The Mind Robber
(season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 14/9/1968-12/10/1968, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Derrick Sherwin, writer: Peter Ling, director: David Maloney)
Rank: 2
'Och I don't know how to tell you this doctor but we've landed in the land of fiction a second time and from this tree I can see our next few adversaries: three bears grumbling about their porridge, seven dwarfs with mining equipment, a boy wizard with a scar on his head, Batman, a Glabdihardit-Clandusprod hybrid from ‘Kindred Spirits’ and a chrome robot from Battlestar Galactica, while my appearance gets changed to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. In a kilt. I think perhaps we’d better go the other way…'
If there’s a single word
to sum up Dr Who then it would be ‘imaginative’. All those worlds, all those
alien species, all those different genres, all that time-travelling, all those
different ways of telling a ‘story’, the complex central character at the heart
of it all - with two hearts no less – this is a show whose very unpredictability,
in the midst of programmes that conform to set patterns and which people watch
entirely for their repetitiveness (soap operas, sitcoms, reality TV, even most
other scifi programmes that tend to have only one set of villains and travel
through either space or time but not both) Dr Who and its many possibilities stands
out a mile. ‘The Mind Robber’ is, by far and away, the most imaginative Dr Who
story ever, which is pretty much like saying it’s the most imaginative thing
ever written for telly, if only because it’s a story entirely about
imagination. The Doctor’s immortal foe this month isn’t a bureaucratic
nightmare a monster or a great dictator (or all three) but a writer who can
conjure things out of nowhere and where the greatest danger for him and his
companions isn’t death or invasion but being turned into fiction characters
themselves, to be tied down into a rigid repetition of behaviour they cannot
escape. For a series that’s all about freedom, about individual choice, this
makes the stakes one of the biggest in the series even if the Doctor and his
companions are saving themselves rather than a world (because this world
doesn’t strictly exist).
Writer Peter Ling, who
only wrote this one story for the series, is kind of the odd one out in Dr Who
writer terms in many ways. He was older than most of the people who had written
for Who for starters, someone who had next to no interest in science fiction
and outside this story his career fell into two halves: writing for the
repetitive world of children’s newspaper serials (whereby a young
impressionable child would be sent to boarding school and learn to conform,
where they would learn something – and then promptly forget it the next week,
every week, for decades. The fondly remembered serial in ‘The Eagle’ ‘The Three
Js’ was Ling’s where John Allen, ‘Specs’ Davies and ‘Jacko’ Eccles are 4th
formers at Northbrook school and have spiffing adventures that they never seem
to remember –it was popular enough to become a TV series for a while) or the
BBC’s big soap of the day Crossroads (whereby businessmen running a motel got
to meet different people but which hit the re-set button at the end of every
episode week after week, for years). Imagine being a writer, one of the most
creative and free-ranging of occupations there could ever be, and knowing
exactly the sort of things you were going to write for the rest of your career
like a hamster on a wheel, but afraid to jump off because getting any writing
job is so hard. You’d go mad. Imagine, then, being offered a lifeline, of being
able to write for the single most imaginative series ever! Ling had worked with
script editor Derrick Sherwin on ‘Crossroads’ and happened to bump into him on
a train where they were catching up about their jobs. Naturally Sherwin offered
his old friend a job now that he had credentials, a sort of holiday from his
usual work, but Ling was non-plussed: what did he know about time and space?
They moved on to discuss their jobs, which seemed very different but had one
thing in common: the amount of fans who seemed to get it into their heads that
their fictional worlds were somehow ‘real’, with endless amounts of letters
being addressed directly to the characters in the show. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny
if they were somehow real?’ Ling laughed, commenting on how their creations
seemed to have a life of their own outside their creators. ‘That’s it’ said
Sherwin ‘There’s your story – forget about science fiction just write me that!’
Ling didn’t seem to hold
out much hope of getting his story made despite his contacts and seems to have
treated his plot as part holiday from
his usual work, a chance to be utterly outrageous and partly as therapy, as he
turns a character much like himself into a baddy, driven on to make his
characters repeat themselves ad infinitum while driven by ‘the system’, a
computer whose origins we never discover but who keeps him trapped. After all,
Ling was pitching for a production team that really didn’t understand the world
he came from, he knew little or nothing about the genre or the usual templates
for how Dr Who works (we invade them, they invade us, or we meet in the middle,
while very occasionally they’ve been here all along) and given his day jobs
doesn’t have time to learn much about Who at all (four years into its seventeen
year run ‘Crossroads’ wasn’t yet at a point where it could be left to other
writers so Ling didn’t have long to write this either). Most production teams
would, in turn, have turned him down, hopefully politely, despite his contacts
in the business (Jon Pertwee was another champion of Ling’s work after they did
some serials together on radio, so it’s even odder Ling never worked for the
series again in his era) – but this is season six, a time when Dr Who stories
are falling like flies, Sherwin himself is halfway out the door and new boy
Terrance Dicks isn’t quite in yet while producer Peter Bryant is just desperate
for someone, anyone, with enough of a writing pedigree to just get the darn
thing back to him vaguely on time. So instead the unlikeliest commission in all
of Dr Who goes ahead, a scifi story from someone who didn’t properly know what
scifi was, with the script editor too busy saving other stories to pay much
attention for the first couple of drafts.
Ling might not know much
about the science part but he picks on the ‘fiction’ and positively throws
himself at the ‘child friendly’ aspect of the brief and throws the Dr, Jamie
and Zoe into a world based on the books that H G Wells especially grew science
fiction from in the first place, the fantasy surrealist worlds created by
writers like Lewis Carroll and L Frank Baum that exist in a universe all of
their own, independent of what other worlds might look like. Little does Ling
probably know it but he does exactly the right thing at the right time:
Edwardian fiction and surrealism are ‘in’ with the hip 1960s teenagers and part
of druggy anti establishment pop culture lore (think John Lennon ‘doing’ Lewis
Carroll on ‘Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’ or Grace Slick
picking up on the pill-taking in ‘Alice In Wonderland’ in Jefferson Airplane
hit ‘White Rabbit’) pretty much by accident (Ling’s novelisation of this story,
actually fairly disappointing given it ought to be the perfect medium for it,
adds a lot more Lewis Carroll references like Zoe falling into a ‘rabbit hole’
and the similarities between the white rabbit and white robots. It could be
that after the BBC banned various Lewis Carroll-inspired songs for drug
references this aspect got toned down in the script itself. It takes a 2021 13th
Doctor novel to go full-on Baum in one of this story’s many spin-off sequels).
For a start many youngsters in 1968 would have had at least heard people talk
about drugs and the mysterious ‘void’ their minds were taken to, a land beyond
space and time that didn’t work to the restrictions of human society but worked
to its own internal logic. If they were really hip they’d also know the ability
of soft drugs like LSD to unlock buried memories of childhood and make them
suddenly very vivid, particularly fiction that made an impression on
impressionable minds at a young age, suggesting a different world beyond the
one they lived in full of different rules and ideals (‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Heart’s Club Band’ started off as a concept album about childhood, with the
real Liverpool child haunts of Lennon and McCartney ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
and ‘Penny Lane’ the first songs recorded for it, while Pink Floyd name their
debut LP after a chapter in ‘The Wind In The Willows’). In short a trippy
looking story about Victoriana characters they’d last thought about when they
were little is the perfect story for the times, even though writer and audience
are probably viewing it through very different prisms.
This isn’t a world the Doctor
lands in per se but a place the Tardis lands in as part of throwing a
get-out-of-trouble-quick switch when it was engulfed in lava at the end of ‘The Dominators’ that throws it of
course and seemingly beyond ‘our’ time and space (the Doctor seriously needs to
stop using those switches as it never ends up well). Technically it doesn’t
have a name but our heroes start referring to as ‘the land of fiction’ and its
a place where literary characters walk around and go through the motions of
their own lives, but where they can interact with our heroes and each other,
sometimes saying new things based on their characters, at other times
restricted to the words their creator wrote for them. The character of Gulliver
is especially clever – every line he speaks is from Daniel Defoe’s original
book, cleverly knitted together in a new context to make sense when he talks to
the Dr about the plot. What a lot of reviewers miss, though, is that
‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is itself a sort of ‘Mind Robber’ for the Victorian era, a
long parody of the genre of ’explorers’ books where the same boring restrictive
characters do the same thing day in day out every week by starting off as a
boring travelogue and ending up in Lilliput where everyone is tiny and the
world is downright bonkers (there were a lot of these style books in the 19th
century and Defoe himself rather resented how many people copied the format of
his own ‘Treasure Island’, coming up with ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ as a snide
postmodernist-style put down of writers with imaginations trapped by exactly
the sort of daily grind they’d tried to escape by becoming writers, where even
the most imaginative and monkeynuts world ever is treated just like, say, going
to Cyprus). The fact that Ling realises this and has Gulliver himself, Defoe’s
symbol of exploration, trapped in an even wackier world is hilarious. Some fans
wonder why the other characters have more freedom to say apparently what they
want but that makes sense by this story’s own internal rules too, as most of
them aren’t restrictive texts but fairytale characters in stories traditionally
passed on by word of mouth and so told slightly differently every time. They
all have a much wider vocabulary as a result, to the point where Rapunzel is
almost a hip 60s teen.
More obscure is the fact
that the children seen at the end only talk in quotes from E Nesbitt’s ‘The Story Of The Treasure Seekers’ (at least
in the parts written by Ling and not re-written by Sherwin), a rare story told
from a children’s point of view of an adult world, finding themselves taking
adult jobs to earn money and live but still seeing it with their looks of
innocence . That’s where a lot of ‘The Mind Robber’ is pointing I think, a
story that takes the long running conversation between generations in Dr Who
and goes to even more of an extreme than simply siding with the hippie
teenagers by looking at the world through the eyes of their younger brothers
and sisters. Children are brought up on fictional worlds where the normal everyday
worlds don’t apply as escapism and in some cases they’re the first ‘adult’
heads they ever get into to see how the world really works and it can be a
shock that the adult world doesn’t work the way you thought it would when you
get there (Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’, a big hit in late 1967, is on
similar lines: how come, after years of being fed books about Alice in
Wonderland drinking weird potions, kids aren’t supposed to be curious and take
them now they’re adults?) ‘The Mind
Robber’ returns to that childish world of anarchy where there are no rules and
people from different stories live side by side in a jumble, far from
restrictions of things like ‘copyright’ and ‘audience expectation’. It’s a
story that asks why our world doesn’t turn out this child-friendly way. Who is
controlling it and making it turn out the way it does and making us repeat
ourselves all the time when we could be doing so much more with our lives? Is
there a master brain out there in our ‘real’ world somewhere keeping us in
place? For if we’re the creators of our own world, if humanity are really the
only species out there, why are we doing thi to ourselves and keeping ourselves
so trapped all the time?
It all harks back to
Sydney Newman’s original idea for the series, that it wouldn’t just move
forwards and backwards in time but go ‘sideways’ from time to time to keep it
interesting (he didn’t expect it to make stories about the present day yet
because where’s the fun in that?) You might think that a trippy and very 1960s
story would date but actually if anything ‘The Mind Robber’ makes more sense
now than it ever did in our age of mash-ups and crossovers, with even stories
like ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’ a sort of mash-up of Who, Torchwood and Sarah
Jane Adventures. Even more so right now given that the plot is basically about
a computer churning out art without quite understanding it or the humans who
wrote it (has The Tardis landed in a bit of a.i. software?!)We’ve seen other
experimental stories where the rules don’t apply in Who too, all of which
followed this one – stories like ‘Warrior’s Gate’ ‘The Happiness Patrol’ ‘The
Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ and ‘Love and Monsters’. Seeing this on television
for the first time in 1968 and in an era when Dr Who was itself as rigidly
stuck to a format as its ever been (the ‘base under siege era’ when the
differenced tended to come from the setting and the monsters, but viewers
watched for the same sense of safety and repetition they got from programmes
like, well, Crossroads) ‘The Mind Robber’ must have been a colossal shock. Almost
as if someone had robbed your mind!
If this story had been
‘planned’ in this way from the first, written to be a trippy drug story it just
wouldn’t have worked. Because this story is being written for slightly
different rules, though, by a writer who doesn’t necessarily understand them but
knew it was good enough for his childhood favourites, it still feels deeply
weird rather than calculated, in a good way, as if even the few remaining rules
of Dr Who’s ever elastic format have been broken. Given that this story also
ended up being made at the end of the longest unbroken recording run in the
series’ history when spirits were flagging and the budget was low (46
continuous weeks! Patrick Troughton took one look at how many lines he and his
friends had to learn and put a complaint into the BBC) it could have been a
disaster. Instead it’s a triumph as everyone pulls out the stops to make this
work and get the most out of what’s available. On paper the Tardis landing in a
white void, which is just the studio floor and walls re-painted, should be
stupid but it’s played with such conviction it really does feel like stepping
into another world. Equally a Medusa statue that’s clearly immobile and being
powered by stop-frame animation, coupled with the shadow of a minotaur (a
bull’s head borrowed from stock) and a ‘unicorn’ that’s clearly a horse with a
horn attached to its head ought by rights to be the single stupidest things the
series has ever tried. Yet it gets away with it because of an atmosphere that’s
unique to this story and runs through everything. People could have played all
this wackiness for laughs, the way they did in lesser shows like ‘The Avengers’
or ‘Batman’, but instead everyone plays it all impressively straight so even though
it looks like low budget children’s telly it never stops feeling scary and
ominous.
One person working
overtime is Derrick Sherwin, a script editor who seems to have not only been
Ling’s good friend but someone very much on his wavelength and who embraced rather
than shied away from the idea of a world of imagination (it helps that he’s on
his last assignment, having grown similarly tired of trying to make so many
similar Dr Who stories look different to each other). Sherwin manages to
re-write this world so that the Doctor, usually the single most extraordinary
thing in an extraordinary series, is now our link to the ‘normal’ world (along
with perhaps the most unlikely companion match ups in the series, an 18th
century Highlander and a physicist from the 21st century, back when that was
still some time off), the safety and reliability of our heroes now the only
thing grounding this story where remarkable things happen all the time. For
this is a land ruled not by science, mathematics and logic and all the usual
rules of Dr Who worlds but a land held together by the thoughts of a writer
whose basically Peter Ling (right down to writing children’s school stories for
a newspaper) crossed with Frank Richards the creator of Billy Bunter (right
down to the Victorian skull cap) and Samuel Bracebridge Heming, a Victorian
writer who really did write for a character with the familiar-sounding name of
Jack Harkaway in ‘Boys of England’ magazine, an orphan who ran away to sea and
had the same dahsing exploits every week for twenty years. He fell asleep over
his desk one day when he was working to a tight deadline (figures: I’ve fallen
asleep writing at least seven of these reviews) and finds himself imprisoned by
a ‘master-brain’ that relies on his imagination to power the world, with
everything here taken directly from it. This is a clever way round the problem
that if this was a world of all fiction you’d expect to meet characters still
in copyright (and therefore expensive to use) but no – it’s all personal choice
from things he’s read (this also explains one of the criticism sometimes
levelled at this story, that it’s all very white and middle class, because that’s
what he’s read being white and middle class himself. I like to think the next ‘Master’
trapped in this world is African American and filled with characters by Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker and Chinua Achebe with all of Alex Haley’s family from ‘Roots’).
Heck, for all we know there’s another quadzillion other worlds inhabited by
their own Masterbrain computers and clapped out writers (in which case Im sorry
to which ever Doctor is currently trapped in the remnants of my fevered brain.
Watch out for those Agrosians!) Everything that we see has been created out of
words – literally (at one point Jamie climbs what he thinks is a tree and
discovers it’s a giant letter spelling out a parable). We never do find out
what alien species created this world and the technology that controls it (this
is a story that works on mystery and intrigue so finding out would be as
‘wrong’ as discovering the Doctor’s real name) but it feels likely to me that
Ling was writing about all the imaginative thoughts he had as a writer,
including memories of imaginative thoughts by other writers, which he wasn’t
allowed to use in his day job and which had been building up in his
sub-conscious all that time until Dr Who enabled him to get them out. Told he
had a blank canvas to create anything he wants, Ling creates a white void (even
if its Sherwin who picks up on a single scene and himself extends the void into
the opening episode) and then proceeds to fill it by letting his imagination
run wild.
The result is a land
quite unlike any we’ve ever seen in any other Dr Who story, a world where
castles from fairytales and mazes from Greek myths are inhabited by Medusa,
patrolled by clockwork soldiers, inhabited by unicorns and invaded by white
robots (actually grey robots seen recently in Dr Who’s ‘rival’ show on BBC the
scifi anthology series ‘Out Of the Unknown’ and an episode named ‘The Prophet’
by Isaac Asimov, based on his short story ‘Reason’, that’s like a less
fever-dream version of this story, where robots gain sentience and copy human
society, right down to discovering religion and worshipping their own spark
plugs that gave them life; religion being one of the two big taboos DW wasn’t
allowed to talk about as a ‘family’ serial, alongside sex, it feels as if this
is a comment on the rigidity of the format too – interesting as they, like
everything in the first episode, were really written by Sherwin at the last
minute: Ling’s script just has the Tardis land somewhere white and empty and
then goes into the first scene of episode two). The story is ambiguous as to
whether this story is ‘real’ (as suggested by the fact the characters leave in
the clothes they mysteriously swap into halfway through this story) or whether
they’re dreaming and wake up at the end (I mean, who changes clothes between
episodes instantly, by magic, except in dreams?) or, in one of the more
outlandish theories, that everything that’s ever happened since this point has
been a dream because we never see them wake up (so the current Doctor is still
Patrick Troughton? I’m up for that!) Or even more outlandishly is this story
the afterlife, where the spirit goes without the everyday rules of the
physical? (Episode one does end with the Tardis being destroyed and everyone
sucked out into space after all (so we’re in C S Lewis’ Narnia, about the only
Victorian book series not here). Tjhis is a world where all your senses are
acting funny, that’s all white except for the beings in it, where there’ no
noise except clockwork that doesn’t sound like clockwork but a typically alien
radiophonic workshop burble, where people come and go as if conjured at will,
either drea or book-logic. There are odd rules about who can be brought into
this world though and the way it exists after all: my favourite scene in the
whole story is when Jamie climbs up Rapunzel’s tower using her hair expecting
to see a fairytale castle and instead finds himself inside a computer, a very
Dr Who juxtaposition not of the ordinary and extraordinary but the sort of
things you get in other stories trapped inside this one. It changes your entire
idea of what this world is and how it’s being created. That said, there are
other rules in this world that make no sense at all: in the big fight at the
end for instance both Bergerac and Blackbeard are both real people (are they
taken from biographies? In which case anyone who’s ever been in the biography
section of any bookshop or library could be here!)
By chance two things
happen that would have torpedoed any other story but which make this one
sparkle even brighter. The first is that previous story ‘The Dominators’ was a
struggle for all concerned – Sherwin hated the story which flew in the face of
everything he (and indeed I) thought Dr Who was about, being one long
right-wing whinge about pacifist hippies, while writers Mervyn Haisman and
Henry Lincoln hated all the re-writes they were asked to do, annoyed to the
point of getting their name taken off the end credits and refusing to write for
the series again. Rather than get the pair to re-write the last two slow and
increasingly tedious episodes Sherwin stuck them into one and elected to write
his own episode as a ‘buffer’ between the two stories, that additionally became
a budget saving device (because the costs for the story had already been set
out in advance, as the lowly paid last part of a six part story when,
traditionally, all ‘new’ things have already been created for the earlier parts
and so don’t need any extra funding). This was to be set in the empty set of a
white void with only the regulars and some robots dug out of storage to cost
for with a ‘buffer’ episode that wasn’t quite in the ‘real’ world and not yet
in the ‘land of fiction’ so the jolt between the two wouldn’t be quite such a
massive shock (similarly, what most guidebooks forget, is that there was
another automatic ‘buffer’ the other side of this story with a three-week gap
before next story ‘The Invasion’ due to the 1968 Summer Olympics coverage
which, for reasons best known to the organisers, was taking place in October
that year, making this the most ‘outsider’ story in the most ‘outsider’ of
series). Ironically nowadays this looks far worse than it did at the time, the
greater picture quality of DVD and blu-ray meaning that you can see that we
really are in the set – see it on VHS though, or even better through the grainy
quality of satellite TV in the analogue days, on a tiny beaten up telly the way
it was meant to be seen, and it looks amazing, like nothing else ever seen on
screen in anything. It’s an inspired move, turning our four dimensions into
five via a fifth episode and giving us the feeling of being in a world that’s
been created out of nothing and held together by sheer effort even before we
meet the ‘Master of Words’ and a place where anything can happen and nothing is
safe, including the first time the series properly blew up the Tardis. We see
the Tardis exploded every other adventure nowadays so this shot has rather lost
its impact now, but if you come to this story after the first few years when
the Tardis represented safety in an unsafe universe and the only means audience
identification characters Ian and Barbara have of ever getting home again then
its the single scariest thing this series can do (and again feels like part of
the trappings of the fiction that inspired it: the ‘fright’ in ‘Alice In
Wonderland’ ‘Wizard of Oz’ and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ all aren’t ‘how are these
people going to cope in this strange world’ but ‘are they ever going to get
home to safety again?’Once more this is a part of those texts that drug users
really identified with). It’s not even a cheat when it re-assembles itself at
the end: ‘thinking’ and putting it back together again fits the internal logic
of this world.
I like to think, too, that Sherwin was clever enough to figure that the Tardis was just too clever, too impossible, too un-restrictive to be tied down even in a land of imagination: its a ‘character’ that doesn’t follow rules or templates the way the fictional characters of this world do so it can’t be controlled like a person the way the Master Brain wants to. You could say that about the Doctor too and the cliffhanger of him spinning away into space, while Jamie and Zoe cling onto the console for dear life (Zoe screaming her lungs out) is one of the most haunting images in the whole series, not least because it takes the Doctor nearly a whole episode to find them both again. If anything this first episode is even more inspired than the following four and proof that Sherwin ‘got’ this story and ran with it in a way that few other script writers could (I can see David Whittaker having fun in this word and making it even more literary, but Dennis Spooner would have made the Master a bumbling cuddly buffoon rather than a real threat, Terrance Dicks would have thrown in some extra battles, Robert Holmes would have spent more time discussing why the real evil in the story is the capitalist society that drains writers dry, Russell T Davies would have worried about the Master’s family back home and Steven Moffat would have made it a place out of time rather than out of space, while you only need look at ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ to see the mess predecessor Gerry Davis would have made of such an oddball tale). Though uncredited (part one is the only episode in history to have no writer’s credit at all) Sherwin’s fingerprints are all over this story and he deserves as much credit as Ling for making it work.
The second lucky accident
is that poor Frazer Hines got chickenpox halfway through so, its thought, from
his nephews who were staying with him at the time (his brother Ian playing the
clockwork soldier who can’t climb the rockface after Jamie and lunged at him
happily with a pike, so given their shared close proximity to everyone its
lucky the rest of the cast didn’t go down with it too). With a leading actor
unable to come into work that day at the last minute, Sherwin was faced with
the choice of either writing Jamie out for a week suddenly and losing a
sub-plot or re-casting, but this is a story where the usual rules don’t apply so
Sherwin invents a ‘game’ where the Doctor has to pick and choose Jamie’s
features and put him back together again, hilariously getting it wrong (the 2nd
Doctor has always been better at the bigger picture than details so it’s more
believable than some of the others; the other faces you see are the directors
of this story and the next, David Maloney and Douglas Camfield). By chance this
last minute re-write ends up being the perfect danger for this world: this is a
land where the single worst thing that can happen to you is becoming a
fictionalised version of yourself, doomed to be reduced to a stereotype that
stops thinking outside your box and doesn’t resemble you anymore (as an example
the threat in the last cliffhanger is Jamie and Zoe being pressed between the
covers of a book to be trapped in time forever, like a pressed flower. It’s an
apt book too: ‘A Fox Caught In A Trap’ part of the real French series of encyclopaedias
‘Scenes From The Private And Public Lives Of Animals’). Having a foreshadowing
where something as reliable and normal as the longest-running Who companion’s
face changing before us ups that threat more than anything else we could
possibly see. Thankfully Frazer Hines is well enough to go back to work after a
couple of episodes and plays Jamie with his usual mix of dependability and
resourcefulness (perfect for this world) but for those two episodes replacement
actor Hamish Wilson is a revelation. He does a spot-on imitation of Jamie’s
mannerisms, even though he looks and sounds nothing like him: this could have
gone so very wrong, but again the production team was so lucky with the casting
(and unlike the writer Wilson was a big Dr Who fan so already knew the
character well without much research). Goodness knows why Hamish never became a
big star because if he’s good in a part originated by someone else with no rehearsal
time, how good must be with an actual script and time to learn it? I know who I’d
have been picking the next time I needed to hire a new male companion…
In fact everyone is lucky
all round with how this ends up on screen. Most directors handed this story
would have had a nervous breakdown but new recruit Maloney, fresh out of a
director’s course at the BBC, has been pushing for a vacancy on Dr Who partly
because he considered it the most imaginative series on TV. Where hardened
directors would have fled screaming he runs towards the problems, throwing in
ideas of his own and doing everything he can to keep this interesting and
unsettling both. He even went the extra mile byu going out of his way to hire
as many of the BBC’s top crew as he could, keeping them enthused by telling
them about the wonderful surreal script and how he could guarantee they’d never
ever work on anything like it ever again: some of the camera angles in this
story are superb, one of the things nobody notices with all the things going
on. We’ve had other imaginative stories in Dr Who before that just looked silly
and self-indulgent when the actors and director got hold of it, but everyone believes
in this story and pulls together to give this story all the things that make Dr
Who great in the Patrick Troughton era like character, drama and tension rather
than treat it as an oddball fantasy comedy. You can see that Troughton and
Wendy Padbury are loving this world and the chance to do things differently
after so many weeks of feeling on a treadmill themselves – the 2nd Dr has made
a habit of being on the fringes of a world and working out how it works before
swooping in to save it, but every time he tries it here this world does
something else bonkers he wasn’t expecting and his increasing bafflement is one
of the funniest things about this fun story. Zoe, meanwhile, gets to play the
closest to an ‘evil’ Zoe she ever comes (she doesn’t get the
brainwashing/possession’ run of most other companions) and she’s surprisingly
good at it: Zoe’s whole character has been her naivety and her lack of street
smarts compared to her book smarts, so in a world about trying to hold onto
your credibility in a world where Dartagnon and Cyrano de Bergerac are engaged
in swordfights with a comic book hero from the future Zoe’s lost innocence when
she starts grinning wickedly feels even more dark and daring that it normally
would. It’s Jamie (and Frazer Hines) whose in many ways the most interesting:
he’s never read a book in his life and can’t actually read bar what he’s picked
up from being with The Doctor (you can hear how much he’s struggling reading
the word trees) so hasn’t got the first clue what’s going on here. But then he’s
never had much of a clue what was going on in these adventures – he just tags
along with The Doctor loyally helping him out. In some ways Jamie copes with
this world better than either of his more intellectual and logical friends because
he simply shrugs his shoulders and accepts it all, however crazed. It helps
turn the usual dynamic of Dr Who on its head, too, and saves the series from a repetition
of its own: usually you an rely on The Doctor to know what’s going on but he
hasn’t got a clue. It’s Zoe who struggles the most: she can usually work out a situation
right away but this fantasy world is so
different to her natural logic she’s a fish out of water throughout, struggling
to tell fact and fiction apart. As ever Wendy Padbury nails a part that’s
absolutely not the one she signed up to play.
Full credit too to the
guest cast, who would have had no idea what they were signing up for when their
agent said Dr Who had been in touch. You could forgive the supporting cast for
picking up the script and thinking ‘why me? I just wanted to play a
robot/monster’ and figuring ‘well if I’m going to play Rapunzel or Gulliver
then I can ham it up!’ but no – its the sheer normalcy of the performances
throughout this story that allow the weirdness to work as well as it does.
Christine Pirie doesn’t seem to have done much other telly which is our loss –
she’s as believable as a storybook character can be, the perfect Rapunzel,
upset with Jamie for not being a prince before teasing him mercilessly, the
girl next door rather than a princess. Bernard Horsfall, in the first of a
three-story run of Dr Who characters as weird as any actor got to play (one is
the authoritarian timelord who puts the Dr on trial in ‘The War Games’, the
other the rogue timelord who fights the 4th Dr in the matrix without a word
being spoken in ‘The Deadly Assassin’)
somehow manages to be a lot more credible as Gulliver in a fake world than all
portrayals of Gulliver as a ‘real person’ in our world, friendly and curious
but slightly detached about the whole thing, out of place even before we find
out who he is. Even Christopher Robbie is believable as a sort of superhero ‘The
Karkus’, a sort of 21st century version of Batman that Zoe read in
her youth that comes from the ‘Hourly Telepress’, surely an affectionate spoof
of possibly the only place Peter Ling would have known Dr Who from, its
increasingly surreal and unlikely adventures in TV Comic. It also leads to
perhaps the biggest subversion of the usual Dr Who plot of them all: it’s the
girl who gets to do the big heavy action sequence this week, whacking a bloke
five times her size on the floor. Priceless. There’s a lot relying on Emrys
Jones as ‘The Master’ a foe bad and evil enough to be, well, ‘The Master’ and
he’s word perfect too, playing effectively two parts simultaneously as the
controlled, frightened human and the evil alien entity coursing through his
brain pushing him to do the most awful things despite himself. Even the little
roles like the children (Sylvestra La Touzel ended up one of the biggest stars
ever to be in Dr Who but this is her first role, when she was ten) are bang on.
The result is a story that bursts with the sheer joy of storytelling all the
way through, a tale that’s so strange and so subversive and rule-breaking that
somehow it all ends up being so very Dr Who, even though there’s almost no
other link to the rest of the series (especially once the Tardis is
destroyed).
Most of all I love the sheer
playfulness of this story, an oh so creative piece about creativity and an oh
so imaginative story about the powers of the imagination that, given we never
get a full explanation of what happens, could either take place in a world
that’s literally the creation of a writer’s subconscious and an invisible entity’s
attempts to build a real, stable home for itself or a story that was all a
dream, Jamie nodding off just as this story starts after a great run of stories
that all follow on from each other – and if anyone’s going to have surreal
dreams after the weird and wonderful future worlds they’ve seen its Jamie, a
character who would have had no use for an imagination before meeting the Doctor.
Unless of course its Zoe’s dream instead, her rigid logical computer brain
learning to think more creatively during her first two adventures with the Doctor
(the white robots are very much a dream vision of the Cybermen from ‘The Wheel
In Space’ two adventures ago: it’s been a busy few hours for poor Zoe, no
wonder her subconscious is still trying to process it all). Or its the Doctor’s
himself, last seen at the end of episode one with his head in his hands trying
to concentrate, given that he’s the character we follow for most of it, perhaps
his subconscious fears over the awful things he’s put his companions through and
how they he’s taken them out of their own times where they were free to be ‘themselves’.
My guess is it’s a sort of combination of their shared psyches entering a realm
created by this writer, with a combination of clockwork soldiers that are
dressed like redcoats (Jamie), and white robots that look a bit like Cybermen
if you squint (Zoe still recovering from her first story) plus Greek myths (The
Doctor is still missing Vicki, see ‘The Myth Makers’) alongside all the things
The Master brought to this world, apparently his own personal favourites rather
than ‘everything’ (he’s actually not that well read for a writer if the only
things that exist in this world are all seen on camera; of course there could
be another whole bunch round the corner, as the spin-off novels and audio books
have picked up on). Or, perhaps, it’s the viewer’s dream: this was an era when
people were just beginning to wonder why so many children watched a series that
was said to scare them silly, with many psychologists pontificating over how
being scared in a safe environment is good practise for all the scary things
you know are out there lurking for you as an adult (although by rights that
should be a story more like ‘The Sunmakers’, a child’s eye view of capitalism
and employment where all adults are grumpy and too tired to play with you, with
images of tax collectors being angry alien marauders; I don’t know about you
but my adult life has never involved running away from a clockwork soldier or a
white robot. Yet anyway. Though admittedly having the same circular
conversations that lead nowhere that the Doctor has with Gulliver is the
perfect metaphor for adult life).
There’s a layer even
above that though: this is a story that knows it’s a story, set in a world of
other stories, because in a story you don’t have to be limited by real life,
even down to the idea of plucking bits from other writers. My favourite
half-serious pet theory is that the Tardis has, through the technical fault of
the opening episode, has landed in the collective subconscious of all the
writers who’ve ever written for the series, crashing into a screaming white
void that has to be filled to a tight deadline before time runs out, before the
writers realise that actually this series is imaginative and creative enough to
pretty much write itself (the driving force of this story is that this world
needs a new ‘Master of Fiction’ to take over before the old one gets worn out
and that as a long-lived timelord whose seen so much The Doctor is the perfect
candidate; it might be significant too that the story ends with the Doctor
trying hard not to have words put into his mouth by the ‘Master-brain’ so that
he ends up a character repeating the same words like everyone else. It might
also be significant that this is Sherwin’s last story as script editor before
handing over to Terrance Dicks, a far more sensible chap far more on top of the
deadlines who would never have dreamed of doing a story remotely like this). A
bit far fetched maybe, but then Dr Who is unlike any other TV series and this
is unlike any of its other stories: it was created from the first as a way to
‘learn’ about things, the sort of series that made you go away and look things
up in encyclopedias and dictionaries while even in 1969 it was one of the very
very few TV series to come with its own spin off novels where the Doctor really
is a fictional character trapped in a book (take your pick from ‘An Exciting
Adventure With The Daleks’ ‘The Crusade’ and ‘The Zabri/The Web Planet’ all out
in the 1960s, each one notably different to the TV stories).
In a sense, too, this
story is about far bigger things, like pre-destiny, the Christian idea that God
has a plan all worked out for us and we’re all just stumbling our way blindly
towards it. A lot of Dr Who stories, especially in the 1960s, touch on it (opst
obviously this story’s sinister twin ‘The
Celestial Toymaker’) but this is one that actually comes out and says it:
are we simply parroting words made for us by someone else, without being able
to see the bigger picture that we’re all fictional creations with no free will
of our own? The Master talks of a ‘higher power than you can ever imagine’,
which is ambiguous enough to mean God, an alien computer or the relentless ticking of an industry deadline. There’s a
telling speech where The Doctor asks of the computer brain ‘are you the one
that’s in charge of it? Or is it in charge of you?’ Apparently the latter given
that, free of its influence, the Master is just a frail old man desperate to go
home. There is a point though, if you come to these stories later, where it
seems The master is going to be…The Master a full two seasons early: it isn’t
based on what we learn in this story and his very English background, but whose
to say The Master isn’t a different Master trapped in a different fictional
world, like say The Whoniverse and given the same name, a control freak whose
joined with the master brain so far he can’t work out what his own free will is
anymore (it’s not that far off the back story in ‘Sound Of Drums/Last Of The
Timelords’ after all). Either way The Doctor defeats it by not falling into the
trap of doing what’s expected of him but of thinking for himself and making the
characters of this world turn on their captor and act out of character in a
riot of imagination. It’s the message of so many Dr Who stories, but told in a
world that’s different to any others we’ve ever had in the series. By some
margin.
So, after six years of
doing its best to inspire scientists and historians, Dr Who gives writers a
turn, showing how fictional worlds are created and the dangers of giving your
audience what it thinks it wants instead of something that little bit more
dangerous and creative. I suspect that, while this story is held in fond regard
by the Dr Who fanbase in general and one that often tops polls of best 2nd
Doctor stories alongside ‘The Evil Of The
Daleks’, its one that’s loved even more by the people it inspired to become
writers, whether ones for this series or for anything else (the same way other
more scientific stories are beloved by scientists or historical ones by
archaeologists). It’s a really, more than anything else, a very lovely love
letter to the sheer joy that imaginative creative escapist works of fiction can
bring to your life and how being a writer is the best possible job you can have
if you do it the right way, for the right reasons, rather than treating it as
an assembly line the way other jobs are. Most TV robs the mind, numbs it to
thinking beyond the basic plot and the even more basic characters, but the best
of writing, as ‘The Mind Robber’ surely is, opens a door in your subconscious
that once opened can never be shut. This story is often compared to
contemporary series ‘The Avengers’ but frankly that’s wrong: if ever a series
had a formula it was that one, repeating the same parade of weird and wacky
cartoon characters without grounding them in ‘our’ world, so that after a few
episodes they all look the same. ‘The Mind Robber’ is very different; the
entire threat of this story is conformity (‘Man would be like a string of
sausages - all the same!’ rants the Doctor in the final episode as he tries to
dodge being tied down to being a character in a book himself, doomed to repeat
the same lines over and over), the ‘big baddy’ at the heart of this story the
kind of template repetitive formulaic rut that a series as wild and expansive
and bold as Dr Who should never fall into.
The fact that ‘The Mind
Robber’ comes at a point in its existence when viewers were beginning to feel
they knew what to expect each week and had fallen into a bit of a rut, it’s
thrilling indeed. Whenever this series has fallen into trouble – in the
mid-1980s, the TV movie, the middle of the Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker years and
yes season 6 where this story comes right in the middle – it’s been because Dr Who
has become the same every week, repeating the same ideas so that if the viewers
miss a week they don’t feel that it matters, not that they missed the only
chance to see a story that would do any one particular thing. That’s why
viewers stop turning in: not because they dislike something or even that they’re
bored by it but because they think it won’t matter. Written to a backdrop of
falling viewing figures and much discussion behind the scenes that something
had to change (that ‘something’ being the 3rd Dr being exiled to Earth) ‘The
Mind Robber’ is a most brilliant gentle two fingers at anyone who tells you
there’s no point in watching the series anymore and an oh so very Dr Who-like
rebellion against all the people who were trying to trap it and make it one
particular thing to be successful, one last tug of that elastic format that was
better than anything any other series had to offer. The brilliance of this
series is that it can go anywhere and be anything and no story pushes at the
envelope of what’s possible more than ‘The Mind Robber’, a story that remains
an utterly unique bit of television, never copied even with episodes that tried
to be just as weird, one that manages to be funny, silly, scary, surreal, brave
and thoughtful all at once, delivered with gusto by a production team without
the slip ups of contemporary stories and acting from the entire cast that’s
amongst the best in the series (it makes sense that a story about the sheer joy
of creating should inspire more hard work than just another boring runaround,
but even so its notable just how alive everyone is compared to ‘The Dominators’ a week before, the
gap in quality between the two stories surely the widest in the entire run of
327 and counting Dr Who stories). I put it to you, dear reader, that isn’t just
one of the best parts of Dr Who ever made but one of the best bits of telly
ever, an imaginative captivating trip that somehow manages to avoid being silly
and ends up as one of the most memorable bits of writing around. A triumph, in
every way (except the poor unicorn and maybe The Karkus).
POSITIVES + One
particularly strong effect is The Medusa, the second and by far the best
example of stop-action animation in the series (the first being the trilogic
game in this story’s half-cousin ‘Celestial
Toymaker’). Medusa is a static head that looks at first like one of the
weakest, emptiest threats the Doctor can face, but then it comes alive, with
hissing writhing snakes stocking out at random in a sticky-out hairdo that
looks uncomfortably like mine in the mornings. Even motionless its haunting and
frightening though, with its deep dark pupil-less eyes sucking you in. In the
context of this story being ‘about’ writing I like to think of this as being
the blank stare common to all writers when they’re trying to think of something
to say and staring at the screen desperate for ideas. Only if you stare too
long you turn to stone and you don’t get to write anything. I’m not saying this
is what happened to the writer or anything but it’s also worth pondering over
the fact that the five episodes of this story are, collectively, the shortest
in the show’s history, three of them not even reaching the twenty minute mark
(the ‘desired’ length for 20th century Dr Who for all but season twenty-two;
the episode total works out at exactly the length a four part story normally
does in fact) despite taking place across five weeks. A quick shout out too to
the crinkly robotic walk noise that accompanies the white robots and which is
some of the Radiophonic Workshop’s best and makes them sound like they’re
wearing electronic rustling trousers.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Considering
that ‘The Mind Robber’ is such a unique story, the sort of thing that could
never possibly be tried again, there aren’t half a lot of sequels on this list.
The first one was even published prior to the ‘Mind Robber’ being on TV!
(wibbly wobbly, timey wimey). ‘The Gaze Of The Gorgon’, published in TV Comic’s
Holiday Special 1966, recounts the Doctor’s first encounter with Medusa back
when he was still William Hartnell and
travelling with his grandchildren John and Gillian. They’ve arrived on the
planet Zeno that’s filled with what look at first to be statues. Closer
inspection reveals that they’re people who’ve been turned to stone. Gillian is
just rescued in time from joining them, after a Gorgon is spot lurking round a
bush as the Doctor recounts the old folk tale. Luckily Gillian is exactly the
sort of companion who always has a mirror handy and the Doctor blindfolds them
all for safety, before walking bravely into the Gorgon’s lair mirror out high. The
survivors of Zeno come out of hiding to thank them before they fly away to
safety in one of the simpler, more basic strips even for this era. You have to
ask whether this same issue of TV Comic was Peter Ling’s introduction to Who as
an earlier story, ‘Guest Of King Neptune’, starts off in the exact same way as
‘The Mind Robber’ – with the trio escaping a volcano!
‘Conundrum’ (1994)
is the most substantial sequel on this list, an entire novel from the New
Adventures range by Steve Lyons and featuring the 7th Doctor, Ace
and Benny back in the Land of Fiction. This is one of those books that shifts
by degrees: it starts out as a straightforward Earthbound murder mystery
(utterly unlike anything the 7th Doctor did on TV) and then chapter
by chapter becomes increasingly bonkers and even more postmodern than the
source material, as it becomes increasingly clear that we’re in a book. Ace,
for instance, ends up in a library reading about herself in the ‘New
Adventures’ range and is later put on trial for being a ‘supporting character
whose outlasted her usefulness (ouch!) while there’s also a group called ‘The
Adventure Kids’ who are near as copyright allows to The Famous Five. It takes a
long time for the Doctor to cotton on to where they are (a game of travel
scrabble with impossible words is the clue in fact) and soon there’s a showdown
with the new Master of Fiction, a teenager this time who has been laying a trap
for the Doctor ever since the events on TV. There’s a great surreal denouement
set in a tearoom the Doctor conjures out of his mind, that the Master of
Fiction keeps trying to disrupt, although this book is a slow burn and
something of a disappointment after so many years of reading about hoew great
it was.
‘Head Games’ is Lyons’
sequel (1995) another 7th Doctor ‘New Adventure’ novel with a rather
crowded Tardis: Ace has gone by now but Benny, Chris Cwej, Roz Forrester and
even Mel Bush are on board. The Doctor’s a bit quicker on the uptake that
they’re back in The Land of Fiction this time (‘this isn’t hell – just a
sequel!’) with a deadly darker fictional version of the Doctor(who later
regenerates into The Valeyard). This book is slightly different in that it’s
not an invasion or a trap but largely an accident: a hole in the fabric between
fact and fiction is broken so fiction is seeping through into our ‘real’ world.
A lad named Jason, picked as the next Master of Fiction, discovers that he can manipulate
people and effectively write his own
stories in the real world. This is a bonkers novel even compared to the last
one: there’s a scene where the baddy storms Buckingham Palce only to discover
The Queens’ off playing sports, the Doctor being arrested for crimes against a
fictional race known as the Detrians and the 6th Doctor yelling at
the 7th Doctor for being such a useless replacement! As if the
Tardis wasn’t crowded enough Ace makes a reappearance and the day is saved by
Winifred Bambera from ‘Battlefield’ and her UNIT troops. This is one of those
books that make you go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ a lot while you’re reading it with all
the tweists and turns but leaves you feeling a bit underwhelmed by the end as
the main thrust of the plot gets a bit lost.
A quick mention for ‘Time
and Time Again’, the comic strip by Paul Cornell that ran in Dr Who Magazine
#207 in December 1993 with a parallel timeline caused by the Black and White
Guardians that saw the Doctor re-live old adventures rather differently while
Benny and Ace try to keep things back on track via collecting artefacts from
his past. In one scene Benny overhears the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe
debating being lost in the Land of Fiction and pretends to be ‘The Hat
Collector from Dr Zeus’ books’, getting the Doctor to pass his over.
‘Legend Of The Cybermen’
(2010) is the 6th Doctor’s turn to end up in The Land of Fiction,
number #135 in Big Finish’s main range. The 6th Doctor is reunited
not just with Jamie (as per ‘The Two Doctor’s) but Zoe as well in one of the
best audios in the entire range which starts out as a creepier sequel to ‘The Tenth
Planet’ (lots of Cybermen trying to convert people!) and ends up being the most
natural sequel to ‘The Mind Robber’ on this list as The Cybermen invade it! We
get all the great literature names you probably expected to be in the parent
story: there are characters who, like Gulliver, can only talk with liens their
creator Charles Dickens gave them, there are others by Lewis Carroll, Bram
Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle (notably all Victorian authors who are in the
public domain, a plot point about how the Land of Fiction is shaped this time
around), a ‘fictional’ story by Zoe about ‘The Laird Of McCrimmon’ (a genuine
unmade story written for season six) and a fun postmodernist interlude that
features cameos by Big Finish’s boss Nicholas Briggs and their sound engineer
Toby Hrycek Robinson! It’s a whole lot
of fun if you know your Who and have a soft spot for ‘The Mind Robber’,
complete with controversial revelation that (spoilers|) Zoe never escaped and
has been turned into the newest ‘Mistress Of Fiction’ and that the Doctor never
really left The Land Of Fiction, meaning that everything since 1968 has been a
dream (well, it beats the ‘Timeless Child’ arc that’s all I’ll say…)
‘The Crooked Man’ (2014)
is a Big Finish audio, part of the ‘Fourth Doctor Adventures’ range, and less
directly linked to ‘The Mind Robber’ but still worth a mention. This is much
more of a ‘Sapphire and Steel’ than a Dr Who story, with a mysterious ‘Crooked
Man’ who lurks and follows the 4th Doctor and Leela. It turns out
that he’s escaped from The Land of Fiction after the barrier between their
world and ours was breached (again!) and he’s come to a bookshop in a seaside
town because the bookseller, Laura, has made up an entire fabricated life to
cover up for a teenage pregnancy. Workmanlike compared to the others on this
list but still decent.
Finally, ‘The Mind
Robber’ was the choice of 2nd Doctor story to be featured in the
‘memory Tardis’ of the i-player 60th anniversary celebratory series
‘Tales From The Tardis’ and is easily my favourite of the six. Jamie and Zoe
had their memories wiped at the end of ‘The War Games’ and there’s a really
sweet opening scene of them beginning to
remember the Tardis then turning round and seeing each other that’s really
sweet, as they embrace ‘every single moment’. ‘I missed the Doctor every day of
my life – I just didn’t realise it’ says Jamie, fondly embracing the Doctor’s
battered recorder, before adding that he would still be with the Doctor now
‘trying to keep up; if it was down to him and wondering if the Memory Tardis is
‘one last gift’ from their old friend. Jamie is a grandfather now, five
daughters ‘legs hairier than mine’ (that sounds like a Frazer Hines ad lib to
me!) and nineteen grandchildren. Zoe is now president, has a son named James
(after Jamie ‘I never realised before!’) and a husband she met in Australia
(‘Oh I’ve been there, I got shot at’ grumbles Jamie, remembering ‘The Enemy Of
The World’). The two friends then
recall how all their experiences with the Doctor have been at the back of their
minds ‘pushing us forward’ with their lives without them even knowing it. They
want to see the Doctor again before Zoe realises ‘we can keep him alive – by
telling our stories’ and Zoe wonders which one to choose. ‘Don’t say the
Cybermen – I’m sick of the Cybermen’ grumbles Jamie as they recall the Tardis
getting covered in lava. Later, after remembering their story, Jamie recalls
that ‘The Clockwork Soldiers still gives me the shivers’ and Zoe apologises
again for getting his face wrong (even though the Doctor did that!) Thankfully
the pair realise their memories have been restored ‘for good’ this time and that
they can come back any time they choose, Zoe dismissing Jamie’s wondering if
they’re in Heaven with the thought ‘I hope not, I’m a very busy woman!’) So
very very sweet, finally putting right a wrong that’s been 54 years in the
making, for me this was the best Who release of 2023.
Previous ‘The
Dominators’ next ‘The Invasion’
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