The Colour Pertwee

With the bunting taken down and the celebrations a fond but fading memory, life in Who-world is showing signs of returning to normal (for a given value of normal, at least). It is with some relief that I can free myself from the self-imposed straitjacket of watching the various older Doctors’ episodes in chronological order and resume my usual pick’n’mix approach to the series. But where to start?

Something which is – to me, at least – fairly obscure, I think. The obvious choice would be The Enemy of the World, the majority of which – duh! – I have never seen at all. But the DVD wasn’t in the shops when I first looked for it, so I plumped for The Mind of Evil instead. Not, you may be thinking, a terribly obscure choice as 1971-vintage pieces of cult TV go, but it’s a story I’ve only ever seen once before, when I was doing my pilgrimage in 2001. Back then, obviously, it was in black and white – technology has managed to resurrect the colour, which is clearly a brilliant technical achievement. Nevertheless my memory of this story is not a vivid nor particularly positive one, so a revisitation seemed in order.

Britain, in the year 1971/1975/1982, and the Doctor and his assistant Jo are attending a demonstration of a new prisoner rehabilitation project at Stangmoor Prison: the Keller Process, whereby all the evil impulses are extracted from a prisoner’s brain. The Doctor is alarmed at the nature of the technology involved, and a number of unexplained deaths in the vicinity of the Keller Machine would seem to suggest he is (as usual) right.

However, the Brigadier and UNIT are too busy elsewhere to worry too much about the goings-on in Stangmoor, as they are providing security for the first World Peace Conference. (Not to mention overseeing the disposal of a highly-dangerous nuclear-powered nerve-gas missile.) When attempts are made on the lives of several conference delegates, the fate of the world is thrown into peril. Can there possibly be a connection between the deaths at the prison and the threat to the conference?

Can there possibly be a connection? Yes, of course, especially when that all-purpose plot contrivance known as the Master is on the scene. Can there plausibly be a connection? Well, that’s where we run into somewhat choppy waters, to be honest. But more on this later.

It’s fairly well-known, not to mention obvious, that the original run of Star Trek was a big influence on the production team of Doctor Who during this period – in particular, the American series’ ability to use SF as a medium for exploring moral and philosophical issues. Bearing this in mind, it’s striking how morally inert The Mind of Evil is. The Keller Process, as depicted here at least, isn’t a million miles away from the death-of-personality quasi-executions in Babylon 5: in what way is it better to kill someone’s personality than to kill their body? Barnham is left clearly incompetent to look after himself by his exposure to the process, so the implication is that at least some ‘evil’ is necessary for a person to function adequately (shades of Trek‘s The Enemy Within, which I was writing about just the other day). There’s some interesting stuff here, but the story always trots briskly past it in pursuit of another big location sequence.

What’s especially striking is how indifferent the Doctor seems to be to the fate of those being processed – he seems more interested in crowing about his own cleverness than raising the issue that the British authorities are carrying out dangerous experiments on their own citizens (which they basically are). It’s very hard to shake the sense that the political outlook of this story is, in a half-formed sort of way, very Tory, if not actually authoritarian: prisoners deserve whatever they get seems to be the message.

It’s become almost a cliche to comment on how oddly charmless the third Doctor frequently comes over as, but it remains a fact – and this may be his nadir. He grumps his way through the story, either in a strop with everyone around him or gently patronising them. The only exception is in his scenes with the Chinese delegate, where we make the startling discovery that the Doctor is a close personal buddy of Chairman Mao, architect of the Cultural Revolution and leader of China during the annexation of Tibet (was noted Buddhist Barry Letts really on-side with this dialogue?). In any story this would be awkward; in this particular one it’s especially troubling.

Verity Lambert, in particular, criticised the Pertwee series for making the Doctor too much of an establishment figure. There’s probably a discussion to be had here, but in general I think she was right. The Doctor admittedly gives short shrift to the Brigadier and various Home Office bods, but this isn’t because he’s particularly rebellious, he just thinks they’re stupid for not listening to him. (He’s fairly crabby with everyone, as mentioned above.) And he does everything asked of him by his establishment superiors, including putting the Keller Machine plotline on hold for a bit so he can go off and investigate the murders at the Peace Conference. The absence of a likeable Doctor really makes it hard for me to warm to the story.

The absence of a good monster doesn’t help things much either. The Keller Machine barely qualifies, being just a slightly-suspect-looking box with some jelly inside. It is a box full of jelly with remarkable qualities, nevertheless: not only can it extract the evil from mens’ minds (hence the Mind of Evil), but it can kill people via their phobias (perhaps the Mind of Fear was also a possible title), and zap itself around the place (also the Mind of Wibbly-Wobbly Teleportation). Not bad going for a jelly.

It’s a blatant plot-device, of course, but one entirely in keeping with the general tenor of the script. Even putting the issue of the timeframe of the whole season to one side (either a year or so has passed since the previous story, or the Master was doing the groundwork for this caper even prior to helping the Nestenes invade), the Master’s plan is frankly mind-boggling. Why does he install the Keller Machine in Stangmoor Prison? Is it because, even at that point, he was planning to use the place as a base from which to hijack the missile? Is his plan focussed on using the missile to wipe out the conference? If so, why bother using the Keller Machine at all? Or is the missile a last-minute piece of improv? (In which case, he’s phenomenally lucky the missile convoy drives right past the prison.)

This isn’t a plan in any accepted sense of the word. The Master is blatantly just freestyling, doing terribly evil things for the fun of it and coming up with a pretext to stitch them together he goes along. (He still comes across as more likeable than the Doctor.) The same could really be said of the script, if you replace ‘evil’ with ‘exciting and visual’. Director Tim Combe loves his set-pieces and generally does a good job with them, from the missile hijacking to the final confrontation.

I’m afraid this second viewing of the story hasn’t done much to change my opinion of The Mind of Evil (it occurs to me that there are bits of Day of the Doctor, which is only about two weeks old, which I’ve watched more than a Pertwee story from 1971). There are lots of good things in this story – I haven’t even mentioned another solid Nicholas Courtney performance, or Michael Sheard as the prison doctor, or any of the other supporting turns -but they just happen one after the other in front of the camera with only the flimsiest of narratives to support them. I’d be a lot more willing to sit back and enjoy the ride if the story had a little more warmth and soul to it, but this is not the case, as displayed in the figure of the strangely charmless third Doctor. I wouldn’t be so harsh as to call this bad story, but anything more than average really would be stretching a point.