45: The Mind Robber

Before Watching

I’ve mentioned this particular stories several times before, so you won’t be surprised to see me say that I’m pretty familiar with it even before we start our critical viewing. Familiar? Who am I kidding? I bloody love this story. I can’t turn off the voice of the 4 year old me who watched entranced as the Doctor and Jamie (mark 2) taunted Zoe before pulling her out of what I thought was a giant drum, but actually turned out to be a jar. So in a way this review is going to be self-defeating, since I can’t necessarily be critical of the story, in the proper sense of the world. Actually, that’s probably not too bad a thing for me. I’d hate it if I could ever watch this story and be dismissive or blasé about it.

After Watching

Right, a quick question. How much do I love “The Mind Robber”. Answer – well, if it helps, I planned to do what I usually do, two episodes in one evening. After episode 2 I just kept on watching until I’d sat through all five, then for good measure I followed it up with the documentary on the making of the story which is one of the special features on the DVD. A while ago, when I was reviewing “The Web of Fear” in Season Five, I made the point that the official BBC DVD is disappointing in the lack of special features. The other side of the coin is that I probably wouldn’t have been complaining at all if the usual official BBC DVDs didn’t provide you with some very nice goodies. In this case it was a documentary called “The Fact of Fiction”,  all about the making of “The Mind Robber” which lasted slightly more than half an hour.

Right then, the genesis of the story is that producer Peter Bryant and Story Editor Derrick Sherwin really wanted Peter Ling to write for Doctor Who. For the uninitiated, Peter Ling was the co-creator of the long running and inexplicably popular ITV soap opera, Crossroads. Given a virtual free hand, Peter Ling really wanted to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, which can be seen in the number of sources that he drew upon for “The Mind Robber”. Now, as we saw with the last story, the production team du jour had a problem with Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s “The Dominators” which was the previous story we reviewed. The decision was made to cut it from 6 episodes to 5. An extra episode had to be added to “The Mind Robber” – yet Peter Ling’s story wouldn’t stretch to 5 episodes. Thank heavens they made the decision for Derrick Sherwin to write a whole new episode 1, after which Peter Ling’s story would begin. If they’d tried to pad the action of “The Mind Robber” as it was to fill five episodes I think it would have had a hugely detrimental effect to the story. So Derrick Sherwin had to write, in effect, a 1 episode story, which could use no new sets, and no actors other than the regular cast. Does that sound familiar? To me this sounds very like the brief under which “The Edge of Destruction” was produced in season one. To be fair, in the end, they did utilize some robot costumes which had been made for an episode of “Out of the Unknown” and painted a sort of primrose yellow to appear white when filmed.

Under the circumstances the episode that Derrick Sherwin then wrote is a masterpiece, and a perfect example of the way you can make limitations in terms of budget actually work in your favour. The cliffhanger at the end of “The Dominators” saw the TARDIS in the path of a volcanic lava flow. Unable to take off properly due to continuing fluid link problems, the Doctor uses the emergency procedures which take the TARDIS outside of normal reality. Some very weird things begin happening. While the Doctor is in the TARDIS’ power room, first Jamie sees his native Scotland on the scanner, at the same time as hearing some rather stirring bagpipe music. No cliché there then. (Sorry. I do honestly love this episode, and the whole story). When Zoe tells him she can’t see it and it’s not real, then Jamie goes off to see the Doctor, and she sees a vision of her home city. In the end the lure of the image is too strong, and Zoe wanders out of the TARDIS into a white void. Jamie goes to look for her, and the pair of them become stranded. When the Doctor realizes what has happened he does not follow immediately, but sits down in a chair, and battles with the mind that is providing these visions. Meanwhile, out in the void Jamie and Zoe find themselves surrounded by strange white robots. The Doctor calls them with his mind, and they walk slowly, tortuously slowly back towards the TARDIS. When they’re a few steps away he rushes out, and drags them back in. This represents possibly the first moment we’ve had time to draw breath, but it proves wrong to do so. Something is drastically wrong with the TARDIS, and suddenly it shatters, leaving the Doctor nowhere to be seen, and Jamie and Zoe clinging helplessly to the TARDIS console as it whirls off into the endless void.

What a start to the story. Although of course it isn’t really a start to the story, since it is so different in style from what will come afterwards. At the start of episode 2 there isn’t really an explanation of how the travelers arrive safely in the forest of words, but then in a way I suppose that it the story saying – Look, it’s surreal. Anything can happen, so deal with it. Right?! – The next part of the story – Peter Ling’s original beginning for the story, has the Doctor and companions initially split up, and having to make their way through what turns out to be a maze, solving various puzzles as they go, and paying the price for failure if they don’t. In the commentary on the DVD all the principal actors who contributed, along with director David Maloney commented on how much they enjoyed working on the story – and how much Patrick Troughton himself enjoyed it – and it seems to be one of those happy production where everyone involved seems inspired to be at their most creative. So, when Frazer Hines was quarantined for a week or so of precious shooting time when he contracted chicken pox, this was actually incorporated into the storyline. A group of lifesized toy soldiers (one of whom was played by Ian Hines, Frazer’s brother incidentally) clank around through most of the episodes, and Jamie goes to attack one, whereupon he is shot, which turns him into a cardboard cutout. The Doctor finds him, and sees that his face has been removed, and he has to choose from sets of eyes, mouths and noses to reassemble it. He gets it wrong, and voila, Jamie can be played for a couple of episodes by actor Hamish Wilson until Frazer Hines is allowed back on set. This looks, and feels as if it has always been supposed to be part of the story.

It’s probably time for me to start drawing some comparisons with “The Celestial Toymaker” from season 3. The stories are similar in the way that the Doctor and companions are taken into a place where the normal laws of causality do not apply, and the master of the domain can shape and alter reality in any way that he chooses. They are similar in the way that various challenges have to be met. So why does “The Mind Robber” work so much better than “The Celestial Toymaker?”. Partly it helps that the travelers have to do so much figuring things out for themselves as they go along – there is no big ninny in an Aladdin costume setting rules, and telling them that their next challenge is going to be even harder than their last etc. etc. What is happening is made clear from episode one of TCT, which works against it, while it takes much longer for it to become clear exactly what is going on and what is at stake in TMR. The level of menace, while still being very much on the level of fantasy, is much greater in this later story, and ‘real’ fictional figures – Gulliver – Rapunzel – The Minotaur and Medusa are quite cleverly woven into it. Mind you, so are a couple of ‘real life’ human beings in Blackbeard and Cyrano de Bergerac, but even that is legitimate when you consider how real lives can become fictionalized over the passage of time.

The story provides a succession of memorable images. The TARDIS console, spinning off into oblivion (while at the same time providing an excellent view of Ms. Padbury’s posterior which has been rightly praised over the years by far better authorities on the subject than me) – The forest of words being revealed to be the pages of a book – the white robots making Jamie and Zoe into fictional characters by squashing them into the pieces of a book. So if a couple of ideas in the script aren’t as well realized as we maybe would have liked – the forest of words, for example, where the scene in the studio in which the characters play the scenes in no way matches the from the top view, then that’s something I find it pretty easy to overlook.

The ending has been criticized by a number of commentators for not really living up to what has gone before. Personally I think it works perfectly well. During the story at odd times we have seen what appears to be the controller of the Land of Fiction, a human being calling himself the Master. (The Time Lord Master, originally played by Roger Delgado, is no connection with this Master, and it will be a couple of seasons before we meet him for the first time.) It turns out that the Master is just a puppet of a supercomputer- whose most obvious part rather resembles the Conscience Machine from “The Keys of Marinus” – a large transparent polyhedron with lots of technical gubbins inside it. The Doctor, having worked his way into the Master’s Lair, enters into a kind of storytelling duel, for the Master sees the Doctor as someone who can take over, and thus enable him to be set free. Not what the computer wants, mind you, for the computer wants to use the Doctor to break free, and make all living creatures part of its domain. Alright, alright, you’ve heard worse than that in the past. Of course, the Doctor is having to work under a handicap, namely, if he mentions himself, then he automatically loses, since he will be making himself into a fictional character. A little too metaphysical? But that’s the genius of this story – you don’t have to take it on that level, but it’s there if you want to. During the battle, the White robots are ordered to attack and destroy, and they end up doing just that to the computer.

Jamie and Zoe are all for leaving the Master where they found him, but the Doctor intercedes for him, and as it is, everything that the computer has done is going to be undone anyway, which allows us to watch the destruction of the TARDIS being reversed. Which brings me to one other link between this story and “The Celestial Toymaker”. One of the more effective features of that story is Peter Stevens’ overgrown schoolboy Cyril, so clearly based on Billy Bunter that Frank Richards’ estate did allegedly complain to the BBC. Now, in the documentary, Peter Ling himself said that he had actually based the character of the Master on Frank Richards! At one point the Master reveals that he has written a series of adventure stories for the Ensign boys’ magazine about Captain Jack Harkaway (hmm – who does that name remind me of?) Actually it was Frank Richards himself who did this.

So, anything more I need to mention? Well, actually, yes. It’s a beautifully acted story, with honours going to Emrys Jones, a very well respected actor of the 40s and 50s, as The Master. We can also applaud a strong performance from Bernard Horsfall as Lemuel Gulliver. All of Gulliver’s lines were actually taken from Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and Horsfall imbues them with great dignity and a real sense of the period in which they were written. No wonder this wasn’t the only Doctor Who story he’d appear in. David Maloney did say that there was a three year rule – that guest star’s had to wait three years between reappearences, so he’d cast Bernard Horsfall in shows three years apart, but that he’d had special dispensation to use him as a Time Lord in “The War Games” , which we’ll come to in a few weeks’ time.

So let’s return to our starting point. I bloody love the “Mind Robber”, and now, having watched it as part of an ongoing series, if anything I love it even more. Season five, while not devoid of its highlights, presented us with a show which was in serious danger of becoming very samey. Then along comes “The Mind Robber” as weird, imaginative and downright wonderful as anything the show has given us before, while at the same time being completely different. There wasn’t much wrong with a show that could deliver up anything like this. Although the fact that Peter Ling never write for the show again is a shame. A shame if he was asked but never had the time, and shame on the show if he was never asked.

What Have We Learned

Anyone calling himself The Master is usually up to no good.

Fiction is important. It matters.