With a running time of just barely over 18 minutes, the final episode of today's viewing of The Mind Robber is easily the shortest single episode of Doctor Who ever aired on television. Sure, in the modern era there are some web shorts and some Red Nose Day skits that run shorter, but nothing that ever played on television as a complete episode in the regular time slot. Honestly, the abbreviated nature of these ones served the story well -- even if it was a happy accident.

Let's talk about that.

The Mind Robber - Episodes 4 & 5

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

As I mentioned yesterday, The Mind Robber was originally supposed to only be four episodes, but had to be stretched to five when the (awful) The Dominators was reduced from six to five episodes. As a matter of fact, the first episode of The Mind Robber was cobbled together in such a way that it is the only episode in the show's history to not have any writer's credit. The other way they stretched it out was to reduce the running time of the other episodes, which is how we wound up with today's mini-sized offering.

At its core, The Mind Robber is a love letter to every contract writer who has ever had to churn out books or scripts to a never-ending deadline. It turns out the Master (no, like I said, not that master) is really just a nice English pulp fiction writer who published an ongoing serial for The Ensign magazine before he was kidnapped by some malevolent force and enslaved in the Land of Fiction. The ultimate goal of the unnamed overlords is to suck in the entire human population of Earth, thus leaving the planet uninhabited and ripe for invasion. In some ways it is not entirely unlike the recent modern episode Extremis. 

Unfortunately, the Master is aging and needs a replacement, and he has selected the Doctor for the job. Of course the Doctor declines the position before being forcibly linked to the computer that is running the entire simulation. This leads to a battle of wills between the Doctor and the Master, but the ultimate victory is a result of Zoe just mashing buttons and overloading the computer's logic circuits. Which, honestly, just sounds like a normal day of running Microsoft Windows.

Overall I would not call this a great story, or a classic story, but I was surprised that it was if nothing else a watchable story that turned out to have much more going on than just magical Land of Fiction surreality. In much the same way that I went into The Web Planet with radically low expectations and was subsequently surprised, this story pulled off the same trick. 

Tomorrow: The Invasion begins, and I couldn't be more eager about diving into it.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Second
Companion(s): Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot
Episode(s): The Mind Robber - Episodes 4 & 5
Steps Walked: 6,959 today, 748,984 total
Distance Walked: 3.60 miles today, 361.12 miles total
Weight: 275.06 lbs (five day moving average), net change -32.24 lbs