The Mind Robber

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.

The Mind Robber is a wonderfully bizarre story which takes the madcap, no-breaks production pace of 60s Doctor Who and uses it to its advantage. The surprise requirement of a fifth episode when The Dominators was cut down left Derrick Sherwin scrambling to write an introduction to the story. As a matter of happy accident, this resulted in an exceptionally good and surreal first episode. Peter Ling might not have liked it, but I certainly do.

Frazer Hines' surprise case of chicken pox is also played off with astonishing naturalism, using the nature of the Land of Fiction to briefly recast Jamie working out brilliantly as a fix. This plays into the obvious meta tendencies of this story, which seems to flirt openly with acknowledging the Doctor as a fiction character in his own right.

The adventures in the Land of Fiction are great too; I love the sets and the variety of bizarre characters that the TARDIS team run into. This is one of the best stories of 60s Who, without a doubt.

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PEAK. My god this story is just so unrelentingly creative and fun, I don't think there's anything in Doctor Who like this. I love it when Doctor Who does these weird trippy concept episodes, and this one doesn't just have a good hook but really sees it through the whole way. It just keeps throwing crazy ideas at you, there's never a dull moment. They've traveled to NOWHERE! The TARDIS gets blown up! Jamie's face got switched around and now he's played by some other dude! Oh look Gulliver's here but he can only speak in quotes from the book! Super-cool stop-motion Medusa! Whatever the f**k the Karkus's deal is! Oh no they're gonna get turned into fiction! The climax is just a fanfic battle! I love it so much.