Out of all the Second Doctor stories and given how so few of them managed to survive the junking period with all their episodes intact, thank god this was one of them! This is one particular story that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without the visuals, The Mind Robber is a wonderfully creative and bizarre story where the Doctor and company are pulled out of reality and find themselves in the Land of Fiction. I won’t dare ruin any of the various characters and scenarios our heroes come across because frankly you should just go watch it for yourself, it’s the Second Doctor story I’ve revisited the most and I have so much fun watching it every single time, honestly the only problem I had with The Mind Robber was that I was sad when it was over, I totally could’ve watched six parts of this story, even for a five-parter it’s remarkably short.

As I said earlier the different characters and situations the Doctor encounters are so much fun and creative to watch which play off brilliantly with Patrick Troughton’s comically cartoonish personality. The winner being how the story manages to work around the actor for Jamie, Frazer Hines, needing to take a week off to recover from chicken pox, I won’t give away how they do it but it’s incredibly inventive and funny. This story is like a Doctor Who version of Alice in Wonderland, you just don’t know what the Doctor’s gonna find around the next corner. It’s unpredictability and how it plays fast and loose with logic make it a highly engaging story, from its foreboding and atmospheric opening episode with one of the best cliff-hangers of all time, to an absolute blast of a climax with the Doctor’s mind battle against the intelligence controlling the Land of Fiction. This is arguably the most creative Doctor Who story ever written and has more imagination than the whole of Modern Who combined. If you’re a fan of Doctor Who and have never seen The Mind Robber before, put this high on your watchlist, in fact don’t even bother doing that, just stop reading and go watch it right now!