Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil Episode Six

Quite a long reprise from the end of episode five shows us UNIT's attack on the prison again, so this action sequence must have been too expensive to only use once. Then when we reach the cliffhanger moment again... surprise! It was actually the Brigadier shooting Mailer, not Mailer shooting the Doctor. This is quite a clever resolution of the situation, since it uses information we weren't aware of (that the Brigadier was present at the scene) but in a fair way.

The Doctor is characteristically (certainly for this story) ungrateful when he says

"Thank you, Brigadier. But do you think that for once in your life you could manage to arrive before the nick of time?"

Is that meant to be a pun on the actor Nicholas "Nick" Courtney's name? If so then he will by definition always arrive in the "Nick" of time, mew.

"I'm glad to see you too, Doctor."

replies the Brigadier with a smile, so he knows the Doctor doesn't really mean it. Their celebration is short-lived though.

"What about the missile?"
"Isn't it here?"
"No."
"Oh."

Fortunately, it isn't long before the escaped Mike Yates telephones the Brigadier to tell him where the missile is. The Brigadier takes most of his UNIT soldiers away with him to try and catch the Master, leaving the Doctor, Jo and Benton behind to deal with the Keller machine.

The Keller machine escapes from the Doctor's electric hula hoop trap by making the very studio set itself afraid of it, shaking the camera and throwing props about, which I suppose must be the sort of thing a television studio is afraid of. This allows the machine to disappear again, then it reappears in the prison set and noms a couple of unlucky mannys.

The Doctor and Jo see the process room is empty, but when they are examining the broken equipment the machine reappears and starts to nom them. Barnham comes in and the machine stops and goes quiet. The Doctor quickly realises that it is because Barnham is near, and he makes him come back when the machine tries to start up again.

"The mind of evil, Jo. I should have realised!"

Clang!

"That creature feeds on the evil impulses of the brain."
"And Barnham hasn't got any?"
"No, the machine extracted them all. Something in his mind acts as a screen and neutralises it. So long as he's here, we're perfectly safe."

The Doctor gets the lid off and we see the creature that lives inside the machine. Cthulhu claims it looks like one of his friends, whose acting career must have been going well in the early 1970s if he managed to land the title part in a major BBC TV serial.

The Master telephones Benton by mistaik, and asks to speak to the Doctor. The Doctor offers to exchange the Master's dematerialisation circuit (which he took from the Master's TARDIS back in Terror of the Autons, a wee bit of continuity between the stories) for the missile, which the Master quickly agrees to, provided the Doctor delivers it personally. The Doctor tells the Brigadier his plan, but the Brigadier is clearly not quite fully on board with it, and still wants UNIT to blow up the missile if they can.

This leads into the climax of the story, where the Brigadier, the Doctor and the Master all have their own plots and plans that are about to meet.

The Brigadier's plan fails first, when the Master prevents him from blowing up the missile by disconnecting "the abort mechanism."

The Doctor goes out to meet the Master in a van that secretly has Jo, Barnham and the sleeping Keller machine in the back of it.

Jo distracts the Master so that the Doctor can Venusian Karate the gun out of his hand with a loud "Hai!"
The Master ends up lying on the ground near the Keller machine, which starts to wake up (and so is probably very grumpy) when the others all run away.

The Doctor reconnects the missile's abort mechanism. Barnham goes to help the Master, which allows him to escape from the Keller machine. The Master then gets in the van and runs Barnham over in a choppy and confusingly directed scene that robs it of a lot of the intended dramatic impact, the end result of which is that Barnham goes

The Doctor and Jo escape in UNIT's helicopter and then the Brigadier blows up the missile, as well as the building it was next to for good measure. We are forced to presume that they also exploded the Keller machine as well, at least until the next scene when the Doctor and the Brigadier confirm it - but as it did not die on-screen it must be ripe for a return story at any point, right?

The Doctor realises he has lost the Master's dematerialisation circuit, and worries that the Master may have recovered it. This is confirmed almost immediately when the Master telephones to let him (and us) know:

"Ah, Doctor. I was afraid you'd be worried about me, so I thought I'd let you know that I'm alive and well."
"I'm extremely sorry to hear that."
"I made the safety of my TARDIS which, thanks to your generosity, is in perfect working order."
"So, we won't be seeing you for quite some time?"
"Not for quite some time. But one day, I will destroy this miserable planet and you along with it. Goodbye, Doctor. Oh, by the way... enjoy your exile."

The story ends with the Doctor insulting the Brigadier to his face when he says

"I'm stuck here on Earth... with you, Brigadier!"

and, like a lot of the Doctor's dialogue in this story if you take it out of context, the Doctor might appear to be acting like a massive yacht, but this is softened by the reaction the Brigadier has to this, which is to smile good humouredly. It's hardly an Avon smile to end upon, but it does have much the same effect of reversing the mood of the final moment.

What's so good about The Mind of Evil?

As with the previous story, the answer is largely due to the Master.

Terror of the Autons introduced the character, but this is the first story to truly let him shine as the Doctor's new arch-enemy. He sits like a pider at the centre of the web of seemingly separate plot threads introduced in part one, and instantly ties them together when he makes his appearance in part two, as only a true Mastermind can.

Roger Delgado is, if anything, even better here than in his first story, perhaps because for a lot of the time he is in familiar territory from his days as a rent-a-henchmanny in '60s telefantasy series, such as the scenes where he hypno-eyeses Chin Lee or teams up with Mailer to take over the prison - except here he has finally ascended to his true potential as not the henchmanny but the brains behind them... the Mind of Evil. That's right, the story's title doesn't just refer to the Keller machine, it has a clever double meaning. I felt like a very clever cat when I spotted it.

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

With the multiple plotlines that come together gradually, Don Houghton's script does well to hide the padding for the most part, but there are definitely some scenes that are redundant or, at best, overlong. These include the unwise komedy scenes with Fu Peng in episode two, the prison fight in episode three, the Doctor's escaping and getting recaptured (also in episode three), the Keller machine disappearing pointlessly on the occasions when it reappears in basically the same location, and the scenes of the Doctor and Jo in the prison cell in episode five.

The Keller machine's repeated menacing of the Doctor at the end of half the episodes is also padding, but I think it is unfair to count cliffhanger padding for this analysis since that really should be its own category, and is just as likely in a shorter story - we have seen this plenty of times before now, mew.

Since this is the first Pertwee Six-Parter we have, as yet, no other examples with which to compare it, so it remains to be seen if this is a typical amount of padding for a P6P, but don't worry - we will soon encounter others.