Day 145 — May 25th 2021
The Mind of Evil Episodes Three and Four
The Mind of Evil — Episode Three
I try to approach Doctor Who with a relatively open mind. I appreciate that stories like this were made 50 years ago with an extremely limited budget and I can overlook most things. People joke about bad effects and the like in the series and it goes right over my head because often they’re not the point.
That said, the dragon at the start of this episode looks rubbish, doesn’t it? Even by Doctor Who standards that’s bad.
It doesn’t help that only a couple of moments later we’re treated to a shot of Benton and Yates against a CSO backdrop which surely also charts as one of the worst effects shots the series has given us so far. We’re in a stage now where CSO is a regular part of the programme’s production, so this certainly won’t be the last time we get a dodgy shot like this, but my God this one stood out…!
The other issue is that I’ve got a fair degree of apathy towards this episode. Oh, things were looking up yesterday. I’d made it out of Terror of the Autons and even if The Mind of Evil wasn’t quite an Inferno, it was still faring well enough. But it’s like I’ve stuck on this episode and decided I can’t really be bothered. I only watched it an hour ago and already I’m struggling to remember exactly what happened.
That said, I always strive to look for the positives, so let’s do some. Jo is great here. She’s being held hostage during a prison riot and yet she’s able to grab hold of a gun and fire off some warning shots which help to get the situation back under control. I always think of Jo as being a fairly ineffectual companion, but fair play I can’t imagine many of the others being this resourceful.
We also get a better confrontation between Doctor Who and the Master here than the one they had in the last story. The setting alone — with the Master spinning around in the Prison Governor’s chair — is infinitely more arresting than just standing around in the UNIT lab, and of course both characters are given Don Houghton’s superior dialogue to say.
All the same, we’re back to a 5/10, which isn’t boding well for Season Eight as a whole…
The Mind of Evil — Episode Four
We’re sort of at ‘peak UNIT’ with this story, in that we’ve got the complete team together for one of only two times. By my reckoning the UNIT ‘family’ consists of Doctor Who, the Brig, Jo, Benton, Yates, the Master… and Corporal Bell. True, Bell’s not given an awful lot to actually do in this one besides answering phones and passing on messages — and I had to just double check if she was in The Claws of Axos or not, because I couldn’t recall — but it’s nice to have another female on the team somewhere. I don’t know if there’s any particular reason that she didn’t return after these two stories, but I think it’s a shame.
This episode has the distinction of housing the story’s Big Action Sequence™, which is technically very well done. It’s got explosions, and people being flung from motorbikes, and Captain Yates even gets shot at. But while it’s probably quite spectacular in its own right it also feels like absolutely par for the course at this stage. In many ways you could have just cut together lengthy sequences from The Ambassadors of Death and Inferno and I wouldn’t have noticed the difference.
And that’s my issue — I watched the action thinking how formulaic it was, and how that was contributing to me not really enjoying the episode. It’s a bit like Pertwee-By-Numbers. UNIT story? Check. The Master shows up? Check. He admits he’s in too deep and needs Doctor Who’s help? Check. Five minute dialogue-free action sequence with stunts? Check. I’ve seen it all before, which is worrying given that this is only Pertwee’s sixth story.
It bothers me that I’ve come away thinking of this as being ‘formulaic’, because there’s also a conscious effort to make sure that it isn’t. Coombe has added in loads of little visual flourishes like a nice crossfade between Doctor Who and the Master which should stand out as really impressive… but just don’t.
The one thing which does really stand out here is just how beaten up Doctor Who looks after his mental fight with the Keller Machine. It’s not often that we get to see our hero looking so badly roughed up (although it does seem to be a theme in Houghton’s stories…!) so it feels all the more effective by being so rare. It sells the threat to me far better than fleeting glimpses of a Zarbi ever could.
There’s one final thing I want to note for this episode, and it’s not even something which made it to screen. The draft script for this one included a line from the Master aimed at his invention where he says that it can’t frighten him because ‘Nightmares are my business’. I love that. How brilliant! I’m amazed it got cut out, because it’s such a great little moment.
A 4/10 for this one.
