Episode #56 : The Mind of Evil

"Do you think for once in your life you could manage to arrive before the nick of time!"

Episode 56:   The Mind of Evil.
Companions: The 3rd Doctor and Jo Grant.
Air Date:        Six episodes. 30th January to 6th March 1971.

The Master plots to plunge the world into war through a complex scheme involving an alien entity that feeds on evil and fear, a prison riot, and a stolen nerve gas missile.

Lets see if this makes any sense to anyone else. The Master uses an alien parasite to drain the evil from men's minds (turning them into innocent child-like individuals) so that he can take over a prison, free the inmates and get them to steal a nuclear missile so that he can start the third world war. It sounds rather far fetched and unusual, and doesn't make much more sense on screen.

We also see the Master for all his evil brilliance is really not as sharp as all that. In most of the stories in this time of the show the Master sets up some dastardly scheme only to have the Doctor point out an obvious flaw that we, the viewers, picked up on ages ago and he has to switch sides to stop his own defeat.

UNIT is shown as performing duties other than hunting for aliens and monsters. In this story their job is protect delegates from governments across the globe as they talk to avert war. The soldiers still get to amass a small body count however against the inmates of the prison.

I have to be honest and say that this isn't a great story by any means. It tries to do the James Bond thing again and fails to pull it off properly. The BBC are trying to give the show a different feel under Jon Pertwee but the political intrigue and world domineering isn't very well done.