The Mind of Evil

A new breakthrough in medical science – the Keller machine - promises to cure the most hardened of criminals of their monstrous ways by extracting all the evil impulses in their minds and making them safe to walk among us. The Doctor is interested and concerned about this development and takes Jo with him to Stangmoor prison to see the device for himself. Meanwhile the Brigadier and UNIT are providing security for a world peace conference in London and trying to keep the volatile situation from escalating to conflict, yet at the same time they are discreetly disposing of a nerve gas missile. And lurking in the background is the Master, with a plan to steal that missile and attack the peace conference and plunge Earth into chaos. And to do it he will use the evil being at the heart of the Keller machine, the mind of evil…

I couldn’t help but notice I felt a sense of frustration in this one, and it was not with the material, but with the way that the Master pretty much had it all under control and was inches from winning this one. I suppose that’s me sympathizing with the beleaguered UNIT guys as they are routinely outsmarted by the Master, beat up by his thugs and generally punked out while the world’s delegates are watching. And it’s not just the uniformed troops getting the bad ride, Jo is caught up in two prison riots and taken hostage and gets relegated to looking after the first man to be processed by the machine, who has effectively been turned from a murderer into a child with all his negative emotions sucked out. A very big child.

The mind parasite inside the machine kills people by using their worst fears against them, resulting in a drowning death in a dry room, a man scared to death of rats being covered in bites and scratches and when the Doctor gets too close it attacks him with a flashback reel of his worst enemy monsters and visions of the world going up in flames which he saw at the Inferno project. Imagine what a meal it would make of the Master if it got hold of him. At one point it does make an attempt, and his greatest fear turns out to be a projection of the Doctor laughing at him. This is until the whole thing becomes too lengthy a scene and it just starts to fry people.

It’s hard to gauge how much time has passed since Terror of the Autons; the Doctor seems to have take to Jo despite her goofing up the first time they met and it’s iffy to think that the Master was able to put his scheme together within the space of one week. The inclusion of the Liz Shaw audio Sentinels of the New Dawn loans a feeling of passing time between the two for sure. And despite the fact that he is without a functioning TARDIS (the Doctor stole his dematerialization circuit) the Master is doing quite well for resources with a limo and a driver to take him anywhere he wants to go. The driver looks like he is actually quite aware of what the Master is up to and might actually be his own version of a companion rather than another hypnotized victim.

I really wish they had gotten the Master right on the DVD cover. He looks a bit too pleasant, even if

at times he can be. He calls Jo "Miss Grant" when he sees her, which is just plain fun to have a gentleman villain. But I think they got him right on the cover of the novelization if you ask me. I actually read it before I saw it and I was well pleased with what I read for once considering that Terrance Dicks penned it with an absolute minimal amount of detail; it's almost like he was paid by the word and he was dared to make a loss on most of his novelizations, but every now ang again he puts out a good one like this, or Inferno and makes for a pleasant read.

UNIT still hasn’t seen the last of the Master, though, as he was slated to return in the next episode, but before then, there’s a novel to read…

NEXT EPISODE: DEADLY REUNION