The Mind of Evil

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PRODUCTION INFO

Name

The Mind of Evil

Serial Code

FFF

First Transmitted

30 January 1971

Final Ratings

6.10m

DVD RELEASE

DVD

VHS RELEASE

VHS

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CAST

Regular Cast
Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who) Katy Manning (Jo Grant)

Guest Cast

Roger Delgado (The Master), Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart), Richard Franklin (Captain Mike Yates), John Levene (Sergeant Benton) [2-6], Pik-Sen Lim (Captain Chin Lee) [1-3], Raymond Westwell (Prison Governor) [1-3], Michael Sheard (Dr. Summers) [1-4, 6], Simon Lack (Professor Kettering) [1], Neil McCarthy (Barnham) [1-3, 5-6], Fernanda Marlowe (Corporal Bell) [1-4], Clive Scott (Linwood) [1], Roy Purcell (Chief Prison Officer Powers) [1-3], Eric Mason (Senior Prison Officer Green) [1-3], Bill Matthews, Barry Wade, Dave Carter, Martin Gordon (Prison Officers) [1-4, 6], William Marlowe (Mailer) [2-5]*, Haydn Jones (Vosper) [2-4], Kristopher Kum (Fu Peng) [2-3], Tommy Duggan (Senator Alcott) [2]&dagger,, David Calderisi (Charlie) [4], Patrick Godfrey (Major Cosworth) [5-6], Johnny Barrs (Fuller) [5], Matthew Walters (Main Gates Prisoner)

CREW

Written by Don Houghton
Directed by Timothy Combe
Produced by Barry Letts

sypnosis

UNIT is handling the security for the World Peace Conference in London, but The Master is plotting to plunge the world into war by wrecking it.

Posing as Emile Keller, a Professor of Criminology, he goes to Stangmoor Prison in England with a machine that apparently removes the negative (or evil) impulses from the minds of hardened criminals. Actually, the Keller machine is a weapon: it contains an alien mind parasite that stores, and feeds on, these evil impulses.

Unsuspected because of his forged creditsentials, he secretly supplies guns to the prisoners, and uses the mind parasite to start a riot by stirring up hostility among them, in which they take control of the prison. He plans to use them to seize a nerve gas missile being transported by UNIT, with which he hopes to destroy the Peace Conference.

In case his plan to hijack the missile is thwarted, he intends to use the mind parasite (once it has fed sufficiently) to wreck the Peace Conference by murdering the American and Chinese delegates, who are to be killed by the mind parasite’s telepathic powers.

NOTES

  • The images from The Doctor’s past in Episodes Three and Five are those of a Dalek (The Dalek Invasion of Earth), Koquillion (The Rescue), Slaar (The Seeds of Death), a Zarbi(The Web Planet), a War Machine (The War Machines), a Silurian (Doctor Who and the Silurians), an Ice Warrior (The Seeds of Death) and a Cyberman (The Invasion).
  • The fire at the end of Episode One could be a reference back to Inferno.
  • A similar mind parasite appears in Legacy. (And the Legacy book actually implies a connection.)
  • The Unbound audio Sympathy for the Devilsuggests that several mind parasites ended up in China after their ship crashed there in the early 19th century, and were kept dormant by the peaceful chanting of Buddhist monks until Mao Tse-Tung began to shut down the monasteries. This might explain how The Master acquired the mind parasite he uses in this story, and the connection between him and Chin Lee — but it also begs the question of what happened to the other mind parasites in the “mainstream” timeline. However, it should be pointed out that Sympathy takes place in an alternate history in which the Third Doctor didn’t become UNIT’s scientific advisor, and that in this version of history The Master may have acquired the parasite from somewhere else entirely.
  • This story had the working titles of the Pandora Machine, Man Hours, The Pandora Box, and The Pandora’s Box.
  • When The Doctor and Fu Peng are speaking Hokkien, subtitles appear – a first in Doctor Whohistory. Subtitles also appear in The Curse of Fenric, where they translate Russian language dialogue.

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