FEATURE BY JONATHAN MORRIS
The Master (Roger Delgado) is an accomplished hypnotist.
Amy (Karen Gillan) is menaced by a Silent in Day of the Moon (2011).
The supercomputer BOSS from The Green Death (1973).
A third of the world’s population comes under the influence of blood control in The Christmas Invasion (2005).
A Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion.
Am the Master, and you will obey me.” Throughout the history of Doctor Who, it’s never been enough for the villains to coerce their victims into obedience. Slaves, no matter how downtrodden, have an awkward habit of rising up in rebellion.
How much better, then, to use technology to make people obey your will; to control not just their bodies but their minds, rendering them unable even to think about resistance.
There are various types of mind control. At its most straightforward, there is hypnotism; you place your victim into a trance and give them instructions, before telling them they will wake up with no memory of the encounter. The most notable practitioner is the Master, ever since he first entranced Jo Grant in Terror of the Autons (1971). The Doctor also shares this ability, using hypnotism to save Sarah Jane Smith in Terror of the Zygons (1975) and to scramble Rupert Pink’s memories in Listen (2014), among others. And other characters have also been able to perform hypnotism, either as an innate ability, such as Captain Wrack in Enlightenment (1983), or as an ability conferred upon them by a third party, such as Li H’sen Chang being gifted powers by Magnus Greel in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).
Those without the ability can, however, resort to technological means of hypnosis. At its most basic, there is the ‘hypnosound device’ from Frontier in Space (1973), which uses ultrasonics to stimulate the fear centres of the brain, causing the victim to hallucinate their greatest fear. Similarly, the Sontaran Styre subjects Sarah to her fears using a forehead-mounted device in The Sontaran Experiment (1975).