing his grip, Salamander is flung out of the TARDIS, plummeting through time and space…perhaps forever.

Final Thoughts

What a treat this serial turned out to be! The plot was fun, well-paced, and a welcome change from the usual alien monsters. There’s nothing wrong with a bug-eyed alien but it makes a nice change to have a good strong human villain.

It’s a strong cast of characters all around, actually, from the love-to-hate Salamander to the strong and capable Astrid. And they’re played very well, dodgy accents aside. For the most part. Colin’s a bit overwrought, but he’s not a big part of the story so it’s not really a problem for me.

I like my television to be progressive, and this serial is in a bit of a weird limbo in that regard. On the one hand, Fariah’s a smart, determined black woman who isn’t reduced to a stereotype (unlike Toberman in Tomb Of The Cybermen) and gets a bit of independence, though it doesn’t last long. Still, an improvement. And you’ve got Astrid, who is awesome. On the other hand, there’s Salamander and his exaggerated accent. Oh, and Mary, who has about as much personality as a bunch of wet tissue paper. So there’s still room for improvement, but it’s encouraging!

I will say that the ending feels a bit rushed, which is a chronic problem in Doctor Who. I would have at least liked to see Astrid retrieving the captives. Still, the confrontation between Salamander and the Doctor at the very end? Excellent. I don’t know how well the effects would have held up if the scene had lasted longer (shooting body doubles from behind only works up to a certain point), but they were very good for the brief time they were shown.

On the whole, I think this might be my new favourite serial. I hope the next is just as good!

4.75 out of 5 stars for The Enemy Of The World.