UU3 - The Mind Robber 3

One of my favourite things about The Mind Robber is the "stream of consciousness" feel to it. The setting goes from a forest of words to a cobweb forest to a long winding cave to a castle on top of a mountain and so on, without ever explaining why the location keeps changing to the viewer or the characters. Fictional characters are introduced and dispensed in quick succession, and giant clockwork soldiers serve as the wardens. It looks and feels like what it is probably trying to represent - a dream world.

The fact that The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe react to the changing scenery and situations with relatively little surprise leads me to believe that they are in a shared hallucination or a shared dream. If that's the case, the most obvious point to hypothesize that the dream started was when everyone was being tormented by the loud, pulsing sound in the TARDIS is Episode One. I honestly don't remember the details of how this story wraps up, or if it dovetails into the beginning of The Invasion, so I'll be intrigued to see if this little idea turns out.

I'm also willing to believe that many, many other people have come up with the whole "It was all a dream" idea, but this whole Chronic Hysteresis trip is trying to register my initial reactions from viewing each episode, and not relying on any pre-established thoughts and notions that have built up over the years and decades since it first aired.

I'll finally mention Bernard Horsfall, whose Gulliver is my favourite fictional character out of anyone in this story. My high opinion of him is based both on how much I enjoy Horsfall's performance, but also because of the fact that every line he speaks is a line from the book Gulliver's Travels. Not only that, but those lines are all crafted in beautiful English from over 200 years ago, and I have an enormous soft spot for archaic English.