The Mind of Evil

Plot

The Third Doctor and Jo Grant visit Stangmoor Prison to examine a new method of treating criminals, whereby negative impulses are removed from the mind using the Keller Machine. Professor Kettering, who is managing the use of the process at the behest of the absent Emile Keller, reconditions a number of inmates including Barnham, a hardened criminal who reverts to an innocent and childlike state due to the process. The Doctor’s suspicions about the Keller Machine are heightened following a string of deaths, including that of Kettering himself, which occur when the machine is operated. Each death seems to involve personal phobias – and the Doctor is threatened by an inferno when he gets too close to the machine.

Meanwhile, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the troops of UNIT are handling the security arrangements for the first World Peace Conference. Captain Chin Lee of the Chinese delegation, whose delegate leader is dead, is behaving strangely and attempting to heighten tension in relations with the United States. It emerges that her actions are under the influence of the Master. She uses the transmitted power of the Keller Machine against the American delegate, Senator Alcott, who barely survives the attack. Captain Chin Lee is deconditioned by the Doctor, and tells him that Emile Keller is in truth the Master, whom the Doctor has previously trapped on Earth by stealing the dematerialisation circuit of his TARDIS.

Back at Stangmoor a riot has broken out and resulted in a dangerous criminal who was next in line for the Keller process, Harry Mailer, seizing control of the prison. Jo is briefly taken hostage, but she enables the guards to retake the prison. The Master, who has heard of the Stangmoor riot by eavesdropping on UNIT's radio communications, arrives and meets Mailer, to whom he supplies enough gas grenades for Mailer and his prisoners to retake control of the prison. The Doctor returns to the prison only to be captured by the Master, who sets the Keller Machine loose on the mind of his old foe, weakening the Doctor considerably. But the Master is losing control of the Keller Machine, which contains an alien Mind Parasite that is dangerous even to a Time Lord, and forces the Doctor to help him contain its power. This done, the Doctor is returned to his cell.

The Master has come to Stangmoor to recruit the prisoners as a private army, and uses them to hijack a UNIT convoy transporting a deadly Thunderbolt nerve gas missile, which he intends to fire at the Peace Conference. Captain Mike Yates, who was in charge of the convoy, is taken prisoner by the criminals. Left in the dark, the Brigadier decides the Thunderbolt missile must be at Stangmoor and comes to the rescue in a "Trojan Horse" style assault. UNIT troops take control of the prison, killing Mailer and the other leading rioters. But the Keller Machine is growing stronger, and now breaks free of the temporary restraints placed on it by the Doctor, who discovers by chance that Barnham, having previously been subjected to the Keller process and thus having no evil left in his mind, has become immune to the Mind Parasite.

Yates manages to contact UNIT, and informs them that the Thunderbolt is hidden on an abandoned airfield near the prison. The Doctor contacts the Master, offering to return his dematerialisation circuit in exchange for the missile. The Master agrees on condition he will come alone. But the Doctor uses Barnham to transport the Keller Machine to the airfield and turn the Mind Parasite loose on the Master. With the Master helpless, the Doctor is able to trigger the missile's self-destruct circuit and the Thunderbolt and the Keller Machine are destroyed. The Master uses the chaos to escape with his dematerialisation circuit, killing Barnham in the process. He contacts the Doctor by telephone to taunt him that he is now free while the Doctor remains trapped in his exile on Earth.

Continuity

An insight into the Master's motivation and his relationship with the Doctor is given when the Mind Parasite turns on him and attacks him with images to evoke his deepest fear: the Master is confronted with and recoils from images of a gigantic Doctor towering over him and laughing uproariously at him.

The Mind Parasite attacks the Doctor on three separate occasions. The first visions are tongues of flame, enveloping the Doctor's terror-stricken face. He tells Jo as he recovers, "Not long ago I saw an entire world consumed by fire..." This is a reference to the recent serial Inferno (also written by Don Houghton). The images in the two later incidents are of past monsters (including the War Machines, a Cyberman and a Zarbi). During these latter hallucinations, Dalek voices are heard chanting for subjugation, extermination, and destruction.

Production

Working titles for this story included The Pandora Machine, Man Hours and The Pandora Box.

The serial features a guest appearance by Michael Sheard, who had previously appeared with William Hartnell in The Ark, and would later appear with Tom Baker in Pyramids of Mars (as Lawrence Scarman) and in The Invisible Enemy (as Lowe), and with Peter Davison in Castrovalva (as Mergrave), and with Sylvester McCoy in Remembrance of the Daleks (as the Headmaster at the Coal Hill School). See also Celebrity appearances in Doctor Who.

The production filmed in Kent where some exteriors, primarily for Stangmoor Prison, were filmed in and around Dover Castle. The junction of Archer’s Court Road with Pineham Road in Whitfield was the location where the Master’s troops ambush the missile convoy. The hangar at the former RAF Swingate was used as the Master’s hiding place for his deadly missile. And Stone Hill Park, formerly Manston Airport, was the base for the helicopter company providing the choppers and aerial footage in the series. This serial went so excessively over budget - primarily due to the use of the helicopter in episode 6 - that its director, Timothy Combe, was banned by Barry Letts from being considered for any subsequent Who work.

Themes

James F. McGrath of the Patheos religion blog notes that the serial poses the question of pacifism (in relation to Barnham's mental state after the Mind Parasite has extracted all of the negative impulses from his mind), and asks: "Can pure unadulterated kindness ultimately prevail? Or does it take evil, in whatever small a measure, to effectively combat evil?" In the serial itself, the prison's medical officer tells Jo Grant that Barnham, his mind largely a blank, is "either an idiot... or a Saint, depending how you look at it".

Pacifism as a theme had previously been explored in much greater depth in the William Hartnell serial, The Daleks, in the context of the conflict between the peace-loving Thals and the warlike Daleks, in which companion Ian Chesterton had resolved the question for the audience: "Pacifism? That only works where everyone feels the same".

Broadcast and reception

David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, in their 1998 book Doctor Who: The Television Companion, noted that the Master's plan was "so convoluted that it seriously lacks credibility". However, they wrote that "the action is brought to the screen with such style and panache that the viewer hardly notices them", with the direction and the alien menace being the highlights. In 2009, Mark Braxton of Radio Times praised the direction and Delgado's Master, though he noted there was a high body count. SFX reviewer Ian Berriman gave the serial three out of five stars, finding it enjoyable if one did not concentrate on the Master's plan, noting that the "two aspects of the plan never dovetail satisfactorily". DVD Talk's John Sinnott rated The Mind of Evil three and a half out of five stars, writing that it kept a good pace and had "all of the elements that made Pertwee's run so enjoyable". Actress Katy Manning has stated that this is her favourite story from her three years on the show.

In print

A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in March 1985.

Home media

The original soundtrack for this serial was released on CD in the UK in February 2009. The linking narration was provided by Richard Franklin.

For many years, this story was unique amongst the BBC's holdings of Pertwee-era serials in that the BBC held no complete colour copies of any of its episodes. However, about four and a half minutes of colour footage from episode six existed on an off-air domestic NTSC Betamax recording. The serial was released on VHS in May 1998 using the BBC's black-and-white 16mm film recordings. The colour scenes, restored by combining the colour signal from the off-air recording and the black and white signal from the film recording, were included as a bonus extra after the story. Several colour clips from the story were included on the 2011 DVD release Day of the Daleks as part of the UNIT family history.

The serial was released on DVD in June 2013. Episodes two to six were restored to colour via the chroma dot colour recovery technique used for other black-and-white Pertwee-era stories. The telerecording of episode one does not contain chroma dot information (this was filtered out at the time it was made) and was recoloured using colour referenced from the other restored episodes. Keyframes, including the first frame of a shot and every fifth frame thereafter (approximately 7,000 in total) were hand coloured by Stuart Humphryes. Motion-estimation software was then used to interpolate the extrapolated colour from the key frames into the intervening frames.