You already know too much about it. The longest, most epic Doctor Who story. The one in which three companions die. The closest the BBC ever came to putting the Dalek comic strip on TV. The episode without the Doctor in it. The Notorious Christmas Episode. Sara Kingdom ages to death. Nicholas Courtney before he was the Brigadier...
We knew it by reputation: but what’s it actually about? We were always a little more vague about that. My childhood Bible, The Making of Doctor Who was unhelpful. “The Doctor’s travels took him to Egypt during the building of the great Pyramid, where he met the Time-Meddling Monk again, then to the planet Kembel, where the Daleks were preparing an invasion of Earth and then to France in 1452.” My other constant companion, the Radio Time Tenth Anniversary Special couldn’t even get the title right.
I knew what Tomb of the Cybermen was about before I saw it. “Silly archaeologists find frozen Cyberpeople and wake them up, egged on by one of those mad scientists who thinks he can make an alliance with them. The Doctor sends them back to sleep.” Daleks’ Master Plan defies that sort of description: “The Daleks form a big alliance to conquer the entire universe and world. They invent an ultimate weapon called the Time Destructor. The Doctor steals the weapon’s power source and...wanders around aimlessly while the allies squabble.”
We’d heard that it was very bleak, ending in a pyrrhic victory. And it certainly does contain two very bleak episodes. In part four two characters who are arguably companions and certainly goodies are killed off; and in part twelve, their replacement is reduced to dust in an actually genuinely disturbing sequence that doesn’t feel like anything else in Who. But the overall tone is pretty light. Bickering baddies, ranty mad villains, vampire triffids, invisible giants and ray-gun wielding spacemen in black uniforms. This is Doctor Who does E.E. “Doc” Smith. More precisely, it’s Doctor Who does Dan Dare.
Some people think that, if we could see Mission to the Unknown (the one-off prologue) through the eyes of a 1965 viewer, we would perceive it as having a vicious twist in its tale. We see two heroic chaps being menaced by evil plants on a jungle planet; we assume that the TARDIS will arrive at some point and the story will get started. But it never comes. That’s the twist. They both die. The terrible surprising message is: the Doctor can fail.
But pretending that it’s 1965 and we’re watching Daleks’ Master Plan on our 405 line TV makes about as much sense as pretending that it’s 1601 and we think Hamlet will marry Ophelia. Everyone knows that Mission to the Unknown is “the Doctor Who story in which the regular cast don’t appear.” And I do mean “everyone”. The Radio Times for Oct 9 1965 is quite clear. “Today’s episode sees no such confrontation [between the Doctor and the Daleks]. In fact the Doctor does not even appear. It is a hint, a warning of things to come.” No first night audience ever existed. No-one ever watched Daleks’ Master Plan for the first time.
What Mission to the Unknown does do is radically change the programme’s viewpoint. We’re no longer looking through the Doctor’s eyes. Stuff happens in the universe, and stuff will carry whether the Doctor is there or not. (The clumsy transition at the end of Galaxy Four underlines this point. “Look at that planet” says Vicki “I wonder what is going on down there?” “Yes, yes, I wonder...” replies the Doctor—and we pan down to Kembel.) This shift of viewpoint is taken for granted in the Nightmare Begins (episode 1 of the story proper). The Doctor, Katerina and Steven are tying up the lose ends of the Myth Makers; a couple of Space Agents with ray-guns and Licences to Kill are following up events in Mission to the Unknown; the Daleks are having their alien council of war; and at one point we cut away to two civil servant on Earth watching a TV interview with soon-to-be-revealed traitor Mavic Chen. We’re outside, looking in at a universe in which the Doctor is just one character. Paths cross; people pursue different objectives; characters come together and separate.
That’s why the story is so hard to sum up. The Doctor doesn’t have a single clear objective. He steals the Taranium Core—the McGuffin which powers the Time Destructor. At one point he mutters that it would probably be a good idea to destroy it (presumably at Mount Doom). There is some talk of needing to get back to earth and warn it about the coming invasion. But a lot of the time the Doctor seems directionless; part of a separate narrative. “I’d forgotten about the Daleks” says Sara Kingdom—quite an odd thing to say in the middle of the longest ever Dalek story.
But in a funny way, this reasserts the basic nature of the Doctor: makes him feel more Doctor-ish than ever before. At the centre, on Kembel, the Daleks are machinating. On the periphery, the Doctor goes from Kembel to Desperus; from the Trafalgar square to Ancient Egypt without any destination in view. He’s a wanderer; and that old ship of his seems to be an aimless thing.
The Daleks’ Master Plan is not a twelve part story. It is barely a story at all. It’s an experiment with the structure of Doctor Who: the programme re-envisaged as soap opera. For the first time it’s a window into something we could call “The Doctor Who Universe.”
The political plot is pretty perfunctory: “thieves fall out” on a universal scale. Mavic Chen, serious Shakespearean villain in the Iago mould, turns out to be more like a comic opera villain in the Mikado mould. It isn’t clear what a Time Destructor does. Destroy Time, I suppose. In that great final scene, it seems to be speeding time up, causing everything exposed to it to age super-quickly. How that fits into the Daleks’ plan we don’t discover. Were they going to hold the universe to ransom? Or was the plan to hide in a bunker, kill everyone else in the universe, and then emerge as the supreme beings? It matters very little. Nor does Terry Nation’s confusion about the difference between “a solar system”, “a galaxy” and “a universe”. The Universe consists of Twelve Galaxies and one of those Galaxies is called The Solar System. I think. But it creates a general impression of a universal war, a context in which the Doctor’s aimlessness occurs. It feels exhilarating even today. It must have been intoxicating if you were the right age in 1965.
This makes it harder to dismiss the digressions and comedy in the middle episode as flaws. They are almost the point. Everyone knows that Feast of Steven went out on Christmas Day. The BBC didn’t want anything scary to go out on the holiday [1] and came up with something Dalek-free. Everyone does not know that the following episode (transmitted seven days later on the first Saturday of 1966) is very nearly as silly—and much funnier. The TARDIS materializes at the Oval Cricket ground, and then at Trafalgar Square on New Year Eve; in between they encounter the Meddling Monk, as played by comedian Peter Butterwoth on an alien planet. The main “jeopardy” is the Monk’s locking the Doctor out of the TARDIS. The Doctor fixes the lock using the magical properties of his ring, which he declines to explain. (“I don’t want to discuss this any more. About turn.”) Completely separately, the Daleks test their Ultimate Weapon and discover that the Doctor has tricked them (by switching a fake McGuffin for the real one.) The Serious Bit (Daleks plotting), the Light Hearted Bit (the Doctor and the Monk on the volcano planet) and the Silly Bit (cricket commentators wondering whether the materialization of a Police Box will stop England making seventy-eight runs in forty-five minutes) exist alongside each other. The idea of the Doctor jumping from the Oval to Tigis to Trafalgar Square to Ancient Egypt catches the idea of the Doctor so perfectly that it hardly matters that he doesn’t do much in each place. [2]
From this point of view, the Meddling Monk stops being curiously irrelevant and becomes indispensable. If the Doctor (in a time machine) is being chased by the Daleks (in a time machine) then of course they are going to run into the only other being in the universe who also has time machine. In a comic book the casual reappearance of a minor character would hardly be worth commenting on. Doctor Who had never worked that way before: it hardly ever did again.
Daleks’ Master Plan works at a conceptual level: we enjoy the idea of it much more than we enjoy the individual episodes. It need never have ended. We could have imagined the Doctor bouncing around that milieu indefinitely: someone would replace Mavic Chen; the Daleks would rise again; some new threat would appear. In fact “Huge Space Soap Opera” turned out to be the wrong answer to the question “What should Doctor Who be?” (The right answer turned out to be the Tenth Planet and the Moonbase.) It was followed by a strange, slow historical story that was hardly a Doctor Who story at all. When the Dalek next appear (in the Power of the Daleks) they have nothing to do with the imperialists we met in this story. Dalek’s Master Plan was an evolutionary dead end.
Unless. Perhaps Master Plan changed the idea of what Doctor Who was in a way that couldn’t quite be unchanged. The founders of Doctor Who fandom, not to mention Mr Douglas Adams, were precisely the Right Age in 1965. What if, once you have seen the Great Big Soap Opera you take it for granted that that is what Doctor Who is from now on? If you “read” the Massacre and the Ark as the next few scenes in the soap opera; the next few windows into the Doctor Who universe? Perhaps Daleks’ Master Plan never finished—because we say it didn’t.
[2] The Doctor knows about Christmas and positively wants to celebrate it, but has never heard of New Year or cricket. Discuss.
