What, exactly, is the shortest Doctor Who episode ever made?
Before we begin, a quick note. There are a number of Doctor Who episodes which are even shorter than the one we’re looking at. These are stories like the Children in Need specials and minisodes like ‘The Night of the Doctor‘ which we’re not counting as actual Doctor Who episodes, as they didn’t feature in any of the main 40+ seasons. So with that in mind, what is the shortest Doctor Who episode ever made?
The answer, of course, is part five of the 1968 story ‘The Mind Robber,’ which came near the beginning of Patrick Troughton’s final season. At this point in the show’s history, a typical Doctor Who episode was around 25 minutes in length, give or take a few minutes, but the fifth episode of ‘The Mind Robber’ came in at considerably less than this at a dead 18:00. But why? Was there simply not enough story to fill it?
Well, kind of. Bear in mind, ‘The Mind Robber’ was originally meant to be a four part story, and it inherited a fifth episode owing to a production crisis, largely caused by the preceding serial ‘The Dominators.’ This had been pencilled in as a six part adventure, but the writer and script editor were struggling to stretch it beyond five. ‘The Mind Robber,’ therefore, had to be extended, unless the production team could somehow invent a one part story to fill the gap.
So, in the end, the production team opted to give ‘The Mind Robber’ an additional episode, and this acted as a sort of prologue to the main adventure. But it was very sparse; it only featured the regular TARDIS crew, the TARDIS set, a white void, and a couple of re-purposed androids. It is possibly one of the cheapest Doctor Who episodes ever produced.
And this is what caused the majority of the problems on ‘The Mind Robber,’ and why episode five ended up being only 18 minutes. The serial came at the end of one of the production blocks, and the team had run out of money. They weren’t able to hire any additional actors or build any additional sets to help ‘flesh out’ the story. They were also limited in how much extra work they could pay the writer Peter Ling for, and in fact ‘The Mind Robber’ episode one was ultimately penned by the producer Derrick Sherwin, albeit uncredited.
So if you take a look at the running times of each of the Doctor Who episodes in this story, you will notice that they all underrun. Episode two is the longest at 21:39, but they get shorter as the story progresses, with episode three coming in at 19:29, and episode four coming in at 19:14. And the reason is, simply, time and money. The team were up against the clock and couldn’t afford to spend more time in the writing room or build bigger sets or hire more actors. They had to get something onto the screen as quickly as possible.
This typified much of Patrick Troughton’s final season, and the TARDIS team of the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe found themselves under increasing pressure to do the ‘heavy-lifting’ in their stories, minimising the need for expensive guest artists. This made for a rather gruelling season, with Doctor Who episodes being turned around on a weekly basis, plus location work in-between, and overall a huge amount of line learning on the part of the regulars. In addition, Season Six was one of the longest Doctor Who seasons ever made at a dizzying 46 episodes.
But despite its curtailed length, is ‘The Mind Robber’ episode five actually any good? Well, ‘The Mind Robber’ is certainly a popular serial, and indeed it was used in 2023’s Tales of the TARDIS series as a way of introducing new viewers to the classic show, with ‘The Mind Robber’ being chosen to represent the Second Doctor. The viewing figures were also respectable, with episodes three and four crossing the 7 million mark.
In the adventure, the Doctor and his friends find themselves thrown into an alternate dimension – a dimension which, essentially, is the world of fiction, consisting entirely of people and places from works of literature. The TARDIS has been seemingly destroyed, and the travellers are lost in a twisted domain which is overseen by a villainous scribe known as the Master.
And no, before you get excited, this isn’t the same Master who would appear in the Jon Pertwee era (and beyond) but a completely different character who just happens to share the same name. And we discover in this Doctor Who episode that he is a human who was abducted by a mysterious alien race and now oversees the world of fiction. They wanted him for his imagination, which is something the aliens severely lack.
The only problem is that the Master is getting older, and the aliens have been looking for someone to replace him. The Doctor is the ideal candidate as he is a Time Lord, and it transpires that the whole adventure has been a series of tests to prepare him for his new role as overseer of the world of fiction.
And the final episode is all about the Doctor’s fight with the Master, and his escape from the ‘fictional’ dimension with the help of a rather powerful typewriter. It’s certainly one of the quirkiest and most imaginative Doctor Who episodes of the season, if not of all time – even if it is rather brief.
That being said, the brevity of ‘The Mind Robber’ doesn’t detract from its fun, and (if you’re not watching the clock) you probably won’t notice that it comprises some of the shortest Doctor Who episodes of all time. It’s an exciting and inventive adventure, and truly one of the highlights of Patrick Troughton’s final season.
The Leisure Hive episodes are also quite short.
Interesting that we have a character called ‘The Master’ who isn’t then in ‘The War Games’ one who isn’t called The Master but we are told who is. Then we have the Jacobi (Time) ‘War Master’ who isn’t the ‘War Chief!’