kerravonsen | Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil

My viewing of this adventure was broken up into a few different sessions, so my impressions are probably disjointed.

Gee there was a lot of escaping and being recaptured. And also many nearly-getting-killed episode climaxes.

Jo was plenty resourceful. She escaped at least once without help, and held people at gunpoint! I usually just remember her being compassionate, which she was here too.

Ah, I love the Brigadier. Not just the snark he has with the Doctor, but his interactions with his staff, especially Benton. Just that slight smile, and the points where you know he is refraining from rolling his eyes. (♥ the Brig)

A bit of Race!Fail, though: "the Chinese girl! It must be the same person!" Not to mention referring to a Captain as a "girl" throughout. Well, it was the 70s. At least the Chinese weren't portrayed as villains.

This Doctor seems very fond of name-dropping. What I'm not sure about is whether he was lying or telling the truth about being on cosy terms with Lord so-and-so, and with Mao Tse Tung.
I liked how he was portrayed as being good at languages, though.

Someone made a comment to an earlier post that the Master keeps on coming to the Doctor for help "because my evil science experiment went wrong". This is certainly a case of that. Yet again we have an elaborate and complicated plan in which the Master's alien ally turns against him. I almost wonder if this plan was born of "oh, I've got this alien monster, what's the most elaborate plan I can come up with to use my toy to take over the world? Right, I'll set myself up as a Swiss scientist, take a year to build a reputation, get invited to install my 'machine' at Stangmoor prison, get invited to an embassy party, take over the mind of a Chinese aide, take her with me when I install the machine at Stangmoor, use her to kill a few delegates, put a wiretap in UNIT's phones, find out the plans for the destruction of the Thunderbolt missile, take over the prison, use the prisoners to steal the missile, fire the missile at the peace conference, sit back and watch the Earth destroy itself, and come back and rule over the rubble. Yes, that will do nicely."

The Doctor certainly seems to be better at fixing things that go wrong than the Master is; better at improvising, more imaginative. Not that the Master isn't clever, he's as clever as a Time Lord can be, and he does make fancy machines, but perhaps he isn't so good at thinking under pressure; he's more methodical.

Mortal fears:
The Doctor:
First, death by fire - referring back to "Inferno", of course. It seems ironic that the Doctor is going to have more run-ins with death-by-fire in his future: (a) probably the destruction of Gallifrey (b) destroyed by absorbing the Time Vortex when he went from Nine to Ten (c) Ten's run-in with the living sun.
The second and later times, we have fire again, but also Daleks ("Exterminate!") and Cybermen. I'm not sure what else.

The Master:
He sees the Doctor, laughing at him. I've heard someone describe this as "a god-like Doctor" but I'm not sure whether that was meant to be the case. Something else to ponder about this: if the Keller Machine takes memories as the source of the fear that it amplifies back, then is the Master remembering some event in the past when the Doctor laughed at him? Or just his fear of the Doctor laughing at him? It probably doesn't matter; in either case, it is a pretty telling fear. He cares enough about the Doctor's opinion to be terrified at the thought of the Doctor laughing at him; he wants the Doctor to take him seriously. He doesn't want the Doctor to admire him (far from it) but he does want the Doctor to respect him.

Then we have the question of whether the Master really wants the Doctor dead or not. Oh, sure, he keeps on threatening to kill him, but he keeps on finding excuses not to. Also - and maybe I was seeing things - I think there was a tinge of actual concern in his face when he came in and found the Doctor almost dead from the Keller Machine (when the Master had hooked the Doctor up to it).

These two things make me wonder, what kind of relationship did the Master and the Doctor have back when they knew each other on Gallifrey? To me, it looks like a younger-brother/older-brother relationship, with the Master as the younger brother. Not that they would have to be brothers, but some kind of relationship where the Master looked up the Doctor, whether because the Doctor was older, or some other reason. This is quite different to how I've seen it portrayed in fanfic, where they were usually equals, in the same classes, and that the Master was cleverer than the Doctor. Mind you, we know from multiple canonical sources that the Doctor did not do well academically in the Time Lord Academy, so it can't be academics which caught the Master's attention.

Okay, Master, what's with the cigars? Do we see him smoking them in any other adventure?