Enemy of the World

In living life by the bible of Doctor Who, one of the biggest surprises has been not bumping into a double of myself at some point. The Doctor has not only encountered his fair share of doppel-gangers, but given the length of his lifetime, he never actually goes more than a short while before encountering someone who looks exactly like him.

It's a flawed, obvious concept for the series to utilise and almost always ends in a loss of dignity for various reasons. They didn't have the resources to pull it off convincingly in "The Chase", so we got a badly overdubbed person dressed as the Doctor waving his hands about at moments when Hartnell could easily have been there. Not long after and we have "The Massacre", which has a better attempt at getting to right because it plays against the limitations of the concept. If the Abbot really was the Doctor, then we have the intriguing idea of the Doctor meddling in history by posing as someone else, and further a someone else who we don't actually meet - so we can assume the Doctor was simply a close match and not, as is totally impossible in real life, a complete identical match. Perhaps, being a heavily guarded political/religious figure, few people have ever seen the Abbott in real life and so the rouse could be pulled off. Unfortunately it's clear from the Abbott's death scene that he never was the Doctor, so we have our unlikely double problem again.

The Pertwee era tackles the concept from a different angle, utilising the series ability to cross boundaries we can't to avoid the obvious pitfalls. In "Inferno" we meet parallel Universe versions of all our friends, which at least gives everyone the chance to wear silly wigs and costumes, but also means we can view the death of Benton, Liz etc. without giving up the characters. Genius! Unfortunately we see very few of the regulars actually die, and the Doctor doesn't even have a double! It would be a stunning missed trick, if the story didn't have its sights on higher ideas. "Day of the Daleks" by contrast shows a 'near future' Doctor, an idea expanded upon by the legions of multi-Doctor stories that followed soon afterwards. We'll discuss those another time, but suffice to say it also inadvertently stumbles on the major flaw of the doubles deal.

As well as the improbably nature of bumping into somebody who looks identical to yourself, and who must surely have the same DNA and by association near-similar looking parents, why did the Second Doctor never bump into a double of the Third? Or the First? Or the Eighth? "The Enemy of the World" sadly stands as the least successful of all the double stories, because it doesn't even attribute a 'super fictional' explanation for the conundrum, like an anti-matter copy ("Arc of Infinity") or an android trap ("The Android Invasion"). Without even these subplots for interest, you are left with just silly voices and costumes. What's impressive about that?

That's why "The Enemy of the World" will be forever known as "the one without any monsters". It's built on a money-saving contrivance, and a completely unlikely one at that.