Science fiction went straight out of the window with this weird, psychedelic 1968 excursion into the Land of Fiction

The Mind Robber: episode two (21 September 1968)

The One Where… lost in the Land of Fiction, the Tardis team meet a unicorn and befriend Princess Rapunzel.

SPOILER ALERT: We'll be discussing some of the Doctor Who adventures broadcast over the last 50 years. In this blog, we're looking at part two of The Mind Robber. It contains spoilers both about the specific episode and the story as a whole.

Of all the daft criticisms of Doctor Who, the daftest has to be that it's little more than a daft children's programme. Because it's rarely more sublime than when it's embracing that daftness. As in the cliffhanger to part two of this psychedelic 1968 romp, when the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are being advanced on by a unicorn. And not a robot using a perception filter to seem like an unicorn, but an actual ruddy unicorn.

The Mind Robber throws hard sci-fi out of the window. It's an exercise that revels in pure fantasy with riddles that your life depends on, a malevolent Medusa, eerie toy soldiers, giant storybooks that can erase you from reality, and allies in the form of Princess Rapunzel and Lemuel Gulliver himself.

There's no pseudo-science get-out clause to any of it: trying to escape a lava storm, the Tardis takes our trio out of reality and into the Land of Fiction. As a bereft 11-year-old, devouring VHS tapes after my favourite programme was axed, this was the story that gave me a gateway the show's 60s era, never to look back. As such, it's probably going to be a controversial choice: if you want your Doctor Who explained by theoretical physics, this is not for you. But as a story about where imagination can take you, it's unsurpassable.

Of course, with this second episode, imagination also came out of necessity. During rehearsal, Frazer Hines went down with chickenpox, and with two weeks before transmission, there was no wiggle room. Producers came up with a great ruse. This being the Land of Fiction, Jamie gets frozen in a state of cardboard-cutout suspended animation, and The Doctor is forced to reassemble his face. The Doctor, being the Doctor, gets it wrong, and Jamie spends the rest of the episode with the face of actor Hamish Wilson. The Mind Robber is the kind of story where that makes absolute sense.

Life aboard the Tardis

Victoria Waterfield had found herself unsuited to a life of time-travelling troubleshooting after all, and Deborah Watling was replaced in 1967 by Wendy Padbury, as gifted young astrophysicist Zoe Heriot. For a gifted young astrophysicist, her puzzled use of the classically sexist Who-companion line – "But I don't understand!" – has to go down as one of its most definitive renditions. Given relatively little characterisation to work with, Zoe's bottom-enhancing sparkly catsuit might have threatened to become the character's signature, but Padbury plays her with enough charm that Zoe still comes off as one of the more likeable companions.

Things would not, however, end well for Zoe. A few stories later, in The War Games – in which the Timelords exiled the Doctor to 1970s Earth and the face of Jon Pertwee – she and Jamie were returned to their own times, with all but their first adventure with the Doctor erased from their memories.

Behind the sofa

The concept for The Mind Robber came from an observation by Peter Ling, co-creator of Crossroads, observing that some Doctor Who fans seemed to believe that their favourite fictional characters were real. And so the biggest scares here are the ones borne out of the demons in your own imagination. As a child I found the nastiest thing here was Medusa – although the cliffhanger at the end of part four, in which Jamie and Zoe are trapped in a giant storybook, then pushed the limits of BBC compliance. And if you ask me, that Rapunzel was not to be trusted …

It does feel like something of missed opportunity that the big bad here is called the Master, and yet just a year later they would introduce a far more dangerous villain with the same name.

Behind the scenes

If The Mind Robber's surreal first episode feels like a bolt-on, that's because it was. When the scripts came in, this and preceding story The Dominators were found to be running short – and there was no money left for guest stars or any new sets. Hence the surreal introduction to the Land of Fiction, which is effectively Jamie and Zoe running round a white panorama pursued by some dusted-off robots. The fact that the adventure was run over five episodes led a disgruntled Patrick Troughton to demand more money from the producers. The compromise was all parts of The Mind Robber run two minutes shorter than normal.

Fragments

• Every line spoken by Gulliver is taken from Swift's original text.

• "I have your dossiers here," says the Master when he finally confronts the threesome. For reasons of their own, Troughton and Hines decided that "dossier" had filthy connotations, and it became an in-joke throughout the shoot.

• "Princess Rapunzel, can we borrow your hair again?"

• Wendy Padbury went on to be a successful theatrical agent. Her biggest signing? A certain Matt Smith …

• "What's the good of thinking? What we want's a battering ram!"

Further Reading

• The official BBC page, complete with typically knowing goof references.

• Here's another nice review from the people at Tardismusings

Next Time

It's the one with the maggots! We're doing The Green Death, as our voyage through space and time finally hits colour.