10 Most Bizarre Doctor Who Moments

2. The Doctor's Cardboard Companion (The Mind Robber)

Doctor Who The Mind Robber Second Doctor cardboard Jamie
BBC Studios

The entirety of 1968's The Mind Robber is a peculiar affair, consisting of the Second Doctor wandering around the Land Of Fiction, a realm where nothing is as it seems.

Similar to the Fourth Doctor in the Matrix, the Second Doctor and his companions encounter all kinds of weirdness within this land, from creaky clockwork soldiers shambling about the place, to a 17th century Englishman seemingly pulled out of time. Oh, and there's also Rapunzel, skeletons, and a Minotaur. Totally normal stuff!

Possibly the strangest moment in the serial though is a sequence where Jamie is inexplicably turned into a cardboard cutout, with his face going missing.

The Doctor is then forced to re-assemble Jamie's face using a nearby selection of eyes, noses, and mouths, but unfortunately, he gets it wrong, and when Jamie returns to his fleshy form, he has a completely different appearance.

Interestingly, this plot point came about via a last-minute rewrite after actor Frazer Hines contracted chicken pox, forcing the role to be temporarily recast. The Doctor's baffled response to this discount Jamie is pure gold, resulting in one of the most delightfully weird Doctor Who moments ever.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!