3 out of 5

Directed by: Barry Letts

Hey… didn’t we do this whole “doctor looks like another character” shtick already?  You betcha!  Back in the sorta lame Bartholomew’s Eve serial in the Hartnell years.  The good news?  Well, firstly that it’s not Hartnell, and secondly that there’s actually a plot that carries through our six parts.  It’s not necessarily engaging all the way through, unfortunately, treading water with some Troughton decision-making hemming and hawing when there’re some really good twists that end up getting compressed in the final episodes, and director Barry Letts, in his first outing, goes with a really static action / reaction shot approach, but a rich cast makes it work.  And Troughton, of course, double-billed as the main man and sniveling dictator-type Salamander, a role he’s initially a bit stiff in but ultimately has fun with.

The crew lands on a beach and Patty, naturally, decides to go splishy-splash, until everyone is chased away by dudes with guns.  Because Doc looks like this Salamander fellow, whom everyone hates!  No: everyone loves him because he’s saving the planet, and you can’t prove otherwise!  So we spend, like, four episodes trying to get definitive proof to convince the Doc to help the people standing against this Salamander fella.

Jamie and Victoria bumble about as per the whims of two members of this faction, Astrid (Mary Peach) and Giles (Bill Kerr), who both do pretty excellent jobs at giving their characters proper depth.  But the win goes to hawk-faced Benik (Milton Johns) for just being the most awesomely smug baddie of them all.

There are some snazzy plot snags late in the game, which are frustratingly left rather unexplored, shunted as they are to the ending.  There’s also a weird subplot with Salamander’s food taster, Fariah (Carmen Munroe), that seems like it’s going somewhere until, like, she’s shot.  Spoiler.

Not bad, not bad.