Name:
Ramón Salamander
Species:
Human
Place of Origin:
Earth
First Seen In:
The Enemy of the World
Appearances:
Christmas on a Rational Planet
Dead Romance
The Heralds of Destruction
Main Actor:
Patrick Troughton
Other Actors:
Peter Diamond
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Although Salamander’s essential plans and ambitions were relatively straightforward, he is remembered by fans for two very distinct reasons, not only was he the only human villain faced by the Second Doctor during the ‘year of monsters’ of 1968 – every other adversary The Doctor faced during this time was an alien of some sort, but he was also the exact physical double of the Second Doctor (Although he had a distinctive accent due to his Yucatanian childhood that The Doctor claimed he would take a month to mimic exactly, even though he was able to convincingly mimic it during his time posing as Salamander).The Enemy of the World
Subsequent developments revealed that Salamander could apparently predict natural disasters such as a dormant volcano becoming active, subsequently blackmailing various public officials to hand powerover to him or be accused of ineptitude for ignoring his prior warnings. While The Doctor discovered some of Salamander’s files of blackmail material, Jamie and Victoria learned that Salamander was causing the natural disasters thanks to a small group of people that he had tricked into confining themselves in a secret bunker While claiming that there had been a nuclear war that had devastated the planet. Not only did this secure him the loyalty of at least some of Earth’s population even if he had to destroy the rest to establish his power, but he also ensured that they possessed only what information about the outside world he was willing to share with them, claiming that Earth’s surface was a nuclear wasteland populated by ruthless mutants that the scientists were helping him eliminate.
Fortunately, The Doctor’s allies ran into one of the scientists after Salamander brought him out of the bunker to kill him – the man having discovered a stray newspaper cutting that threatened to expose Salamander’s lies, providing them with the necessary information to realise what Salamander was really planning. At the same time, The Doctor was able to deduce the truth about Kent due to the ease with which Kent was willing to resort to murder to get what he wanted, concluding that Kent simply wanted to take Salamander’s place. Having convinced some of Salamander’s staff that he was the monster he was underneath his facade by ‘interrogating’ Jamie and Victoria While posing as Salamander and using their genuine fear of him as evidence, The Doctor pursued Kent and Salamander into the now-deserted bunkers, Salamander setting off bombs to try and kill The Doctor and Kent.
In a desperate attempt to escape, Salamander attempted to trick Jamie and Victoria into thinking he was the Doctor after his escape from the mines, but this deception fell apart when he was brought to the TARDIS and he gestured to Jamie to activate the controls, something that the real Doctor had always expressly ordered Jamie not to do. When the real Doctor arrived, having escaped the explosions relatively unharmed, Salamander tried to escape by setting the TARDISin flight, but in his haste and ignorance he neglected to close the door before the TARDIS dematerialised, with the result that he fell out of the ship and into the Time Vortex, The Doctor and his companions nearly sharing his fate before Jamiemanaged to close the doors (“The Web of Fear“). As a result, Salamander was left drifting in the Time Vortex for all eternity, trapped in a vast void that he could never escape and that The Doctor would never be able to recover him from.