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!

“You know he’s a fictional character”

Mes critiques sont de plus en plus courtes mais que dire sinon que Ling flippait, et que pourtant l’histoire qu’il écrit est aussi magique que décisive. 

En fait c’est vraiment une parenthèse certes fauchée (et un peu improvisée), mais quand même très avant gardiste dans ce tout qu’elle dit de la série  

Le Docteur est encore n’importe qui, et il peut donc être toutes les histoires possibles. 

Pourtant, avec le seul pouvoir de son imagination, il se bat pour ne pas être qu’une histoire.

An acid trip of a story that is a better version of The Celestial Toymaker. The serial clips along at a decent pace. The variety of sets, and situations, make this a very engaging story. The imagination of the writers is poured into every aspect of the story. The costuming is excellent, and the set design is top-notch too.

Also, this one gets bonus points for the famous shot of Wendy Padbury hanging onto the TARDIS console.

The Doctor is forced to take the TARDIS out of reality itself in order to escape the lava explosions we saw at the end of The Dominators. As a result, the team end up in a white void called "The Land of Fiction" which is presided over by an evil force which acts much like The Great Intelligence, who turns them into stories (motivation unclear). I'm not sure why any of this was happening, but it was an entertaining ride which certainly trumps the first story of this season.

This will not be the last trippy, dream-like "fighting against imaginary forces" story we ever see in Doctor Who, but I think its the first to take this concept quite as far as it does (angry unicorns). In hindsight the plan does come across as the sort of thing The Master would concoct. The fact that the character in this story also happens to be called "The Master" is an odd coincidence, it would be interesting to find out whether this story had any bearing on the creation of The Doctor's greatest Time Lord nemesis.

There is lots of imagination, fun and intrigue at work in this story, although it could be said to be slightly overlong as a whole and repetitive in places. There is only so many times that you want to see The Doctor and his companions realise that the way to destroy their enemy is to loudly declare that "it doesn't exist!" The problem with this common story device is that any peril a character faces can be undone by wishing things out loud, which makes all the peril pretty pointless.

Much like The Celestial Toymaker, The Doctor faces riddles in order to get to the next stage, whilst riddles work well in books and video games I'm not sure that television is their most suitable medium. They are either tediously obvious or unsolvable in the time you are given on screen. Watching The Doctor work them out is not fun. A far better realised task leads to The Doctor accidentally creating a fake Jamie, this is hilarious (and a good cover to allow Frasier Hines to go on holiday).

It is a fun, but very flawed story.

This is an excellent story. The core concept itself is brilliantly creative and fun while the characters are well-thought out and, while some may be a bit one-dimensional, that's clearly intentional. I think the earlier parts, when there's still a lot of mystery, are the best but it's all pretty good, if a bit tonaly inconsistent between the start and end. Also of note is that the special effects seem really good for the era.