Mission To The Unknown: Ranking - 99

     Mission To The Unknown

(Season 3, no Dr or companion (!), 9/10/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Donald Tosh, writer: Terry Nation, director: Derek Martinus)

Rank: 99

  'They say that Marc Cory was stranded on Kembel,

He wandered through the jungle and knew it very well,

Born into society, a real astronaut,

Until the Daleks arrived and made his life very short

And I, I live in this galaxy

And I curse the life I'm living and I curse this poverty

And we could have all been free

Thanks to Marc Cory!

The Daleks hunt him down which makes him so forlorn

And next to them the Varga plants try to cover him with thorns

He was such a hero and made out to be so great

That it was a surprise last night when a Dalek said 'exterminate'

And now I, I live in this galaxy

And I curse the life we're living, Tiranium core pushing us to poverty

And I wish he'd set us free

Marc Cory!'

 

Well, here’s an odd one: not only this is ‘old Who’s single solitary one-parter (and therefore the shortest story of the entire sixty year run) it is, to date, the only story that doesn’t feature the Doctor anywhere (and you thought he wasn’t in ‘Blink’ or ‘Love and Monsters’ much!) It’s  story that exists out of time this one, a trailer for Dr Who’s longest story but one that doesn’t have that much connection to the plot (and won’t appear for another month in any case!) and where all the human characters and the closest this story has to ‘heroes’ are dead at the end, a rare case where The Daleks actually get to win for a change. Sandwiched between a straightforward futuristic story and a less than straightforward historical ‘Mission To The Unknown’ exists in a no-man’s land not quite belonging anywhere and, Daleks aside, doesn’t even seem like Dr Who given that it’s a gritty spy thriller with no time travel, no continuity references and no hope. How come? A catalogue of errors really. Back in the 1960s it was sacrosanct that TV always came in blocks of multiples of 13 episodes (a quarter of a year) to make it easier for the schedules to plan when programmes would be on; it didn’t happen every year but traditionally Dr Who always ran for 39 weeks of the year in its early days. The decision late in the day to cut ‘Planet Of Giants’ from four episodes down to three at the start of the previous year left a 25 minute hole in the schedules and here we are, at the end of the lengthy second recording block, and nobody quite knows what to do about that hole still. As it happens the series regular’s contracts all came to an end at around this time too; rather than renew them together it was decided to give all the actors a much needed holiday and an extra week off. Meanwhile, BBC controller Huw Weldon mentioned to the production team that ‘someone in his family’ (his wife/mother-in-law/perhaps himself after seeing how much money the BBC made on merchandise – accounts differ) really really really liked The Daleks (and, no doubt, the extra merchandise they sold on the back of them) and thought rather than having the usual six parter per season having one long story that ran for weeks before Christmas and over the holidays would be a really good idea. The production team weren’t quite so sure but, hey, the production team in this era reckon Dr Who really can do anything so three months of wall to wall Daleks should be possible. What would be really good though is to have an episode building up anticipation for the big day setting up the story. The resulting twelve-part epic ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ is quite unlike anything the series had tried before or since, full of twists and turns and which took a lot of set-up. So someone (maybe writers Terry Nation, script editor and co-writer Dennis Spooner or producer Verity Lambert working on her last story) decided to solve their problems in one go, with a story that established what the Daleks were up to before the Doctor got involved.

So we get the unique situation that at the end of ‘Galaxy 4’, instead of following our friends inside the Tardis when it lands, instead we see them looking at the scanner and over at the deceptively pretty planet Kembel and wondering what it must be like as they shoot past it, little realising they’ll materialise there in a couple of stories’ time. Downright scary is the answer as it’s another of those Dr Who/Terry Nation jungle planets full of creepy noises and killer sentient plants ‘part animal part vegetable’  that infect people and turn them into giant cactuses (an idea that actually seems terrifying, unless you’ve just come to this story from its sillier cousin ‘Meglos’ from 15 years later which is so different in feel and execution you can’t believe that the two are part of the same series). For one week only our ‘heroes’ are three astronauts who get exterminated/spiked across the course of the story. Two of them are mere passengers but the third is secret spy Marc Cory whose flown their shuttle there deliberately on behalf of the Space Security Service program (the SSS, because seemingly everything connected to the Daleks has a Nazi link somewhere) because he’s heard that The Daleks are up to something. Only the shuttle gets into trouble and crashes into the planet where its attacked by the Varga plants, a sure sign that The Daleks are here because they usually only grow on Skaro. What they find sets up the plot for the whole of the twelve part epic to come, with The Daleks plotting, in oddly loud voices, about taking over the milky way end of the cosmos after a thousand years or so of lying dormant (since The Doctor defeated them in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ in fact). Only the trio all die out before they can warn anyone, at the spikes of the plants or the exterminator gun of The Daleks, leaving a tape message that gets discarded and buried in the wilds of Kembel. It’s a neat mirror of what’s to come in the epic to come, as The Daleks are shown to be a unified well-drilled unstoppable fleet of soldiers and the small pockets of resistance fighting them in an unfamiliar environment haven’t got a hope on their own. ‘Masterplan’ will be full of tiny heroic but doomed battles like these across various planets (a hallmark of terry’s work, not just in Who but in ‘Blake’s 7’ and ‘The Survivors’ too), seemingly at odds with the usual Who message that good will always conquer evil if it tries hard enough (the only way the Daleks are stopped in ‘Masterplan’ is by uniting those various planets – oh and sneakily using The Daleks’ own toy against them). For here, even though the astronauts are hardened astronauts are clearly not the sort of boys you want to bring home to meet your mother, they are also clearly the side of good and they lose totally. It’s the one story The Daleks totally and utterly win and where they’re the ‘heroes’ in their own story (in that sense it’s closer to the Dalek comic strip in TV Century 21, written by Spooner with ideas from Nation, than it is to any past Dr Who story on telly).    

The result is an episode that’s a lot more action based than the usually cerebral Hartnell stories which are more about exploration than combat or scares and actually much more like Terry Nation’s future series ‘Blake’s 7’ than anything else Who will do: The Daleks are, in so many ways, the ‘federation’ in the future, the power in charge, and the humans are terrorists trying to overthrow them in a coup just like Blake’s men; this episode and that series both end very bleakly with the ‘goodies’ all dying a pointlessly heroic death in a scene where the establishment apparently wins. At least this one didn’t go out Christmas week though. Even now, with all the writers we’ve had since in the supposedly more brutally realistic 21st century, Nation is by far the most pessimistic writer the series had in terms of his vision of the future where mankind usually thrives, eventually, no matter the obstacles put in his way but always die a horrible pointless death in his writing; Nation’s other big success, after all, is ‘The Survivors’, where 99.9% of humanity dies of the plague. ‘Mission’ reminds me of another series Terry was working on in between his Who commissions though, ‘The Saint’, a proto-James Bond spy thriller series on ITV that even starred Roger Moore a decade before getting the Bond job as Simon Templar, secret agent. It’s a very 1960s idea of espionage, a genre far closer to Terry’s own tastes than scifi (which he’d never really watched before Dr Who) in which the bad guys seem to have everything going for them only for the good guy to arrive and save the day without even getting his suit ruffled. The one downside of the spy genre, though, is how repetitive it is: sure the bad guys might talk in different accents or hide out on boats and trains or a house, but generally speaking it’s the same plot every week: even the Bond films, for all their different settings, tell basically the same interchangeable story. So Terry gets to have the best of both worlds by throwing in a spy story into Who’s ever-elastic format and doing all the things he couldn’t do with ‘The Saint’, even having the baddies win (the absolute no-no of series like ‘The Saint’ or you wouldn’t have a series!) So, instead of The Doctor, the unknowable alien, saving the day with science and doing something clever, we have a much more earthy story about a human who hides in the jungle bushes and tries to smuggle out messages back to base.

Terry is clearly excited by the idea of combining these two styles because much as ‘Mission’ is a trailer for ‘Masterplan’ it was also planned as a sort of pilot for a series he really wanted to make and which got as far as another pilot ‘The Destroyers’ before being abandoned. Terry was in a rather unique arrangement with the BBC: as a freelance writer he’d held on to the rights to The Daleks where other writers on staff had given up theirs to the BBC (see ‘The Web Of Fear’ for how the BBC had wisened up to this after the success of The daleks and fought the creators of the yeti tooth and nail for the rights to use them, with a battle so fierce that in the end neither side got to use them again!)  By now The Daleks are a global phenomenon not just a British one, thanks to the Peter Cushing Dalek films being made by Hammer Horror that had been a surprise box office success (not that Terry had much control over these either: he seems to have enjoyed the big battle scenes and seeing his creation on the big screen in colour but hated the humour that risked making The Daleks look silly). Terry’s dream was to move to America, the home of all his favourite series and where they made programmes with much bigger budgets and the plan was to take The Daleks with him and put them in their own series, with a new group of foes fighting against them: The Space Security. Alas ‘The Destroyers’ was never made (at least until Big Finish has a go as an audio adventure forty years on) but it would have been much the same as ‘Mission To The Unknown’ every week, with a bunch of humans fighting gritty battles against the unstoppable Daleks, who would ‘win’ more weeks than not. There would be no Doctor, no Tardis and no time-travelling though: basically it’s a straightforward spy epic set in the future. Oh and in case you’re thinking ‘wait, doesn’t everyone in this story die already?’ the plan was that hero Marc Cory, at least, would have a relative still living named Jason (just like Jason King in the decade’s other popular spy thriller ‘Department S’!) who vowed revenge and teamed with Sara Kingdom from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, a sort of sequel/prequel set in the middle of the two stories back in the days before being around The Doctor had thawed her out along with a new hero ‘Mark Seven’ (whose basically Tarrant in Blake’s 7, heroic but thick and quite often rude). Judging by the one surviving story that series ends up much the same way: an enjoyable and impressively scary tale that’s slightly lopsided by having the baddies drawn in far more detail than the goodies and by having them win. It’s a shame it was never made properly because Terry, for one, thought this was his future: we know for instance that Sam Rolfe, creator of the other other of the decade’s most popular spy thriller series ‘Man From UNCLE was a special guest at the recording of this story (and Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was a consultant). This story is also not unlike the sort of thing Terry had been writing for the Gerry Anderson team with whom he’d been big friends (it’s the reason why The Daleks ended up in their spin-off comic ‘TV Century 21’ rather than joining The Doctor over at ‘TV Comic’ or ‘Countdown’), with the same sort of rugged square-jawed all-American heroes (only played by puppets). The closest Anderson series to Who by far though is one Terry never got the chance to write for (because he was working for Tony Hancock at the time)  ‘Fireball XL5’: was he jealous of his good friend and fellow Who writer Dennis Spooner who did? (And if so is it significant that he cheekily nicks the name of the planet Kembel from the episode ‘Space Vacation’).

 
Without the need to ‘protect’ the heroes for the family audience or tie up all the loose ends in many ways ‘Mission’ is Nation’s purest episode as a Dr Who writer. Usually his stories for the show live or die depending on how sympathetic the script editor is to his material in fleshing it out (as his stories all tended to come in short, strong on plot but weak on characterisation) but here there’s only one episode to fill and its so full of Daleks and spies light on the usual Dr Who stuff that this time Donald Tosh mostly leaves his friend to get on with it. The first thing that strikes you is how grim it all is – even to a target nation of seven year old boys who are rooting for The Daleks its impressive how far they push the envelope and how hopeless things feel without the Doctor around (and even when he does turn up in ‘Masterplan’ that’s the other candidate for Who’s bleakest story with more deaths than arguably any story until 1981’s ‘Logopolis’).  It all feels in retrospect like Nation taking back control of his creations and moving on from what the series and the Cushing films had been doing to them. The last time we saw The Daleks in ‘The Chase’ they were reduced to comedy stooges, an excuse for the Doctor and co to have fun and explore space without staying anywhere for more than an episode at a time, but in this story The Daleks are back to being properly scary and ruthless again, the series coming to their territory instead of them chasing The Doctor in his territory of time and space. There are no moments of light humour, no dotty scientists, no cutaways in haunted houses or the Marie Celeste, just scene after scene of people trying to avid extermination and, eventually, failing. Other Dalek stories are about preventing them taking over the universe but in this story they’ve pretty much already done that (all but Earth’s segment) and trying to unravel their headstart is what gives this story and its twelve part successor its unique feel, where the Doctor will be pushed to extremes like never before with no less than three surrogate companions dying. Here things seem hopeless before the Tardis even lands on Kembel (they don’t get any easier for the first few grim episodes of ‘Masterplan’ either, which ends episode 4 – the part where we would all usually go home – with the Doctor about as defeated as we ever see him, with two goodies dead in the course of the episode). Oddly, rather than introduce the characters we’re going to know and love in the following epic the human cast of three are exterminated here one by one – its only a recording made at the end of this episode (apparently reel-to-reel recorders are back in fashion circa 4000AD, which admittedly seems less ridiculous than it did when I first watched-heard this in the 1980s now that vinyl and cassettes are back in vogue) found by the Doctor that has any bearing on the future plot.

I wonder, too, if that’s because Terry is updating his foes. He was always very open about how The Daleks were surrogate Nazis: the first Dalek story is what would have happened if Germany had won WW2, ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ is about what would have happened if they’d invaded Britain and ‘The Chase is, so I say anyway, about Terry’s fears about where the world is heading in the 1960s as the far right start slowly springing up elsewhere. ‘Mission’ and ‘Masterplan’ are about what’s happening right now, in 1966, but in a cold war not a world war. The Daleks have become communist Russia, plotting on the other side of an impenetrable galaxy, with well-drilled troops that in this pre-Davros, pre-Dalek controller period are very much equals. Only this time the war isn’t being fought on their home turf on Skaro but on a jungle planet between them and ‘us’. My first thoughts on seeing news reels of the fighting in the jungles of Vietnam when I was little was how much it looked like Kemble; I really don’t think that’s a coincidence. Nor are the shots to come in ‘Masterplan’ of The Daleks attaching flame-throwers in place of their usual guns to set the jungle alight (so like Vietnam footage its spooky). Nor is the fact that the Humans, who are suddenly very American, have crash-landed there from a space shuttle that skims the trees much like the ‘treetop flyers’ of Vietnam. The Daleks aren’t locals either but they have local knowledge (just like the Vietnamese on the ‘side’ of the Russians in the 1960s in as much as a cold war has sides) and can turn this jungle against their interlopers; they have even brought som nasty traps of their own. As far as I know there were no Varga thorns in Vietnam for real but they really are very close to the real thing: the mines or flares left as booby-traps in the bushes that could incinerate or exterminate you. This would also tie into why this has stopped being a plot about big battles and action sequences (like the fights in WW2) and started being more about spies, of two sides who aren’t communicating trying to steal a march over the other side and find out how they tick (the main reason why spy thrillers were so popular in the 1960s). The sense you get from watching Vietnam footage is how all those innocent lives were wasted on both sides, drafted into a war that never needed to be fought (its not as if Vietnam played any part in the end of soviet Russia, no matter how many American presidents told us it did), which is much how you feel about the humans in this story who die for nothing. The fear of conscription is lurking at the back of many a 1960s Dr Who story, the fear that Britain will follow America into one of its wears against Russia, but here more than ever: as much as Terry loved brutality in his stories and the bravery of the individuals who stood up to the system you also get a sense of futility, that wars do no good. And that, I suspect, is why the American networks were so reluctant to put this story on the air: Britain could let him write these moral messages in code, but in America anything that was even slightly anti-war was frowned upon. After all, Cory (as American as any British-played character is in Who) is really not that different to The Daleks. He’s manipulated his fellow astronauts and you would have said was borderline paranoid about what The Daleks were up to until they helpfully spell it out in his earshot. He’s every bit as relentless and ruthless as they are – the only difference is he’s less deadly (and not for lack of trying), happy to let his men die if he lives to fight another day. That I suspect is why the first real Dr Who spinoff series never came into being (and it’s one with more legs than Torchwood or Class, though ‘legs’ seems a funny word for a series about Daleks). Though The baddies will turn up in Dr Who again, starting with the following season and ‘Power Of The Daleks’, a disillusioned Terry will step away from his biggest creation  until the Dr Who production team revive them in 1972 (and he’s so shocked by ‘Day Of The Daleks’ he offers to write his own).   

How do you stop the war then, a seeming inevitability caused by a war-mongering species? How do you ever get peace? Well, that’s the genesis of one of Terry Nation’s greatest ideas in this story and its sequel: an intergalactic committee that’s sort of-ish like the United Nations, built up of six races we’ve never seen before (and with more to come in ‘Masterplan’). These aliens all look properly alien too, though oddly so much from this story and its sequel have been lost – and as none are referred to by name except Malpha - fans are still debating whose who: one’s got spikes growing out of the top of his head (Beaus?), one wears a futuristic diving helmet (Sentreal?), one has a face covered in square lines as if he’s just been hit in the face with a football (Malpha); one has a face that’s devoid of all features and a hat that looks a bit like an egg (Gearon?); another has the most 1960s fringe ever seen on an alien whose otherwise dressed like a monk (good job too, given that The Doctor will dress up as him later on) while the most memorable one, sadly only seen in this episode, is memorably yet accurately described by the ‘Who’s Next’ guidebook by writers Mark Clapham Eddie Robson and Jim Smith as a ‘Ku Klux Klan Christmas tree’ (!)

The Hartnell era has the most interesting aliens by far – not necessarily the best and certainly not the scariest, but they feel usually feel like they have a whole culture we don’t see on screen, rather than being yet another invading army and never more so than here with these different members of otherwise unseen races, each with their different costumes, hairdoes, voices, helmets, even very different methods of clapping. Here they’re desperately trying to negotiate for peace – even if peace in this instance, as it so often is across history, is more about trying to prevent the warmongers from invading you as long as possible and delaying the inevitable rather than stopping them outright. They tap into the growing sense watching the news in the 1960s of ‘why doesn’t somebody in power do something to sort this out?’ but all with very different ways of working out what that something could be. These aren’t heroes like Marc Cory and friends after all, but a child’s eye view of politicians from different cultures who each have their own agendas and reasons for being selfish and who can’t yet see the bigger picture. In the 1960s these sorts of peace meetings were still, as a rule, considered to be a good thing that keeps us safe and it was only the cynicism of the 1970s (particularly Watergate) that made the majority of people start thinking that maybe politicians didn’t always have our own best ideals at heart. Dr Who, though, has this peace conference set up to fail from the first and the Daleks are just doing what The Nazi Party did in 1930s Germany, ‘appearing’ democratic while seizing all the power bit by bit (their creator did base the Daleks on the Nazis’ ruthlessness after all). It’s a neat idea and if you had to have a whole episode without the Doctor in it then sticking a load of Daleks and lots of wacky aliens was very much the way to go.

However, ‘Mission To The Unknown’ is still quite a rough ride in places. The big problem is that this story is rather hard to follow: I always thought that was because it only existed on audio (this is one of only three stories, along with ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Massacre’ where no moving footage exists at all and there are relatively few telesnaps either) but actually both the animation and a live-action remake (part of a media degree by a student at the University of Lancashire in Preston, broadcast on youtube and attended by both Peter Purves and Edward De Souza, Marc Cory himself) are just as hard to follow: the astronauts all look much the same (except when they’re in the process of turning into a plant) and The Daleks are, in this era, meant to all think the same. It’s only the delegates who give colour (as much as you can in a black and white story) and they’re not clearly defined enough yet – only Malpha (the one with the really bad eczma) becomes a ‘character’ this early on. It seems odd, too, given that the entire purpose of this exercise was to deliver bonus Daleks that there’s comparatively little Dalek screen-time here (less than in the last three stories anyway); most of the plot (as such as it is) is given over to the Humans and even though the older Marc Cory, in particular, is an interesting character played with impressive seriousness and sombreness by De Souza (a mostly Hammer Horror actor who could have gone down the Peter Cushing route but plays the role impressively straight and much closer to Terry Nation’s preferences; Nation might also have heard that he came super close to being cast as Bond himself instead of Sean Connery in 1962, while he went on to appear in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ in 1977, albeit not as Bond) and Jeremy Young as Lowery (finally getting some actual lines after being there at the start as a caveman in ‘An Unearthly Child’ – he’d been really proud of how this unknown programme had taken off since he’d been it and is one of the few non-regulars to say they really enjoyed working with William Hartnell, said to be distraught when he realised they wouldn’t get to share any scenes together) they’re a pale substitute for Hartnell and co, with no space to be more than one dimensional soldiers rather than the three dimensional people we know and love. Even after you get to know ‘Masterplan’ well it’s hard to care, not least because it’s also odd how little of this story dovetails into the twelve-parter at all; I understand they had to make it so that you could follow that one even if you’d missed this one but, really, it takes more than a vague threat and a botched tape recording to link them together. Even granted that the budget would only stretch to one set you’d think we’d get to know this planet and the background more. Had we seen the wonderfully named Bret Vyon and Kurt Gantry in a mock-up spaceship set at the end a month early, coming to search for Cory’s body, or Mavic Chen preparing to contact The Daleks after hearing of their colossal power, it would have helped tremendously to link the two I think (and they could just about have recorded them during the first episode of ‘Masterplan’ and slipped the footage in just before broadcast of this story two weeks later, which is pretty much what they do with the ‘throw forward’ from this story that was filmed a week after the rest of ‘Galaxy Four’ episode four). ‘Mission doesn’t really work that well as a trailer for the story to come – if only because its delayed for four weeks while we follow the Tardis to Ancient Greece instead (for ‘The Myth Makers’) and only get back to Kembel in a months’ time, by which time even the most passionate fan has forgotten most of the plot. And it certainly doesn’t work as the pilot for a new series, given that it was never made.

As a story in its own right though, as a one-off and as a bit of inspired last-minute book-keeping ‘Mission To The Unknown’ is a big success and offering us more Daleks, in this their greatest of eras, is no bad thing, while the regulars were long overdue their break. Terry after all has been given quite a hard sell: an episode that has to be low budget with only one main set and a tiny cast of characters, that’s self contained yet also leads in to a longer story and which has to feature lots of Daleks, but in these sorts of conditions he excels himself with some of his best writing, without the usual lags or repetitions that mar even the best of his other work. The soundtrack is unique, even with ‘Masterplan’ to come, with the least amount of music of surely any Dr Who episode (just a couple of violin-heavy ‘stings’) with most of the mood coming from the seriously creepy radiophonic sound effects. There’s a gripping story in here even if you’d never heard of The Daleks and what we do see of them makes it clear that they’re at the peak of their powers again, not on the back foot like they were in ‘The Chase’. Nation’s dialogue often feels a little out of place in 1960s Who, being 1950s action hero stuff, but it belongs in this story where every sentence is punctuated with exclamation marks and every scene feels like a battle of life or death, grippingly tense even when you’re not quite sure what’s happening. The Varga Thorns, a logical extension of the screaming jungles of ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The Keys To Marinus’ are a brilliantly scary idea, flora that you don’t think much about in your everyday world turned into something that’s ‘pscyhotropic’ and first brainwashes you into killing everything around you and then takes you over (it’s hard to judge by the animation but I’m willing to bet this was one of the single scariest things the series ever did. Certainly the production stills and audio together work a treat. The idea of them ‘crawling’ along the floor worries me though given how similar ideas turned out in other Nation stories). The jungle sets are amazing, both in photos and in ‘Masterplan’, easily the best of the many times the series tried this, with full marks to Richard Hunt (unusually this story paid for two designers, Ray Cusick handling the spaceship set). It’s all very imaginative, very different to anything that any other series was offering (yes even the spy ones never did it quite like this) and very brave. In that sense it’s a neat swansong for Verity Lambert too who, more than any other single person in Dr Who lore, shaped the series to what it became – ending it with a story this ambitious, brave and scary is as good an end as any to her time in charge and sums her two years up well. While Dr Who will go on to have runs when it’s even scarier for a period or when individual stories are better, the series will never be so consistently great or ambitious ever again. No ‘Mission To The Unknown’ doesn’t feel much like Dr Who. But then in those very earliest days there never was one style that felt like Dr Who either and it’s still made with all the same love and care as the parent series.

One final thought: the title of this story’s always puzzled me – this isn’t the unknown, it’s the planet Kembel (yeah it’s not a well known planet but the astronauts know enough about it to know that it shouldn’t be covered in Daleks and Varga thorns for starters) and ‘mission’ isn’t quite the right word either as it implies a co-ordinated plan, rather than a last ditch stand by terrified astronauts on the nearest planet. Could it be a reference to yet another series, Dr Who’s latest competition that had launched just a month earlier? That’s anthology series ‘Out Of The Unknown’, which is sort of The Twilight Zone’s better read but slower younger brother and is similarly bleak most weeks being based on some of the most sombre works of science fiction ever written. The lack of the Tardis regulars or, well, any hope at all makes this story feel a lot more like an ‘Out Of The Unknown’ episode than a Dr Who one. With Who always treated as a children’s series, even when it blatantly wasn’t, to a point where it sometimes drove the people who worked on it mad, could this be a comment about how grown-up the show could be, even when compared to the BBC’s more grown-up series? After all, lots of children watched ‘Out Of The Unknown’ too even though it wasn’t designed for them in mind and none of them ever came to any harm (erm, actually thinking about it a fair few grew up to write really dark Dr Who stories in the 21^st century but we won’t go there!)

POSITIVES + Admittedly this is another ‘missing story’ so all we have are film stills but...The Daleks look amazing. They’re built for the starkness of monochrome and are lit to perfection by impressive newbie director Derek Martinus (a last minute substitute for Who co-founder and teleprompter co-creator Mervyn Pinfield who fell ill), while giving them an alien jungle to glide around in just seems ‘right’ somehow, much more than seeing the metal meanies in a quarry or a spaceship set. No wonder there was such ‘Dalek fever’ in 1965 when they looked as good as this – the wonder was more that the trend didn’t continue into 1966. There’s still never been a design, in any scifi series, quite as good as Raymond Cusick’s – practically every other alien is clearly a human dressed up including most Dr Who ones but the Daleks don’t look or sound like anything else on TV, intelligent impenetrable tanks with attitude, the most grown-up and impenetrable of designs housing terrified vulnerable children. If you can’t have The Doctor for a week they’re a more than fair substitute.

NEGATIVES - The only plotpoint of this story you need to know in order to follow ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ is the tape recording of what the Daleks are plotting, one that Marc Cory makes in his dying moments (with The Daleks helpfully continuing their discussion after exterminating him), something that the Doctor picks up in episode one of the ‘Masterplan’ story to follow. We see Marc make his entire recording on tape before he’s exterminated (and presumably this isn’t a magnetic tape, which is what it looks like, or the thing would surely be wiped by that making-the-screen-go-negative effect) and yet, in a continuity point that would be unthinkable in the modern series, by the time the Doctor hears it the writers have had a re-think and totally changed the wording so it sounds nothing like the message Cory actually makes (to be fair they did make it a full three months earlier and maybe couldn’t remember how it went but still, from a viewer’s point of view it’s only been 28 days). Eh?! 

BEST QUOTE: Malpha: ‘This is indeed an historic moment in the history of the universe! We six from the outer galaxies, joining with the power from the solar system - the Daleks! The seven of us represent the greatest war force ever assembled. Conquest is assured!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Well there’s the small matter of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, a twelve part epic that carries on from this episode by having the Tardis arrive in the swamps of Kembel and is often seen as part of the same story by fans, appearing on the same soundtrack CD and novelisation (although it’s not that direct a sequel: none of the characters in this story appear in that one, unusually).

As discussed, ‘The Terry Nation Masterplan’ was to (co)write this epic thirteen parter then split for America, for a new life of fame and fortune and love. Terry was fed up of the way he was being treated as a freelancer in England dismissed as a children’s writer but thrilled by how the Americans saw him. So he hatched great plans, with ‘Mission To The Unknown’ a sort of unofficial testing ground for a spin-off series where The Daleks were the stars and were up against the Space Security Service, featuring many of the characters from the same story. He’d already killed Marc Cry off so Terry created a brother, Jason, who was after revenge. He’s already killed Sara Kingdom off too but liked her so much he used her anyway (this is the harsher, colder Sara of the earlier episodes so could at a push, fit in the gap between the two stories which is why I’m including it here rather than with ‘Masterplan’). Terry got as far as writing a pilot episode, one untitled on his original script but which has come to be known as ‘The Destroyers’, with Big Finish producing a version under that name as part of the ‘Second Doctor Box Set’ in their ‘Lost Stories’ range (even though, technically, there’s no Doctor in it at all, his copyright belonging firmly with the BBC). The story starts with a full-on Dalek massacre of the inhabited satellite M5, led by SSS Officer Carson. Sara, Jason and another man try to find out what happened and named Mark Seven stumble across an underground Dalek base but find out it’s really a ruse and while they’ve been investigating The Daleks the metal meanies have been destroying their home. There’s the usual Terry Nation fun with ‘living plants’, a chase sequence across a rickety bridge (just like ‘The Keys Of Marinus’), a Dalek civil war (there’s a Black Dalek and a Supreme Dalek who both think they’re boss in the days before Davros) and a mysterious web creature (who was, most likely, another one of nation’s invisible creatures if this had been on TV).  It’s both a typical nation story, using all the tricks of the trade he’d learned during his years on Who cobbled together for an audience who had in all likelihood never seen them (America won’t broadcast Dr Who regularly until 1972) and  a typical pilot story: it’s not so much a full adventure so much as a bunch of intriguing concepts thrown together that are clearly going to be sorted out later (though sadly they never were). If there’s a problem it’s the same one as ‘Mission’ – without the Doctor there, a known goody we can trust, it all falls a bit flat with quasi-criminal Humans fighting evil Daleks (who Terry clearly likes a lot more than the Humans, who are mere cannon-fodder for the most part). It’s no long lost classic but it’s well worth hearing and might have become something had it gone to a full series and had the chance to build up the characters a bit more.

Look out also for the ‘Dalek Outer Space Book’ 1966, published in the middle of ‘Masterplan’ (and possibly opened by children the morning of episode 7’s transmission): none of the characters are the same but most were written by Terry Nation and feature the return of the Space Security Service, with a very similar ‘feel’ all round.  Especially short story prequel ‘The Outlaw Planet’ which tells the story of The Daleks’ invading our particular solar system and features Sara as one of a team of astronaut-spies working on behalf of an alliance between Earth, Mars, Venus and Uranus (all colonised by the year 4000 and treated like different worlds, apparently).  

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