The Mind Robber Episode 4

The one where the Doctor meets the Master of the Land of Fiction...

The cliffhanger is basically resolved in the same way as the previous one, by our heroes convincing themselves that the creature threatening them isn't real. There's a nice twist here in that the Doctor is almost tricked into accepting Medusa by using the sword to vanquish her, but he realises at the last moment that he cannot kill that which is not real (an idea which is quite disturbing in itself). It just goes to show how unimaginative the cliffhangers have been on the whole in Season 6 so far. The Mind Robber episode 1 aside, they've all been formulaic and repetitive (especially The Dominators). Let's hope better is to come...

Ooh, that sound the robots make when they approach tingles my spine! That metallic scraping noise that signals their arrival, it's fantastic! We haven't seen the mute white robots since episode 1, so it's great to have them back, this time blending in with the futuristic surroundings of the computer room, and later standing in contrast to the gloom of the Master's domain. I adore that robot design, and think they're one of the best robots Doctor Who's ever had (even though they were Out of the Unknown's first!).

Lemuel Gulliver is back to perplex our friends, with Bernard Horsfall never quite sure what accent to use. The character of Gulliver was born in Birmingham, but Horsfall doesn't really bother to try Brummie. Occasionally he sounds a bit Yorkshire, and when interacting with Frazer Hines, slips mistakenly into a Scottish lilt every now and then, but he gives such a mesmerisingly even performance that you have to admire him otherwise.

I do love the quick mention of the Yahoos by Gulliver here, which are primitive creatures from Swift's original fiction. There's also a society of calm and rational intelligent horses called the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels too - maybe the unicorn at the end of episode 2 was a Houyhnhnm? OK, I'll stop writing that now because I know it's impossible to pronounce!

Things get very, very silly when the Doctor and Zoe encounter the Karkus, a character from the comic strips of the Hourly Telepress in the year 2000. The Karkus has a silly (and nonsensical) name, and turns out to be the worst superhero since Krypto the Superdog, succumbing with the greatest of ease to the nervy fight choreography of Zoe Heriot! The "fight" scene between Wendy Padbury and Christopher Robbie is lamentably poor, looking every bit as over-rehearsed and laughable as it sounds. Any fight scene where the defender waits for the attacker to get into the right position to be thrown over their shoulder is officially awful. The whole thing is fundamentally silly too, not helped by Patrick Troughton's oafish clowning, and while some might find it endearingly embarrassing, I just can't forgive it. Having said all that though, it's not often the female companion gets a proper fight scene like this!

The Doctor finally gets to see the face behind the fiction when he is taken before the Master of the Land, who turns out to be a rough approximation of the First Doctor (a cross-pollination of Hartnell and Cushing). The Master is actually a human being, a writer who fell asleep at his desk in the summer of 1926 (so is this all his dream?), and woke up in the Land of Fiction, wired up to the huge glass Master Brain (which, incidentally, looks magnificent). The writer penned 5,000 words every week, for 25 years, for the boys' adventure magazine The Ensign. Ling created The Ensign for The Mind Robber, but spookily, within three years of transmission, a real Ensign magazine would be created, as the organ of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints!

There's a heart-stopping moment in this confrontation scene where the Master asks if the Doctor has ever heard of Captain Jack Harkaway, the character he wrote for in The Ensign, and of course, any 21st century Who viewer will have expected him to say Harkness instead. It's a spooky bit of prescience (sort of!), but just imagine if this author had created Harkaway, inspired by the "real life" Captain Jack Harkness, who has recently been recruited by Torchwood in Cardiff? The mind boggles!

Emrys Jones is great as the Master, swinging from doddery eccentric to oppressed slave in the blink of an eye, and also manages to make him sympathetic. I've always wondered what that little white blob is in the corner of his mouth though.

Regular viewers continue to be teased by mention of the intelligence which feeds off the Land of Fiction too. In 1968, any mention of the word intelligence would provoke thoughts of Yeti and Tibet and the Tube, but once again this is not another meeting with the Great Intelligence, but another entity entirely, one which needs human imagination to thrive. I mentioned in my review of episode 3 that Doctor Who spin-off fiction has suggested that the Land of Fiction is the discarded creation of the Gods of Ragnarok from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy - who also thrive on human imagination and entertainment - and this theory sounds cleverly possible. Plus, could the Celestial Toymaker be involved somewhere along the line too?

The cliffhanger thankfully has a bit of creativity about it, with the white robots pressing Jamie and Zoe into the pages of a giant book, essentially "fictionalising" them. It's an arresting image which probably stuck with contemporary viewers, and eagle-eyed fans might notice that the chapter our heroes are being pushed into is called "Pris au piege", which in French translates as "trapped" or "caught".

First broadcast: October 5th, 1968

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The revelation that the Land of Fiction is controlled by a giant super-brain and an enslaved human journalist is wonderful.
The Bad: The Karkus vs Zoe Heriot. Oh puh-leez...
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 5...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 5

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-mind-robber.html

The Mind Robber is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Mind-Robber-DVD/dp/B0006PTYOM/.