May 22: Terror of the Autons Episode Four / The Mind of Evil Episode One

It doesn't take the Doctor long to be freed from the telephone cord the Master trapped him in last time; the Brigadier comes in and pulls the cord from the wall and the signal is cut.  It takes a little longer, though, to figure out how the daffodils are activated and how they kill people.  And yet when the Doctor does figure it out (via the near-asphyxiation of Jo), that plot is curiously abandoned.  Oh sure, the Master refers to it as part of the invasion plan, but beyond that, nothing.  We certainly don't see people around the nation being killed by plastic-squirting daffodils, which is really what this plot needs.

The Autons attack the UNIT forces. (Terror of the Autons
Episode Four) ©BBC

The main draw to this episode though isn't killer daffodils but rather an actual meeting between the Doctor and the Master.  Before they've been dancing around each other but never in the same room together; this episode fixes that.  Of course, it seems like the Master has the upper hand for most of the time: holding the Doctor and Jo at gunpoint, leading them to the coach where the Autons are waiting so as to prevent an air strike, preparing the radio telescopes for the arrival of the main Nestene force...really, it's only the fact that the Doctor convinces the Master that the Nestene will kill him too, leading the Master to (briefly) switch sides to send the Nestene packing, that ends up thwarting the invasion plan.  And then the Master escapes, leading the Doctor to callously say how much he's looking forward to their next meeting of death and destruction.  The git.

As a four-part introduction to the Master, Terror of the Autons works quite well; placing him at the center of a known threat and putting him in control of that threat is a good move.  Yet I find that this is a story that's easier to admire than it is to actually like.  There are lots of memorable and effective scenes, with some fun one-liners (such as the Master on McDermott's death: "He sat down in this chair here and just slipped away"), but it doesn't quite cohere into something substantial -- there's nothing really to sink one's teeth into. About Time described it as "the visual equivalent of four packets of Skittles", which is probably the best summation of this tale.  It's fun while it lasts, but there's not much beyond that.

But now we turn to the first episode of The Mind of Evil (or The Mind of Evul, if you're looking at the spine of the region 1 DVD).   Unlike, say, The Silurians or Terror of the Autons, there are no existing off-air color copies of The Mind of Evil.  Now, episodes two through six have been color recovered in the same manner as parts of The Ambassadors of Death, but when they made the black-and-white film copy of The Mind of Evil Episode One, they added a filter that got rid of the color pattern.  Consequently, this first episode has been manually colorized by Stuart "Babelcolour" Humphryes, who's done an absolutely sterling job.

We move from shenanigans with Autons and radio telescopes to a fortress prison, where a brand-new method of execution is being performed.  Except the condemned isn't killed; instead all the "evil" impulses in his mind⁵⁹ are drained away into something called the Keller Machine (after its inventor, Emil Keller), leaving the person with only good thoughts.  The Doctor seems rather worried about this idea (not to mention condescending; his constant asides to Jo during Professor Kettering's explanation are awfully rude, even if they are entertaining), and it would seem he's right to be.  People start dying around the machine, apparently based on their greatest fears; so a man who's afraid of rats dies from a heart attack, yet with claw marks all over his face and neck, while Professor Kettering himself, who's afraid of water, drowns to death in a completely dry room.

Meanwhile it seems that UNIT is handling both security for the World Peace Conference going on in London and transportation for some sort of missile.  Clearly they've got their hands full, so when the Chinese delegation, in the form of Captain Chin Lee, keep raising a fuss, it doesn't help matters any.  It seems that important papers have been stolen and Chin Lee is holding UNIT personally responsible.  "More trouble," the Brigadier says as she leaves.  "Mmm, pity," Yates replies.  "She's quite a dolly."  Sigh... Mike Yates, ladies and gentlemen.  But then we learn that Chin Lee is under some form of control, and she in fact took the papers.  It's therefore extra-suspicious that, when she calls UNIT to inform them that the Chinese delegate has been murdered, there seems to be almost a half an hour gap between when she discovered the body and when she called UNIT.

And meanwhile, the Doctor is left in the room with the Keller Machine when it starts to go off, at which point the Doctor appears to be engulfed in flames...







⁵⁹ Given that the idea of evil being an actual, measurable substance tends to go against a lot of what we're told in Doctor Who, some have suggested that "evil" in this case is another word for "testosterone".