TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Mind Robber”

“The Mind Robber” (season 6, episodes 6-10. Originally aired Sept. 14-Oct. 12, 1968)

The great thing about Doctor Who‘s format is its flexibility, something that the program took far more advantage of in its early days than it does now. The TARDIS can take you anywhere in time and space, which means that it’s child’s play to segue between a Wild West gunfight, a moonbase threatened by malevolent cyborgs, and the bloody murk of the French Revolution. In doing so, the show didn’t just change settings, it changed genres, most often between straight-up science fiction adventure and historical costume drama. Especially in the William Hartnell era, Doctor Who often pushed as far as it could from the science-fiction underpinnings that made its genre-hopping possible. But “The Mind Robber” takes the show somewhere farther than it’s ever gone—not just out of its physical universe, but out of its storytelling universe, and into the overarching nature of fiction itself. At the time, that didn’t sit well with its viewers, many of whom were confused and irritated by what they saw as an unnecessarily silly and fantasy-laced premise. But the reputation of “The Mind Robber” has, quite deservedly, grown over time. No serial so closely embraces Doctor Who‘s roots as children’s literature, with the possible exception of Hartnell’s “The Celestial Toymaker.” And yet, “The Mind Robber” is also one of the series’ most genre-breaking and forward-thinking stories. If it’s sometimes sloppy and doesn’t make total sense, that actually has the weird effect of strengthening what’s at the heart of the tale: This is a story about the Doctor in which the main threat is to the Doctor’s ongoing narrative itself.ways, from helping to define the Doctor by defining who his enemies are, to establishing a tradition of dramatically revealing a serial’s main villain as the cliffhanger of its first episode.

Originally published Aug. 7, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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