Perhaps the greatest thing about the early years of Doctor Who was its flexibility. It seemed to tell different stories in a way that wouldn't work for modern stories. One story could take place in the wild west, were as another could take place in the far future in the next ice age. Not only did Doctor Who change its settings with each story but it seemed to change genres, most often switching between historical drama's to proper science fiction.
There is no other story that demonstrates that flexibility better than, The Mind Robber.
The Mind Robber not only takes the story further than it has ever been before and not just out of our physical universe, it reaches into the nature of fiction itself. At the time, this didn't sit well with its viewers many of whom would write into the BBC and Radio Times saying they were confused and irritated by its fantasy laced premise. However and quite rightly, the reputation of The Mind Robber has gotten bigger over time and it really is a good story, even if at moments it can be a little dull and make little to no sense, there is an enduring quality to it that is intoxicating.
Any Doctor Who fan will know that change was in the air during the final series of the show to feature Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. The viewing figures were dropping rapidly and the creative team behind the show at the time knew that the show needed a major shakeup if the show was to survive into the next decade. Most of Troughton's first two years in the role had been dominated by base under siege stories. These were stories where the TARDIS and it's crew would arrive in a secluded base with a crew under strain thanks to an outside force trying to get in. There is nothing wrong with that premise, in fact, it is the one plot device that has managed to survive virtually untouched for the past 50+ years the show had been running. It was just that, at that point in time, that sort of story had gone a bit flat and stale. And the show was beginning to look pale in comparison to shows like The Avengers which was getting millions and millions of viewers and was in colour from 1965 with plenty of outside filming and The Prisoner had rewritten the rulebook about what you could now get away with in contemporary science fiction. In 1970, the show got the shakeup it needed with Spearhead from Space.
1968, the year this story was broadcast was slap-bang in the middle of the psychedelic era which had wormed its way into pop culture in a big way. While it had been a part of Doctor Who from the very beginning it had never featured in bigger way. The Mind Robber took that psychedelic feel and pushed it right to fore and played around with the nature of reality in a way that is hard to shake off.


It is important to say that there is nothing in The Mind Robber that is played camp. In fact, there is nothing camp about this story with things from the onset set out to be deliberately creepy like the clockwork soldiers who lumber about the forest. It is also evident that this story is an ironic play on the fact that Doctor Who was considered a children's programme so they used characters from children's fiction. All the characters that are used here also come from British Fantasy novels presumably from their fantastical look and feel with characters from the works of Carroll and Charles Dickins popping up all over the place.

But this is one of the beauties of this story, is that where it really ends? The question is unanswerable as it really is a question of did it really happen at all? And if it did, exactly what happened?
There is no clear indication of when the fantasy elements included in this story really take hold and where the journey into the land of fiction really happened. Could it be when the TARDIS breaks up or could it be at nine minutes in when the Doctor closes his eyes to try and fight the dream visions. Could it have started when Jamie and Zoe go out into the white wilderness which looks suspiciously like a blank page or when they are all breathing in the mercury vapour from one of the TARDIS's damaged circuits, that stuff can't be good for the brain! Or, perhaps they have always been there, after all the Doctor is a fictional character, which leads us to wonder whether it is even possible for him to escape the traps that threaten to make him fictional.
Even stranger still is that there is no real conclusion to this story with the TARDIS just fixing itself. But there is no "yay back in reality!" moments, not until the beginning of the next story, The Invasion. Weirder still, at the beginning of The Invasion there is no Master, who presumably went with them and not one of them notices. Could he have been a figment of their imagination, someone they conjured up as a person to rescue? Did they really escape back into their reality or just into a form of reality that they preserve to be the real one? You can understand why this story wasn't held in much regard from the viewing audience in 1968! But The Mind Robber had an impact on the show, not least in Amy's Choice, a story from the Stephen Moffat era in 2010 which was set in a fictional reality and the characters had to decide which one was real and which wasn't. Could it be possible that the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory were transported to the land of fiction?

As I stated above, the resonance of The Mind Robber is also strange and how it has effected the show as a whole. At one point the Master says he was responsible for the creation of the character Captain Jack Harkaway, a name that bears a striking resemblance to future companion Captain Jack Harkness, but with Stephen Moffat having created Captain Jack, this could be a direct link to this show.

Gulliver is also the perfect character to keep popping up all over this story as he is a wanderer who has a habit of going to the far corners of the world and encountering aliens, he is just as much like The Doctor as the Doctor is! The Doctor even describes him as just as much a traveller as them. The only reason Gulliver's Travels isn't science fiction is because the term for the genre hadn't been invented then when it had been invented in 1726. It is also weird how the Doctor knows who Gulliver is almost right away and can quote the book word for word but, in a world populated by fictional characters, whose to say that the Doctor and Gulliver aren't the same person?
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