286 The Mind of Evil: Episode Four

EPISODE: The Mind of Evil: Episode Four
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 286
STORY NUMBER: 056
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 20 February 1971
WRITER: Don Houghton
DIRECTOR: Timothy Combe
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 7.4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured using chroma dot recovery

"You wanted to know how long I could hold out against that machine. Well, the answer is I can't. Nobody can."

The Doctor is quickly overcome by the the Keller machine falling unconscious and causing the Master to restart his stopped heart. He is flung into a cell with Jo. The machine then attacks the Master but he locks it in the treatment room and barricades the door hoping to starve it of the negative emotions it feeds on. The Master has the prisoners hijack Unit's missile convoy seizing the Thunderbolt missile. Captain Yates pursues the missile on a motorcycle to a local hanger but is captured. The machine learns how to teleport itself and goes on a feeding frenzy round the prison and attacks Jo & the Doctor........

The Doctor's been subjected to the Keller Machine twice, nearly killing him the second time:

MASTER: Wake up! Wake up! Ah. Welcome back. Would it surprise you to know that one of your hearts stopped completely? You were within an inch of dying.
DOCTOR: You wanted. You wanted to know how long I could hold out against that machine. Well, the answer is I can't. Nobody can.
MASTER: Of course you can! If I can control it from that console, then so can you. And you must while I'm not here.
DOCTOR: No, no.
MASTER: Oh, come on, Doctor. We are both Time Lords.
DOCTOR: Be that as it may, I know the secret of that machine. Inside is a creature that feeds on the evil of the mind, and very soon it'll feed on yours.

The Doctor's prophecy comes true very quickly as the machine turns on The Master exposes that what the Master fears most is The Doctor!

It's not quite clear how the machine, or rather the creature inside it learns to teleport. If it could do it all along why hasn't it done so before now to escape from the Master? Or perhaps it's got something to do with the amount of negative emotions it's absorbed recently having boosted it's power levels somehow? Either way the wibbly wobbly teleport affect used will be instantly recognisable to anyone who's seen people leave the Liberator's teleport bay in Blake's 7.

The effect of the machine killing looks very odd. I suspect this might originally have looked quite similar to the energy effect seen in Ambassadors of Death and Terror of the Autons but hasn't survived being converted to Black and White terribly well. It looked odd when I first saw it in B&W off of UK Gold and on the VHS release and now looks even odder now it's been colour recovered on the DVD!

This episode is built around a location action sequence of the prisoners ambushing the missile which works really well.

The ambush sequence was recorded at Archers Court Road Whitfield, Kent on 28th October 1970.

On the 29th October 1970 filming took place at Alland Grange Manston Park, Kent which provides the location where the missile is stored for the next few episodes.

A sequence showing he convoy underway at Pineham Road was cut from the finished program, which was shot 30th October 1970 the same day as the location footage at RAF Swingate cut from episode 3. I know footage for episode 5 had to be reshot following a problem with a damaged negative: I wonder if the footage on this day was similarly affected?

Since the very first Doctor Who story the Doctor has spent a fair proportion of his time being flung into cells. In fact the second episode of the first story, the Cave of Skulls, is named after the very first place his imprisoned in. But actual Prisons? You don't see that many of them in Doctor Who. All his companions get locked up in the Conciergerie Prison in Paris but the Doctor stays free. We get an entire Prison Planet in the Dalek Masterplan episode 3, Devil's Planet, an idea that Terry Nation liked so much he reused it in the third episode of Blake's 7, Cygnus Alpha. A sixth season Troughton story, Dick Sharples' the Prison in Space, would have been set in a prison run by leather clad women, but the story was abandoned at a late stage. However later that same season Jamie gets thrown in a Military Prison during the War Games. The only proper prison in the entire series is in this story, but we'll see a prison with a single prisoner in the Sea Devils and one for malcontents on the moon in Frontier in Space. A Prison space ship gets seen in Stones of Blood and another prison in space would have appeared in another cancelled story, Shada.

As you can see we don't return to the subject much after Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor..... and we'll look at a possible reason for that next episode!

Two day after this episode was broadcast The Human Time Bomb, the 10th episode of Doomwatch Season Two, was shown on BBC1.