The Mind Of Evil
(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 30/1/1971-6/3/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Don Houghton, director: Timothy Combe)
Rank: 49
'Here it is, every fan's Keller machine: all Dr Who episodes have been wiped except for a few surviving scenes from 'Time and The Rani, 'The Timeless Child', The Myrka, The Kandyman, Kylie Minogue and Adric pouting. Wahahahahaha! Love, The Master'
The last-gasp of the deeply serious Dr Whos of the early 3rd Dr era before things got sillier, ‘The Mind Of Evil’ is sentenced to be at least a candidate for the most unfairly forgotten set of Dr Who episodes of them all, one of the most gritty ‘grown-up’ moral adult that the series ever did. From next story ‘The Claws Of Axos’ onwards Dr Who will become more like a bright colourful cartoon, one full of the big monster hit of the day doing something jaw-dropping, to a backdrop of The Master being comic-book wicked and UNIT being child-friendly. Here, though we’re in the crossover period from the great season 7 when stories were longer deeper and darker, when for the last time in only his second appearance The Master is a truly credible threat who can cause real harm, when UNIT are soldiers fighting for their life and where Pertwee’s role is to bash bureaucratic heads together and sulk about being exiled to a backward planet as much as be dashing and heroic. In time the UNIT era will play it safe, discovering a formula that really connected the public and mining it to death but for now the rules aren’t set in stone yet. The Brigadier is a dashing soldier running around shooting at people rather than stuck behind a desk and even gets to wear a Doctorish disguise. UNIT has a female corporal who gets to do every bit as much as Benton and Yates. Benton himself is more a babysitter in this story than our usual dependable soldier, the person The Brigadier leaves at home back when he goes off gallivanting. The Doctor is so new at this that he doesn’t have his invincible air yet and this is one of the few stories where he effectively comes off worse at the end. By contrast The Master isn’t yet the desperate gaudy villain he’ll become but a real threat, worming his way into the very heart of the institutions The Doctor keeps banging his head against. Even Jo is closer to James Bond than Brooke Bond, our peril monkey not so much a PG Tips chimp as a lockpicking daredevil. Watch any of the later 3rd Doctor stories and you’ll feel safe and cosy, safe in the knowledge that good will prevail. With this story you really don’t know which way things are going to go right up until the end nd whether justice can ever be served against the people who really deserve it.
For ‘Mind Of Evil’ has a
lot to say about good and evil and how most Human beings (and even timelords)
exist somewhere on a spectrum rather than being one thing or another. It’s a
typically sensitive script from Don Houghton, who goes from showing how the
same people can turn out different ways in different circumstances in the
parallel worlds of ‘Inferno’ to a story where everyone has something evil
tucked away inside their subconscious that can be let loose when the
circumstances allow, some combination of ego, fear and paranoia. For ‘Mind’ is
a script all about free will and determinism, where evil is caused not by evil
people so much as the evil done to people and asks questions of whether people
turn out the way they do because of some inherent inherited nature that shapes
their character or whether they were just brought up that way. This is a story
that is really all about capital punishment, of rehabilitation and freedom, of
second chances, of how far you’re prepared to go punishing people in the same
manner of the crime they caused in retribution before that starts reflecting
badly on you, of how much you should hold someone responsible for their actions
and how much criminals too are the victims of their darker impulses. In this
story the big monster of the week isn’t some tangible foe you can shoot with a
gun but your darkest abstract fears being used against you by virtue of The
Keller Machine, a new invention that’s driven by a parasite from outer space
(in fact it’s a bit of a weird one: the story starts out being purely about the
machine, which is more symbolic and referred to as ‘Pandora’s Box’ in the first
draft, like the Greek myth about the flask where everything evil was trapped
before being let loose on the Earth, but Terrance Dicks began seeing plotholes
in the way it seemed to have a mind of its own and turned it into an actual
being partway through, the change being so subtle you don’t really notice until
its pointed out). Everyone is susceptible to it to greater or lesser extents
because all of us have dark sides, places in the mind when we’re all vulnerable
and terrified. It’s the part of mankind that returning monsters in Dr Who are
so good at exploiting to divide and conquer, the paranoia that someone else is
doing better than you are. Even The Doctor’s not immune, seeing a whole host of
old monsters (including the Obvious, like Daleks and Cybermen, but also the
less obvious like ‘The War Machines’, a Zarbi from ‘The Web Planet’ and
Koquillion from ‘The Rescue’ amazingly enough, apparently taken from the Doctor’s
memories at random, unless its more his embarrassment at having been outsmarted
by such weedy adversaries; sensibly they skip previous story ‘Terror Of The
Autons’, as out of context a tiny doll with fangs isn’t the most immediately
scary thing the Dr ever faced) and the burning fire of a destroyed Earth from
Houghton’s other script ‘Inferno’,
a reminder of what’s at stake if The Doctor ever loses and how easily things
can go wrong.
Seemingly invented by the
civil service to free up prisons The Keller machine is meant to rehabilitate
even the worst prisoners by robbing them of their darkness, of making life
better for them. A kindness you might think, except when some of the prisoners
we see come out of the machine they have nothing left in their heads and
they’re just empty, their personalities stripped away from them – and how is
that any better than murder? And aren’t the prisoners just extreme versions of
what everyone suffers from, full of dark impulses that drive our lives? What
would be left of us if our subconscious fears were taken away too? Dr Who is a
series that deep down is all about free will, of letting people from all
planets choose their own path while being aware of what ripples they cause for
the people around them, of trying to find a middle ground of compromise where
everyone is happy and people who would exterminate you are exterminated in
return. Much of Dr Who is about how you can’t separate what makes mankind great
from what makes him, well, human and fallible, the thing that sets us apart
from Gods and (sometimes) timelords, how none of have the right to say if
someone else is truly evil. But at the same time it’s not an easy question to
answer. More people would be safe with our hardened criminals taken off our
streets. Living in prison is not much of a life as it is. That’s the great
thing about ‘The Mind Of Evil’ – other episodes around it are clear cut: stop
the fracking, stop the Autons, stop The Master. But like the best of other
stories in this era (‘The Silurians’ ‘Ambassadors
Of Death’ even ‘Claws Of Axos’ a little
bit) there are no easy answers to this story, a deeper conundrum that simply
waving a sonic screwdriver can’t solve. If we had the capacity to brainwash
people with kindness should we use it? Or would that in itself be unkind?
(Houghton said he was thinking of Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at the
time, whose a far worse criminal in a far worse dystopia than Barnham in
1970s/1980s Britain).
The Master wasn’t in the
first draft of Houghton’s script which really was all about the machine but it was only natural
that the production team would want to include their new toy in a story all
about evil. He’s still on the run following ‘Terror Of The Autons’ and spent
the past six months plotting his revenge by doing what this Doctor never could,
worming his way into the establishment by charm so that he can get near the
machine and basically treat it like a hoover so that it blows the evil in
people’s faces instead of sucking them up. The machine can then be used to
taunt you with your greatest phobias that appear so strong that they physically
kill you by causing you to physically manifest what you’re most afraid of, even
causing men to drown in a dry room (I know the feeling – I have mine whenever I
catch a TOTP re-run The Spice Girls are on). As with all great technological
breakthroughs the machine isn’t evil as its neutral, but in the wrong hands The
Keller Machine can be used to make good people bad, as much as bad people good. The
great irony of all this is that, if people only knew what he was capable of,
then they’d be turning the machine on The Master and locking him up, but no –
thanks to (made up) contacts (does The Master have his own psychic paper we
never see? It would explain a lot) and his brilliant ability to act The Master
is the one pointing the machine passing judgement on everyone else. And isn’t
that the truth of how the world works at it’s worst? (Houghton doesn’t make a
big thing of it but I’m willing to bet that he’s passing judgement on crooked
judges and politicians here, the people who are worse criminals than the people
in the prisons because at least they’re ‘honest’ about what they did rather
than trying to hush it up).The Master really is the antithesis of The Doctor in
this early era, happy to be an establishment figure to The Doctor’s rebel who wouldn’t
want to belong to any establishment who would have him, a man (at least in this
era) who can bring out the worst in people rather than their best. The story
makes great ploy too of the fact that The Master is the biggest evil around who
deserves to be locked up himself but whose suave and clever enough to stay out
of trouble, befriending the hoi polloi so that he becomes untouchable (it’s so
good an idea he gets banged up for real in ‘The Sea Devils’).
There’s an even bigger
phobia underlying ‘The Mind Of Evil’ though, that our ‘enemies’ with whom we’re
locked in a stalemate are about to turn suddenly wicked, becoming the nasty
people we secretly always feared they were, as the background to this story is
a peace conference (one hosted by UNIT soldiers, weirdly). The threat in this
story isn’t that The Master will use the Keller machine on everyone on Earth
(that sounds like a big job even for him) but that The Master will unleash it
at a peace conference and instead unleash war, using mankind’s paranoia to
destroy ourselves for him (and presumably an exiled Doctor along with us) and
turn our learned, noble leaders on to the powers of war (and yes, we did
actually have some politicians to admire back then, although today this feels
like the most scifi aspect of the plot). This was an idea that happened when
the writer was looking for extra ideas and asked his wife if she had any and
it’s a masterstroke (she plays Captain Chin Lee in this story so had a lot to
do with how it turned out). We’ve said a few times already that Dr Who was a
cold war baby, created when JFK was president and ending less than a month
after the fall of the Berlin Wall (the closest the slow collapse of the Soviet
empire came to having a fixed end date). Even in a series full of little cold
wars past present and future this is the big one in many ways: very much
recognisable as ‘our’ world and with an Earthly threat down the other end. It
even uses a real missile, codename ‘Bloodhound’, a Thunderbird 2
SAGW missile on loan from the 36th Heavy Air Defence Regiment, thanks to Berry Letts ringing up the RAF and
dropping into casual conversation how much co-operation he’d got from the army
and would they fancy joining in too now they had a fulltime armed force of
their own in Who? I mean just look at it, it’s huge (and dangerous enough that
only the troops themselves were allowed to handle it): these are the stakes
we’re fighting for here, because there’s no way we’re going to survive either
side dropping something that size (and surely no sight is less likely to have
lots of little Whovians running down their local recruitment offices which were
a sort of more benign version of the Keller Machine’s brainwashing, though
honestly even in the 1970s the DW fanbase was more likely to grow up to be the
people at the peace conference than the soldiers, however much we loved The
Brigadier. Seriously, did nobody in charge actually watch these programmes and
realise how anti-war Dr Who was and is?!) This was a time when everyone
watching feared a sudden escalation into an all-out war, when one wrong or
misinterpreted move by either side of the twin superpowers could see everyone
evaporated overnight, with the world perpetually poised a single press of a
button and a forty second pause before annihilation. Rumours were rife (many of
them confirmed after the cold war ended) about how close both sides had come to
making a mistake via malfunction or mistake and how disaster had only been
averted by soldiers who actually went against the rulebook and refused to press
the final button. How much worse, then, when you have a third power meddling
and trying to deliberately create havoc?
So, yet again in Dr Who,
our real villain is ourselves and The Master is only exaggerating what’s
already there. One of the great things about ‘The Mind Of Evil’ is that the
threat is even closer to home than it was in the parallel world of ‘Inferno’. This
isn’t a parallel world this time – it’s our world, in the here and now, in
UNIT’s pretty-much contemporary time period (give or take a decade. Sometimes).
Houghton’s comment on the justice system, that so often locks up the victims
rather than the perpetrators, is new ground for Dr Who and a more than worthy
point to make. Particularly in this period when the Doctor, the outright
goodie, is locked up – a victim of his own crazy justice system back on Earth -
and The Master is free to go anywhere. It even ends with the colossal
miscarriage of justice that sees The Master free to run off while The Doctor is
stuck despite his good intentions and morality. Setting so much of a
child-friendly series in as brutal a place as a prison is a brave move but it
pays off: the location filming looks really good. The story goes that the
production office rang up the home office and asked to film in a real prison
but were turned down curtly straight away: it would give away too many secrets
and be a logistical nightmare. Besides what prisons were empty enough?
Everything was full – and they flaming didn’t have a Keller machine they could
use! And no they weren’t going to let prisoners do something fun like film for
Dr Who! So instead the 11th century fortress Dover Castle in Kent filling in
for the fictional Stangmoor Prison, a word combination of the real English
prison ‘Strangeways’ and ‘Dartmoor’) and it looks really good without being as
implausible as it may seem now: until the 2nd World war and in some
cases beyond it was normal to have the local Medieval castle double as a
prison. A few lines from script editor Terrance Dicks to cover this and away we
go! The castle was probably chosen because it was also nice and near to an RAF
hangar at RAF Swingate which the production team had been allowed to use free
of charge, with troops made available as extras treating it as a training
exercise, just like the army cadets in ‘The
Invasion’ (and the navy seals in ‘The Sea Devils’ to come). It’s not just
the outside though: the interior studio sets too are impressively realistic and
claustrophobic and just like the real thing. By now it’s become the usual sort
of padding to have The Doctor or companion locked up in a cell somewhere and
they all look the same, i.e. flimsy, but this is a real sets of cells in a real
prison that really do feel impenetrable. It’s a smart move putting Dr Who
somewhere it had never been before and yet which feels so ‘right’ and seeing
The Doctor butt heads against ignorant prison wardens makes a nice change from
him butting heads against ignorant civil servants. There are two big action
sequences during the prison riots and while having a second gets repetitive
they both look impressive, more real and visceral than usual for Who with a lot
of extras involved (real troops in the first one who, due to a
misunderstanding, turn up in their own uniforms rather than the prison gear
made for them; the second is a last minute replacement when Durham Film Labs
which always processed Dr Who negatives was involved in an accident where part
of the building toppled over, leaving some of the films they were working on at
the time exposed to the air, including a part of ‘The Mind Of Evil’. Several
feet of film were lost, leading the crew to film themselves running around;
that’s the director himself in the dark glasses running around and looking a
bit lost). There’s even a helicopter for the first time since ‘The Enemy Of The World’, at great such great
expense that it pushed this story way over budget (and got the director into a
whole heap of trouble).
Great as the moral
background is though, excellent as it looks on screen, it’s in the
characterisation where this story comes alive, especially when The Doctor and
The Master are butting heads. While they spoke in ‘Terror’ most of that story
was The Doctor trying to overcome obstacles The Master kept putting in his way,
like a giant game of Mousetrap (made out of plastic). This story is a much more
direct confrontation, a chess game between two masters of the sport and Roger
Delgado is immediately the single biggest threat we’ve seen in the series since
The Daleks came along. While The Doctor has been butting heads and largely
getting nowhere in his exile living off The Brigadier’s handouts The Master has
been enjoying himself, making the most of all the temptations of humanity and
the status symbols like the big limousines and the big fat cigars. He’s at home
in this mixed up corruptible world in a way the more moral Doctor could never
be and makes the most of it. Last time we saw The Master he was a circus freak
but now he has the power of the entire establishment behind him. He’s a total
fraud whose impressive enough at disguises to become seen as the real thing,
utterly convinced of his own brilliance where The Doctor is still coming to
terms with his faults. This darker, moodier, more driven Master plays even more
to Roger Delgado’s strengths that the wickedly colourful bounder of ‘Terror Of
the Autons’, giving him more scope to look good while being naughty. The
sparring between Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee is so often the highlight of a 3rd
Doctor story but rarely more than here where they clash so brilliantly, so
different and yet so the same, so equally committed to their cause, stubborn,
tenacious and clever. You really do get the sense that both of them relish the
challenge of fighting someone else as clever as them, the same way that prize
fighters relish the challenge of pitting themselves against the best rather
than ‘easy’ fights, because they both know they have to raise their game from
who they’re used to fighting. For the first time, though, we also get a glimpse
of what drives The Master on quite this hard: after all his plan involved him
spending six whole months plotting revenge on The Doctor (while later stories
reveal just how impatience he is). The best moment in the entire story comes
midway through when you even begin to feel a little sorry for this would-be
dictator, whose accidentally trapped when the Keller machine switches itself
on. The Master’s phobia is telling: a giant hologram of The Doctor laughing at
him. For yes despite the charm, despite the respectability, despite the
planet-sized ego, The Master is driven by failure, just like most of us. It’s a
wonder the machine isn’t full after pulling just a few seconds’ worth of evil
out of his brain. Until now we haven’t had a chance to learn a lot about The
Master and till now he’s just been another one of many colossal threats, but
this story makes it clear just how personal this vendetta is and turns him into
more than just another villain to become most fans’ favourite psychopath. It
also ties into the overall arching theme of what we do with our worst
criminals. Really The Master is as much a prisoner of his own darkest deepest
fears as the prisoners sentenced to undergoing treatment with the Keller
machine: the hint is that The Master wasn’t made that way, but created. How
much of a hand competition with The Dr had in making him turn out the way he
did? Though he doesn’t mention the drumming in his head from 36 years later
this is visibly the same confused, warped alien we see in David Tennant’s day,
who isn’t quite sure what he’s doing but can’t stop himself from doing it.
It’s a new twist on an
age-old Dr Who theme: be kind, even to people who aren’t kind themselves,
because perhaps they’ve never been shown it (and might have turned out
differently if they had). Though the ‘Buddhist’ feel of this era hasn’t got
going properly yet (Barry Lets’ first script ‘The
Daemons’ won’t be transmitted till the end of the year) it’s fully in
keeping with other 3rd Dr stories that ask big questions about karma and the
natural, unhealthy, unbreakable cycle people doing bad things to other people
has ripple effects that causes them to lash out at other people. It makes for a
clever contrast too: The Doctor has himself knows what it’s like to be trapped,
having been exiled by his own people, sentenced to imprisonment to one particular
place and time (he’s noticeably much more patient with the prisoners in this
story than he is the jailors in charge of them – or with his friends; this is a
snappish exasperated Doctor whose got more than a touch of The master inside
him, especially when he snaps at poor Jo as he does repeatedly across this
story) and we really feel his frustrations in this story as he lashes out at
the people around him, a victim of his environment and circumstances every bit
as much as the prisoners, both before and after The Keller Machine is switched
on. Just because his cell is a bit bigger and his conditions a bit freer
doesn’t make it any easier for someone used to travelling across all time and
space to be stuck here. Exile, for The Doctor, is much how they say prison is:
its impossible to defeat the system and get your freedom before your time is
up, but it is possible to get little victories while you’re there, like
defeating the aliens that come your way. As a result you really feel it when
The Doctor loses this one and The Master rings him up to rub his face in it and
understand his grouchiness even when you can’t condone it. For this is a series
that’s stopped being black and white now its no longer made that way but in
colour, with even the hero open to temper tantrums. Similarly The Brigadier is
painted both ways, as a boss dishing out orders that are unfair and a man
prepared to do his part rather than just sending his troops into harm’s way (it
seems most odd that an underling like Benton would be put in charge of a peace
conference while The Brigadier goes off to storm a prison but it’s a great
moment for The Brigadier as a character, as he saves The Doctor instead of the
other way round for once. Complete with Doctor or Master-style disguises – they
should have let Nicholas Courtney do much more of this, he’s brilliant!) It’s
even better for Jo, the one character in all of Who that can plausibly be a
purist goodie with no bad tendencies whatsoever (that we see, anyway: it would
be interesting to see what The Keller machine would show her. A cut scene in
the script has Jo facing bats, though it would be in keeping with the character
if her big fear is letting everyone down and putting her friends in danger, as
she nearly did when she was brainwashed in ‘Terror’). Forget the later stories
where she can only look googly-eyes at the people around her and ask them for
help; in this story you see why UNIT allow her to stay on the payroll: she’ll
do anything to save her friends and working on her own initiative rather than
sitting around waiting to be rescued.
She’s also there as the Dr’s moral compass when he occasionally forgets
the real people caught up in The Master’s plot and like Rose to come her
compassion is by far her most interesting trait, without the judgement of the
people around her (just look at the way she befriends converted mass-murderer
Barnham, seeing him as the defenceless
simpleton he’s become rather than the cruel beast of the past. In a
story that keeps asking big questions of our morals, of who we should be and
how we should act when we all have a little bit of the darker impulses inside
us all, Houghton’s answer is definitely to ‘be more like Jo’.
Like all things in the
early Pertwee stories this is a great ensemble piece though where everyone is
taking things seriously and all the guest cast shine. Neil McCarthy is superb
in the tricky part of Barnham, whose believable both as the pre-machine rough
thug who probably eats kittens for breakfast and the post-machine sweetheart
who wouldn’t hurt a Zarbi, never mind a fly. William Marlowe as the more leaner
yet meaner Mailer is also bang on the money. He was married to UNIT’s Corporal
Bell, Fernanda Marlowe, at the time while following a divorce later in the
decade he’ll re-marry to Roger Delgado’s widow Kismet. Pik-Sen Lim, too, gets
one of the first decent parts for a genuine Chinese actress (as opposed to a
Caucasian in yellow-face) on UK TV – there were so few Chinese actresses around
in Britain at the time that the production team were getting desperate to cast
her, until the writer chipped in to say his wife was Chinese and had an equity
card; given that she’s a last minute substitute and fighting against charges of
nepotism she’s excellent, utterly devoted to The Master but enough of her own
person to look down on the non-Chinese speaking English with disdain (it’s a
small point but the fact that the 3rd Dr is fluent in Hokkien Chinese and they actually
make Pertwee speak some at speed, as if he’s been doing this his whole life, is
a great little detail to remind us that this is a Dr who ended up in England by
chance but is just as at home anywhere in the universe; Pik-Sen coached him in
this too in her spare time as well). The smaller part of prisoner Vosper is well
cast too, with Haydn Jones making the most of his few lines, usually in a
double act with Barnham (where they resemble George and Lennie in John
Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’, the clever one looking after his thick friend
and trying to keep him out of trouble, ultimately failing due to a misunderstanding
in perhaps the first really important work of fiction that dared to ask
questions about the justice system). Raymond Westwell’s prison governor too is
a delight in his scenes squaring off against The Doctor, a Barrowclough by
nature turned into a Mr Mackay by his constant muttering (we’re two years away
from the pilot of ‘Porridge’, broadcast as part of the Ronnie Barker showcase ‘Seven
Of One’ but there are times when it looks very similar indeed, especially the
debate about whether criminals can ever be rehabilitated and whether they need
the love of a Barrowclough or the discipline of a Mackay).
Really, though, its the
script that makes this one and it’s a tragedy that Don Houghton never wrote for
the series again. He really ‘gets’ this series, the half-establishment half
anti-establishment Doctor who has no patience for the human value systems
around him but who naturally assumes his place is near the top and The Master
who really is an establishment figure despite secretly plotting to take it
down. I wish we’d seen more of these two squaring off in Houghton’s words as
there’s a sophistication in ‘The Mind Of Evil’ that all their later partnerships,
however fine, can never quite match again. UNIT too seem like a real army for
maybe the last time, a group of soldiers who’ve effectively given up their
freedom to stand by their country and Brigadier. The same for director Tim
Combe, who went so spectacularly over budget Barry Letts never worked with him
again after this, perhaps forgetting how much he himself went over budget
making ‘The Enemy Of The World’ three years
earlier): he really ‘gets’ these characters and how they work in a series
neatly balanced between action and dialogue (those are his children, playing
with the children of costume designer Bobi Bartlett, in the scene on the
playground when Chin-Lee is up to no good and burning official papers). There’s
a lot of talking in this story but it only begins to sag near the end, like
many six-parters; equally there’s usually one big action moment per episode to
keep things moving. The only real issue is that it is static at times. There’s
so much time spent inside the prison that we begin to get stir-crazy looking at
it, while the ‘peace conference’ element is never done as thoroughly or as
entertainingly as the parts in the prison so we never end up caring about the
bigger story (which is just noises-off) as much as the little stalemate in a
single prison. Like the other long stories with multiple parts ‘Mind of Evil’ also
repeats itself just that little bit too often, with the Keller machine used for
three of the five cliffhangers (even the Dr doesn’t have that many phobias). The
master’s second appearance is his most bonkers plan till ‘Timeflight’ (perhaps
the most bonkers plan in all of Dr Who): did he really have the parasite with
him when he was exiled to Earth? Did he really think he could keep total
control of the Keller Machine? And if he does cause a nuclear war on Earth and
The Doctor still has his dematerialisation circuit how does he think he’s going
to get out of this one? This is the start of him getting desperate and sloppy in
his attempts to take revenge out on The Doctor and while that’s perfectly in
keeping with who The Master will become this doesn’t yet fit what we see of The
Master on-screen now. Similarly UNIT are the last people who should be in
charge of a peace conference: they’re used to dealing with invading aliens not
diplomats. By this time the civil service have clashed with The Doctor lots of
times: why don’t they seem his as a real threat to peace and tell The Brigadier
to keep him away at all costs?! There are plotholes too about what the parasite
inside the Keller machine really is. We get multiple explanations none of which
match (take your pick from an invention subverted by The Master and an alien
that feeds off the dark recesses of the mind, which seems an odd thing for
evolution to do even in Dr Who. Does it eat darkness? If so why doesn’t it just
see The Master as its best chance of a meal and eat him?) There’s also the much-derided
dragon effect, which is supposed to menace an American delegate at the peace conference
to death: Barry Letts later called this the worst effect during his time on the
show and while I wouldn’t say that’s true (there’s ‘The Planet Of The Plastic
Spiders’ and ‘The Invasion Of The Rubber Dinosaurs’ to name but two) it does
stand out as a weak effect in an otherwise strongly made story (the cast took
to calling it ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’; the director sensibly cut the scenes to
a minimum). Less spoken about is the mind parasite itself, which turns out to
be a pile of spaghetti covered in green washing up liquid: not the thing Keller
machine-inspired fears are made of. There are times when things slow down to a
crawl and the stretch of six episodes seems like a life sentence.
Still, though, there are
one heck of a lot more things going for than against this story, which manages
to ask all the right questions and come up with several good answers, a complex
morality tale about whether men who are flawed themselves can start mucking
around with people’s brains and trying to ‘correct’ them. This is, in many
ways, the most ‘Doomwatch’ of Dr Who stories with the least amount of scifi mentions
of any stories of the era, a more plausible story than normal about something that
seems like a logical extension of where the world was going already (like all
of Kit Pedler’s series in the early days when it was pitched as being the more
down-to-Earth version of Who). It’s an impressively complex, subtle story from
a time when most drama was about black and white villains (and funnily enough
this story used to exist only in black and white right up until the DVD, when
it was re-coloured using a technology that picked up on the ‘pulses’ embedded
in the lines of the existing copies that seems more like magic and implausible
than the Keller machine; I actually prefer a lot of the 3rd Dr stories before
they were re-coloured but not this one which needs to feel ‘real’). Goodness
knows why this story gets overlooked as much as it does: it covers all the
ground this era of the series always did but in a slightly different way, a
story with a lot to say and all the right people saying it. Dr Who won’t be
this grown-up and intelligent again until Sylvester McCoy’s final year – and by
then people will have been brainwashed by a Michael Grade machine, every bit as
horrific as a Keller machine, into not watching or caring at all.
POSITIVES + Another of
my favourite scenes in this story is when The Master is so pleased with how
well his scheme is going that he takes the time to sit back in a limousine and light
up a cigar, enjoying hiding in plain sight while everyone on ‘our’ side panics
and goes to pieces, something which isn’t at all necessary to the plot but
which tells you so much about his personality. This is a timelord who doesn’t
have cigars or limousines back on Gallifrey but he’s making the most of being
on Earth in the 1970s in a way the Dr would never in a million years think to
do. Even the fact he has a limousine with darkened windows like some egocentric
celebrity, while the Doctor has a quirky souped-up yellow car from decades ago
open to the elements, tells you everything you need to know about the
fundamental differences between their personalities. It’s all very clever and
helped make The Master more than just a threat to the universe but arguably the
threat to the universe when The Daleks weren’t around.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Open The
Box’ is the name of the third and final story in the ‘UNIT: Revisitations’ box
set (2018) which deals with the repercussions of the riots in Stangmoor prison
and The Master’s use of the Keller machine. Chin Lee, for instance, has been
scarred for life but has vowed to do good to make up for her past behaviour,
the newly elected head of a company designed to offer meditation to anyone who
needs it around the world to help prevent outbursts of anger amongst the
population, only a mysterious creature has been hiding inside the alpha waves
used in her podcasts. This is a story where the plot’s a bit ropey but the roar
of the monster is terrifying in all the right ways and little bits of
characterisation are really interesting, especially when the Keller Machine is
switched on: Osgood is horrified by the thought of failure and letting Kate
especially down, leading to a sweet scene where Kate has to calm her scientific
advisor down and tell her that she’s never trusted anyone more.
Previous ‘Terror Of The Autons’ next ‘The Claws Of
Axos’
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