April 19: The Mind Robber Episodes 2 & 3

The imagination continues here.  After the console and the Doctor spin away into the void, they all find themselves in a strange forest.  Jamie is attacked by a Redcoat who turns him into a photograph, Zoe is trapped inside a building and then a jar (as part of a riddle), and the Doctor is confronted by, er, some schoolchildren.  Well, they don't all have to be dangerous.  He also encounters an odd English gentleman from 1699, who seems to also talk in obscurities and riddles.  And this is all being watched over by someone who the Englishman (and the credits) both call the Master -- but don't get excited, it's not that one.

The Doctor puts the wrong face on Jamie. (The Mind Robber
Episode 2) ©BBC

This is a story which relies on imagery and story logic.  The best part is when the Doctor has to reconstruct photograph Jamie's face and gets it wrong, which means Hamish Wilson is playing the part of Jamie this week.⁴³  He does a good job, and it's definitely unsettling to see someone unfamiliar playing such a familiar part, particularly because the Doctor simply accepts that Jamie looks a little different right now.  (And this is the reason why a different Jamie is unsettling in a television show that changes lead actor every few years -- in almost every case regarding the Doctor there's a degree of uncertainty when the change happens, and each one has a degree of build-up, to let the audience know something's coming⁴⁴; here it's brought up briefly and then treated as normal.)  There's also a nice moment where, after Jamie sees that the forest they're in is actually a forest of printed words, the three of them attempt to hide from the toy soldiers that are searching for them, while telling the Englishman not to give them away.  Except the Englishman apparently can't see the soldiers, so he inadvertently does give them away by addressing them: "I could not forebear smiling, sir.  What you told me is mistaken.  There was no army here."  So the soldiers lead them away to be run down by a unicorn.

Episode 3 is more of the same.  The unicorn problem is solved by the Doctor having Jamie and Zoe insist that the unicorn isn't real; once they do, it turns into a statue (well, a photograph blowup, but the Doctor calls it a statue later).  It seems that belief is a powerful force in this realm.  Jamie is once again turned into a photograph, but with Zoe's help (who's very funny by the way when she works out why Jamie's face looked different: "You got it all wrong!") they bring Jamie's proper face back.

After this most of the action occurs inside a labyrinth underground, complete with a ball of string to help guide them.  The Doctor and Zoe go ahead to confront the Minotaur, which the Doctor once again insists isn't real (he'll change his mind when we get to The Time Monster) and thus isn't a danger to them.  Jamie manages to outwit and escape from a toy soldier, and climbs up a cliff via a convenient rope which turns out to be Rapunzel's hair.  Except Jamie finds himself inside not a medieval tower but a more futuristic library, which happens to be printing out a new story: the one that the Doctor and Zoe are currently experiencing.  After encountering the Englishman again, who the Doctor works out is in fact Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift's novel, they head back to the center of the labyrinth where the minotaur was, only to find Medusa confronting them...

These two episodes are different in style from episode 1, but the same sense of story logic and hidden danger is present here, which means that even though we've moved from a white void and robots to a fairytale place and toy soldiers, the underlying threat is still the same.  Let's hope they can keep this up for the last two episodes.







⁴³ The real world reason: Frazer Hines has chickenpox this week.  Fortunately they're doing a strange surreal story at the moment, so they can use this to their advantage.
⁴⁴ With the obvious exception of Time and the Rani, for reasons we'll no doubt come to when we reach that particular story.