The Mind of Evil by: Don Houghton and directed by: Timothy Combe

 

The Mind of Evil stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Roger Delgado as the Master with Richard Franklin as Captain Yates and John Levene as Sergeant Benton.  It was written by: Don Houghton and directed by: Timothy Combe with Terrance Dicks as Script Editor and Barry Letts as Producer.  It was originally broadcast on Saturdays from 30 January to 6 March 1971 on BBC1.

 

It isn’t often in classic Doctor Who where there are callbacks to previous adventures.  The Mind of Evil is one of those few times.  Commissioned as The Pandora Machine or The Pandora Box from Don Houghton after the success of Inferno, with the only specification that it include the Master who was to appear in each serial for Season 8.  Houghton looked to Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange for inspiration, which would be adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1972, released less than a year from the broadcast of The Mind of Evil.  This is one of the few Pertwee stories that for the longest time did not exist in a colorized form, along with The Ambassadors of Death, Episode Three of Planet of the Daleks, and Part One of Invasion of the Dinosaurs being released on black and white.  For the 2013 DVD, it Episodes 2-6 were recolorized using the same chroma dot recovery and Episode One was done manually, with further film and video restoration done for its recent Blu-Ray release.  The inspiration came in the form of criminal reform, by removing all of the violent and evil impulses from a prisoner, leaving them as a docile and almost helpless man, and mixing that with a story about UNIT handling security at an international peace conference as delegates are turning up dead.  The script underwent several drafts, having multiple monsters outside of the Keller Machine and the Master at various points, before those two storylines working hand in hand to fill out the six episode commission.  The first half of the story is essentially split between the prison and the peace conference, while the second half is dealing with the theft of a nuclear missile the Master wishes to start World War III by setting it off.  These two plots blend seamlessly into one another at the drop of the hat with UNIT infiltrating the prison to break the Doctor and Jo Grant out after the prisoners take over.  They are essentially captured throughout most of the story which could easily have fallen flat, but Houghton’s scripts create a delicate balance of intrigue and drama as the Master’s plans work together.

 

In Terror of the Autons, the Master was essentially a background villain with his own plot and that continues here, though Houghton ups the stakes by instead of having the Master play second fiddle to a bigger threat, he is the primary antagonist.  He’s the one manipulating things in the prison and at the peace conference, all through double agents.  Perhaps the most interesting character, at least for the first half of the story is Chin Lee, played by Pik-Sen Lim,  part of the Chinese delegation for the conference and the one to be sabotaging the conference, using the Keller Machine to essentially instill fear in the delegates and at one point Sergeant Benton.  As a character, as this time was very much steeped in topes of Orientalism, presenting Asian women as somehow exotic and objects of desire.  This is something that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks wouldn’t have actually stood for and that has helped in aging the serial really well, as the Peace Conference itself is very forward thinking.  This was released in 1971, at the height of the Cold War with communist China and the Soviet Union still being seen as enemies, and The Mind of Evil doesn’t make the Chinese characters out to be evil, there is no yellow or red scare tactics to be seen here.  The Episode Two cliffhanger is the closest that gets to it and that’s an American being killed because of his fear of the Communist Threat, represented by a dragon.  While this is one of those moments that fans often lambast as a bad special effect, but the performance sells it for what it’s saying, that the American fear of Marxism (or their perceived ideas of Marxism) is dumb and will get used and eventually cause a downfall.  It’s also telling that the Master is the threat of the story, and not Chin Lee, she’s just being used and is already hypnotized.  Sure the Master is an alien, but Delgado plays him as an English gentleman here which is an important tactic.  He’s masquerading as a Swiss scientist, so adding in this idea of threat coming from Europe, and not from outside the realm of normalcy.  That’s where the threat is coming from, it’s a homegrown threat, something that harkens back to stories from Season 7 and forward to literally the next story to be produced and released.  The Master wants to blow up the world because he’s kind of bored and wants to see people pitted against each other so he can take power in the ensuing vacuum.

 

The idea of fear coming from home grown sources is also incredibly telling when the Doctor and the Master are both menaced by their own fears.  The Doctor’s fear harkens right back to Inferno, seeing the flames of the burning Earth, representing the Doctor’s own failure to save everyone.  He is essentially forced to confront the necessity of his choices in Inferno and while the script from Houghton does not imply that he did anything wrong with the choice, it was the only one he could make, but he is still traumatized by having to make that choice.  The Master’s fear, however, reveals the great insecurities of the character, seeing a giant image of the Doctor laughing over him.  The Master is insecure that the Doctor is not threatened or impressed by him, it’s this story where a lot of the fandom shipping of the Doctor and Master kind of has its roots right here.  Interestingly, we never see fears for Jo Grant, the Brigadier, or Mike Yates, but we do see Sergeant Benton influenced by the machine.  This isn’t an issue with the story, adding it in might have ended up cluttering the six part story so it somehow needed a seventh part, which isn’t a problem, but it is an interesting idea to have possibly explored.  Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney, John Levene, and Richard Franklin are all excellent, with Manning’s Jo having her time to shine in the middle of the story while the Doctor is defeated by the machine and the Brigadier having his moments ensuring that the peace conference can actually happen.  The production of this story is also near perfect, with Timothy Combe returning to direct for the final time and blowing the budget on ensuring that it looks excellent while Dudley Simpson’s score can be described as nothing short of iconic.  It is this score where the Master theme is augmented into essentially a full score and you get the real sounds of the Pertwee era personified.

 

Overall, The Mind of Evil is perhaps the perfect follow up to Inferno from Don Houghton, creating a pair of two beautiful stories.  It’s a mirror looking into the Doctor and where Doctor Who will be going with a lot of the future with Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks making their mark on the show while still understanding what worked about those first four stories Derrick Sherwin commissioned.  It’s a story that is overlooked far too much by fans, but looking closely at it is one with a lot of hidden depth and an important look at what the show will be and who the Doctor and the Master actually are.  10/10.