The Daleks' Master Plan, episodes 1 - 7, by Terry Nation & Dennis Spooner
13 November - 25 December 1965
I wonder if viewers at the time were a little surprised when that Dalek story from before returned after a few weeks of Ancient Troy? It's a unique happenstance during the Classic series, and my first feeling going into this serial is that something is terribly wrong with Doctor Who. We've never seen a companion injured like Steven has been, and all around there is a desperate sort of air as the TARDIS arrives on Kembel.
(An aside: How odd is it that the Doctor doesn't just have medicine in the TARDIS? After getting into so many scrapes alongside his companions so far, you'd think he would have learned. All I can think of were the anti-radiation gloves drugs from The Daleks. Maybe that's all he had? It beggars belief.)
My immediate reaction to the most recent addition of the crew is how out of her depth she feels. Adrienne Hill injects about as much life as she can into a pretty bare character prompt. Katarina is a woman out of time, and she seems to have just been jettisoned (cough, cough) into the wrong television show. Still, I appreciate how throughout these first few episodes, William Hartnell does his very best to seed in some very plausible affection between the Doctor and his new companion. It makes what comes next all the more nasty.
But before that, we meet Bret Vyon, our direct link to the story of Mission to the Unknown, as he is busy searching for the missing Marc Cory. And oh, how my heart stopped to hear his voice. That's the Brig! But, no. He's not the Brigadier, not yet. This character is a very different man, ruthless, willing to lie to achieve his goals, and certainly no friend of the Doctor's. No matter all that, the sound of a familiar voice appearing unbidden in the blurry depths of an episode long lost brought a smile to my face. It's nice to meet you, Nicholas Courtney.
Bret gets a good characterizing moment early on, when reacting to Katarina's suspicion at his offer of antitoxic tablets to improve Steven's condition. Exasperated, he retorts, "I hate to see anyone die through stupidity." Though he's all business and absolutely focused on his goal, this is still a man who does what he thinks to be right. It's very humanizing.
After briefly watching him wearing his mask of false bonhomie for a televised interview in the first episode, we are introduced to the real Mavic Chen when he greets Zephon in the Dalek base. He positively radiates smugness, as if knowing something everyone around him does not. One gets the sense that this man is playing a hundred different games, all at the same time, and it makes him feel very important. From the reactions of those watching his interview, we know that the Solar System has its share of cynics, but by and large the people seem to be under his spell. It's terrifying knowing what he's plotting while they go trusting him to their deaths.
I give Terry Nation a bit of stick for his more idiosyncratic writing choices, but he does seem to have had a genuine hate and fear of authoritarianism, and I read Mavic Chen as an explicit condemnation of self-serving politicians. The Daleks have him pegged almost right away, saying "His ambitions exceed his usefulness." Kevin Stoney brings that to life magnificently. I do still wish the yellowface hadn't been done. I accept its presence as an unfortunate fact of British television of this period, but it does still make me uncomfortable every time Chen is on screen.
Meanwhile, with the TARDIS imperiled by the Daleks and their pyro-flames (very cool imagery, that, by the way) Katarina and Bret flee the machine with a recovering Steven, and run into the Doctor. Bret's very keen to get lost, but the Doctor has an absolutely great moment shouting him down. "Now will you shut up! Sir?" It put the biggest grin on my face. And later, when Bret calls him a very brave man, he totally waves it off. It would be unimaginable during An Unearthly Child that the Doctor would be the one insisting that the evil before them must be fought. Hartnell really has come leaps and bounds with the character by this point. He receives far too little credit for making the Doctor into the character they are today.
His Doctor also gets another chance to wear a disguise, infiltrating the meeting of the evil masterminds while disguised as one of the delegates, then nabbing the core of the Time Destructor and running when the alarm is tripped. This is also the sort of thing that will become commonplace in the Doctor's playbook, but I'm struggling to remember an instance of it before this point. Well, there was The Reign of Terror, and that bit was pretty fun, too. I'm glad to see it done again.
At the start of the next episode, we get a little foreshadowing of Chen's fate when Zephon is exterminated for his incompetence. Chen still doesn't seem to take it to heart and continues along as he did before, seemingly sure of his invincibility. With the suspicion put forward that the core's thieves were Earthlings, he takes responsibility for heading back to Earth to use his resources there to track them down. The sheer cheek he has, BSing the Daleks. You have to admire it. The Daleks, meanwhile, bring Chen's stolen ship, piloted by our heroes, down onto the aptly named Desperus, which looks a lot like the jungle we were just in. The parts of the episode we spend on Desperus lack somewhat in incident, at least until the cliffhanger. Katarina is in peril, being held hostage by a desperate man. But we've been through this drill a million times, haven't we? Surely she will find a way out?
Well... no. Shockingly, we're made to watch at the start of the next episode as Katarina, possibly not even knowing what she's doing, hits the airlock's release and ejects herself and her captor into space to die. This is dark. Like, really dark. The Doctor and Steven are stunned, too, and the Doctor gives a fitting eulogy, but it's all over far too quickly. I'm left with a sense of unease, wondering about the implications of Katarina's sudden arrival and even more sudden departure, but the message is clear: no one is safe anymore. Who's next? Bret? Steven? Maybe even the Doctor?
Unbeknownst to them, by the time that they arrive at Earth, their situation has already been complicated by Chen discovering Bret's involvement and dispatching an apparently highly skilled and effective agent to kill the three on sight. It's all too real when Chen says, after she's gone, that "A heroic war cry to apparently peaceful ends is one of the greatest weapons a politician has." Life, it seems, is cheap in these games politicians play, or at the very least in this serial, as another man (ostensibly an ally at first) is shot dead by Bret upon the heroes' arrival at a lab facility. Not long after, the agent sent by Chen, Sara Kingdom, guns down a shocked Bret while the Doctor and Steven run for their lives. When she tells her comrade to aim for their heads, it's easy to think that either of our heroes could be next on the chopping block, when divorced from all future knowledge.
When Sara tries to pursue, of course, she's caught up in a scientific experiment and thrown across the galaxy to a swamp planet called Mira (groan) along with the Doctor and Steven. Though not the most thrilling of planets design-wise, the invisible creatures living there are done convincingly. I'm glad this episode in particular is still intact so that we can see the footprints being made in the mud and the other effects surrounding the Visians. Sara seems quick to surrender to pragmatism in the face of adversity, agreeing to work with the Doctor for the time being. Her unwillingness to believe their story is understandable, as is her distress over killing Bret, who we learn to have been her brother. The story doesn't get much time to reflect on the human toll of this latest murder, since Sara is back in the cave sharpish as the invisible creatures on the prowl again. As are the Daleks, who soon turn up on the planet to corner the three. When the Doctor turns to the camera and says "I'm afraid, my friends, the Daleks have won," we almost believe it. Nothing seems to have gone right all throughout this serial, and the Daleks seem far more dangerous than they ever have before. The almost comic portrayal of them from The Chase is a distant memory at this point.
Still, it's a mercy the Daleks of this period seem more inclined to take prisoners. When they try to reel in the three, the Doctor manages to instigate what I'm pretty sure is the first "MY VISION IS IMPAIRED" moment in the series by smearing some mud on the lens of the Dalek taking them captive, and they split for the Daleks' pursuit craft. This leads to an amusing scene where Mavic Chen and the Black Dalek bicker over their mutual failure to capture the Doctor and his friends up to this point. I had a good chortle when the Black Dalek observed of Chen, "You make your incompetence sound like an achievement." Politics, everyone!
Eventually, of course, they are actually captured - lest we forget that this is Doctor Who - and the Doctor manages to bluff his way into providing Chen with a fake Time Destructor core before splitting back to his TARDIS with Steven and Sara in tow.
This half of the serial is capped off by the ever curious Feast of Steven, which seems to garner mixed reactions from most corners... An inconsequential runaround, for sure, but it was Christmas after all. Couldn't very well have more senseless killing going on while everyone's about to sit down for a turkey dinner. There are a lot of great moments in this episode, such as when the Doctor refers to himself as "A citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot," which I think is a great encapsulation of the character. I'm even a little charmed by the breaking of the fourth wall at the end, if I'm being honest. It's an utterly bizarre way to leave off on The Daleks' Master Plan for now, just another curious change of tone in what is becoming a long series of the like.
So far, I'm captivated, and I'm eager to see how the end of this serial is realized on the screen. With the cynical and gloomy atmosphere of it all, though, Feast of Steven is at least a nice palate cleanser. Maybe a musical interlude will help, too? Our 1965 musical pick is coming next, and after that, a brief look at a trilogy of Sara Kingdom audios from Big Finish.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 5 April 2020.)
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