The Mind of Evil Episode One

The one where a man drowns in a completely dry room...

For the first time in what seems too long, the Doctor actually seems quite happy in the opening scene of this story, although his good mood doesn't last very long at all. It's odd, because this Doctor seemed pretty jovial and pleasant in Spearhead from Space, and only really got grumpy when he saw things going wrong. But in the past few adventures (the latter half of Season 7 and Terror of the Autons), he comes across as a right moody devil, and not someone I'd particularly want to spend time with. This is very possibly why the Third Doctor has traditionally been one of my least favourite incarnations; the version we had in his debut story is much more appealing.

The early scenes inside Stangmoor prison are cacophonous and unsettling, with the raucous prisoners shouting and clanging away on the verge of a riot. The soundtrack is really noisy, making it hard to make out dialogue at times, and the grittiness of the scene where the wardens collect an irate Barnham makes it feel more like Get Carter than a family teatime adventure show. Ray London's prison set is impressively convincing though.

It's such a Doctor-y thing when he starts to interrupt Professor Kettering's presentation, making observations to Jo just that little bit too loudly. You can imagine any Doctor doing this, but for some reason it's slightly funnier when Pertwee does it because he plays it straight (his timing of the line "It doesn't" when Kettering says the Keller Machine leaves the patient as a "well-balanced individual" is spot on).

No wonder the Doctor's concerned about Kettering's experiments though, because this machine is a pretty powerful tool, and one that could potentially change British society in a fundamental way. It's a very dystopian concept that feels like something Anthony Burgess might have written in A Clockwork Orange: a machine which extracts all the negative and anti-social thoughts from a human's brain, leaving them placid and cooperative. It's brainwashing, a form of emotional cleansing, and feels fundamentally wrong, and is exactly the sort of thing the Doctor should be looking into.

What's most unsettling is that the machine actually stores the negative thoughts it extracts inside it's phallic "reservoir box", which is currently 65% full (this means it's 65% full after just 112 extractions, so there's only space for roughly 60 more processes before the tank is full. Then what?). Anything which removes a human's negative thoughts, but keeps them in some sort of hoover bag full of lots of other negative thoughts, is basically A Bad Thing. Who exactly is this Emil Keller who invented it, and where is he now? He apparently came over from Switzerland 12 months ago to install it, but his absence now is highly suspect.

Kettering says that Keller (the juxtaposition of those two names is quite clumsy) had an assistant with him when he installed it, a "rather attractive Chinese girl", which is an unfortunate comment in the same episode that prissy Captain Yates describes the very same woman (Chin Lee) as "quite a dolly". These are inherently sexist comments from these two men, but somehow more understandable when you remember that they're written by Don Houghton, husband of Chin Lee actor Pik-Sen Lim. He must have been very proud of his wife!

Meanwhile, the Brigadier is up to his eyes in international security matters as we learn that UNIT has been placed in charge of security at the first ever World Peace Conference (oh dear...) as well as the transportation of some kind of missile convoy (oh dear...). Who in their right mind would put UNIT in charge of these things, going on their past record of ineptitude? And how are these two things within UNIT's remit anyway?

I'm not sure what relevance this missile has to the story as it is mentioned once, then forgotten about, but I admit I do like Houghton's dual plotting, with the events at Stangmoor completely separate to those involving UNIT (the only subtle crossover being Chin Lee).

It's clear all is not well with the peace conference because before long, papers belonging to the Chinese are apparently stolen, and then the Chinese delegate, Cheng Teik, is found dead. The common factor in these two crimes is Captain Chin Lee, who we see has actually burned the documents in the children's playground outside (in full view of the Brigadier's office, leaving a serious fire hazard as smouldering paper and dead leaves mingle in the waste bin!). She also lies about the time it took her to contact UNIT when she "found" Cheng Teik's body, and sports a suspicious looking disc behind her ear, as if under some form of mind control. And what have we recently learned has been messing with people's minds? Houghton's dual plotting is beautifully structured so that the two storylines begin to subtly merge.

The two deaths caused by the throbbing Keller Machine are well done, with first medical student Arthur Linwood suffering a fatal heart attack after apparently being savaged by rats, then Kettering himself drowning in a completely dry room. What puzzles me is that the Keller Machine is obviously inserting these fears into the victim's imagination, so how does that cause the physical effects of their death? Linwood died of a heart attack due to his musophobia, so must have been under the impression he was being savaged by a horde of rats. But there are scratches and bites on his face and clothes, so what caused that? Were there really rats in the room? Then we see Kettering "imagine" drowning, but then we learn that his lungs are full of water, meaning he actually drowned, rather than died of aquaphobia. It's not very clearly thought through how people are dying. Does the machine incite fear to deadly levels, or does it summon up a fearful situation which actually kills the victim?

At the end we see the machine assaulting the Doctor by making him believe he is engulfed in flames. But does this mean the Doctor suffers from a deep-seated pyrophobia, or is he actually being burnt to death in flames? Is what we're seeing real or imagined? It seems to be both. I suppose we'll get some form of answer in episode 2 when the Doctor inevitably survives this immolation and we can see if his velvet jacket is at all charred...

First broadcast: January 30th, 1971

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Ray London's impressively convincing prison set, and Don Houghton's clever dual plotting.
The Bad: I really can't get my head around exactly how the Keller Machine kills, and I'm not sure Houghton knows either.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 11
Neck-rub tally: 1

NEXT TIME: Episode Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five; Episode Six

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/2014/04/the-mind-of-evil.html

The Mind of Evil is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Mind-Evil-DVD/dp/B00BPCNNXS