Episode Review: Arc 45, The Mind Robber
Augh! I have no Two icon, nor room for one!
In which Jamie begins the honored Who tradition of climbing ropes with fuckall idea of what they’re attached to/secured by. Rose in The Empty Child salutes you, Jamie.
I LOVE this serial. So many awesome little touches! So many cool bits and creatures, all sort of thrown onto a solid storyline that didn’t really need them, but without really burdening it or blurring into a pointless hash of stuff.
The visual of the disintegrating TARDIS, floating console and floating, corpse-like, shut-eyed Doctor at the end of the first episode/beginning of the second is really moody and compelling. Troughton has a very striking face-he looks interesting in black and white, and they light him to very good effect. He looks kind of off or alien at moments just due to lighting decisions, which is an interesting visual treatment of a human-looking alien character, and there’s teasing visual hints at mystery, difference and hidden power that I sort of miss in the I’M A LOOONELY GAWD, BEHOLD MY ANGELZ!bombastic vibe of New Who.
Two kind of has me charmed. For one, his smiley-face-to-frowny-face transition is AMAZING. And when he’s attempting to escape from the robots and by scaling the bookshelves I kind of luffed him and went all “Climb, Two, climb!”
But there was one odd moment in the last episode when he seemed patently unwilling to sacrifice himself for Jamie and Zoe that seemed pretty off to me. I mean, given that the next scene has the Master (yeeeeah, but not, more on that later) alluding to the power he serve’s plot to destroy earth via this device, it makes sense, but the Doctor doesn’t know that’s their intention in the scene where he refuses to become controller to save his companions? I think we’re supposed to gather as an audience that the Doctor grasps the scheme before we do, but I almost feel there should be evidence of that, because with what we’re given that he knows it feels a bit too early for him to have possibly drawn that conclusion, and so he just looks like he’s welching, agreeing to doom Jamie and Zoe to living death as fictional characters to save his own ass…which is creepy and OOC, unless Two’s cowardly streak, of which I have heard, extends to pretty immoral levels.
If Jamie McCrimmon is the son of a piper from 1746, out in the Highlands, historically, would Jamie know how to read? It's clear in the episode that he does, but really? I mean, the Scottish Reformation which brought Calvanism and the Kirk into Scotland was in 1560, and practically the first thing Calvanists do when an area comes into their jurisdiction is establish literacy, a la the American colonies, to enable everyone to read the bible. Yet Metzner’s Calvanism essay anthology (he was a professor of mine, actually) had me believing that it took a long, long time for Kirk authority to permeate Scotland, most especially the Highlands, and as such it seems unlikely that Jamie would have had access to the type of educational resources or cultural imperatives that would have enabled literacy?
Yes, I’m aware how entirely beside the point of this episode that is. It just bugged me. In other Jamie related random!musing, Jamie’s vest is questionable. Historically accurate I guess, what with furs being kinda universal, but, er, questionable. Jamie, however, is pretty cute in his turtleneck and kilt. But I’m slightly unnerved by the fact that he appears to have no leg hair whatsoever. Like, none. At all. Jamie is a reptile: discuss.
I was wondering what was up with the plot device of Jamie being played by a different actor for a bit of the serial-not that the mix-n-match!face thing wasn’t kind of creepy-cool, but it did seem kind of extra-narrative. Wiki explained:
“During the filming of The Mind Robber, Frazer Hines contracted chickenpox and was replaced for part of the serial by Hamish Wilson. This was written in as part of the story when Jamie is turned into a cardboard cut-out and has his face removed by the Master of the Land of Fiction. The Doctor's first attempt to reconstruct his face is unsuccessful. Eventually Jamie's real face is restored when Hines recovered.”
I love a TON of the walk on characters and visuals from this. The forest of letters is great, and the British Schoolchildren were kind of nightmarish. When they laughed at trapped!Two later in the serial it was affecting because those kids were honestly unheimlich.
I kind of adore the streaming narrative on a stock market ticker. Rapunzel is severely adorable and Gulliver ftw. I give myself crazy points for recognizing Little Women based on that clip when Jamie wanders in and hears it-not that it’s a terribly impressive feat, I was just really pleased with myself, its been well over a decade since I’ve read one of those. The classical allusions were much fun: minotaur at the center of the labyrinth was natural, and the snakes on the Medusa’s head looked like Ray Harryhausen animation.
The White Robots in this episode are weird, blocky, VERY old-school sci-fi, but there’s something charming in them, just as there is in the toy soldiers-sort of a very genre’d idea of scifi robots, v. tropey and over-the-top, though I’m not exactly certain what the episode’s conflation of childish things/children and the fictional is doing here, other than the fact that the man behind the world was a school master once and wrote boys adventure stories? That makes sense, if that’s the reasoning behind it, but it could have been more clearly drawn. The White Robots’ unfolding star shaped destructor beam just looks cool. And the Masterbrain is REALL pretty, with its sort of atomic proton cloud structure look.
This, other than War Games (well, and all of five seconds in Five Doctors), is my first encounter with Zoe, and I do like her quite a bit. Is Zoe’s being from roughly 2000/the 21st century problematic? No, b/c Time Whimey Wibbly Wobbly. Not like with Star Trek where chronology gets awkward and Bugs Me.
The Karkus is LARGE ON THE LULZ. I love that some random comic strip character shows up and Zoe knows how to deal: her mad martial arts skills are a-freaking-mazing given that she appears to way maybe 60 pounds total. Between this and Time Monster, a young female companion is DOOMED to trip a security system that’s already been suffiencently explained by panicing and stupidly walking back into it. Headshake. Oh, male writers… Also, I’m kinda feeling the Jamie/Zoe vibe.
The idea of being overtaken by narrative, a sort of theft occurring, leaving a person reduced to a character and becoming fiction is frankly awesome, both from an in-story perspective and from a meta-level standpoint. And there’s something creepy!cool about being pressed to death in a book, like a flower. The way Jamie and Zoe can only say things they’ve said before when they’re reduced to characters works really well-the actual physicality of them leaving the book/being on the roof in character form works less well. I like the concept, but kind of stumbling execution. Creepy Evol Jamie and Zoe are actually pretty scary, with their Cheshire grins.
So in this piece we get a villain who chooses to go by ‘the Master,’ sets elaborate traps for the Doctor, gets in some mutual intellectual fanboying, and who the Doctor is so interested in matching wits with that Zoe accuses him of actually enjoying their predicament. If you think this is awkward given Three’s era, I might agree with you. But you can sort of see the trajectory:
selenak pointed out that the Mad Monk had the Master’s humor, and the War Chief had the Master’s ambition (and I read a history with the Doctor and compelling interest in him). In between those two comes this ‘the Master,’ who had the Master proper’s mental/psychic prowess, ability to elaborately plot (literally, even) and to deliberately ensnare the Doctor in it: the Doctor and this Master even get a “come into my parlor/said the spider to the fly” moment.
It’s like you can watch the production team working their way towards creating the Master as a character, trying several different approach vectors to crystallize into the enduring villain the Master became. In a way it’s like watching a couple Hartnell episodes and seeing them sort of shaping the character of the Doctor into existence, or almost seeming to discover it like the old Michelangelo metaphor of chipping away at a block of marble to free the sculpture within rather than having to ‘create’ anything at all. Which is an odd deterministic argument for a fictional character, which I’m not making, but there does, just by hindsight, seem to be something a touch inexorable about the evolution of both characters, and the similarity of their development from a production standpoint lends credence to the ability to read the show as a bit of a pluralistic parallel-narrative for both of them, if you like.
The only real attempt I've seen to discuss the strange similarities between this Master and THE Master is
evilawyer_fic's Games, which I really like: not an answer that lodges in my personal canon as indisputable trufax, maybe, but a very interesting exploration.
That said, this Master is under the yoke of an alien intelligence that makes him wear an electric yarmulke to control it. o_O It does not look any cooler than it sounds. At first I thought there might be something going on with his weird hands? On closer examination, I think that actor is just giddy with liver spots. There’s an interesting interplay between the schoolmaster’s brain and the computer/representative of the alien intelligence: it can seize his voice, he’s only aware in a curtailed way of what he’s doing-I wish we got a bit more of that, but it’s a solid arc, so why bitch? Though the aliens insist the Doctor cooperate for ‘the greater good’: what specific greater good? The Doctor recognizing the Master’s innocence and saving him with his companions at the end was pretty good.
The Master apparently had Balzac-levels of productivity: he published adventure stories in a magazine called The Ensign for 25 years, at 5000 words a week. Which is certainly decently prodigious. His stories were about a Captain Jack Harkaway*-this must have evolved into Captain Jack Harkness, right? They’re too similar of names not to be correlated. Somewhere, someone is writing Schoolmaster/Jack.
The Master says that he has all of Earth’s Masterpieces with him, but given the presence of the Karkus, I’m curious as to who’s vetting said Masterpieces, and by what standard of quality? Does the place simply contain everything that will be written, or does it pull from the minds of those within it, like Zoe for the Karkus, and the other characters from the Master?
So in the end the Doctor wins by RPing/ playing Dungeons and Dragons/ writing fanfiction. Pretty win. Though Cyranno de Bergerac vs. d'Artagnan? Um. Okay.
There’s an element of a call to life at the expense of fiction (a little odd for escapist sci-fi television), what with the Doctor begging Jamie and Zoe to reject fiction and seek salvation in real life.
I love the line “We obey our creator. That is all that can be expected of any character” from Gulliver-though I know several other writer friends who would violently disagree (esp. those with a firm belief in ungovernable characters because of headvoices), I find in a pretty apt summation of how much everything and one you write is fundamentally drawn from you, and in some ways representative of an inner landscape that you can’t deny association with/responsibility for simply by externalizing the forces of that creative act or claiming that the entire process is some vastly uncontrollable thing, disconnected from both your will and personal identity.
The ending is really odd. I /guess/ you know from the TARDIS snapping back together that it all works out? But what a truncated finish!
Side note: I didn’t know until it was referenced in this episode that a Master Tape was an original recording, of which copies can be made. That makes the song title of the same name on the Series Three soundtrack kind of a clever pun, which I never got before.
*Oh, apparently the name of a real Boys of England magazine Penny Dreadful character-my bad.
In which Jamie begins the honored Who tradition of climbing ropes with fuckall idea of what they’re attached to/secured by. Rose in The Empty Child salutes you, Jamie.
I LOVE this serial. So many awesome little touches! So many cool bits and creatures, all sort of thrown onto a solid storyline that didn’t really need them, but without really burdening it or blurring into a pointless hash of stuff.
The visual of the disintegrating TARDIS, floating console and floating, corpse-like, shut-eyed Doctor at the end of the first episode/beginning of the second is really moody and compelling. Troughton has a very striking face-he looks interesting in black and white, and they light him to very good effect. He looks kind of off or alien at moments just due to lighting decisions, which is an interesting visual treatment of a human-looking alien character, and there’s teasing visual hints at mystery, difference and hidden power that I sort of miss in the I’M A LOOONELY GAWD, BEHOLD MY ANGELZ!bombastic vibe of New Who.
Two kind of has me charmed. For one, his smiley-face-to-frowny-face transition is AMAZING. And when he’s attempting to escape from the robots and by scaling the bookshelves I kind of luffed him and went all “Climb, Two, climb!”
But there was one odd moment in the last episode when he seemed patently unwilling to sacrifice himself for Jamie and Zoe that seemed pretty off to me. I mean, given that the next scene has the Master (yeeeeah, but not, more on that later) alluding to the power he serve’s plot to destroy earth via this device, it makes sense, but the Doctor doesn’t know that’s their intention in the scene where he refuses to become controller to save his companions? I think we’re supposed to gather as an audience that the Doctor grasps the scheme before we do, but I almost feel there should be evidence of that, because with what we’re given that he knows it feels a bit too early for him to have possibly drawn that conclusion, and so he just looks like he’s welching, agreeing to doom Jamie and Zoe to living death as fictional characters to save his own ass…which is creepy and OOC, unless Two’s cowardly streak, of which I have heard, extends to pretty immoral levels.
If Jamie McCrimmon is the son of a piper from 1746, out in the Highlands, historically, would Jamie know how to read? It's clear in the episode that he does, but really? I mean, the Scottish Reformation which brought Calvanism and the Kirk into Scotland was in 1560, and practically the first thing Calvanists do when an area comes into their jurisdiction is establish literacy, a la the American colonies, to enable everyone to read the bible. Yet Metzner’s Calvanism essay anthology (he was a professor of mine, actually) had me believing that it took a long, long time for Kirk authority to permeate Scotland, most especially the Highlands, and as such it seems unlikely that Jamie would have had access to the type of educational resources or cultural imperatives that would have enabled literacy?
Yes, I’m aware how entirely beside the point of this episode that is. It just bugged me. In other Jamie related random!musing, Jamie’s vest is questionable. Historically accurate I guess, what with furs being kinda universal, but, er, questionable. Jamie, however, is pretty cute in his turtleneck and kilt. But I’m slightly unnerved by the fact that he appears to have no leg hair whatsoever. Like, none. At all. Jamie is a reptile: discuss.
I was wondering what was up with the plot device of Jamie being played by a different actor for a bit of the serial-not that the mix-n-match!face thing wasn’t kind of creepy-cool, but it did seem kind of extra-narrative. Wiki explained:
“During the filming of The Mind Robber, Frazer Hines contracted chickenpox and was replaced for part of the serial by Hamish Wilson. This was written in as part of the story when Jamie is turned into a cardboard cut-out and has his face removed by the Master of the Land of Fiction. The Doctor's first attempt to reconstruct his face is unsuccessful. Eventually Jamie's real face is restored when Hines recovered.”
I love a TON of the walk on characters and visuals from this. The forest of letters is great, and the British Schoolchildren were kind of nightmarish. When they laughed at trapped!Two later in the serial it was affecting because those kids were honestly unheimlich.
I kind of adore the streaming narrative on a stock market ticker. Rapunzel is severely adorable and Gulliver ftw. I give myself crazy points for recognizing Little Women based on that clip when Jamie wanders in and hears it-not that it’s a terribly impressive feat, I was just really pleased with myself, its been well over a decade since I’ve read one of those. The classical allusions were much fun: minotaur at the center of the labyrinth was natural, and the snakes on the Medusa’s head looked like Ray Harryhausen animation.
The White Robots in this episode are weird, blocky, VERY old-school sci-fi, but there’s something charming in them, just as there is in the toy soldiers-sort of a very genre’d idea of scifi robots, v. tropey and over-the-top, though I’m not exactly certain what the episode’s conflation of childish things/children and the fictional is doing here, other than the fact that the man behind the world was a school master once and wrote boys adventure stories? That makes sense, if that’s the reasoning behind it, but it could have been more clearly drawn. The White Robots’ unfolding star shaped destructor beam just looks cool. And the Masterbrain is REALL pretty, with its sort of atomic proton cloud structure look.
This, other than War Games (well, and all of five seconds in Five Doctors), is my first encounter with Zoe, and I do like her quite a bit. Is Zoe’s being from roughly 2000/the 21st century problematic? No, b/c Time Whimey Wibbly Wobbly. Not like with Star Trek where chronology gets awkward and Bugs Me.
The Karkus is LARGE ON THE LULZ. I love that some random comic strip character shows up and Zoe knows how to deal: her mad martial arts skills are a-freaking-mazing given that she appears to way maybe 60 pounds total. Between this and Time Monster, a young female companion is DOOMED to trip a security system that’s already been suffiencently explained by panicing and stupidly walking back into it. Headshake. Oh, male writers… Also, I’m kinda feeling the Jamie/Zoe vibe.
The idea of being overtaken by narrative, a sort of theft occurring, leaving a person reduced to a character and becoming fiction is frankly awesome, both from an in-story perspective and from a meta-level standpoint. And there’s something creepy!cool about being pressed to death in a book, like a flower. The way Jamie and Zoe can only say things they’ve said before when they’re reduced to characters works really well-the actual physicality of them leaving the book/being on the roof in character form works less well. I like the concept, but kind of stumbling execution. Creepy Evol Jamie and Zoe are actually pretty scary, with their Cheshire grins.
So in this piece we get a villain who chooses to go by ‘the Master,’ sets elaborate traps for the Doctor, gets in some mutual intellectual fanboying, and who the Doctor is so interested in matching wits with that Zoe accuses him of actually enjoying their predicament. If you think this is awkward given Three’s era, I might agree with you. But you can sort of see the trajectory:
selenak pointed out that the Mad Monk had the Master’s humor, and the War Chief had the Master’s ambition (and I read a history with the Doctor and compelling interest in him). In between those two comes this ‘the Master,’ who had the Master proper’s mental/psychic prowess, ability to elaborately plot (literally, even) and to deliberately ensnare the Doctor in it: the Doctor and this Master even get a “come into my parlor/said the spider to the fly” moment.
It’s like you can watch the production team working their way towards creating the Master as a character, trying several different approach vectors to crystallize into the enduring villain the Master became. In a way it’s like watching a couple Hartnell episodes and seeing them sort of shaping the character of the Doctor into existence, or almost seeming to discover it like the old Michelangelo metaphor of chipping away at a block of marble to free the sculpture within rather than having to ‘create’ anything at all. Which is an odd deterministic argument for a fictional character, which I’m not making, but there does, just by hindsight, seem to be something a touch inexorable about the evolution of both characters, and the similarity of their development from a production standpoint lends credence to the ability to read the show as a bit of a pluralistic parallel-narrative for both of them, if you like.
The only real attempt I've seen to discuss the strange similarities between this Master and THE Master is
evilawyer_fic's Games, which I really like: not an answer that lodges in my personal canon as indisputable trufax, maybe, but a very interesting exploration.
That said, this Master is under the yoke of an alien intelligence that makes him wear an electric yarmulke to control it. o_O It does not look any cooler than it sounds. At first I thought there might be something going on with his weird hands? On closer examination, I think that actor is just giddy with liver spots. There’s an interesting interplay between the schoolmaster’s brain and the computer/representative of the alien intelligence: it can seize his voice, he’s only aware in a curtailed way of what he’s doing-I wish we got a bit more of that, but it’s a solid arc, so why bitch? Though the aliens insist the Doctor cooperate for ‘the greater good’: what specific greater good? The Doctor recognizing the Master’s innocence and saving him with his companions at the end was pretty good.
The Master apparently had Balzac-levels of productivity: he published adventure stories in a magazine called The Ensign for 25 years, at 5000 words a week. Which is certainly decently prodigious. His stories were about a Captain Jack Harkaway*-this must have evolved into Captain Jack Harkness, right? They’re too similar of names not to be correlated. Somewhere, someone is writing Schoolmaster/Jack.
The Master says that he has all of Earth’s Masterpieces with him, but given the presence of the Karkus, I’m curious as to who’s vetting said Masterpieces, and by what standard of quality? Does the place simply contain everything that will be written, or does it pull from the minds of those within it, like Zoe for the Karkus, and the other characters from the Master?
So in the end the Doctor wins by RPing/ playing Dungeons and Dragons/ writing fanfiction. Pretty win. Though Cyranno de Bergerac vs. d'Artagnan? Um. Okay.
There’s an element of a call to life at the expense of fiction (a little odd for escapist sci-fi television), what with the Doctor begging Jamie and Zoe to reject fiction and seek salvation in real life.
I love the line “We obey our creator. That is all that can be expected of any character” from Gulliver-though I know several other writer friends who would violently disagree (esp. those with a firm belief in ungovernable characters because of headvoices), I find in a pretty apt summation of how much everything and one you write is fundamentally drawn from you, and in some ways representative of an inner landscape that you can’t deny association with/responsibility for simply by externalizing the forces of that creative act or claiming that the entire process is some vastly uncontrollable thing, disconnected from both your will and personal identity.
The ending is really odd. I /guess/ you know from the TARDIS snapping back together that it all works out? But what a truncated finish!
Side note: I didn’t know until it was referenced in this episode that a Master Tape was an original recording, of which copies can be made. That makes the song title of the same name on the Series Three soundtrack kind of a clever pun, which I never got before.
*Oh, apparently the name of a real Boys of England magazine Penny Dreadful character-my bad.