Doctor Who A-Z #56: The Mind of Evil (1971)

A contemporary audience would not have seen The Mind of Evil as a throwback. Two stories in to Jon Pertwee’s second season, and Doctor Who is already hard to recognise as the same show Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell starred in. Don Houghton’s story also features the show’s newest ingredient, Roger Delgado’s suave supervillain The Master. We’re still a long way away from regular repeats, home video, even the Radio Times 10th anniversary guide to the series, anything that might enable viewers to keep track of the recurring ideas in this show. Yet, four years after The Evil of the Daleks, The Mind of Evil returns to that story’s core idea of villainy as a quantifiable element that can be measured and extracted. The Second Doctor’s experiment on the Daleks suggested that it was possible to isolate, even transplant, evil as if it were a virus or an organ. The Mind of Evil begins with the Third Doctor inviting himself to a demonstration of the Keller machine, a miraculous invention that can completely remove evil from a criminal’s mind.

The Doctor objects to this on moral and practical grounds, and the scene of him loudly grumbling and heckling his way through the Keller machine’s demonstration is extremely funny. What he never does is object to the process on plausibility grounds. The Britain of Pertwee-era Doctor Who has a lot of things that early ’70s Britain doesn’t have – a space programme, a third BBC channel – but these bits of incidental futurism are in a wholly different league to a machine that can drain off evil into some sort of container, a process so physical that we’re told there is a risk the container can overflow. Since this is a Season Eight story, it will be no surprise to learn that the Master is behind it all. But it’s odd that, prior to the unmasking of “Professor Keller”, the Doctor never wonders whether this machine that so resembles his own experiment on the Daleks might not be of Earthly origin.

This isn’t really a complaint. The Mind of Evil is far from the craziest plot Doctor Who has ever unleashed on its audience – there’s far too much competition for that. But it is a rare instance of the series failing to realise how weird it’s being. Writer Don Houghton completed his outline before the Master had been introduced to the series, so at one point Professor Keller was presumably a human mad scientist, just like Dr. Stahlmann in Houghton’s only other Doctor Who script. To close off the Evil of the Daleks comparison, the main difference between the two serials is not that one stars Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines, and one stars Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning. It’s that one is a deliberate pastiche of the naivete and weirdness of Victorian science fiction, while one is trying to be gritty, grounded and contemporary even by the standards of early Third Doctor stories. Yet the same, deeply strange, idea is at the core of both scripts.

If you ignore the Master and the Keller machine, the rest of the story is made from standard political thriller elements. There is a high-level peace conference where a diplomat is murdered, a secret germ warfare project that gets hijacked, and a prison riot. The first two might plausibly exist in another Doctor Who story of this era, but the latter is definitely a shade tougher than the series norm. It’s not just the bloodbath it ends up in – this is definitely one of those Pertwee stories where stunt team HAVOC were earning their wages – but even in the first episode the roaring and banging from the prison cells feels bracingly dangerous, frequently drowning out the Doctor and Jo.

Maybe it’s the Alan Clarke-ish setting, maybe it’s an attempt to offer the viewer some reassurance in the middle of all of this, but the Doctor is unusually human this week. He agrees to help UNIT investigate the murder of the Chinese ambassador without the usual moaning about how this human business is beneath him. When another Chinese diplomat says he’s never heard a Westerner speak his language so fluently (resulting in the first use of subtitles in Doctor Who), you expect the Doctor to offer a teasing correction along the lines of him not exactly being a Westerner. But it never comes; he accepts the compliment and moves on. This is the only classic Doctor Who serial that could be accused of being Sinophilic; the Doctor’s claim to have been friends with Mao Tse-Tsung raises eyebrows these days, but it is at least of a piece with the Third Doctor’s habit of hanging out with the top brass. Director Timothy Combe was insistent on casting Chinese performers, even when it proved difficult to find male Chinese actors in Britain. The main Chinese female role was somewhat easier to cast, as Don Houghton is married to Pik-Sen Lim. His script gives several members of the male cast opportunity to remark on how attractive she is, making him Doctor Who‘s ultimate Wife Guy.

In the end, the prosaic wins out over the peculiar in The Mind of Evil, and the Master’s plan to start World War III is some disappointingly unimaginative Blofeld business. But its undercurrents remain fascinating. Alien races in 1960s Who tended to be either good or bad, and the only ones that don’t fit neatly into either category – most notably, the Time Lords – are the ones who look like humans. A season ago, by contrast, Malcolm Hulke showed us a race of ostensible ‘monsters’ who have good and bad members, and The Mind of Evil proves that the Silurians are not the only inhabitants of Earth who enjoy this latitude. It is slightly strange that the Doctor thinks a machine designed to remove evil from the world will be a disaster for the human race, a verdict textually justified by the Keller machine’s tendency to reduce its test subjects to a near-comatose state. But it’s quite possible that humanity’s ability to encompass profound decency and virulent evil is why he relates to us so much – and, as noted above, encountering the Keller machine seems to have made him identify unusually strongly with the human race.

Seen from this angle, The Mind of Evil is an unusually thematically consistent script. The alien mind parasite the Master has used to build the Keller machine isn’t good or evil – it does what it does because it has to feed. But the Master has chosen to do evil with it, as surely as the Doctor has chosen to do good. The real horror of the Keller machine is that it removes other people’s freedom to make that choice. And what does this story boil down to? An illegal British bioweapon which UNIT have placidly accepted the job of guarding. The Pertwee years are never as straightforwardly rah-rah pro-military as their detractors claim, but even so this is an unusually bleak portrayal of the Brigadier and his staff. The Doctor still trusts them, though, because he knows they have the capacity to do better. Once you’ve met Daleks, Yeti, Autons and Cybermen, you start to value that.

Next: The Claws of Axos (1971)

Graham’s Archive – The Mind of Evil

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