The Mind Robber - Episode 5

Now I am onto the final episode which is actually the shortest episode running at just 18 minutes. It’s about seven minutes less than a normal episode but to be honest judging by what I would see, I think that it was perhaps the right length.

The episode starts off with a nice little scene between the Master and the Doctor and it leads to a rather disappointing castle set. Things don’t get any better when Karkus made a return. Rapunzel also makes a return after her blink and you’ll miss it performance in episode three. De Bergerac is brought into the episode quite late in the episode and aside from the rather ridiculous prosthetic nose, it seemed like one character too many as far as I am concerned. It was during this moment where other characters were being bought in that I thought that the story was going a bit too far away from what I would be happy to put up with.

There’s a nice moment when the Doctor almost turns himself into fiction when he starts typing. Then it becomes a battle of wits between the Master and the Doctor. The scene where he gets tricked into the TARDIS and the box that he is in gets moved is rather well done. I also liked how Jamie and Zoe were used in this episode. The Master had copied them and got them to act differently to how they would normally and I liked this though somehow it seemed rather strange to see them do anything that would hurt the Doctor (yes I know they weren’t the real Zoe or Jamie). The performances of the regulars have all been rather good and they’ve dealt with the unusual story well and there wasn’t a dud performance and they were all given good stuff to do.

It’s good that they didn’t decide to kill off the Master. Normally he would have either sacrificed himself or just got caught in the crossfire but they decided just this once to end it on a good note. The way that it ended seemed a bit odd but I suppose odd is the perfect word for this story. As an episode it did feel a bit like it was 90% padding and 10% of proper story. Even though it was so short it didn’t have the sort of ending that I was expecting. I think that the problem with the story is that whilst it certainly has a charm that I hadn’t noticed before, it cant be said that it’s the most effectively told story as the excessive amount of fictional characters became an issue.