Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil by Terrance Dicks

Published: July 1985

Edition read: Target first reprint, 1985

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter...and he strikes, like Thunderbolt...

Purple Prose: "Conscious as he was of the hollowness of scientific pretensions, Kettering had been flattered and delighted when Emil Keller had chosen him to oversee the first use of the Keller Machine in England...So far Kettering had succeeded in concealing his ignorance with a good deal of high-flown scientific gobbledegook." (p.28)

Childhood Recollections: I can remember reading the beginning but nothing more- I have a suspicion that this is one of the ones I bought in my teens and read in one sitting.

Ramblings: It’s been said of ‘The Mind of Evil’ (I think) that it’s the one Pertwee story which may as well be missing for all that anybody thinks of it- certainly the other week I was surprised to see that Amazon still have the VHS for sale as new. As Don Houghton’s second contribution to Doctor Who, it has something of a hangover from the seventh season’s atmosphere; pared down and shorn of the aliens, the story could equally have worked in Doomwatch, while it’s also one of the few stories to respect the original and more ruthless conception of the Master’s character. The absence of a really memorable monster seems to have denied it a place in popular memory and so the story languished at the bottom of Target’s list for a good few years. Which is a shame, because it dares to think big (if the Pertwee era was in some areas trying to echo the Bond films, ‘Mind’ wants to be Thunderball when it grows up), balances ideas and action and even goes so far as to present UNIT as a competent military organisation. It was a natural, then, for Terrance Dicks’s sweep-up of the remaining Pertwee and late Troughton stories, and given Dicks’s ability to raise his game ever so slightly with the stories he helped bring to the screen, on balance the prospect is a promising one.

With the increased page count of 144, Dicks’s adaptation begins superbly. Not only does he take the obvious course and fill in backgrounds for Barnham and Mailer, so we know exactly why they’re inside, but a comparatively disposable character like Kettering gets a page of back story and there are affectionate steps inside the thought processes of Sergeant Benton and the Brigadier (complete with allusion to Doris). He’s on less firm ground with the Chinese characters and clearly doesn’t feel comfortable providing them with much depth, but certainly the first half of the book is at least as good as anything else published under Dicks’s name. The problem comes with the second half; as with the original story, this consists of a number of action set-pieces which look fantastic on screen but don’t necessarily transfer to the printed page with the same kind of impact. That said, the adaptation is paced out precisely in relation to the page count, and it’s only at the very bottom of page 142 that Barnham is run over, with the Doctor’s final line hanging in the air as it did on television. It’s not unfair to describe this as one of Terrance Dicks’s best attempts at adapting a UNIT-era story since his early efforts in the 1970s; certainly the comfortable feel for familiar characters is there, and I’ve no doubt that anybody reading the books in story order would find this fitting very comfortably between ‘Terror of the Autons’ and ‘The Claws of Axos’.