My expert viewer and I really enjoyed this one. Can you believe it? This is the third time the Doctor has to play a double, and this time he pulls it off. William Hartnell had a robot double in The Chase, but sometimes he was his robot double, and sometimes he wasn't which was overall rather confusing. Hartnell plays another 'double' role in The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve but I hardly count that as the Doctor practically drops off the face of the earth until the very end. Plus, Hartnell just looks like an Abbot, and only Stephen cares or knows.
So kudos to Troughton for pulling this off. Troughton and Salamander don't actually meet until the last five minutes, and they only have about a 30 second scene before Salamander falls out of the TARDIS and into time and space. What a way to die! That's better than the airlock. But the Doctor does run around quite a bit, pretending to be Salamander and there are brief moments when he pulls the wool over our eyes.
This is one of those episodes that was recently recovered, so not even my expert viewer has seen it not in reconstructions. I'm very glad that this was recovered. There were a lot of nuances, looks, and movements that would have gone unappreciated as recons. Plus, because of the 'double' issue, in general it would have been really confusing.
What would a TV show be without a strong female character?
We find out that Salamander is keeping a few humans deep inside the center of earth. He needs them to cause the natural disasters, so that Salamander can seem god-like on the surface. He fools these scientists into believing that Earth is at war, and the air is full of high radiation levels. It's a very elaborate scheme, and Salamander must convince the scientists that there's a war going on upstairs. Only in Doctor Who can they pull off this plotline! My expert viewer mentioned that it must be getting rather crowded down in the center of the Earth, what with the scientists, the Atlanteans, and the Silurians there. Anyone else we have missed? They could have a real party down there.
This takes place in the future but does not contain aliens. There were quite a few side characters in this plot, and most of them were rather likable. We liked that Donald Bruce, head of security, didn't try to kill the Doctor right away because he wanted to find out more about the Doctor and he has issues with Salamander. Usually the characters are either good guys, or insane/bad guys, so it was different that a lot of these people were both good and bad. It was much more realistic that way.
My expert viewer could not watch this all in one day, which I really wanted to do. I'm very disappointed in him sometimes. Why wouldn't you want to watch The Enemy of the World all in one sitting??
After watching this episode I had a dream that I was running around in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Jaime. We were caught in a time loop and everything was repeating itself, so we had to repeat the adventure, but somehow needed to change the ending to get out of it. The Doctor looked like Troughton and Hartnell put together, which means that he was not cute. It was a very strange dream. Freud would have a field day with my brain.
Next Up: The Web of Fear
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