Jamie: Come on, back to the TARDIS.
Zoe: Is that the right way?
Jamie: Of course it's the right way. No it could be... erm...
Zoe: We're lost, aren't we.
Jamie: No, I wouldn't say that. We're just er... well...um... [beat] You want to know something?
Zoe: What?
Jamie: I think we're lost.
Way way back in my Tomb of the Cybermen review, I mentioned that Patrick Troughton was magical. I'm going to expound on that just a little bit here, since this is the most fantasy-oriented story ever, so this may come off as a bit of a love letter to the Second Doctor.
First, though, let me set the stage. Way back in 1964, they had to fill out a few weeks of schedule-time with some nonsense set inside the TARDIS and featuring only the regulars. The result was The Edge of Destruction, arguably the worst and most boring 50 minutes the program spat out until the 1980s. 42 serials later, they find themselves in the same situation: The Dominators, arguably the second-worst thing the program spat out until the 1980s, needed to be curtailed from 6 to 5 episodes. In order to keep the schecule intact, the next serial needed an extra episode of padding, and it needed a budget of practically nothing.
The result is The Mind Robber, episode one, which puts the TARDIS crew in a big white set with some stock robots and a few stock backdrops to represent Scotland and Zoe's city (note how we don't get Gallifrey for the Doctor; we instead get inverted images of his companions). This is more important than most people really want to think about; going straight to the Land of Fiction would have made things jar a great deal worse.
Now after the Doctor makes a great deal of fuss about NOT! LEAVINK! ZER TARDIS! (sorry, but with Zer Karkus coming up later, I couldn't resist), his companions think they'll be just fine wandering off anyway. And then they do just that, even when the Doctor's yelling at Jamie, who really, really should know better by now.
Do me a favor. Read the rest of this paragraph and then watch about two minutes of the clip from The Evil of the Daleks, episode 2. By this point, Waterfield and Maxtible have spent about five minutes talking about "...them" until finally a Dalek bursts through the door. Watch Troughton. Watch the way he acts throughout this scene, and especially watch the way he turns around as the Dalek enters.
All of the other Doctors can do concern, and most of them can do worry. Troughton was the only one of the bunch who could actually do fear, and he does it again here in episode one of The Mind Robber. And why not? The TARDIS is being invaded by a malevolent force "about which we know nothing!" This happens a lot more in the 70s, but in 1968, The Web Planet notwithstanding, this sort of thing doesn't really happen. So he's afraid, and he sells it perfectly.
Nevertheless, his companions do a very silly thing and get themselves into trouble, which leads to a genuinely creepy moment at the 13:50 mark. We get negative images of Jamie and Zoe, grinning and beckoning... and over this, we hear the real Zoe scream. When Troughton begs them to "go in[to the TARDIS] before it's too late," again, we have real fear. Again, companions got hypnotized all the time in the 70s, but not nearly so much in the 60s.
Episode One is genuinely creepy and surreal. It doesn't rely on grotesque monsters jumping out and going "boo!" at you, and there aren't any "how did they do that?" moments (cf. The Deadly Assassin and The Daleks respectively). And then to top it all off, in the episode's closing moments, the Doctor apparently succumbs to a psychic assault and the TARIS explodes.
...and then we get that shot. You know the one.
This one.
But anyway, it's an exercise in disaster management, and it works. It sets the tone for the next four weeks and ensures that we'll stay interested. If, of course, we weren't used to regular TARDIS-abuse and hypnosis from later stories.
And the exercise in disaster-management continues in the next episode. If this story isn't famous for that shot, then it's famous for being the one where someone else has a go at playing Jamie for a week because Frazer Hines got chicken pox. Their solution - Jamie loses his face and the Doctor gives him the wrong one - is brilliant. Rarely does the Doctor make a mistake this drastic when the safety of his companions is at risk.
We're introduced to the villian, who appears to be supremely evil (and 70s viewers would be forgiven for thinking he was the Master), and we also meet Gulliver, a man who can only quote Gulliver's Travels and yet the Doctor is eager to keep talking to him.
And lo! The use of the word "companions" to describe the Doctor's, er, companions.
The Doctor and his companions reunite, and here he learns that the TARDIS broke up. Just imagine Tom Baker trying to say "The TARDIS broke up?!"
So they're in a land of fiction, and they can defeat monsters by acknowledging that the monsters don't exist. We get a unicorn, a minotaur, Medusa, and... Zer Karkus, a 21st-Century superhero. Later on, Star Trek is going to make a living out of the "Godel, Escher, T'pran of the Ninth Vulcan Dynasty" approach, but let the record show that this is different. Zer Karkus is another piece of Earth fiction, he's just one that we haven't heard of yet (and still haven't even though he's from 2000... just keep walking). And this is important, because the Doctor's not the all-powerful boggly-eyed scarf-wearing jelly-baby-eating lunatic he'll be in a decade, which means that, like his companions, he needs to face something he can't not believe in. The upshot of this is a girl in a skintight jumpsuit gets to grapple with a man in a body-stocking. Or to put it another way, Zoe gets to beat up her childhood hero.
Really, this is a fantastic setup, truly out of left field for the show, and it's only the ending that trips up at all. But then, the entire series format pretty much lends itself to that. It's time for the obligatory nod to Buffy: In the 90s, Joss Whedon turned "cramming the season finale full of stuff" into an art form, but here the end just comes too quickly. Then again, how often is a Doctor Who serial let down by its ending? Let's take a look at the usual fan-favorites:
The Talons of Weng-Chiang: has pretty much everything in its setup you could ever ask for. Maloney directing a Holmes script in Victorian London while the Doctor plays at being Sherlock Holmes and the companion wins a wet t-shirt contest? Sign me up! That doesn't change the fact that the ending is a mess.
The Caves of Androzani: doesn't count. Holmes' entire brief was "kill the Doctor," so everything in that story builds up to the end. Besides, (almost) everybody dies.
Pyramids of Mars: if it weren't for Star Trek Voyager, the merciless technobabble employed here would probably be forgiven.
Genesis of the Daleks: wherein the Doctor changes his mind more times than Two-Face.
City of Death: "Duggan! That might have been the most important punch in all of history!" It only works because it's funny.
So what we see is that, more often than not, the ending of a Doctor Who story basically consists of "put the toys back in the box as quickly and cleanly as possible," and even then that's not what we get here. The villain is in fact a tired old writer wired up to a machine that demands entertainment from him, and who doesn't want the Doctor to die, but rather to take over so he can finally get some rest. Yes, the Master Brain eventually has other plans, but that's because we can't have a story without somebody who's actually bad. The Mind Robber surely has to be one of the best Doctor Who serials ever. Unique, surprisingly well-paced, and of course, because the Doctor's Patrick Troughton and the director's David Maloney, you can't fault the acting.
10 out of 10.
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