Time Lord files appear to be paper ones, in cardboard folders, kept in filing cabinets. Not the most secure way of keeping secrets such as a weapon that can blow up a galaxy.
On learning that the Master has stolen this particular file, the Time Lords decide to send the Doctor to the planet Uxarieus to prevent him getting his hands on the device.
However, they don't actually tell him where he is going, or why - nothing that might actually allow him to carry out the mission which is so vital to them.
He even arrives on the planet before the Master, but can't take any advantage of this because he hasn't a clue why he's been sent there or what he is up against.
Their arrival coincides with the presence of some colonists and the sudden arrival of some miners. The two groups are antagonistic towards each other, to the extent that relations rapidly break down and they start shooting at each other.
The Master is a Time Lord who has a fully operational TARDIS and can therefore travel to any point in the history of this planet. So why does he elect to arrive in the middle of a range war? Just two years earlier would have seen the planet empty apart from the natives.
Why initially find in favour of IMC, when he must not want them digging up the place whilst he's trying to get his hands on the weapon. Surely it would be better from the off to have to deal with some fairly feeble hippies.
An issue which afflicts many other stories - the colonists just happen to have established their settlement within a stone's throw of the Primitive city, and the miners just happen to want to land right on top of the colonists. There is a whole planet to play with. IMC could have landed on another continent and stripped it bare before the colonists were even aware of them.
We know why IMC have come - lots of lovely duralinium - but why are the colonists even here?
All we see is barren rock - no forests or grass cover. What made them decide that this was the best planet to start farming on?
There must be plant life somewhere, otherwise what do the natives live on. If it isn't around here, why did they not go to where it was?
Why is Earth classifying planets as suitable for colonisation when they are rich in the minerals that it desperately needs? Surely some sort of mineralogical survey should take place before any decision would be made?
Even if their spaceship can't lift-off safely ever again, the colonists could have moved off to another region by other means once they found that their crops weren't growing where they were.
At one point Gail from Coronation Street (Helen Worth plays Mary Ashe) says that the planet has no animal life - and then says there are birds and insects.
This is the first time that Jo Grant travels in the TARDIS. It is also the first time that she even sees the inside of the ship, which just seems wrong. It is hard to believe that she has worked with the Doctor all this time and she has never asked to see inside, or been shown. If The Mind of Evil really took place 18 months after Terror of the Autons, then that makes it all the more unlikely that she has never been inside the ship.
She's the Doctor's assistant, so surely she would have seen the main thing that the Doctor wanted assistance with?
As for the TARDIS being capable of travel - she just saw it dematerialise in the last story. Why so incredulous now? Surely she must have heard stories from the Brigadier, Benton and Yates as well.
Mind you, Jo actually thinks that the colonists could have left Earth in 1971 when told they left back in '71. She also manages to forget within a couple of minutes that the Master's TARDIS has a booby-trapped entrance, despite only just having to slide along the floor to get inside.
The Master does not use lethal gas because he needs the Doctor's help in accessing the city - before he knows that the Doctor can help him access the city.
Earth is terribly over-populated, yet IMC can only manage one expert mineralogist on their team (Caldwell).
Caldwell pretends that he has killed Winton, and the IMC guards just accept this. They don't even offer to take the corpse away with them. When Dent finds out about this, won't he be suspicious that this does not sound like the sort of action Caldwell is capable of? He's been really outspoken in his opposition to violence.
Caldwell allows the Doctor to drive them both to the IMC spaceship - despite the Doctor not knowing where the spaceship is. (This is because petrol-head Jon Pertwee insisted on driving).
We keep hearing of how the Primitives are harmless, yet they go around with spears and knives at all times and abduct people as hostages for food.
They are telepathic, yet the Doctor easily fools one with the old coin behind the ear trick, and later the Master launches an attack with smoke bombs, which they surely ought to have seen coming. Even if Time Lords can shield their thoughts, it doesn't explain other human characters like Caldwell knocking them out.
The Doctor realises straight away that a 50 foot high dinosaur can't fit through an 8 foot high door - but the colonists don't, and IMC obviously haven't realised it either or they wouldn't have done something that could so easily be disproved.
IMC must come across a lot of gullible opponents to launch the giant lizard attacks, and to have a spy posing as someone from an unknown colony, all turn up at the exact same time they arrive.
The spy - Norton - goes out of his way to make himself look suspicious, and later when there's a gun battle he shouts out a warning when it's guaranteed to get him killed. That's some loyalty he has to IMC.
The Doctor talks as though the radiation will vanish overnight once the weapon has been destroyed, and crops will suddenly flourish.
The colonists have pretty much declared UDI from Earth, in an armed insurrection. With all that duralinium on the planet, surely it is only a matter of time before the colony gets wiped out after the Doctor and company have left. There isn't even a site of special archaeological significance any more, that might protect the planet from mining, thanks to the Doctor.
Lastly, the TARDIS lands back at UNIT HQ in the opposite corner of the lab from where it took off from. Good job the Brigadier moved to the other side of the room for no real reason then...
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