Follow TV Tropes

Following

Trivia / Doctor Who S6 E2 "The Mind Robber"

Go To


  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!: There's a widespread belief that Zoe's catsuit was purple, and it's frequently drawn like this in fanart. This seems to have originated from fan colourizations of black and white screenshots; there are colour photos on the DVD showing it was actually silver.
  • Blooper: The Master's Ominous Multiple Screens were real screens showing the live feed from the cameras. The same is true of the scanner in the TARDIS: When the Doctor and company return to it at the end of Part 1, you can actually see the ending credits of the episode are cued up on the scanner. Since the episode contains moments of Noticing the Fourth Wall, it works beautifully.
  • Corpsing: At one point the Doctor and Zoe are attempting to get through a door. Watch Zoe as the Doctor hides her under his cloak and you can just about tell that Wendy Padbury is laughing underneath it. This was because Patrick Troughton had, maybe accidentally or maybe not, stuck his fingers up her nose.
  • Creator's Favourite Episode: Patrick Troughton and Wendy Padbury both found this their favourite story.
  • No Budget: For the first episode, which is why it's a Bottle Episode.
  • Permanent Placeholder: When Peter Ling originally wrote the serial, Victoria's replacement hadn't been created, so he wrote for a generic female companion by the name of Zoe. The producer liked the name, and it stuck.
  • Promoted Fanboy: Because Hamish Wilson knew of the show and watched episodes with Jamie, he was able to easily recreate him in the short time they had to find a replacement.
  • Prop Recycling: The robots are reused from an Out of the Unknown adaptation of Isaac Asimov's short story "Reason". Coincidentally, at that very same time, Out Of The Unknown borrowed two Daleks and the TARDIS for one of their own episodes, also set in a dream world.
  • Real-Life Relative: Frazer Hines' cousin Ian played one of the soldiers.
  • Troubled Production: "The Dominators" proved to be such a disaster it was trimmed down from six to five episodes at the last minute, forcing an extra episode to be added on to the start of this story. This caused problems as the show could not exceed its allocated budget, meaning it could not pay any guest actors or build any new sets or make any new costumes for the new Episode One. Therefore, the episode had to be made with only the three lead actors in speaking roles, only using the TARDIS set and a blank white studio, and featuring some non-speaking monsters in borrowed costumes from Out of the Unknown. It also came at the end of the Season 5 production block, by which the show had been in production for 46 consecutive weeks, and Patrick Troughton was simply exhausted; upon discovering the first episode was to be a Bottle Episode carried entirely by the three regulars, Troughton complained to the production team and the episodes were edited down to 20 minutes each to lighten his workload.
  • What Could Have Been: Copyright reasons limited what characters Ling wanted to use, including Zorro.
  • Written-In Infirmity: Frazer Hines suffered a nasty case of chicken pox during production, leading to the idea of having his character temporarily change appearances into Hamish Wilson (justified in-universe as the Doctor trying to reconstruct Jamie's face from memory). All the subsequent scenes with Wilson were written with very little time to spare.
  • Working Title: The Fact of Fiction and ManPower.


Top