You know, I'm starting to think the Master might not be in this story at all.
The Investigator isn't played by Roger Delgado, he's played by Peter "Saruman" Howell. He wastes no time in nailing his many colours to the mast by investigating the Marshal as soon as he arrives. He lets the Marshal tell his side, which is a mix of truth and lies, and then turns to the Doctor:
"You are a Doctor, I take it?""I am, yes.""Qualified in?""Practically everything."
But because of the hostages he backs up the Marshal's story for now.
The hostages are attempting to escape from the room before it gets irradiated, by escaping down the "fuel probe" ahead of the radioactive fuel. In the nick of time they burst into the room where the Investigator was just about to drop all the charges against the Marshal. As soon as he sees they are safe, the Doctor changes his tune completely:
"Investigator, these are the missing witnesses. Jo, Miss Grant here, is my assistant, kept hostage to ensure my cooperation in this travesty of justice. Investigator, I accuse that man and that man of the most brutal and callous series of crimes against a defenceless people it's ever been my misfortune to encounter!"
He then provokes the Marshal into losing his temper (not that difficult) and condemning himself out of his own mouth:
"They're mutants! Mutts! They're diseased! To be wiped off the face of the planet! I..."
Oops. Sondergaard is brought into the trial at this point and is able to back up the Doctor's assertions.
While this is going on, one of the mutants derpily teleports up to Skybase to join in the fun. Unfortunately, the Marshal pewpewpews it as soon as it reaches the trial room, and its appearance (despite being far more derpy than scary) scares the Investigator into siding with the Marshal. Ky and Cotton are taken prisoner (again) while the Doctor, Jo and Sondergaard escape to Jaeger's lab and lock themselves in.
The Doctor and Sondergaard are now able to do the crystallography they were so keen on, plugging the green crystal into the apparatus. With a little bit of technobabble the Doctor realises that they need to put the crystal and Ky together with some radiation, which luckily is already present in the room the Marshal wants to lock them up in. So when the Marshal breaks in (sadly without the need for any classic slow-cutting) and orders Jo and Sondergaard to be taken there, he is actually playing into their paws. Ky takes the crystal and turns into a mutant before their eyes.
The Marshal's megalomania reaches its peak as he tells the Investigator he will not be allowed to leave and will have to live on Solos from now on.
"I shall rule from Skybase."
he announces, and
"We'll begin a new Earth, the centre of a new Empire."
In a callback to their earlier exchange, the Doctor again says "he's quite mad." To which the Marshal replies
"Oh no, Doctor. I told you. Madmen lose. I've won. Solos is mine."
Ky's mutation doesn't stop when he's a mutant, it continues until he becomes a fabulous version of himself with rainbow stripes that remind me of me, so he has obviously reached a higher state of being. He vanishes, and then remembers to open the door for Jo, Cotton and Sondergaard to escape too.
The Marshal is still trying to get the Doctor to make the atmosphere of Solos breathable for mannys, but at the last moment when the Doctor says it is ready he remembers that he doesn't trust the Doctor and so gets Jaeger to turn it on for him, which means that when it overloads and blows up it is Jaeger that gets killed.
The Marshal is about to shoot the Doctor when Ky arrives and pewpewpews the Marshal.
The day has been saved. The Investigator puts Cotton in charge of Skybase, and Sondergaard intends to stay on Solos to help turn the rest of the mutants into fabulous big gay longcat-like beings as well - a worthy goal. As for the Investigator himself, he wants to take the Doctor and Jo back to Orthanc Earth with him, so they sneak back to the TARDIS after a short, unfunny bit of komedy business to end on.
What's so good about The Mutants?
The Mutants is just a really good story, which unfolds a bit at a time until it all comes together at the end. Ky's metamorphosis into a felis ex machina feels earned because of everything that has preceded it in order to set it up as the eucatastrophe.
Despite the non-appearance of the Master, the guest characters we do get are memorable and are used well in their roles. Sondergaard in particular, although he does not have that many scenes, feels like a natural companion (if not capital-C-Companion) for the Doctor from almost as soon as they first meet, who the Doctor treats with respect as a fellow scientist. This is in contrast with Jaeger who, even though he may be the intellectual equal of Sondergaard, is never treated as an equal by the Doctor because he uses his science powers for evil.
The Marshal, as a one-off baddy, has a tough time competing with the Master in the memorability stakes (not being played by Roger Delgado puts him at a disadvantage as well), but is nevertheless shown to be a cunning and resourceful antagonist to the Doctor. He could perhaps have benefited from making a stronger first impression, since his scenes in episode one are shared with the Administrator and Varan, so it is not immediately clear which of them will turn out to be the main baddy.
But perhaps that is a strength of The Mutants - that it does not play out as you might expect it to. As I also said of Ambassadors OF DEATH, it is not a typical Doctor Who plot - the clearest indication of that here is that "the mutants" of the title are not the baddys, they are just googly-eyed monsters who want to have a good time derping around on their own planet without interference from mannys.
For all that is good and fabulous about it, The Mutants isn't a perfect story, and to discuss its biggest weakness we must now turn to our Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis.
Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis
The pacing of the story is such that the padding is disguised about as well as it could be, but there's no denying that the plot has to be stretched to fill six whole episodes. Unlike The Sea Devils, which managed to pad itself out to six parts by throwing in extra scenes with the Master, inessential yet enjoyable, The Mutants simply seems to stretch out what plot it has to fill the time required of it. When viewed episodically (as originally broadcast) it is not so noticeable, but this is definitely one of those six-parters to avoid watching all the way through in a single sitting.
Episode one suffers particularly badly from this stretching, with the Doctor and Jo taking a long time to reach the main plot - and coming so early, this perhaps creates the impression that the story is even more padded than it is. The leisurely start sets a precedent that isn't exactly held to for the rest of the story, but there is a lot of our heroes getting captured and escaping only to be recaptured again soon afterwards that could probably have been left out of a more tightly edited set of scripts.
The cliffhangers are another problem with the editing, and there are two particularly poor examples in parts three and five (although thee are somewhat made up for by part four's cliffhanger being rather good) where the episodes seem to end simply because their 25 minutes is up. Sapphire and Steel may not have been assigned to this story, but it looks as though the manny that did their cliffhangers was.
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