WATCH ALONG | CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO | 8x6 | The Mind of Evil: Part 2
Added 2023-10-19 14:26:02 +0000 UTCEpisode 8x7 is currently exporting and will be posted shortly.
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Comments
The Doctor's vision of a world being consumed in flames was a reference back to the parallel Earth being destroyed in "Inferno" (which was, like this story, written by Don Houghton). At least it was a more convincing nightmare than the pathetic dragon that's supposed to be the terrifying cliffhanger at the end of the episode -- one of the more notorious failures among Doctor Who's monsters. Apparently the whole studio erupted in laughter when the silly thing made its entrance, and in the final edit they cut its appearance down to the bare minimum. :-) Regarding the oddly shifting colour in this episode (and the rest of the story)... As I mentioned in connection with "The Silurians", many of the Third Doctor's stories, especially from the first half of his era, no longer exist on their original transmission videotapes. "The Mind of Evil" was preserved only as black-and-white film recordings made for sale to foreign TV stations and later returned to the BBC. But during the early 2000s, it was discovered that these black-and-white recordings still contained most of the colour information from the original tapes, in the form of a pattern of very tiny "chroma dots" overlaying each frame. Thanks to the development of some extremely ingenious software, the film recordings could be processed and the original colour recovered -- not in perfect quality, but good enough to be watchable.
Steven Cooper
2023-10-19 17:10:36 +0000 UTCSome episodes from the 3rd Doctor era had missing colour episodes with only the black & white versions existing. Attempts to recolour episodes were made with varying degrees of success.
Malcolm Wolf
2023-10-19 15:32:42 +0000 UTC
