Working titles for this story included "Man Power", "Another World" and "The Fact of Fiction". "The Mind Robber" was originally composed of four episodes, but the preceding serial, "The Dominators", was reduced from six to five episodes. This resulted in a sparse first episode being written, as they had to use the limited budget of the replaced episode. This stretching of the story also resulted in the first four episodes only running between 19 and 22 minutes in length, and Episode 5 being the shortest "Doctor Who" episode ever at slightly over 18 minutes.