Doctor Who A-Z #45: The Mind Robber (1968)

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate Jamie and Zoe, perhaps the best two-companion team this show ever had. It’s not just that Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury have so much personality, although that’s true. It’s not even that the basic concept of the characters – the plucky Jacobite soldier meeting the space-age computer genius – is a fertile one, though again this is the case. There are a lot of Doctor Who companions who are played by good actors, and a lot of companions whose core characterisation is strong. The strength of Jamie and Zoe is that the writers reliably remember these characterisations. Even in The Mind Robber, where a large part of the first episode revolves around them yearning for home, they’re still eager to get out and get stuck into a new adventure. As soon as they realise they’re in trouble, Jamie wants to fight the problem and Zoe wants to learn about it. It’s a completely charming conception of the companions’ role in the story, and Hines and Padbury always make the most of it.

It’s good to celebrate the regulars here, because the rest of The Mind Robber deliberately gives you few familiar elements to hang on to. The first episode sees the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe trying to make the fastest possible getaway from the last story – I can sympathise – and ending up in a strange white void. It’s a surreal setting, but the show has dabbled in this kind of anti-naturalism before, most notably (and lamentably) in The Web Planet. Episode one of The Mind Robber, though, keeps increasing the strangeness and the danger until its final act of iconoclasm – blowing up the TARDIS. Somehow, things become stranger from here. The Doctor has already warned his companions not to leave the TARDIS, as his escape manoeuvre might have landed them in a completely different universe where the rules of physics no longer apply.

True to form, Zoe is particularly eager to get out there and find out what that could mean, but this new universe has far weirder things to offer than just water flowing uphill, or laws of thermodynamics being broken. It is a Land of Fiction, where everything that is imagined can come true, and the primary threat is that the secretive ruler of this realm might turn the Doctor and his friends into fictional characters that he can control. The obvious irony, from a viewer’s perspective, is that the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are already fictional characters – we know, because we’re watching them. But that doesn’t do justice to how sophisticated The Mind Robber‘s metafictional ideas are. As with so much of Patrick Troughton’s final season, not least its last story, there is a sense of the show taking stock of its progress at the end of a decade.

That decade has taken Doctor Who from being a semi-educational series about a space-time tourist to an adventure series about a hero fighting monsters. One of the issues with the ‘pure historicals’ that formed a large part of early Doctor Who‘s educational remit is that they left the Doctor with very little recourse to action: making the Doctor a prime mover in real history would mislead the young audience. It’s a problem that is wittily inverted in the Doctor’s final duel with the Master of the Land of Fiction (not to be confused with the Master, who hasn’t turned up yet). The Doctor’s strategy is to write new incidents of the endless story which forms this universe. The one thing he can’t do is write himself into the story, or he will become part of this fiction and the Master will have won. In other words, he has to create a story which will turn out in exactly the same way without the Doctor’s intervention. That’s the kind of story that the series regularly told in its early years, but here it’s defined as something from a completely different universe to regular Doctor Who.

It’s surprising, in some ways, that this is a consensus classic. Doctor Who contains plenty of fantasy elements, but prior to Russell T Davies’s return to the show in 2023 they were usually dressed up in science-fiction drag; magic incantations that are actually alien equations, dream worlds created in virtual reality. The Land of Fiction, though, is a world where fiction is real. There’s no way around it, and you’d think the more literal-minded faction that every SF fandom includes would object to it. The resolution to the TARDIS’s destruction, after all, involves the ship simply un-exploding, offering a way to read the whole story as a strange dream. You could, if you wanted, decide that the TARDIS is giving one of its maddeningly cryptic, vaguely traumatic warnings about the Fast Return switch being stuck again. 

No-one, it turns out, wants this, and that’s presumably because The Mind Robber is too good to write out of continuity. Writer Peter Ling was offered the chance to write another story but he turned it down on the grounds that he’d already emptied his bag of ideas in these five episodes. You can well believe it: from the transformation of Jamie to the delightful running joke about Rapunzel, there is an astonishing weight of invention here. Director David Moloney is far away from the kind of war-movie grit that characterises some of his other acclaimed serials, but his work is just as strong, with the stop-motion snakes on Medusa’s head a particular success. Admittedly, it’s the kind of story where an unrealistic moment can be easily absorbed into the overall metafictional style, with Zoe’s delightfully hokey fight with the Karkus working far better than it should. Perhaps it’s because we’re still reeling from the introduction of the Karkus, yet another dazzlingly original twist on the story’s core idea. Recognised by Zoe as a comic-strip hero from her childhood in Earth’s future, the Karkus is doubly fictional, a character who doesn’t exist even as a fictional character. It’s worth remembering your companions’ origins just so you can pull off imaginative coups like this.

By contrast, the flurry of cameos at the end of the story include several characters who are either real people, or inspired by real people – Cyrano de Bergerac, Sir Lancelot, d’Artagnan and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach. In any other story this would be a straightforward gaffe, but coming as the Doctor fights to remove his companions from the Master’s fiction it has an uncanny resonance. Perhaps these real people are remembered as fictional characters because they’ve been absorbed into the Master’s world? It’s a mind-boggling end to a mind-boggling story. The series has been here before in The Celestial Toymaker, but the comparison only emphasises how much more confident Doctor Who is in its creepiness and its imaginative excesses by the end of the Troughton years. From the brilliant sound design that heralds the approach of the Master’s toy soldiers to Troughton’s utterly committed, breathlessly sincere performance, it’s a solid gold triumph.

Next: The Invasion (1968)

Graham’s Archive – The Mind Robber

Full Doctor Who Archive Here