Mindgame (home video)

Mindgame was a home video published by Reeltime Pictures. It was part of the Mindgame Saga.

Synopsis
A Sontaran, a Draconian and a human are trapped in a cell together by a mysterious alien and must fight each other to survive.

Plot
On an asteroid in space, Sontaran Field Major Sarg is transmatted from a battlefield to a prison cell with three beds and a mirror that serves as a door. He is monitored by an unseen lupine alien who watches the cell and removes Sarg's gun through some unknown teleport. When he attempts to leave through the mirror, he is knocked out by a device similar to a sonic disruptor.

A Draconian attending a military assembly arrives. His knife disappears as well. He and the Sontaran discuss where they could be. Sarg thinks he is the enemy. A human female arrives from serving as a mercenary on a reconnaissance run. She holds them at gunpoint, but her gun vanishes. As they discuss their whereabouts the alien observes that Sarg is quick to react whereas the Draconian and human are thinkers.

It turns out the three beings represent their races and that the asteroid serves as an interdimensional prison from which there is no escape. They must fight each other so the alien can judge which species his people should join forces with to conquer the galaxy, though they would be in control. The Draconian and human refuses to fight and gang up on the Sontaran when he tries to kill the human, seeing that he would be set free if he did so. They convince him the fight would not be honourable and the alien offers pain over death. They are attacked by a sonic device and are knocked out.

When they revive, they agree to fight. The beds disappear from the prison cell and three Draconian knives materialise. The human blinds Sarg with her jacket as the Draconian stabs him. Then he stabs the human. The alien enters through the mirror with a gun and meets the Draconian. The human rises and grabs the gun while Sarg holds the alien. They co-operated to escape and so the alien deems the experiment on them a failure. The self-destruct countdown begins. When the alien begins to transmat to his own dimension, the human gives him a message to carry back to his people; she shoots and kills him as he beams away.

Reaching the alien's control station, the human sees that the transmat is similar to human transmats and, asking herself what the Professor would do, reverses the polarity of the neutron flow. Since Sarg was the first to arrive, he must go first and there is no certainty that he will be returned to the Sontaran Empire. He returns to the cell and is transmatted away, followed by the Draconian. The human sets the transmat on a time delay and races to the cell. She is beamed away a few seconds before the asteroid fades into nothing, uttering the word "wicked".

Cast

 * Human - Sophie Aldred
 * Sontaran - Toby Aspin
 * Draconian - Miles Richardson
 * Alien - Bryan Robson

Crew
to be added

Story notes

 * Terrence Dicks offered to write the story after hearing Barnfather mention the basic idea of three people in a cell during a train ride together.
 * The production was done with multiple cameras as practice for an abandoned plan to do a soap opera set on a space station. Barnfather told an interview he'd wanted to do "six titles a year, do two at a time... with some monster element from Doctor Who." This also allowed the production to use a cheaper studio and film quicker, saving them money.
 * Reeltime planned to film Mindgame in one day and booked the location on that basis. When they started to overrun, Terrence Dicks rewrote the script to remove and simplify scenes, but the production still had to finish incompletely.
 * A middle act was removed to save time, where the captives would have pretended to agree to fight in exchange for rest and food, and then "sit down and chat... [a] quieter, more reflective sort of thing" as Dicks put it. It was included in the novelisation.

Filming locations

 * The film was made at the University of Westminster in North London.

Production errors

 * In one of the scenes with the Alien in the control room, a boom microphone appears on the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

Continuity

 * Sarg makes the same observations on the difference between female humans in comparison to male humans as Linx (TV: The Time Warrior) and Steg. (HOMEVID: Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans)
 * The Draconian alludes to a time another alien came to the aid of the Draconian Empire. (TV: Frontier in Space)

DVD, video, and vod releases

 * The film was released on VHS tape in 1998 and on DVD in 2003.
 * It was rereleased on DVD and digitally through Vimeo's video on demand service on 1 April 2015, alongside the making of.