One of the joys of Doctor Who is when decades after first broadcast, a story’s themes are suddenly painfully relevant again, and you can marvel at the timelessness of the world’s greatest Science Fiction television series. An even greater joy is when a story over half a century old suddenly acquires a whole new thematic shape thanks to some development in the contemporary world that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen when it was written.
One upon a time, “The Mind Robber” (1969) was a charming, whimsical tale. After a hasty escape from an erupting volcano, the Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe travel outside of reality, and into the Land of Fiction. There they encounter a smorgasbord of fictional characters—Rapunzel, Gulliver, the superhero Karkus—while navigating word puzzles and labyrinths, before reaching the heart of this fantastical world, and meeting its creator: the Master, a rather affable author from England, 1926 (no, not the bestest-frenemy-of-the-Doctor Master, this is completely different person who happens to share a moniker).
Ah, a simple writer! Typing away to create a fictional world of many out-of-copyright fandoms and, yes, there are one or two threatening White Robots wandering around, and a unicorn did try to gore them, but really it’s been an exciting adventure through a fantasy land of only mild peril for the Doctor and companions, and now they can head back to the TARDIS, right?
No. Of course not. Alas, after the Doctor gives the Master some much appreciated recognition and praise for his work in writing The Adventures of Jack Harkaway—where he showed terrifying prolificness, writing five thousand words every week for an astounding twenty-five years (seriously, I would do light maiming for that kind of consistency)—it’s revealed that the real controller of the Land of Fiction is a computer which bears a marked resemblance to a Large Language Model. It “feeds off…thoughts” and needs the creativity of humans to survive. Without any ability to imagine, the alien is unable to create its own fiction. It needs a person with “boundless imagination” as “a lifeline.”
This hard-working writer has been kidnapped, and the Land of Fiction is powered wholly by his creativity. Alas, he appears to have bought in to the sales pitch for LLMs, describing the one his brain is hooked up to as “another power, higher than any you could begin to imagine,” despite its dependence on his imagination. And with him getting on in years, the Doctor has been tapped as his replacement, and refusal is not an option. That alien LLM is stealing your creativity whether you like it or not. For the “greater good,” of course. Dreams of artificial general intelligence, mass theft of creative work, all of it being done because of some nebulous benefits that are never cleanly articulated…it’s all here, and the Doctor is having none of it.
The reveal of the LLM in the penultimate episode gives fresh context to earlier events. The first episode was a hastily written filler, as the previous story, “The Dominators,” was unable to come up with enough plot to fill its allotted six episodes. Despite that, it manages to be not only an eerie prologue to the rest of the adventure but speaks to the temptation of LLMs and the unending promises that they’ll Make Things Better (Somehow). The TARDIS has landed in a white void, a nowhere beyond time and space. And how often has the writer feared the blank page, represented here by that unsettling void? Nothing exists upon it, yet the possibilities are infinite. It’s quite understandable to be a little intimidated. Surely, if there was something to make the moment where you’re faced with the terror of sheer nothingness a little more comfortable, that wouldn’t be so bad?
The white void offers that comfort to Jamie and Zoe, tempting them outside by placing a familiar setting on the blank page: the Highlands of Scotland for Jamie, and a home city for Zoe. Both are convinced they’re real, that if they step out into the void, they’ll be home again. Common sense insists that they’re wrong, but the temptation is too great for Zoe, and she runs from the safety of the TARDIS into the comfort she believes she’ll find in the void.
And what if that blank page could be just a little less blank? What if there was a comforting paragraph or two, just to make it a little more friendly? Okay, you didn’t write those words, but that’s okay…it’s safer now the void isn’t a void anymore.
Except it’s an illusion. Zoe had been tempted outside to find nothing but hostile White Robots (the rather brilliantly designed minion bad guys of the story), and now she’s lost. And so is Jamie who foolishly and/or bravely followed her. When the Doctor finally pops out to drag them back into the TARDIS, their costumes are blanched white, merging into the void, and their expressions are blank: the flat same-y prose of an LLM in human form.
When he finally makes it to the Land of Fiction, the first character the Doctor encounters is Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver, but there’s something off, not quite right about him. He’s able to make intelligible conversation, but his responses are just a little off. And that’s because he’s only able to say the words given to him by his writer. When interacting with the Doctor, the words most likely to make most sense are selected as replies, a simplified version of how an LLM chatbot responds. Like a language model, this Gulliver has no thoughts of his own, no depth, no feelings. He’s responding based on available data, not generating original lines (I recognise the meta here, given this is scripted television). There’s none of the inventiveness one might find in a Gulliver’s Travels fanfiction. On the surface, he sounds like a person; crack open the surface, and there’s nothing underneath. He’s both a metaphor for LLMs themselves and for their outputs that lead them to be painfully anthropomorphised.
There’s no more depth to the other characters encountered by our heroes. Rapunzel contains a single dimension: She wants someone to climb her hair. Medusa—with her exceptional stop motion animation—and the Minotaur are simple monsters. The superhero of the future, the Karkus, is a stereotype with deliberate fake muscles. It’s a world that at first glance seems teeming with creativity but is actually mere recreations of existing stories, recreations that are, perhaps, a curious delight at first, but quickly become flat. Unable to offer even the most modest of depths that Doctor Who can usually summon up in its most lowly of guest characters.
While we don’t yet know the full effects of language models as they are currently being used in society, there are plenty of indications that they can have an unhealthy effect on cognition. And “The Mind Robber” doesn’t forget about that. Poor Jamie and Zoe are literally crushed inside a giant book by the alien LLM, and when the Doctor next encounters them, they speak in repetitive phrases and freeze up in-between lines. (In the manner of a computer, I wish to emphasise, not an actor forgetting the script.) The stakes are upped from not-thinking to being-told-what-to-think as the alien language model then convinces Jamie and Zoe that the Doctor is evil, and to trap him in a fake TARDIS. Add to that the refrain throughout the story where our heroes must be able to recognise reality from fiction in order to survive, and “The Mind Robber” manages a prescient trio of the biggest concerns on how language models can affect thinking.
To save Jamie and Zoe, the Doctor must engage in a battle of wits with the alien LLM: his creativity versus an alien intelligence that has no imagination and nicked everything ever written by humans. They’re able to summon up fictional characters (some real people who have had numerous fictions written about them) to attack and defend Jamie and Zoe—Cyrano de Bergerac, D’Artagnan, Blackbeard, and Sir Lancelot—until the LLM has had enough of the Doctor’s shit and decides to just kill him.
It would be nice to see this unrepentant thief of all the words be defeated by sheer creativity, but there’s still a hefty dose of ironic satisfaction in how it gets taken down. Zoe, computer genius capable of taking down a Cyberman invasion fleet single-handed, figures it’s time to blow up this computer in the time-honoured fashion of pushing all the buttons. The Master Brain, at peak tantrum, yells at the White Robots to stop them. The dutiful minions shoot. Zoe and Jamie duck. And the computer bursts into flames. Good work, White Robots! It may not be the most diplomatic or civilised of solutions, but a lot of angry finger-stabbing at buttons gets across the anger and frustration of creatives in having their work stolen, and there is the satisfaction of a nice explosion at the end.
“The Mind Robber” is set in a world created from other people’s stories by an alien intelligence unable to imagine for itself and so it stole the literature of humanity. Yet it still saw itself as a higher intelligence. In exchange for its mass theft of creative work it intended to destroy any further human creativity by turning them all, as the Doctor puts it, into “Sausages…Man will just become like a string of sausages.” That dichotomy, both requiring creativity to exist, while its existence means destroying creativity, is where we sit today with LLMs. Doctor Who’s least science-fictional tale has become one of its most prescient.
© 2026 Lizbeth Myles
