Doctor Who A-Z #19: Mission to the Unknown (1965)

I’d like to think these reviews hold a bit of interest to people who aren’t into Doctor Who, if only because the history of Doctor Who is, to a large extent, the history of British television. Today’s entry, for instance, tells us something about the BBC’s commercial position in the 1960s. It’s not just that it exists because a budgeting problem dating back to the original pilot required them to do a one-part story while the regular cast were on holiday, though this is, make no mistake, really weird. Given the impossible brief of doing a Doctor Who story without the Doctor or his companions, producer Verity Lambert made the perfectly logical decision to focus the episode on the one element of her show that was as popular, if not more so, than the hero – the Daleks.

Since their introduction less than two years ago, the Daleks had been the centre of a merchandising bonanza. A glossy technicolor film adaptation of the first Dalek story had  been released just two months prior to Mission to the Unknown. Tellingly, whereas the film turned the Doctor into Peter Cushing’s genial human inventor “Dr. Who”, the Daleks, apart from a colour paint job and a natty new claw attachment, received no such reimagining. They were, after all, the stars of the show. If something like this grew out of a BBC show today, there would no doubt be a protracted paperwork battle between the original creator and the Corporation for licensing rights, but the 1960s BBC was still Reithian enough to maintain a respectful distance from such grubby commercial considerations. As a result, the Daleks’ creator Terry Nation would soon withdraw the show’s right to use its most famous villain as he tried to interest American networks in a standalone Dalek series.

I’m not sure if the Doctor Who production offices knew Nation was thinking along these lines in 1965. The Daleks would still appear in the 1966-67 series, albeit written by David Whittaker, and building to a point which could have been used to close off their time as part of Doctor Who. Either way, it turns Mission to the Unknown into a masochistic act. This is a TV series turning one of its own episodes into a pilot for another TV show – another show which, had it been successful, would probably have killed Doctor Who. It’s commonly (and debatably) claimed that the series’ 1980s decline was down to an inability to compete with Star Wars and the cycle of blockbuster science fiction it spawned. Imagine how much harder it would have been, though, if Star Wars had featured Doctor Who‘s most iconic elements – and done a much better job of exploiting them than the old series ever could.

Had the Dalek series been made, would it have improved on Doctor Who‘s own Dalek stories? It would undoubtedly have given the monsters a bigger canvas – closer to the breathless, epic-scale Dalek comic strips being produced at the same time than anything in Doctor Who. Mission to the Unknown, though, shows where it could have gone wrong. For all Nation’s imagination has scope and scale, it frequently falls down on basic plausibility. The story culminates in United Nations space agent Marc Cory trying to warn his fellow humans about the advancing Dalek army in the most agonisingly incompetent way imaginable. Around this time, Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were discussing the possibility of video-calls to Jupiter by the year 2001. Terry Nation, by contrast, cannot imagine fourth-millennium astronauts doing anything more efficient than recording a reel of cassette tape, then throwing it into a jungle and hoping someone finds it.

The Daleks, with their bodies developed for post-nuclear survival, are a great science-fiction concept, but they’re the exception in Nation’s work. He frequently fell back on golly-gee Dan Dare tropes that already looked naive at this point in the 1960s. After all, by this point there’s a space race going on in the real world, and everyone could see it didn’t look like this. This doesn’t mean Nation’s stories aren’t fun – quite the opposite. In the end, Mission to the Unknown isn’t meant to be viewed as a pilot for a series that was never made, it’s meant to be an episode of William Hartnell-era Doctor Who, and it’s solidly enjoyable in that spirit.

Indeed, one of the effects of making a Dalek episode of Doctor Who without the Doctor is that it makes the Daleks radically more threatening than they were in their last, semi-comedic, appearance. Mission to the Unknown asks a question the modern series has occasionally pondered in episodes like Turn Left, Revolution of the Daleks and 73 Yards: without the Doctor, what are the human race’s chances of survival against creatures like the Daleks? And Nation’s answer is, unequivocally, zero. This is one of those Dalek stories like Day of the Daleks where the titular creatures spend a lot of time working through intermediaries, which is more frightening than it sounds – it reminds you that the Daleks can easily wipe out a whole team of elite space pilots without having to get personally involved until the very end. They also benefit from one of the wildest plot elements in 1960s Doctor Who – a whole team of alien collaborators from across the galaxy, including your favourites ol’ hexagon-skin, evil Christmas tree, the guy with tendrils on his face who looks like an itinerant member of Manfred Mann, Dome-head McGee, that one with the spots…

This is the kind of big imaginative swing that makes Nation’s stories worth watching, and makes you forgive his inability to predict video conference calls. Mission to the Unknown was not the launchpad for a series that finished off Doctor Who, but it did kill a specific part of the show: following up this extended trailer for an epic Dalek story with a comedic four-parter set in ancient Greece was almost certainly the point the audience lost patience with the pure historicals. But we’re doing these in order, so for better or worse that’s where we’re going next week…

Next: The Myth Makers (1965)

Graham’s Archive – Mission to the Unknown

Full Doctor Who Archive Here