The Mind Robber - Episode 3

This episode starts with the horse that had been painted horse running towards them. When I write it like that it doesn’t sound particularly good but its perhaps better than I am making it sound. This episode sees Frazer Hines return after his bout of chicken pox. He returns on his 76^th episode and is just one behind William Russell now. It’s strange that as much as I thought Hamish Wilson did a good job standing in for Frazer, once Frazer was back I felt a little sense of relief that they were back together and it felt like it was back on track and it was done rather well if truth be told.

The thing about the episode is that it does feel like it’s a holding pattern until the Doctor gets to encounter the Master. Obviously not THE master but less intense version. It’s quite odd that we don’t get to see his face but rather just his voice and its left to the other characters to keep the danger levels up. There are more literal characters that appear apart from Gulliver. Rapunzel appears when she helps Jamie climb the rocks to avoid capture by the clockwork soldiers. Though no sooner has she appeared than she literally disappears. This means that Frazer has to do his best acting against a ticker tape machine reading whatever came out of it. To be Frazer, he did it very well.

I was impressed with the stop-animation effect used to realise the Madusa. If you did this now it would look very slick and very good but doing it back in 1968 makes it look even more good. The cave scenes were also quite good because they didn’t seem boring and did the job that they needed to do and it was during this that some sense came to the producers because they could have shown us what the minotaur looked like but they didn’t and instead we got to see the shadow which was obviously the right thing to do because no doubt it wouldn’t have looked as good on screen.

Whilst I was impressed with the Madusa realisation, I thought that the cliffhanger did lack a sense of drama. It seemed like a bit of a weak ending but that’s probably the worst thing that I could say about it because as an episode it works very well and seems to be comfortable in its current setting. As far as experimental stories its one that works reasonably well and I am certainly a lot more engaged in the story than I was at any point during ‘The Dominators’.