Doctor Who Rewind - The Mind Robber

The eruption on planet Dulkis at the end of The Dominators, leaves the TARDIS buried in molten lava, on escaping from this, the old fluid link thingie has blown, and the Doctor is left with only one option, to use a bypass, which will jump the ship completely out of time all together and into a world of complete fiction.

Yes, the Mind Robber is a bit of an experiment in how much you can push the limits of TV and it's viewers. But refreshingly it offers a break from the monsters, space bases and corridors.

The crew land in a void, which is populated by fictional characters from their own worlds. For instance the Doctor meets Gulliver, the famous traveller from the pen of Jonathan Swift, Jamie meets the Brothers Grimm's Rapundzel, and Zoe meets a creation from her home era called Karkus, a kind of superhero character. Other characters met include the cursed Medusa, a Unicorn,a Minotaur and a battalion of toy wind up soldiers.

The world they inhabit is both weird and wonderful. Castles, mazes and forests made of giant letters. At the centre of it all is the evil Master. No, not The Master, the evil time lord from Galifrey, but a writer of fiction who has been kidnapped out of his own life to write stories for this crazy non world. He's been trapped in the void for years and is growing old, so needs to find a successor to take over, and guess Who, is in the frame.

I really liked this story. The writer, Derrick Sherwin really tried to come up with something totally different from anything seen on the programme before. He took advantage of the fact that anything is fair game on Doctor Who.

Unfortunately, Frazer Hines (Jamie) caught the measles during filming so had to miss one episode, but because of the abstract nature of the story an ingenious work around was used. In a test for the Doctor, Jamie is frozen still and flat, his face is missing, and the Doctor must choose face parts (eyes,ears,nose,mouth etc) in order to put him back together. Unfortunately he fails and makes up another face, belonging to the actor who is to replace him while Frazer Hines recovers from his illness. If I hadn't known that Frazer had been ill I would have thought this was just part of the story. And even better, the actor taking temporary control over his character (Hamish Wilson) has all those Jamie-isoms down to a fine art.

Zoe's fight with Karkus is a bit naff to be honest, but it was rushed through during filming, as was the nature of filming back in the day. It's also overly long but to make up for it we get that incredible scene at the start of the story when the TARDIS has literally broken apart and the console is spinning in the empty blackness, with the Jamie and Zoe clinging on for dear life. Zoe is clad in her sparkly skin tight cat suit with her bum well placed so that the discerning viewer has a ring side seat. It's a moment where high art is slightly eclipses by the body beautiful. I can only imagine that the kids would have been perplexed as to why their dads were starring at the screen boggle eyed during that sequence back in the sixties.

Next time on Doctor Who rewind, we go from on extreme to the other with a story that is given everything the BBC can throw at it.