WALK INTO MY PARLOUR

The Mind Robber vs. The Runaway Bride

‘For twenty-five years I delivered five thousand words every week,’ wails the Master of the Land of Fiction in The Mind Robber. Five thousand words a week doesn’t actually sound very much – a lot of writers working today would aim to write close to that in a day – but I admire the old fella’s stamina in keeping that rate up for a quarter of a century. I hit the Writer’s Wall with this blog a few months ago. Having watched and made notes on both The Mind Robber and The Runaway Bride back in May (shortly before the start of the Fifteenth Doctor’s first full season), I found myself unable to write them up into a blog post before now. In large part that was down to circumstance – life has been very busy and there just hasn’t been much time to sit and write. But on those few occasions that I did have the opportunity I really struggled to make a start. I knew roughly what I wanted to say for each, but I couldn’t find the words or the creative energy. I just had to leave it until the muse and suitable opportunities re-presented themselves at the right times.

It wasn’t only a lack of time. After all the excitement (delights and occasional disappointments) of Ncuti Gatwa’s debut season, I think I felt a bit Doctor Who-d out. I find that this happens to me periodically with each of my Big Three Fandoms (Doctor Who, comics, and football). I have seasonal periods of intense interest in each of them, rarely at the same time as each other, followed by a few weeks or sometimes even a few months in which I just don’t have quite the same enthusiasm. I feel that I’m re-entering a season of Who-ishness though. Perhaps it’s something to do with the nights drawing in.

I’ve had to watch both stories again, so I hope that what I have written here is fresh. You hear writers say that sometimes you just need to sit down and start writing to get over the block, even if you don’t know exactly what to write – just put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and let it happen. I’ve tried that here, and miraculously it seems to have worked. Large parts of what I have written below I didn’t know that I wanted to write, but now that I’ve done it I’m glad that I did.

The Second Doctor story The Mind Robber, written (mostly) by Peter Ling, was first broadcast in five episodes between 14 September and 12 October 1968, and the Tenth Doctor’s The Runaway Bride by Russell T. Davies was first broadcast on Christmas Day 2006.

The Mind Robber

Re-watching all these old Doctor Who stories and searching for something interesting to say about each of them is a fun hobby, often very satisfying when something ‘clicks’ – when I spot something I hadn’t noticed or given much thought to before, or recognise a theme or a connection linking one story to another – but there’s sometimes a little bit of a cringe factor to be overcome, especially in the classic series stories. I think most of us who watched the original show when it was first broadcast have a particular liking for some eras, and other periods that can make us feel a little bit embarrassed and awkward.

Classic Who stories were produced and broadcast in and for a different time, and one has to allow for that context, but I confess that when I ask the Randomiser to select my next adventure I’m always hoping for one from the period in which I was the primary target audience (mid-1970s to early 1980s), because my inner child doesn’t find those ones at all cringey. However, I struggle a bit with some of those that were written and performed for young viewers of other times – especially the late 1960s and the mid- to late 1980s. They were never made for me, and some of these stories make me pause to wonder why I, a fifty-something-year-old man, am watching an old-fashioned kids’ programme. It’s a reasonable question, with only one answer: ‘Because it’s Doctor Who, of course’.

The Mind Robber is one from that late 1960s period, and my heart deflated slightly when it came up on the watchlist. I’ve seen it a few times now, and I’ve struggled to consider it with the same fondness as some other fans do. My residual impressions have been that it was all a bit too childish, clunky and over-simplistic. A televised pantomime. It’s funny how one’s opinions can change though; on this latest rewatch I found it to be a genuinely interesting story, creatively and resourcefully made, and attempting to explore some mature themes.

The impressions of childishness come mainly through the principal characters. The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe line-up always had a bit of a Play School tone to it – acting and dialogue delivered in broad strokes and primary colours. One feels that this was a period in which the Doctor was travelling with a pair of pre-schoolers – wide-eyed and deferential – presumably because the production team considered their main audience to be fairly young. The juvenile feel of The Mind Robber is re-enforced by the inclusion of representations of E. Nesbit’s Bastable children – it was quite unusual for Doctor Who to feature actual child actors in its cast (I’m struggling to think of any that preceded the Bastables in televised Who) – and other characters from traditional children’s literature and fairy tales.

Aspects of The Mind Robber’s production look extremely ropey. Sets such as the forest of books and the ‘nothingness’ into which the TARDIS arrives fail to look like something other than a television studio. The fact that you can see the back wall of that ‘white void’ studio in the first episode always irritates me, but I was interested to read Andrew Hickey say in his Obverse Books Black Archive volume on The Mind Robber that this wall-line would not have been visible on a 1968 television screen. Again, it’s important to remember and to try to re-imagine the context in which these stories were first made and shown.

There are other aspects of The Mind Robber that appear rather shabby. The Karkus character is a bit rubbish, for example. The story contains generous helpings of screaming, monsters and chases through corridors – all staple kids’ adventure stuff. It’s a bit mad to think that this story was part of Season 6 of Doctor Who, while the sophisticated Inferno, which was one of the stories I watched prior to this one, was a part of Season 7. How could these two stories – poles apart in tone – possibly be part of the same series? That they are is part of the multifaceted wonder of Doctor Who.

So there are some easy targets for a negative appraisal of The Mind Robber. But reading a little bit around the production issues reveals further helpful context. Financing on the show was extremely tight at this point, and the budget wasn’t helped when the decision was made to increase the length of the story from four episodes to five (due to having reduced the length of the preceding story, The Dominators). So the production team needed to be resourceful. The first episode was written from scratch, utilising a minimum of physical resources. Many of the dramatic notes in the story as a whole were created through suggestive dialogue and clever sound effects. The additional problem of Frazer Hines falling ill halfway through recording was solved with the clever single-episode face change idea. I love seeing and reading about this level of resourcefulness. It’s instructive for life: so many problems that initially can seem insurmountable can be overcome by utilising what you have available to you, and with a little bit of imagination. As the Doctor tells Zoe, ‘I think we may be in a place where nothing is impossible. Come on!’

Doctor Who usually works best when it exercises the power of the imagination, both on the production side of things – in the crafts of writing, design, acting and direction – and in the minds of its audience. This is a show that makes us, the viewers, want to get off the sofa and to dream up our own adventures – to play them, to write them, to draw them. It turns us into the myth makers, into the masters of our own lands of fiction. I think that’s right at the heart of what makes it such a special, beloved, enduring television programme.

The empty dimension of Part One of The Mind Robber is perhaps representative of that blank canvas of our imaginations. It’s a simple idea, but somehow a very attractive one, like having a clean piece of paper in front of you and the anticipation of writing or typing, or colouring with a brand new packet of felt-tip pens, whatever you like. The feeling is similar with a landscape of thick, freshly-fallen snow, or a still-surfaced swimming pool, or the surface of a newly-opened tub of butter or a jar of marmalade. The prospect of digging or diving in, or making that first mark of a pencil or pen, is … a little bit scary, possibly an act of sacrilege, desecration (and what if I do it wrong?!) … but also delicious, exciting, incredibly empowering.

There is another deep-rooted fear awoken by this idea of a place of complete absence. As well as the fear of spoiling it, there is a fear that perhaps it does contain something after all – something so terrifying, so different that it has no place in the known, material universe. ‘Zoe, listen to me. If we move outside the TARDIS, we step into a dimension about which we know nothing. We should be at the mercy of the forces outside Time and Space as we know it.’ I think Russell T Davies tapped into this particular primal horror very well in Wild Blue Yonder. It reminds me of the difficulty I have in stilling my thoughts, emptying my mind, for purposes of mindfulness and meditation. These are mental disciplines I would quite like to be able to practice but I struggle, and I think this is because of a reluctance, a fear, of letting go, of diving into that pool – because I worry that perhaps there’s something horrific lurking deep within.

There are further scary moments and scenes in the rest of The Mind Robber. I expect a couple of the cliffhanger episode endings must have been especially disturbing for young viewers back in 1968. Zoe’s scream, over a close-up of the Doctor’s face, eyes shut as if he is dead, as the TARDIS console and the travellers spin off into darkness, is a quite terrifying climax to Part One. And the ending of Part Three, in which Zoe and the Doctor are menaced by Medusa, is also frightening. I think it’s the stop-motion animation of the snakes in Medusa’s hair that make it so disturbing. There’s something so creepy and just-not-quite-natural-enough about this technique, as with Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, or the awakening of all the toys in Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate’s Bagpuss.

The Narnia-like forest, the torchlit caves, the White Robots, the crackling, echoing thud of the approaching footsteps of mechanical toy soldiers … Once you are able to ignore the handicaps of low budget, squint a little bit and let your imagination take over, these all contribute to an enjoyably scary story.

Another of the episode cliffhangers comes at the end of Part Four, where Zoe and Jamie find themselves crushed by closing walls. It’s a little like Leia and Luke in the garbage bays in Star Wars, except these aren’t ordinary walls – they are the pages of an enormous book. The Master (of the Land of Fiction) has tricked the Doctor’s companions into becoming fictionalised characters. (Perhaps this transformation involves the use of ionic energy, which the Isolus of 2006’s Fear Her use to turn real people into fictionalised scribbles.) The Master (and the Doctor) can thenceforth control Zoe and Jamie’s actions by first describing them in the form of a story.

(There’s a slight irony to this, in the Master’s actions being the opposite of what we can have a tendency to do as fans (especially, but perhaps not exclusively, when we are young): consider the fictionalised characters of Doctor Who to be real people.)

It’s a clever twist, and quite macabre the more you think about it. Zoe and Jamie become victims of a particularly nasty form of coercive control. There’s quite a tradition in Doctor Who of the imposition of hypnotic control, over young female companions in particular (it seemed to happen to Sarah Jane all the time), and it’s a bit problematic. But this idea of writing someone’s story before it happens seems even darker. Predestination is an important tenet of many people’s Christian faith (Psalm 139:16: ‘Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.’), although disputed by other believers. I guess it’s a comfort for some people to know that God has already decided and secured their future, while for other people it’s a horrendous idea incompatible with a belief in free will and freedom from slavery. The Mind Robber’s Master of the Land of Fiction is a fearsome god indeed.

The Runaway Bride

It’s hard to quantify just how exciting the prospect of The Runaway Bride, a Doctor Who Christmas Day special, was back in 2006. This was only the second of what would become the traditional annual festive special – I suppose in a way the second was what made it into a ‘tradition’. 2005’s The Christmas Invasion had been such a treat; having never known such a thing for 35 years of my life the idea of being gifted a brand new episode of Doctor Who on Christmas Day – the centrepiece of the Christmas telly schedule, no less, with a Radio Times front cover and the introduction of a new Doctor – was a revelation. By 2006, my inner child could hardly wait for Christmas, as much for himself as for my five-year-old son James who was also massively into the show at this point, and it was more to do with Doctor Who than for any other aspect of the festivities.

I have been trying to remember what I felt about The Runaway Bride just after it had broadcast. Slightly disappointed that it didn’t quite live up to my unbelievably high expectations, perhaps? This was the first new Doctor Who for five-and-a-half months, since Doomsday in July 2006. Doomsday was possibly my favourite of all New Who stories at that point, with all the excitement of Daleks versus Cybermen and Rose being separated from the Doctor. I’d been playing Murray Gold’s ‘Oooh-ooh-ooh-oooh’ track from that episode (my daughter Hannah called it the ‘Rose not feeling very well’ music) on fairly constant loop since the soundtrack album had been released at the start of December.

The Runaway Bride didn’t quite scratch the itch that the climax of Doomsday had created. Naturally, for a Christmas episode, it was a bit lighter, fluffier. Donna Tate came in as a one-off companion, which naturally meant there was a more comedic tone. There was a big Christmas-movie action scene (the TARDIS motorway chase), a Christmassy song (‘Love Don’t Roam’, sung by Neil Hannon), and loads of Christmassy trimmings (such as the Robot Santas and the exploding Christmas tree baubles). The secondary guest star, Sarah Parish, played the impressively-designed Empress of the Racnoss as a pantomime villain. Overall it was fun enough, but Doctor Who all dressed up in a Christmas jumper and putting on the performance expected of it by the wider family rather than those of us more deeply invested.

Rewatching The Runaway Bride now, I’m reminded that it did contain some rather dark themes, overshadowed in my memories by the decorative aspects. I had forgotten how big a deal was made of how heartsbroken the Doctor was at this stage over his loss of Rose. He’s moody and snappy for much of the story – grief and resentment simmering beneath the surface, and spilling out every now and then in irritated little snaps at Donna (‘That’s my friend’s,’ when Donna picks up Rose’s shirt, and the especially cruel ‘You're not special, you're not powerful, you're not connected, you're not clever, you're not important.’).

And then the rage boils over at the story’s crescendo, the Doctor seemingly lost to untempered fury as he uses the Thames river to wash baby Racnoss spiders back down the plughole to the centre of the Earth. The Runaway Bride makes a big deal of this moment, focusing on the Doctor’s shadowed face and Donna’s horrified reaction. Clearly this is an important point in the Doctor’s journey – a reminder of all that he has lost, and the fact that, as Donna says to him later, he needs to have a friend with him at all times. ‘You need someone to stop you.’ But I can’t help thinking that his destruction of the Racnoss – who were climbing up the spout with the intention of eating humanity – wasn’t that different from how he had dispatched plenty of other species, armies and races in the past.

Donna also has dark underlying issues in her life. Hers is a complex story about which we would obviously learn a lot more in subsequent years, but I would suggest that there is more character depth for Donna in this single-episode debut than was afforded to Martha in the whole of the subsequent season. She is very funny, of course, as Catherine Tate brings great comedic talent to the series, so there is much in The Runaway Bride that makes us chuckle. She has cunning – that scene in which she pretends to sob at the wedding reception, but sneaks a cheeky wink at the Doctor, is a nice little sign of how clever she can be. But people often develop those sorts of smarts – humour and guile – as defences against something, and in this story we also see signs of Donna having had a quite tragic life.

She has a truly terrible mother. Jacqueline King provides a convincing performance as narcissistic, bullying mum Sylvia Noble, whose sins have had a bit of a whitewash in the recent Fourteenth Doctor mini-series, in my opinion. We should never forget quite how awful a parent she has been to Donna; her hectoring, belittling treatment of her daughter undoubtedly contributed to Donna’s lack of self-belief and self-esteem. When the Doctor is so rude to her on the London rooftops, Donna’s reaction (‘This friend of yours. Just before she left, did she punch you in the face?’) is annoyed but not shocked, as if this is a familiar wounding – she has heard it all many times before.

She also has terrible friends: the sneering Nerys, and a whole church full of wedding guests quite happy to carry on partying while Donna was missing without trace. And in The Runaway Bride she learns that the man she was about to marry despises her, groomed her as a human resource for the Empress’s diabolical plan, and has been poisoning her – emotionally and literally – every day since contriving to ‘accidentally’ meet her HC Clements.

We know now that there is so much more to come for Donna. Wilf, Turn Left, the DoctorDonna metacrisis, saving the universe, Shaun, daughter Rose, and returning to travel once again in the TARDIS more than sixteen years after she left it. But none of this was planned when The Runaway Bride was written, so we are supposed to watch it as an account of Donna’s complete story cycle. Her one-off adventure with the Doctor opens her eyes to the possibility of change, of the potential within herself, and the great wide universe beyond. ‘Not getting married, for starters. And I'm not going to temp anymore. I don't know. Travel. See a bit more of planet Earth. Walk in the dust. Just go out there and do something.’

In this sense, The Runaway Bride could be seen as the visitation of an angel (the Doctor), heralded by the appearance of a star (the Racnoss spaceship), and instigating a transformative change in the life of the madonna (er, Donna). Of course, it’s a double angelic visitation in this story as Donna brings transformative change for the Doctor too; they mirror each other in guiding each other on to the right path. It prophesies the DoctorDonna to come (Journey’s End), and also serves as forewarning of the dangers if this visitation having never happened – if Donna had previously chosen to turn right onto the wrong path (Turn Left).

As I’m weaving an autobiographical thread into this blog I need to mention some personal significance here. I’m not sure how clearly I made the link at the time, but The Runaway Bride was broadcast at a point in my life at which I was similarly being awakened to what was really right for me in life – a Christmas visitation which led to my own life changing dramatically for the better. It took a while to get there, but some specials are worth waiting for.

Connections

As discussed a little bit above, both The Mind Robber and The Runaway Bride play with ideas of free will and predeterminism, choosing our own paths versus having someone write our stories for us. In The Runaway Bride, Donna discovers that her working life at ‘posh’ security firm HC Clements and engagement to Lance has all been an illusion of free choice, as Lance has been stringing her along and priming her with huon particles for the Empress. In The Mind Robber the Master of the Land of Fiction has been manipulating the Doctor into taking over his job in service to the Master Brain.

Other similarities between the two stories include a familiar Doctor Who directorial trope in the early stages of each. The as-yet-unrevealed big baddie watches the Doctor and his companions on a screen from the safety of their secret base. ‘Good, good, excellent!’ chuckles the Master as he observes Jamie turn into a cardboard cut-out and Zoe fall into a trap beyond the gothic doors. ‘Clever, clever, clever boy!’ cackles the Empress, her sinister claw tapping a screen showing the Doctor looking up at the sky.

Both villains use remote-controlled robots in the form of Christmassy figures clothed in red and white – the Land of Fiction’s Clockwork Soldiers (like Christmas toys), and the Empress’s Robot Santas.

Large cobwebs are a sticky component of both stories. The Racnoss spaceship appears to be constructed from some sort of web material, both inside and out. In The Mind Robber, the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie have to pick his way through cobwebs in both the tangled forest and the Minotaur’s maze of caves.

‘Won’t you walk into my parlour?’ the Master asks the Doctor, who replies ‘Said the spider to the fly.’ In The Runaway Bride, the Doctor and Donna walk into the Empress’s parlour, where HC Clements himself is enshrouded in webbing: ‘My Christmas dinner!’ cackles the Empress.

‘Harvest the humans! Reduce them to meat!’, the giant spider later cries. A similar analogy, although more metaphorical is by the Doctor to describe humanity’s potential fate in The Mind Robber: ‘Man will just become like a string of sausages!’

Inside the Master’s fiction-creating base, Jamie activates a machine that dictates a couple of lines from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: 'Christmas won't be Christmas without presents,’ says Jo, as she and Meg lament their impoverished circumstances. In The Runaway Bride, the Doctor predicts a happier time for Sylvia and Geoff when Donna comes home: ‘Best Christmas present they could have,’ he announces (before remembering that Donna hates this time of year).