Mission to the Unknown [Doctor Who, Story 19]

Mission to the Unknown by Terry Nation

9 October 1965

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What can I say to inaugurate such a prodigious set of episodes as this? Thirteen episodes of television is a hell of a lot to wrap one's head around. I almost feel it's more appropriate to treat The Daleks' Master Plan, and all its attendant hangers-on, as a season unto itself. My first thought entering it before starting this episode, is that the notion of them successfully stretching the idea across the entire span of those thirteen episodes seems fanciful at best. The Chase couldn't even really do it across six, and isn't this just a grittier version of that, writ large?

If there are cracks in this edifice, then I can't see them from this low vantage. Mission to the Unknown is a fairly able episode to start off with, and I reminded myself while watching that this was never intended to be a standalone, and that the only thing keeping it from being The Daleks' Master Plan Episode 0 is that it's separated from it by a different serial in between. So simply on its merits as a part of a larger serial, it holds up alright and stands as a good teaser to the larger story to come. Edward de Souza does good as Marc Cory (licensed to kill) in the lieu of one of our regulars or the titular frontman, though understandably he gets only about twenty minutes to be characterized. You can't begrudge the work he does, though, and his sheer desperation to get the message off Kembel is sold quite well.

The Varga plants are absolute nightmare fuel, the idea of having your body taken over by a plant reminding one of those fungi or worms that infest certain slugs and other creepy-crawlies. The idea of it happening to a person is stomach turning, so it's small wonder that it's undersold in this episode. Having read the novelization of The Daleks' Master Plan from the 1980s about a year and a half ago (it includes this episode as part of its inaugural section), it was a small letdown from that author's rather visceral descriptions of the creatures, though the imagination still runs wild... Even the jungle of Kembel sounds hostile, with the cacophony of alien noises filling the air in it setting me on edge while the surviving astronauts were stalked by Vargas and Daleks.

Also noteworthy is the assembly of hostile aliens we see in the Dalek city. It occurs to me that we've never seen such a motley assortment of different kinds of alien on the show in one place. It does a good job of selling the scale of the universe (even if Terry Nation occasionally seeming to mix up star systems and galaxies does not), and we are grounded of course by the sight of the Union Flag on the humans' spaceship, which is a nice touch.

All in all, an intriguing start, but we will see whether the legend outstrips the actual serial once we get into the meat of The Daleks' Master Plan soon. But first, speaking of legends, The Myth Makers.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 30 March 2020.)