2.16: The Mind Robber
In which we visit the Land of Fiction, and meet its master. (Not that one.)
Broadcast: September-October 1968
Watched: October 2019
The Mind Robber, Episode 1
Love the foam machine pretending to be lava. When was the last time we spent this long in the TARDIS? The walls weren’t that dark before were they? (They were not. Clayton Hickman, the former editor of Doctor Who Magazine, once did an entire thread about the replacement of the photo-blowup walls used in the background of early episodes with these new, darker sets.)
The cut from “We must not leave the TARDIS!” to Jamie looking doe-eyed at a video of Scotland on the scanner is top. Although clever Zoe being the one to be tempted out is a nice touch.
The white void is properly creepy, and the TARDIS blowing up the most shocking moment in god knows how long – possibly since Tenth Planet 4.
Anyway, that was good.
The Mind Robber, Episode 2
Zoe screaming feels wrong to me. Also is there a reason the episodes of this one run short? Part 1 was a late addition right?*
Anyway this is bloody brilliant, obviously. Gulliver! Sinister children! Jamie’s face! (If Jamie is recast because Hines is ill, when did they film the sequence where he gets turned into a cardboard cut out?) The master talking to himself like Gollum and then laughing to himself like, well, like the Master. I do sort of wonder how kids who watched Dr Who because they liked monsters attacking earth felt about this.
And the cliffhanger is an attack by a unicorn!
When I was a kid and this was repeated on BBC 2 it gave me an incredibly misleading impression that the Troughton era was far more interesting than it actually is.
*So, Eddie Robson answered this one in some detail, and has given his permission for me to quote him on this:
The episodes are short because when the scripts came round Troughton said “You’re skimping on guest actors and getting us to do more work to fill the gap, aren’t you” and he was quite right, apart from ep 5 there’s far fewer speaking roles per episode than you’d usually get.
[Producer Peter] Bryant was trying to save money because it was the end of the block and they’d gone over budget on earlier stories. But also, it had been a really long production block (46 episodes on the trot) and Troughton was knackered and didn’t take kindly to being worked even harder. The regulars went on strike and the compromise was the scripts would be trimmed to twenty minutes. And yes, ep 1 was a late addition, written by [script editor Derrick] Sherwin to replace the episode that had been dropped from The Dominators.
Oh and they shot the sequence where Jamie gets turned into a cutout the following week, with ep 3.
Eddie is good, IMHO. Please buy his new novel, Drunk On All Your Strange New Words.
The Mind Robber, Episode 3
This is a spiritual successor to Toymaker, isn’t it? So why does this one work so much better? Is it because it’s about four hundred times as unhinged?
The noise the solders make when they walk is f***ing terrifying.
The Medusa bit is great – is that claymation? How on earth did they film that?
The Mind Robber, Episode 4
Zoe is surprisingly stupid, setting off traps and so forth. I would forgive this, only when she works out how many words the master has written, she’s out by an order of magnitude. She’s not even good at maths, which is meant to be her specialism. Also the master’s creation “Captain Jack Harkaway” is clearly at the back of RTD or Moffat’s mind in 2004-5.
The thought occurs that the sort of collage effect of this story, sticking literary characters, fairy tales, myths, comic strips etc together into one thing, is kind of a microcosm of Doctor Who itself.
The “getting shut in a book” cliffhanger is mental, although weirdly underpowered. Needs some music or something.
The Mind Robber, Episode 5
Ha, just googled “Pris au piege”, which is at the top of the book Jamie and Zoe are shut in. It means “trapped”. Nice.
Bernard Horsfall is so good as Gulliver. I’d entirely forgotten about the sword fight. Real missed opportunity that no toy company has ever done a Doctor Who set containing Cyrano, Lancelot, Gulliver, maybe Dracula from The Chase, Robin Hood etc.
The masterbrain talks like a Dalek. If this was an RTD story it would turn out to be a Dalek. Wonder if there’s an influence here on Bad Wolf.
Anyway. That was absolutely top.
A further helpful note from James Cooray-Smith:
“The Medusa is stop motion, yeah. The initial impetus for the story was [scriptwriter] Peter Ling - who created Crossroads - having to deal with all the post from people who wrote to the characters.”
'When I was a kid and this was repeated on BBC 2 it gave me an incredibly misleading impression that the Troughton era was far more interesting than it actually is.'
This was the first Troughton I saw, and created in my head a conceptual swinging sixties psychedelia Troughton era that is more vivid to me than the real thing.
Jack Harkaway is in fact a real creation, and the Master of the Land of Fiction is something of an amalgam of his creator, Bracebridge Hemyng, along with Billy Bunter writer Charles Hamilton and Ling himself. In fact, the metafiction of this episode is more fourth wall breaking than immediately apparent, and the more you unpack it, the darker it becomes. I hold that this is actually a psychological horror story disguised as a fantasy romp. (For more on this, see the Relative Digressions episode Wrenna and I did!)
The fun thing is that Jamie being turned into a cardboard cut-out was already in the script, it wasn't added cos FH fell ill. It was just a wacky idea like Zoe being in a jar. So the recast only meant a very short extra bit needed to be written.