WATCH ALONG | CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO | 8x10 | The Mind of Evil: Part 6
Added 2023-11-04 18:26:39 +0000 UTCEpisode 8x11 is currently being edited and should be posted in about an hour.
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Comments
This is a really underrated story, and a bit of a last gasp of Season 7’s style. Dover Castle is an epic setting for the prison
Chris Brooker
2025-06-29 04:41:45 +0000 UTCJust FYI, the title of the Season 19 story "Kinda" is pronounced with a short "i", like the beginning of the word "kindergarten". I'm looking forward greatly to your reaction to it, as you go straight from the early 1970s to the early '80s... :-) For many years, "The Mind of Evil" held the record as the most expensive Doctor Who story ever made. The main reason, of course, was the big action sequence of UNIT storming the fortress (actually Dover Castle in Kent) at the end of Episode Five, which was so complex it took a day longer than had been planned and budgeted for to film. (They reused quite a bit of it at the start of Episode Six in order to squeeze as much value out of the filming as possible.) Then there was the other major stunt sequence of the missile hijack in Episode Four, not to mention director Timothy Combe deciding at the last minute that he needed a helicopter to provide the Doctor and Jo with their escape from the explosion at the end of the story... Sadly, this budget blowout meant that Combe would never get to do another Doctor Who story. But there's no denying it looks superb, especially since the Royal Air Force (after it was pointed out to them that the Army had provided a platoon of troops to use as extras in "The Invasion" a couple of years previously) agreed to make a genuine ground-to-air missile available to the production, together with the personnel to handle it. Unfortunately, these soldiers turned up to the filming dressed in their military garb rather than looking like the Master's convicts, prompting the hasty addition of a line to Episode Five about the Master using "hired mercenaries with fake uniforms"... The nameless creature inside the machine is certainly one of the weirdest enemies the Doctor's ever faced -- it's intelligent, but it never speaks and we never really learn anything about it or even where it comes from. It remains impressively menacing throughout the story, thanks to simple but effective tricks like the wavy distortion of the picture whenever it teleports from place to place. This is something that would be trivial to do nowadays with video effects software, but back in 1970 the show had no facility for post-production effects at all. Instead, it was achieved live in the studio, by feeding a particular sine wave audio signal directly into the actual scanning coils of the cameras, thereby disturbing the stability of the picture being recorded. A small but ingenious example of the way the show during this period was continually pushing the envelope of what could be done with the technology available to it.
Steven Cooper
2023-11-05 01:11:45 +0000 UTCThe filming location of the prison was Dover castle
Tobly
2023-11-04 20:01:58 +0000 UTC
