Doctor Who: The Mind Robber

As Doctor Who stories go, they don't come much weirder than The Mind Robber.

To escape from the lava flow that ended the last story, the Doctor takes the TARDIS out of time and space completely to a place he can only call "nowhere."


Here, anything that doesn't actually exist exists, so cue literary characters, a comicbook superhero and an evil genius who transforms Jamie and Zoe into fictional characters.


The Doctor too is at risk, as he can only escape this fate by failing to do whatever the master predicts in writing.

It's a visual tour-de-force – particularly in the last episode – as the Doctor and the master battle-it-out by verbally narrating a fight without contradicting what either of them has already said.

As with so many Doctor Whos, the final episode is also when it all falls apart. The earlier hook of being "nowhere" gets rather forgotten, and the master's plan to take over Earth could really have happened on any old planet. Worth mentioning too, is the final resolve – to overload the computer and make it blow up, thereby somehow returning everything to normal, which is what would have transpired anyway had the master won.

Fiction or not, there’s no way a computer so easily overloaded could have coped with the entire population of Earth.

Still, this is a wonderful, albeit slow, story, and in the face of such a terribly unworkable ending, I'm forced to ask myself why I enjoyed it so much, when I'd no way tolerate such a sloppy conclusion in the modern series. And I think a key reason would be this – we had four episodes that did hold together before it all fell apart in the last one.


Thanks again to www.shillpages.com for these screencaps.