Doctor Who 0040 The Enemy Of The World Six part story that aired December 23 1967 to January 27 1968. Screenplay by David Whitaker, directed by Barry Letts. This was Barry's first big directing job, he would direct a few stories and later become a producer for the series from 1969 to 1974. Some great stories happened during those years, as well as the introduction of color filming and larger budgets. He cast Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. Barry continued to direct on the show after he left the producer job in 1974, he took a turn as the executive producer of the 18th series in 1980.
After that he continued to work in TV as a director or a producer. He produced the BBC Sunday Classic Serials for 8 years, working with Terrance Dicks as his script editor. Barry and Terrance had worked together on a good number of episodes of Doctor Who when Terrance was script editor for that series. Both of these guys are a couple of my favorite people behind the scenes, they did a lot of great stuff for DW. Barry passed away in 2009 and Terrance passed away in 2019.
When I watched the series for the first time in late 2012 the only episode I had to watch was the existing 3rd episode from the Lost In Time DVD Box Set. On October 11 2013 the BBC released the news that the 5 missing episodes had been found in Nigeria. The episodes were released on iTunes and someone was nice enough to copy them and pass them on. Here's that post.
I did not see the 'episodes only' DVD that came out November 2013, the Special Edition 2 disc DVD set I have came out in 2018 and it features plenty of extras and enhanced picture quality for the episodes. They look fine to me.
I liked the story even better than the first run through. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria land on a beach and get involved with the locals. Turns out the Doctor is the spit of Salamander, a politician who has some Machiavellian plan to rule the world by creating natural disasters. He moves into the area to help, making the local leader look bad, and winds up running that sector.
The Doctor and companions join forces with a group that is against Salamander and helps defeat the evil mastermind. Patrick does a good job as both characters and as usual the rest of the cast is quite good.
Salamander had created a secret lab underground, he locked the workers in and created a fiction to keep them there. They believe that the world had gone to war and the surface was heavily radioactive. He keeps them alive to run the machinery to cause the natural disasters. That Salamander is a real baddie and he'll get his soon enough. An enjoyable story for the most part.
The commentaries have appearances by Frazier Hines, Mary Peach, Milton Johns, Gordon Faith and Sylvia James. Tobey Haddock is the host for the commentaries, he also hosts a documentary where he interviews people looking for a new bit of information about the story. He interviews some of the people that appear in the commentaries and a few others. He finds some nice bits of info and a nice heart warming story.
There's a nice tribute to the late Deborah Watling. An interview with Philip Morris tells the story of his finding the missing episodes in Nigeria. That same TV relay station turned up copies of the missing Web Of Fear story. I'll watch that next week. The rest of the special extras include a 1991 introduction by Jon Pertwee, a photo gallery, some PDFs of scripts and Radio Times listings, and the 1967 BBC trailer for the story.
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