The Daleks' Master Plan, episodes 8 - 12, by Dennis Spooner & Terry Nation
1 - 28 January 1966
We rejoin the main adventure with something of a New Year's hangover going on. It feels like everyone stumbled out of Feast of Steven still halfway sauced, first onto a cricket pitch and then Trafalgar Square on New Year's Eve. It does take away slightly from the tension when we finally cut back to the Daleks and their allies on Kembel. Still, the scenes we get there, while brief, offer a chilling look into the Daleks' endgame as they exterminate Trantis, and Chen, it seems, finally starts to sense the change in the wind and gets nervous. Although episodes 8 - 10 feel very inconsequential in the long run, we do get to say hello to the Monk again. Peter Butterworth remains a deft hand at comedic bumbling and little jokes as part of his performance and keeps things entertaining, even if by the end of the Ancient Egypt segment a small part of me was hoping to get exterminated.
Once we return to the plot - uhh, return to Kembel - the crew is all business again, as the Daleks now have the real taranium core and nothing stands between them and conquest of the universe. Sara in particular becomes all business again rather quickly, very grave... Her determination to stop the evil machinations of Chen and the Daleks is clear, and it's well acted. While the Doctor is absent from episode 11, Sara and Steven are left to sort things out by themselves, and do a pretty good job of it without their companion's guiding hand there. Tensions are high, though, and the scene where they argue in the jungle is surprising, but quite good.
It's often pointed out how silly it is that the Daleks went to all the effort of getting the cooperation of the delegates from the outer galaxies, and then just locked them up anyway before the invasion could begin. I feel it does make a small sort of sense, though... The Daleks were noticeably growing more paranoid throughout the serial, with the Black Dalek in particular becoming more erratic the longer his forces failed to capture the Doctor and his companions. Maybe they're just tying up loose ends, or maybe they just decided that with the Time Destructor absolutely secured, they no longer needed the outer galaxies' fleets as backup. Who knows?
At any rate, before the Daleks can dispose of the delegates, they're rescued by Sara and Steven. It's a very interesting scene, with Chen recognizing Sara and, incredibly, believing that she's here to rescue him out of loyalty! There's barely any visual reference, but you can tell just how hatefully Sara glares at him when he comes out. The conflict the two feel over letting all these miserable characters free is a nice touch as well, and they make the right choice at the end of the day to think of the greater good and let the treacherous delegates run off to organize their forces against the Daleks. Of course, it backfires when Chen, desperately clinging to the idea of his own relevance, captures the two and brings them to the Daleks. Overall, a brilliant episode, very tense and foreboding, and the best is yet to come.
Though delusional to his last breath, Chen manages to keep a menacing sort of presence. It's astonishing how he really thinks the Doctor wants to replace him; for a self-serving man, the idea of someone being selfless in the face of impossible odds is absolutely inconceivable for him. And his final breakdown, trying to order around the Daleks while they stare coldly and say nothing, before finally being gunned down, couldn't be more fitting. And at last, the Doctor appears, having been working behind the scenes to get into the Dalek base and rescue Sara and Steven. I almost didn't notice Hartnell was gone, since Jean and Peter were doing a pretty good job of carrying the last episode, but one gets the sense he was actually doing something important while he was off screen, almost presaging the machinations of the Second or Seventh Doctors. The bit where he uses a Dalek as a shield to nab the Time Destructor and escape with his companions is fantastic.
And Sara, selfless Sara, ignores the Doctor's instructions by going back against his wishes, to help rescue him. And it's hard to say if she actually succeeds in this, in the end... The Doctor might have been fine without Sara's help, by my reckoning, and the weapon he's just stolen will take a terrible toll on them both. When we started this adventure, the Time Destructor was just a name, a hushed terror, another in a long line of superweapons with an obscure purpose, and you go into this almost expecting the Time Destructor to be the same thing. It's only in the final episodes that we discover that it harnesses time itself as a lethal weapon, rewinding or accelerating its effects to wither away jungles, or revert Daleks back to an embryonic state. And it's terrifying. As the Time Destructor continues its lethal work, the wind howls, and the very planet starts to decay into dust around the Doctor and Sara. It turns the stomach to watch Sara rapidly age, and the Doctor become weak and fall to the ground, and even more so when Sara finally wastes away. Even having known it was coming, it was still shocking to watch, and has a lot of punch to it after spending several episodes and four Big Finish audios with the character.
Eventually the Time Destructor spends itself, and the Doctor rises from the ashes. Though he tries to play things off, showing Steven the shriveled Dalek mutants left dead in the sand with his usual twinkle, it sounds incomplete. Steven won't have any of it and cuts him off.
"Bret, Katarina... Sara."
And we can almost imagine the Doctor's face falling.
"What a waste. What a terrible waste."
With only a hollow victory to bring with them, the Doctor and Steven depart.It's brilliant stuff, it really is. After the grim beginning of this serial in the jungles of Kembel, something equally grim to end it almost seemed like an assured conclusion. But although I really, really enjoyed The Daleks' Master Plan, and even though the ending was brilliant, I can't help but to feel that there must have been another way, that maybe a ray of hope wasn't uncalled for.
In short, I liked it, but I would most certainly hate if Doctor Who was like this all the time.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 12 April 2020.)
No comments:
Post a Comment