Doctor: No, why?
Zoe: Well then, presumably we've landed, so why isn't the scanner showing anything?
Doctor: Well, because, well, we're nowhere. It's as simple as that.
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Episode 2, 21 September 1968
Episode 3, 28 September 1968
Episode 4, 5 October 1968
Episode 5, 12 October 1968
Written by Peter Ling
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines and Hamish Wilson as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
During its hurried departure from Dulcis, the TARDIS blows a fluid link, forcing the Doctor to activate the emergency unit to escape. This transports the TARDIS into a void beyond time and space--they've left the universe as we know it entirely. The Doctor withdraws into the TARDIS's innards to make the repairs necessary to get them up and running again
But something strange is going on. Both Jamie and Zoe are lured outside into the void when they see images of their homes on the scanner--the Scottish Highlands for Jamie, and a futuristic conurbation called "the City" for Zoe. But outside they find only a white, featureless nowhere, where they soon fall into a strange, hypnotic trance.
The Doctor realises what's happened when he returns to the TARDIS control room and finds the doors wide open. He's able to sense that some sort of malevolent presence has entered the TARDIS through the open doors, and he engages in a telepathic battle with it. Through this battle, he's able to free Jamie and Zoe of the influence that's controlling them, but in the process, the TARDIS flies apart, and Jamie and Zoe are left clinging to the control console as it floats through black emptiness.
(Zoe in her sparkly catsuit, clinging to the console, is possibly the single greatest frame in all of Doctor Who.)
Eventually, the TARDIS team wake up to find themselves in a dark, spooky forest. They're in some sort of strange Land of Fiction, where riddles and wordplay take on physical reality. For instance, the Doctor and Jamie find Zoe trapped behind a painting of a door, but they can't open it because it's not a real door. When is a door not a door? When it's ajar, of course--as soon as the Doctor figures out the answer to that riddle, the door transforms into a giant jar, with Zoe trapped inside it, and the Doctor and Jamie are able to rescue her by removing the lid.
There's a neat little trick where the Doctor finds a cardboard standee of Jamie, with a blank face. Next to it are several different facial elements--for instance, three pairs of eyes, three noses, three mouths. The Doctor has to reconstruct Jamie's face onto the standee. Of course, he gets it wrong, and Jamie comes to life with the wrong face, allowing Frazer Hines to have a week off while Hamish Wilson takes his place.
The TARDIS team also encounter several figures from literature and mythology: Gulliver (played by Bernard Horsfall, in the first of several appearances on the programme), Medusa, Rapunzel and the Karkus, a superhero from a comic strip popular in Zoe's native time, the far future known as "the year 2000". But any of these characters who attempt to obstruct our heroes--like Medusa or the Karkus--remain real only so long as the TARDIS team think of them as real. For instance, Zoe is able to defeat the Karkus by convincing himself that he's just a work of fiction; this then allows her to overcome his super-strength and defeat him in a wrestling match.
Eventually the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe reach a castle on a mountaintop, and at its centre they find the Master of the Land of Fiction, an old man hooked up to a massive computer. He is a writer of boys' fiction from 1920s England who fell asleep at his desk one day and was kidnapped to serve as the brain for this massive computer. The computer is what generates the Land of Fiction, but it needs an imaginative human to serve as its creative impetus.
Now, though, the Master is growing old, and he needs to be replaced--by the Doctor. The Doctor, of course, refuses, so the Master traps Jamie and Zoe inside a giant book, turning them into fictional characters. The Master himself won't release them, so they can only escape if the Doctor agrees to take the Master's place; this will allow the Doctor himself to free them, as his first act of office.
The Doctor still refuses, but the Master is able to use Jamie and Zoe--who, as works of fiction, are now under his control--to entrap him and hook him up directly to the central computer. With both the Doctor and the Master now in control of the Land of Fiction, a write-off ensues, with the two of them summoning up various literary characters to battle each other, though the Doctor is hampered in that he cannot write about himself, or he will turn himself into a work of fiction.
The Doctor is able to free Jamie and Zoe, who then sneak into the control centre and override the central computer. This sends the white robots that serve the Master haywire, and they destroy the computer and therefore the Land of Fiction. The TARDIS team are able to free the Master--who, disconnected from the computer, has no memory of anything since his kidnap in the 1920s--and the four of them depart in the TARDIS.
What Lisa thought
She really liked this one--a whole lot. She thought it was a fun romp, and she really liked the post-modern air to a story in which the regular characters are explicitly attempting to preserve their reality in the face of attempts to turn them into works of fiction. She also felt like she was getting a peek into British schoolyard culture (at least, of the 1960s), as with the schoolchildren who kept asking the Doctor riddles. ("What can you make of a sword?" "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" "Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the river.") She gives "The Mind Robber" a wholehearted seal of approval.
Me? I like the sparkly catsuit.
The next story in our rewatch will be "The Krotons".
