Classic Doctor Who 6x02 "The Mind Robber" eps 3-4 full reaction

Loving your reactions to this unique story; it really is a breath of fresh air, particularly after the string of "base under siege" stories of Season 5. At the end you mention looking forward to "the last two episodes", but in fact, there is only one more episode to go -- both this story and its predecessor, "The Dominators", ended up being an unusual five-part length rather than the six and four originally planned. "The Dominators" was cut in an attempt to speed up its rather lethargic plot (though it's still a snooze-fest, even so), leaving a one-episode hole which had to be filled by the show's script editor, Derrick Sherwin. That's why Episode 1 of "The Mind Robber" doesn't have any writer's credit at the start; Sherwin chose to create a prologue episode to bolt onto the front of Peter Ling's four-part story about the TARDIS landing in a world of fiction (which then became episodes 2 to 5). The episode had to be written very quickly, and using practically no resources -- just the three regular cast, the TARDIS set, an empty studio, and some old robot costumes from the BBC's costume storage originally made for another show. (Sherwin then made some minor alterations to the later episodes to make further use of the robots.) This story is also notable for the unusual shortness of its episodes, which is due to the fact that it was the last story recorded in a very long production block. Just as "The Tomb of the Cybermen" was actually recorded at the end of the fourth production block and held over to launch Season 5, so "The Dominators" and "The Mind Robber" were recorded at the end of the fifth production block and held over to launch Season 6. By the end of "The Mind Robber" the show had been in continuous production for 46 weeks, and Patrick Troughton in particular was exhausted (although that didn't stop him from later speaking of "The Mind Robber" as possibly his favourite story from his era). He was not at all happy to discover that Episode 1 was to be carried by the three regulars alone, with no other guest actors, and his complaints led to the production team agreeing to trim several minutes from each episode of the story. In fact, Episode 5 is the shortest ever episode of Doctor Who, just eighteen minutes long. I wish I'd remembered in time to suggest that you might put Episodes 3, 4, and 5 into one reaction video, since the three episodes together have a running time of less than an hour. Ah, well... next time will just have to be a mini-reaction. :-)

Steven Cooper