Doctor Who A-Z #21: The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66)

The odd thing about Terry Nation is that, the more he began to define himself as a writer of epic science fiction, the more he returned to his roots in comedy sketches. It’s not just that stories like this and The Chase contain more comedy than the Doctor Who stories he wrote before them, although that is true. But the first two Dalek stories obey the Aristotelian unities of drama. They start in the same place they end, and follow a consistent set of characters, themes and institutions to a logical conclusion. The Chase and The Daleks’ Master Plan don’t do that. They luxuriate in the series’ ability to hop across space and time at the expense of consistency. Nation’s preferred mode is still space opera, but if he wants this week’s space aria to involve a cameo from The Beatles, or a visit to the Marie Celeste, or a stop-over in silent Hollywood or ancient Egypt, it will.

This is, perhaps, another reason why his proposed Dalek series never got made – the narrative form he is currently wedded to only works in a series where the hero has a time-space machine, and at the moment there’s only one of those. He gave us a taster of what things would be like without the Doctor and the TARDIS in Mission to the Unknown; for all that story had its charms, as soon as this one begins you’re grateful for normal service. The Daleks’ Master Plan begins with two episodes set on Kembel, the same planet as Mission to the Unknown, with the Daleks and the galactic delegates from that earlier story returning as the villains. It’s effectively the same story, but the arrival of the Doctor, Steven and Katarina seems to have persuaded everyone to step up their game. (It doesn’t hurt that Steven and Katarina are a strong contender for sexiest companion team ever – often overlooked, because of their brief tenure, but it’s true)

It’s not just the presence of the show’s regular leads, though. In place of Mission to the Unknown‘s rather bland space pilots, we’ve got Bret Vyon, played by Nicholas Courtney. He’s brave and charismatic, and even without the knowledge that Courtney will go on to be a series legend you look forward to having him as a companion. And then something unexpected happens. Just as the story starts to open out and get beyond Kembel, episode four sees Katarina and Vyon killed traumatically. Katarina, at least, sets the template for future companion deaths by going out in a heroic act of self-sacrifice. Vyon, though, is killed by an agent of the Daleks, which feels all wrong. The Doctor is meant to protect his friends against the Daleks and their allies, and suddenly this happens. It’s as if the fatalistic worldview that was safely fenced off in the Doctor-free Mission to the Unknown – what happens when the Doctor isn’t around to protect people? Well, they die – has bled through to the rest of the series.

People often refer to The Daleks’ Master Plan as a story where two companions die, but they’re not talking about Katarina and Vyon. They’re talking about Katarina and Vyon’s murderer, Sara Kingdom. Kingdom enters this story in the episode where most Doctor Who serials wrap up and she dies at the end, but she makes perverse sense as a companion. Her journey isn’t that dissimilar to the one Turlough will later take, and the picaresque structure and epic length of The Daleks’ Master Plan means she puts in as much TARDIS travel as several other companions. Any doubts about the sincerity of her newfound allegiance to the Doctor are erased when she activates the Time Destructor at the end of the story, wiping out the Daleks at the cost of reducing herself – graphically, horrifically – into a pile of dust. She is also played by Jean Marsh with a catsuit, a smirk and a laser cannon, so she’s more fun than ninety per cent of the show’s ‘proper’ companions anyway.

Seeing Sara Kingdom as a ‘proper’ companion, though, points up a way to watch The Daleks’ Master Plan as something more rewarding than “The Chase, only twice as long”. Rather than one gargantuan story, this is more like a short season with an arc – indeed, if you add Mission to the Unknown to its tally, it’s thirteen episodes, the exact same number as the early seasons of new Who. By this metric, it begins with a five-parter that sets up the Daleks’ allegiance with Mavic Chen (a charismatic but unfortunately yellowfaced performance from the great Kevin Stoney), segues into the weirdest two episodes since The Edge of Destruction, stops off for a one-off Christmas special, wrongfoots people with a comic three-parter about the Meddling Monk which the Daleks unexpectedly bulldoze their way into, leading the audience into a devastating two-episode finale.

That all sounds very modern when you put it like that, and there were moments when the Daleks, Mavic Chen and a sunglasses-wearing Meddling Monk faced off in Ancient Egypt where it struck me: this is exactly the kind of mad anachronistic mash-up that became the series’ defining mode under Steven Moffat. The problem, as is often the case with arcs in classic Who, is not the ambition but the execution. A modern series would use the same writer for the set-up and the payoff, leaving other writers to vamp in between. Here, episodes 1-5 and 7 are written by Terry Nation, and episodes 6 and 8-12 are fleshed out from Nation outlines by Dennis Spooner. Spooner is a more accomplished writer than Nation, to the extent where some of his comedy interludes are actually funny. (There’s a great one in episode eight where two cricket commentators see the TARDIS materialise on the field and decide to just keep going) Yet there is a lack of conviction in his finale, despite its traumatic death toll. It might just be that the serial has tarried too long. The shock of having the Daleks barge into a humorous Monk story and start slaughtering people is a good one, but it still leaves Spooner with less than three weeks to reconstruct the sense of gathering crisis Nation had spent five episodes establishing.

The other problem is that, just as Spooner’s turned in his first episode, Nation ducks back in to write episode 7, The Feast of Steven. The Feast of Steven is perhaps the only Hartnell episode which is referred to by its episode title more often than its serial title, and there’s a good reason – it is very hard to accept it as part of the wider story. It’s not just that there are no Daleks, it’s that there’s no sense of threat or urgency. Instead, we get an exasperating slapstick interlude designed for a Christmas Day broadcast, stuck in the middle of a story which really needed fewer excuses to go off on tangents. Still, the Monk material is a comic side trip, and that doesn’t stick in the craw as much as this does. The real problem is that, despite spending his apprenticeship working with titans like Tony Hancock, Nation’s comic sensibility remains “everyone shouts over each other, and the more they shout the more comedy it is”.

Rather than being the epic zenith of Hartnell-era Doctor Who, then, The Daleks Master Plan is closer to Season Three stablemates like The Celestial Toymaker and Galaxy 4 than you’d expect: solid ideas and bags of ambition, let down by a shaky grasp of dramatic basics. The usual caveat with missing stories applies, that this would all probably work better if we could see it. It’s directed by Douglas Camfield, a hot contender for Doctor Who‘s best ever director, and the two surviving episodes are full of wonderful little visual grace notes like Mavic Chen irritably swatting away a Dalek’s eyestalk. (The image in the missing episode 11 of Sentreal, the galactic delegate who looks like an evil Christmas tree, sulking in jail is also very funny) The structural problems are hard to overlook, though, and it’s hard not to agree with Steven at the story’s conclusion. Looking around at the field of death and destruction, he says this isn’t the triumph it should be, and he’s right.

Next: The Massacre (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The Daleks’ Master Plan

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