"The Mind Robber" - Episode 1

Doctor Who
Airdate: September 14, 1968
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury
Produced by Peter Bryant
Directed by David Maloney

A mechanical fault prevents the TARDIS from leaving the island, and it is quickly buried in molten lava. Inside, the Doctor reluctantly uses an emergency device which takes the TARDIS outside of time and space altogether. They arrive in the middle of a vast nothingness, and while the Doctor sets about making repairs, Jamie and Zoe are tempted outside by images of their homes. They quickly become lost in the white void. The Doctor comes under psychic attack from an unknown foe, and he too leaves the TARDIS in search of his friends. He finda them under some sort of hypnotic control, surrounded by large white robots. He corrals them back into the TARDIS and tries to get away, but the TARDIS walls break-up around them. Zoe and Jamie cling to the console as the Doctor is flung off into the void...

The first thing I want to direct your attention to is the fact that this episode has no credited writer. It was, in fact, written by then Script Editor Derrick Sherwin. He's going to have a pretty expansive role in Season Six, and particularly in the transition into Season Seven, but at this point he was just the Script Editor, and I believe there were all sorts of complicated rules about the same individual doing more than one job, so the credited Script Editor couldn't also be the credited Writer.

Anyway, Sherwin had to step in and write the script for this episode after it was decided that "The Dominators" would be cut back from six to five episodes. "The Mind Robber", then, needed to expand from four to five episodes in order to make up the shortfall. This episode was slotted in, but it had to be made for almost nothing. So we get an episode with practically no guest cast, and the most minimalist sets you can imagine. All we have is the TARDIS interior and a white void.

And yet, it manages to be tremendously effective. It's extremely eerie, and it definitely puts the audience on notice that something very much out of the ordinary is happening. A few times before, "Doctor Who" has attempted to do outside-the-box stories like this, but they're usually either valiant failures like "The Web Planet" or steaming piles of irredeemable cack like "The Celestial Toymaker". This episode, despite the circumstances and limitations surrounding its production, gets it exactly right.