The Dalek's Masterplan: Ranking - 20

 

The Dalek's Masterplan

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven. Katarina and Sara are sometimes counted as companions too, 13/11/1965-29/1/1966, producer: John Wiles, script editor: Donald Tosh, writers: Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner, director: Douglas Camfield) 

Rank: 20

In an emoji: ⌛

   'How this story might look with other Drs interrupting other sport events: 

'And its go go go! Wait no, its stop stop stop! There must be some technical issue with the lights and a red flag unless I am very much mistaken - oh I am very much mistaken! It's not a red flag but a blue box has just arrived on the grid and a man in ruffles shirt sleeves and a cape has just got out and started chatting to the driver on pole. 'Who are you?' he says 'Lauda' says the driver 'WHO ARE YOU?' he shouts and then starts wittering on about being around at the time of the invention of the motor car in the 19th century' 

'And its Goran Ivanisevic to serve in the last point of a tense final...Wait what's this blue box doing arriving on centre court? A girl in a bomber jacket clutching a tennis racket has just run across the pitch to smash what we all thought was one of the drinks holders but turns out to be one of the most evil races in the universe. 'Ace!' shouts a man with a question mark umbrella as he runs after her. 'No, let' says the umpire and play starts again, even though half the line judges have just been exterminated'  

'And a blue box has just interrupted the cup final of 1966 where a man in a bowtie has just run out onto the pitch and scored a hat trick against West Germany. Is it offside if the ball landed on top of a time machine that's only half-dematerialised though? Well, the officials have checked the records and all seems to be fine. They think it's all over...well it would be if time wasn't relative!!!' 

Or ‘A League Of All Terry Nations’, with some episodes from former script editor Dennis Spooner thrown in too. This is the big one: a twelve part epic (thirteen if you count prequel ‘Mission To The Unknown’). It’s a story that’s like a big Dr Who variety box full of everything the story can do with something for everyone: full on science fiction, gritty drama, silly comedy, episodes heavy on character development, episodes heavy on plot, episodes that are unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, varying from barbed portrayals of wicked societies in collapse to frivolous character pieces about the sheer joy of being alive, with locations stretching from futuristic jungle planets to Ancient Egypt to the first time the Tardis has landed in contemporary Britain at the time of broadcast since the opening episode over two years ago, a story that’s all about the gloomy thought of the inevitable destruction of mankind but still takes time off to play cricket and muck around in Hollywood and even the show’s first Christmas and new Year’s day specials full of the festive spirit where the Doctor famously takes time off from his busy schedule saving the solar system from annihilation by wishing us all a happy holidays. There’s something for everyone, though by the same token everything is a bit too much for some. 

The ruthless Dalek Masterplan: mine the taranium core needed to create a ‘time destructor’ (effectively an atomic bomb) that can wipe out all life in the known galaxy, a plot that builds nicely on the previous three Dalek stories about the dangers to humanity by our own hand in the future. The ruthless Dr Who masterplan: have a Dalek bonanza on over Christmas so parents flocked out to buy as much merchandise as possible to top up the license fee. Neither quite works the way they’re intended (the Daleks still lose in the final episode and viewers were getting a tiny bit sick of Daleks after thirty-one episodes in barely a hundred weeks, with the ratings for this story lower than the previous trio of shenanigans with Daleks) but its a mighty close run thing and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan still stands as one of the biggest and best stories in the Dr Who canon, an epic that pushes the Dr and his companions as never before in a battle royale that very nearly does feel like it’s to the death this time. The action takes place across no less than five planets and eight different timezones and it’s the sort of story where the unthinkable not only can happen but seems to happen every week, up to and including the deaths of people closest to the Dr. What’s more it’s the longest DW story of them all (as I’m one of those pesky fans who insists on counting ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ as four stories and ‘The Key To Time’ as six) that runs to a whopping five hours! ). The Radio Times no less called it ‘Dr Who’s longest and most exciting adventure yet’. All these years later it’s still the longest – and for the most part the most exciting too, even with parts in the middle that understandably sag a little under all the strain. It’s an exhaustive, exhausting rollercoaster ride which will leave both our heroes and ourselves never quite the same again after watching it. By the end of it you feel as drained as if the time destructor had been worked on you too and you’ve aged several years in a few minutes, but in a good way: this is a story whose intensity ebbs and flows a lot during the course of the episodes (generally depending on which of the three writers are in charge). 

While some fans make a good case that this story is too long with longeurs two-thirds in that are completely unnecessary to the plot, ‘Masterplan’ is the sort of big high-stakes drama all shows needs a couple of years in to keep people watching and remind them not to take anything for granted, because this is a story that can go anywhere and can do anything and usually does. Why is it quite so long? Well, BBC director Huw Wheldon’s mother-in-law wasn’t very keen on Dr Who but quite liked the Daleks and the bossman had quite got it under his skin that his mother-in-law was a good litmus paper test for the general viewing public. He dropped a line to the production team saying that they should have more episodes featuring the Daleks than the customary twelve a year, while the extra sales publicity drive over the Christmas holidays, with all the extra funding the BBC would get on top, would be handy too. Maybe twelve episodes in one go rather than six would be nice. That would be quite a strain for any writer so Terry Nation, who as Dalek creator in the years before Davros always got first refusal, was joined by his friend ex- script editor Dennis Spooner, the pair splitting the story up into half between them (Terry got episodes 1-5 and 7, Dennis the rest), with current script editor Donald Tosh trying to tie everything together. Not until Crosby, Stills and Nash do you get three such different writers in one place and you can often tell which writer is coming up with which part: Nation comes up with the gritty grim plot of dashing around in space and humans being mean to one another, Spooner the absurdism comedy that pokes fun at the idea of a TV series ever thinking it can be a grim gritty drama about people being mean to one another and Tosh writes the more visual, TV-literate stuff (if you missed the name on the credits the easiest way to tell whose writing is to listen out for whether the Daleks are speaking ‘normally’ i.e. angrily as they do in Terry’s stories, in elongated prescriptive prose as per Spooner or are simply shooting at someone as per Tosh). 

 Perhaps because of this ‘Masterplan’ is a serial that, if it has any one theme running through it at all, is all about people trying to do their normal day job when it gets ‘hi-jacked’ by someone else trying to control them. Previous Dalek stories by Terry Nation had featured plots about what might have happened if the Nazis had invaded London in an alternate past (‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’), a cold war parable about nuclear war in an alternate future the Nazis might have gone onto next had the war lasted a few more years (‘The Daleks’) and what might have happened if the Daleks had invented time travel (‘The Chase’, something the Nazis were long rumoured to be working on in their last days when they went a bit mad by all accounts, even by their standards). All of Terry’s stories are about the dangers of wanting peace in a universe where your neighbours don’t and who are quite prepared to wipe you out. This story is more about what might have happened if you’d dropped the Nazis into 1965 to create an alternate present, when the hastily assembled United Nations had been put together to keep the peace and oversee everything but everyone at the United Federation are working together more out of fear of each other than actual peace, so they are all deeply suspicious of each other’s motives and secretly hatching plots (so not at all like the real United Nations, my goodness no). It’s worth remembering too how in the years before Hitler became the dictator everyone knew and hated countries were falling over themselves to appease him, afraid of heading into another world war so soon after the first one and keen to be the last people to be exterminated. Terry well remembers the days of Neville Chamberlain coming home with a bit of paper proclaiming ‘peace in our time’ – but what happens when your enemy won’t recognise the paper that’s been signed, because they don’t really believe in democracy at all? 1965 is a time when Britain is anxiously looking over its shoulder, crossing it’s fingers that Russia isn’t going to just invade it, while given it’s ‘special relationship’ with America being a sitting duck for if the Russians are truly going to explode. So in ‘Mission To The Unknown’ and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ we have a bunch of people who know that peace can never last, telling the Daleks who don’t believe in peace how important peace is, while everyone at home knows it’s a sham and expects the worst. Note that the right-wing ‘Space Security’ in this story have the initials ‘SS’ and are dressed much like Nazi stormtroopers. 

 Goodness knows that’s scope enough for a story, but this is Dr Who and the Daleks don’t just want to conquer everyone in the here and now but every planet across all space and time and to do that they need to build their new nasty super weapon, the time destructor. Only to build this they need a quantity known as the taranium core which can only be mined on Earth, with a laborious process that takes fifty years. The time destructor is a force of such colossal power that is clearly meant to be an atomic bomb. While its meant to work by accelerating everyone close to where its launched through the rest of their lives very very quickly, pictures of its effects would have reminded all viewers in 1965 of the shots of Hiroshima and Nagsaki, of emaciated victims in tattered clothes ‘evaporating’. It won’t have been lost on terry Nation that, following the end of World War Two, America and Russia both have been building up their store of these weapons and that both sides are looking for an excuse to use them. It’s a threat more visceral and deadly than most we get to see in the Whoniverse and like many a Terry Nation script this one seems to be him working through his phobias, worried at the rise of the alt right in the 1960s and all the little Hitlers who might be born in a future where they can get hold of these nuclear weapons. Nation is desperate for someone in charge to make it all better, but judging by what happens in the earlier episodes of this story he doesn’t trust the united federation as far as he can throw them (which isn’t far, even though one of them has a sort of football for a head). 

 Nation’s got more than a little bit jumpy at international politics in his last few stories: he can see all the corruption and racism that fuelled the Nazis happening again, but from a position of power, collusion, manipulation and bribery this time rather than all-out invasions – after all WW2 had happened partly because the ‘League Of Nations’ created by the victors of WW1 had come down on the losing countries like a tonne of bricks, creating the poverty and resentment in Germany that led to the rise of Hitler as someone who at least sounded as if he cared about his country (if only selected racially pure bits of it). Dr Who is a series that’s all about multiculturalism and how having multiple voices helps all of us and which thinks that giving power to any one group of people is asking for trouble. It should like this federation of planets (it will when the idea is raised again in ‘Curse’ and ‘Monster Of Peladon’ stories in the 1970s where any committee representing different views is automatically a good thing) but you can almost feel Nation’s frustrations with his and the other nations’ leaders shining through the screen. In the Whoniverse there are nine delegates who run the solar system, all of whom look and act very differently to one another and who feel as disparate and varied as any European Union. They’re all, however, easily scared, effortlessly manipulated and who like being told what to do by Mavic Chen, the thin-skinned being in charge who seems closest to a human out of anyone but who just happens to have long extra-long fingernails and (judging by the behind the scenes pictures) is painted blue (lots of 1960s programmes got into trouble for casual racism and ‘blackface’; in one of their most anti-racist DW stories it might be significant that Dr Who paints poor Kevin Stoney in blueface).The union are the League of Nations as they have ended up in the mid-1960s, beings who should have equal power but who are in danger of being controlled by one person’s vision the way Nazi Germany was, with shades of Britain’s entry into the European Union going on in there too (it didn’t happen till 1973 but people were already talking about it in 1965).

That’s what you’re meant to think anyway and many a Dr Who guidebook has had fun trying to work out which delegate represents which country (I won’t go through all that again so soon after ‘The Curse Of Peladon’ and having a go in ‘Mission To The Unknown’ but the guy with spots who likes taking charge is probably America and the spiky haired guy always plotting looks a bit Russian, while the one with the poor teeth being over-ruled a lot is probably Terry Nation being rude about his own homeland – I leave it to you which out of France, Germany et al are the guy with a goldfish bowl for a head, the dude all in black rocking a giant cross or the one in a radiation suit), but I think there might be something else going on here: I put it to you, dear reader, that ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ is also a postmodernist take on making television, as befits a writer who’d already given the Daleks CCTV. This story is Terry Nation’s ‘goodbye to Britain’ story as he packs his bags and moves to America to make his fame and fortune (it won’t go well and he’ll be back, but not before Terry pitches a Daleks-without-the-Dr story to every American TV network he can find, the pilot of which ‘The Destroyers’ is very similar to Masterplan’s ‘prequel’ story ‘Mission To The Unknown’). This story feels like the writing of a man used to speaking his own mind whose spent far too long in ‘tone pitches’ and ‘demographic meetings’ trying to please too many people at once over in America (where Terry Nation was chief writer on ‘The Baron’, a series that’s sort of Antiques Roadshow’ if it had been written by Ian Fleming or John Le Carre), an alien land that thinks it’s a sprawling mass made up of different people but which really has nothing on Britain and all the different audiences the BBC has to juggle. This story seems like Nation pitching all the different delegate/demographics he’s written for already that really represent the very different cultures that make up Britain (Dr Who having a wider range of these than most shows ever had in one go): there’s a man with a football for a face who must surely be your typical sports fan turning in early before ‘Match Of the Day’ starts, another with a Beatle fringe with crooked teeth whose maybe the younger working classes, with the older working classes perhaps represented by the man with bricks for a face, there’s some guy in a skuba diving kit who clearly goes on lots of posh holidays, someone whose basically a big plant (the housewife?), someone in a kaftan with a futuristic visor (the teenager into science and the latest gadgets and trends, be they hippie India ness or computers), a man covered in round blobs whose maybe a prototype Dalek gammon racist, a man with an egg for a head (the brainboxes or maybe the youngsters who haven’t fully ‘hatched’ yet) and a man in a robe with cactus arms who looks just like a monk and is clearly meant to be more intellectual than the rest (it might be significant he’s the one the Doctor impersonates and is the one Terry probably identified with the most). Maybe this story is Terry Nation complaining that trying to write a story that appeals to the whole lot is impossible? Or maybe it’s his plea to the American networks that trying to appeal to just one audience is the impossible bit when he’s been successfully writing for all of them? 

It’s Mavic Chen you need to watch out for though, whose perhaps the TV executive who knows what he wants and is happy to use a combination of charm and anger to get it, maybe even the BBC director general who effectively pitched this lengthy story that the production office and writers all secretly didn’t think would ever work: despite the feminine fingernails he’s clearly the alpha male of the group (even more than the delegate named Malpha) and sells everyone out to the Daleks in return for being co-ruler of the galaxy. He’s a great character, not unlike a Dalek himself (and way more interesting than Davros) as he plays everyone off each other in his quest for total domination, but he’s smarter than most Dalek collaborators too: he knows that to build the time destructor the Daleks need a taranium core that can only be mined on Earth after fifty whole years of work and they can’t simply replace it if they exterminate him. Chen, of course, is only giving the Daleks what they want so he can get his hands on their technology and double-cross them. The Daleks and Mavic Chen really aren’t that different: they’re both right wing nutters who like controlling other people and having them in the same room feels a little like peak Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany working together: even though they appear to stand for different things (Communists in principle want to share wealth after all, the Nazis to hoard it for the special guys) their means overlap, the extreme fringes of left and right not that far apart from each other, with everyone in the middle in danger. There’s one big difference though: Mavic Chen has charm that he can switch on and off when he wants to. He’s not one-note like the Daleks (who you sense Terry has got bored writing for already) and you never quite know whose side he’s on. Kevin Stoney is the hero of many a Dr Who story but particularly here, adding little distinctive touches like the finger he holds out at a funny angle while thinking or the unique way he holds a pencil between his second and fourth fingers, someone who in other stories would be a figure of fun but who here is positively frightening. Stoney is so good as the Bond-like baddy Mavic Chen that his smarm oozes out of the camera, a man whose so used to playing people off each other and being in charge of them all that he’s smug and arrogant in all the best ways, striding round the story with a raised eyebrow throughout, so sure that he’s going to win that right up until the end he sees the Doctor as a minor irritant who keeps getting in the way and delaying the inevitable rather than an equal. Not many people can stand up to the Daleks when they’re on screen and hold their own (in fact he’s in a class of two, along with Michael Wisher’s Davros) and the story loses its power when he’s not on screen. Watching his slow descent from master manipulator to Daleks puppet is also highly satisfying and subtly done, pushing Mavic Chen, master of self-control, into new sdirections with every extra episode. The Northern Daily Express even made Mavic Chen their ‘villain of the year 1965’ over the Daleks and rightly so – it’s a shame we never see him again (although he is pretty comprehensively killed off). 

Throughout this story, as people team up and betray each other over and over again, The Doctor is the moral backbone, always doing the right thing no matter how much it costs him or the people around him and trying to save everyone if he can in a space and time where lies are cheap. William Hartnell is utterly brilliant throughout in a story that gives him more varied things to do than maybe any other. He’s tough and fierce when he realises what the Daleks are up to, light and giggly in the two ‘comedy’ episodes transmitted over the Christmas holidays and more cunning than we’ve ever seen him at story’s end. Peter Purves is equally magnificent as the traditional hero out of his depth in a world where traditional heroics get you killed, finding new ways to play up Steven’s sheer bewilderment at what’s going on while staying likeable and brave. Poor Katarina, who only joined at the end of previous story ‘The Myth Makers’, (spoilers) dies as heroic and unexpected a death as any we ever see in the series, saving the Dr’s stolen spaceship from a prisoner whose holding her hostage by ejecting them both out into space (and while a few guidebooks have wondered if she even knows what she’s doing, being a handmaiden from ancient Greece, clearly she does – there’s a scene where she’s listening hard to the Doctor and Steve debating how the ship works and she’s clearly bright in every way except technologically; she was written out because it was feared that having a companion from the past would slow up the action by having things explained to them that the audience already knew, though nobody complained about that with Jamie or Victoria; in the first drafts it was Vicki who sacrificed herself before she got written out in Ancient Troy, which would have been even more of a wrench, Dr Whos most idealistic and 1960s representative companion dying in the most miserable and pessimistic way possible). Adrienne Hill’s wide-eyed innocence is exactly right for the part and I so wish we’d seen more of her – even the five episodes she’s actually in would be something as we only have one of them surviving complete (the scene of her death floating eerily in space – actually the actress bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion juxtaposed with stars - is still talked about by fans lucky enough to see it at the time of transmission as one of those great ‘wow’ moments along with the Cybermen coming out of their tombs and the Daleks taking over London and I can see why if the telesnap reconstructions are even a quadzillionth as good as the real thing. Original Dr Who designer turned director Stanley Kubrick even got in touch with his old team to see how they did it for a similar effect in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey)’. Adrienne became a drama teacher in later life – and was always miffed that none of her pupils would believe she’d once been in Dr Who and ta that time didn’t have any photographic evidence to show them! For the first few episodes we have a new character in the Tardis and one that I always felt has as much right to be counted as a ‘companion’ as some others, given the amount of episodes he’s in and Tardis travelling he does. Nicholas Courtney turns up two years early before landing the role of The Brigadier and Bret Vyon is kind of the Brig pushed to extremes in a world where everyone’s a soldier and the stakes are impossible (he’s more like ‘The Brigade Leader’ from the parallel world of ‘Inferno’ in fact). He starts by trying to car-jack the Tardis to take him off jungle planet Kembel before realising team Tardis are on his side and proving to be heroic as well as stoic and cynical. 

Bret (more spoilers) dies too, in a story that’s full of death, shot by his own sister, who also turns out to be a goody (in the end) with Jean Marsh making her second of three DW appearances as tough girl Sara Kingdom. She’s an interesting character, an ice queen feminist that’s pretty far ahead of her time for 1965 whose been brought up under a fascist regime without really questioning it until being around the Doctor’s strong moral compass means she gradually melts and learns to let her hair down (mostly thanks to being in the two most obviously ‘jokey’ episodes in all of 1960s Dr Who). Although she’s Terry Nation’s creation 6/9ths of her appearances are in episodes written by Dennis Spooner and given his own love of putting postmodern symbolism into stories, the ‘demographic TV room’ nature of the delegates, her surname ‘Kingdom’ and general all-round toughness I’ve often wondered if she’s Dennis Spooner writing Terry Nation into one of his own stories as a form of ‘goodbye’ present before he leaves for the States (particularly as both Spooner and predecessor David Whittaker’s biggest complaint of Terry Nation scripts were the lack of strong female characters!) If so perhaps it’s significant that (even more spoilers) Sara dies at the end of this story too, having literally ‘run out of time’ in a most harrowing way as she basically disintegrates in front of our eyes (well, ears nowadays as only the soundtrack of episode twelve exists). It’s always hard to judge if still photos would have worked as well as moving footage (I’ve been fooled both ways by returned episodes I’ve known for years as telesnaps) but if this was anything like as good as it seems from what we have left and how people who saw it at the time remember it then the finale is one of the grimmest, toughest, darkest scenes in all of Who as Sara is reduced from a new friend to a skeleton, all because she sacrificed herself for the Doctor and Steven. I wonder too if Spooner was being cheeky here about terry’s own time ‘running out’ on the series before his move to America, even though everyone at home would have been convinced she was there to stay after nine episodes of Dalek-dodging. Similarly I’ve wondered if Dennis Spooner wrote The Meddling Monk in as himself, given that he created the part in ‘The Time Meddler’ a few stories earlier: funny, mischievous and apparently never taking anything too seriously, though with a steel heart and a survivor’s instinct at the centre, he’s notably the opposite of Sara and they’re two characters who bounce off each other well, Sara’s more straightforward black-and-white view at odds with The Monk who switches sides at the drop of a hat (very much how both men worked, judging by interviews with their peers).

Really, though, this is the Dalek’s story and they’re as brilliant as we ever see them here: cunning, ruthless, totally in control and as charismatic as a disembodied electronic voice coming from a tin can on wheels can be. The Daleks have ‘a genius for war’ as Mavic Chen smartly puts it and this is their biggest battle, the closest they ever come to winning (give or take ’Parting Of The Ways’, which is only solved by Rose turning into a Goddess. As you do). They’re an unstoppable force without mercy (even by their standards their extermination-rate is high this story) and do things we’ve never seen them do before, such as add flame throwers to their arms so they can burn through jungle (much like the Americans in the Vietnam war in fact. Is Nation making a comment here about which country most resembles the Nazis in the modern age?)A special shout out to regular voice artists David Graham and Peter Hawkins who manage to make even the more esoteric and intellectual speeches written for them by Dennis Spooner sound menacing and threatening. You totally believe this is an all-powerful race who’ve already taken over part of the galaxy and who can do anything they please and for the most part they succeed – this is one of the closest battles in all of Dr Who, one where even the Doctor knows it’s best to run away before he’s ready to face them because he knows they hold all the cards this time. Notably, while parts of ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ are silly indeed, The Daleks are never comedy characters themselves even after ‘The Chase’ made them out to be the butt of all the jokes. Instead they’re as big and bad a threat as the Doctor has ever faced in sixty years and it takes using their own weapon against them to finally defeat them. 

 For the first time in the series time is the biggest baddy though and not in an abstract way like some of the 1970s or Moffat-run stories, but something dark and powerful and scary. People don’t just die outright in this story, they age to death horribly, fading away from existence so that all that is left of them are their skeletons. The last episode especially is as dark and sombre as any in the Dr Who canon when the Doctor finally uses the time destructor and unleashes it against the Daleks, he and his companions getting caught in it too. Of course, time is the baddy in many a BBC production too, which makes me wonder if this is another ‘Spoonerism’ equating this story to working for the series, but particularly this epic story with all its effects sets and costumes – and far from being an anticlimax after twelve episodes in any ways the last part is the best one of all (Sara risking her life to save the Dr’s). This is the sort of story where nobody comes out of it unscathed though: Mavic Chen dies the sort of horrible death that befits one of the most evil baddies, Steven is distraught at all the destruction, Katarina Bret and Sara all end up pushing up the daisies and even the Doctor is never the same again (they don’t ever mention it, but fans have come to assume that the Doctor’s regeneration as his ‘body wears a bit thin’ in ‘The Tenth Planet’ eight stories down the line is a time-delayed side effect of events in this story). 

There’s another theme that runs across this story’s diverse episodes too, about legacy and time. The Daleks want to change time so that nothing mankind ever achieved will have ever meant anything – the same for all the other planets too. All that art, science, technology, culture, learning understanding, adapting, growing, Hollywood films,– it will all be lost, ‘millions of years of progress reversed’,because of man’s basest greediest side. Nation is clearly writing about the atom bomb here and a warning that there really are no second chances if one is dropped again in anger. The Daleks are allabout a rigid mentality, of making people the same as you – forever. They want to use the time destructor as much to make time stand still in one place as kill people off, so that they will always be the rulers of the guardians of the solar system’. Controlling your legacy though, which is what so many people try to do across this story, is hopeless in a solar system that’s always evolving and adapting, so that the person you used to be looks silly to your grandchildren: not just the Daleks or Mavic Chen, but the directors and stars of silent movies who think they’re the bees knees who don’t know that talking pictures are round the corner making so much of what they created null and void (the Valentino figure in the story even has a squeaky voice, just to ram the point home, while Bing Crosby - not that Dalek operator Robert Jewell looks anything like him, but it would be odd if there were two people with that name in films - gives up being an old fashioned clown to become one of the growing singing stars of the day), the Ancient Egyptians building giant temples to Gods that nobody except historians remember today, the cricketers who compete for a brief note in a guidebook one day, the revellers in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve who will just be doing exactly the same in another year, even the volcano planet Tigus where new countries are being created out the magma that rises from below. The Daleks are fighting a losing battle because the universe doesn’t work that way: we’re meant to be grow, evolve, mingle with other races (and maybe other species) civilisations are meant to rise and fall: resistance to time is futile. I do wonder, too, if the time destructor – which behaves just like an atom bomb – is Terry Nation coming to terms with the end of the war and thinking that the ends does justify the means, that the extra protracted suffering that would have happened without the bomb being dropped was worth it to defeat an almighty foe (even if it was Japan not Nazi Germany, who’d already crumbled by then). 

 It’s such a shame we can’t see it all nowadays (only a quarter of ‘Masterplan’ exists and even those episodes only survived the ravages of time by accident) as this story does so much, across it’s three months of broadcast time including things no other show could do, things this show had never done before, things the show would never do again and things nobody would ever have expected from Dr Who. The best episodes of the twelve tend to come at the start as we follow the delegates and their confused re-action to The Daleks, before The Doctor creeps into their lair in disguise and steals the taranium core, before the Daleks chase him across time and space just as they did last time. Along the way the Tardis lands on Kembel, just as in ‘Mission To the Unknown’, one of nation’s beloved ‘screaming jungles’ that, again, looks just like news-clips of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. It’s as lush and well made as all Dr Who planets in the 1960s and way more convincing than when they have a go in colour in the 1970s . Weirdly the story ignores most of the story from ‘Mission’ and none of the characters re-appear (the tape recording Marc Cory makes is picked up by Brett but he could easily have found information out from another source). A quick word too for the Technix working for the Daleks, who aren't in this story much and are some of the most obscure races in the series because no moving footage of them exists and not many photographs, just a series of publicity shots where the poor actors shave each other’s heads and William Hartnell has fun laughing at them from under his wig! Seems like poor reward as legacies go, given that only three of the six extras were bald before filming. Clones who have no free will of their own they fit both strands of the story too: one the one hand they’re what free-thinking ‘us’ will become if the Daleks get their way and on the ‘TV metaphor’ front they’re the technician minions doing all the technological stuff but treated by their bosses as extensions of their computers. The Doctor is at his best as he sneaks into the UN conference and steals the taranium, setting off a race of time and space with the Daleks (eventually) in hot pursuit. 

Next the Tardis lands on the penal colony Desperus where conditions are as desperate as they sound, a side effect of the military regime in the future who believe that any slight thing is a crime. Terry’s future series ‘Blake’s 7’ will end up on planets like this one quite a lot – the most backwards planets in a futuristic society that feel more like mankind’s earliest caveman days struggling for survival – but this is a rare chance to see a prison planet on Dr Who. As much as prisoner Kirksen is presented as a ‘monster’, ready to kidnap and kill Katarina if it will help get him off the planet, Nation is quick to show that he’s a more sympathetic creature than Chen or the Daleks: he’s trying to survive, by any means possible, as so many people do during a war. He can’t see the bigger picture though: the Doctor and Steven are trying to save everyone, not just one life. In the end his death, when he would have died anyway had he stopped the space shuttle so the Daleks could catch it, feels like a mercy. Next the story lands in a futuristic Earth under military control conducting time experiments with mice that they’re hoping to teleport into space – inevitably, given that they’re on the run from the Daleks and are split from the Tardis, the Doctor and Steven are the first to use it. This ‘cellular dissemination’ gets there a full six months before ‘Star Trek’ and looks far more painful too given all the gurning that’s going on. Next we’re on the swamp planet Mira inhabited by invisible race The Visians. I wish we could see more of them (even though they’re invisible…you all know what I mean!) – the Tardis doesn’t stay on Mira very long and there aren’t many photographs that exist (maybe John Cura, the professional photographer hired by the BBC and various actors agencies to take them so stars would have something to send off to employees, was getting tired arms after doing this for so many shows across so many years). Nation’s given us lots of invisible races before (including on ‘The Chase’ just five months earlier), writing them in as a ‘cliffhanger’ for Spooner to get out of, but there’s a neat twist that we do actually ‘see’ what they look like (or at least their body silhouette) when the Daleks exterminate them thanks to an effect that, by 1965 standards, looks excellent indeed. It’s another aspect of this story’s take on legacy: these beings don’t even have skeletons to show that they ever existed and just sort of dissolve into thin air. 

It’s the interlude that comes next that’s the most controversial and the one that’s hardest to analyse properly at all given how little of it exists (Cura was obviously taking a break over the holidays – perhaps it cost too much to pay extra time for the holidays? – so for years we didin’t have any photographs until Robert jewell, playing Bing Crosby, found some out of focus ones he’d taken off his telly; much of the audio, meanwhile, is of a silent film being made, which isn’t much good to us purely as a soundtrack). The wittily named ‘The Feast Of Steven’ (everyone does have a bit of a party at the end after all) was, for forty years, the only Dr Who story ever to go out on Christmas Day and like Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat stories to come it has to be standalone apart from the main story arc, silly enough to fit the Christmas spirit and ‘special’ enough to do things a bit different. And different it certainly is: the Tardis lands in contemporary Britain (for the first time since 1963, the one place we used to think it could never land in the days when Ian and Barbara were trying to get back home, how exciting!) where it gets mistaken as a ‘real’ police phonebox. There’s a brief joke here where Spooner writes in a cliffhanger that the atmosphere is ‘poisonous’ and ‘deadly’ at the end of episode six, which nation turns into a riff on the dangers of smog and pollution (Spooner, reportedly, wasn’t at all happy his big plot twist got tuned into a joke). The Doctor and co get taken in for a questioning on a set that, to all intent and purposes, was that of the ‘other’ long running BBC hit police drama ‘Z Cars’. In a story that’s partly about the art of making television and more than one reviewer referring to Dr Who as a series that was like ‘channel hopping’ and changing genres week to week it’s perhaps inevitable the production team would go all postmodern and end up ‘inside’ another show, Spooner perhaps subliminally reminding Terry Nation of all the things he’ll miss out on if he moves to America without the BBC like sports broadcasts, films and oddball TV dramas. ‘Z cars’ might seem an odd choice to 2023 eyes but it was a staple of many a family audience between 1962 and 1978 it’s one of those jokes that falls a bit flat for viewers who didn’t see the original series (and they can’t see a lot of it now: it was hit even more badly than Dr Who in terms of missing episodes with more less half of the 800-odd missing). The original joke was to have been even funnier: producer John Wiles got in touch with his fellow department to see if he could use their actual sets and some of their actual actors (including Brian Blessed, seriously considered for the part of the Doctor himself a few times down the years) and got rather a rude message back. So instead the production team have great fun spoofing their ‘rivals’, painting the policemen out to be one-dimensional and narrow-minded compared to the Dr Who characters who are playing for much bigger stakes across a much bigger backdrop. If ever there was a ‘bring it on big guys!’ to another programme in Dr Who it’s this, not comparatively gentle later pot-shots at Star Wars or Star Trek. Watch out too for a colossal in-joke where the Doctor turns to actor Reg Pritchard, playing a ‘man in mackintosh’ wandering round the police station, and asks ‘don’t I know you from Jaffa?’ (he was indeed in Jaffa in ‘The Crusade’ playing the shady tradeseman Ben Daheer the Doctor steals clothes from). 

Not content with ruining television next Dr Who ruins films. It’s so hard to tell nowadays but the joke originally was that we didn’t know where we’d landed: I mean, there’s a girl trapped on a sawmill. What dastardly fiend is up to that? Of course everyone goers to rescue her – only to have a director having apoplexy because they’ve just interested his filming (an in-joke here is that the girl is played by Sheila Dunn, who was the fiancé of the director – the real director Douglas Camfield I mean, not the actor playing the director; she’ll be back properly on screen in a more ‘normal’ role in ‘Inferno’). The Tardis crew scatter to avoid being caught by security, just like the events in the ‘sister’ comic strip ‘TV Terrors’ in ‘TV Action’ that was, more often than not, opposite the Dr Who strip in the 1960s, about TV a fanatical children so keen to meet their heroes that they have to keep dodging security man ‘Hoppit’. Along the way we ‘see’ a Keystone Kops chase, someone who looks a lot like a pre-fame Charlie Chaplin and commiserate with the world’s worst Bing Crosby impersonator. Most people coming to this now haven’t got a clue what the hell is going on: just take it that Dr Who was for a family audience and this part was for the grandparents. It’s sort of the equivalent of Dr Who doing an episode based in the 1960s…except is isn’t (because The Beatles shaped the future so much it still looks recognisably like the world we live in now in a way anything pre-1962 just doesn’t). Sadly they cut one scene where the Doctor tells the director the film’s going to be a hit ‘because I’ve seen it in the future’ and accidentally invents custard pie fight! Odd to think that, until ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ eight years later this was the last scene Tarry nation wrote for the series that made his name! And then, at the end, in a programme about programmes and a story about stories, everyone has a party and the Doctor breaks the fourth wall and wishes ‘a Merry Christmas to those of you at home’. A lot of fans have had kittens about this bit because it ‘destroys’ the illusion of this being a programme that ‘could’ be happening and it is very out of keeping with everything else in the series. But then it was meant to be: every other Christmas programme did something like this (including ‘Z Cars’) – the very fact that it isn’t a programme where something like that ‘fits’ (except for Christmas Day) only rams home how unusual these circumstances are. Besides, I like to think the Doctor’s just thinking of anyone who might be watching on the ‘space-time visualiser’ he got from the Xeros Space Museum (and no, despite what some guidebooks say, it isn’t just an awkward Hartnell ad lib when he forgot his lines: its in every draft of the script and could have been edited out anyway, as a lot of Hartnell’s most obvious ad libs were by season Three. I rather like it (I’m alone, apparently, given that this episode has an episode appreciation index of just 39, the lowest the series ever got across 328 episodes) - while at the same time being glad that Dr Who never tried anything remotely like this again. 

…Except perhaps the next episode where we move on to New Year’s Day and everyone’s having too much fun to get down to work again yet, so instead we land on a cricket pitch, the commentators leafing through their books to see what this interruption means for the rules and whether there’s ever been a precedent in the past. Again it’s hard to work out how ‘funny’ this bit is without the visuals, which do all seem to be told from the commentator’s booth while a bunch of cricketer’s stand around scratching their heads, but the deadpan delivery is spot-on and the idea of the extraordinary of Dr Who rubbing up against the ordinariness of a cricket match is so very much in keeping with this series’ ethos it will inspire the entire 5th Doctor’s persona (weirdly the Doctor doesn’t seem to know what cricket even is in this story, with the story’s best gag that it looks like some sort of unusual primitive custom). Finally the plot gets moving on the Volcano planet Tigus, a set that looks magnificent from the photographs, the Tardis apparently landing on a working gully complete with jets of steam (one of which blows up the Monk’s habit!) In plot terms, though, it feels like a bit of unearned jeopardy in a story that already has enough going on, the Monk sabotaging the Tardis’ lock to strand the characters on a boiling hot planet the way he was abandoned on an ice planet at the end of ‘The Time Meddler’. It’s good fun hearing William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth trading insults most gentilely though, as if they’re two old rivals meeting up for a game of lawn bowels and this scene makes a good counterpoint with the United Federation scenes: everyone in this universe, it seems, is out to hoodwink the other. Luckily for the Doctor and co it turns out that the sunlight on this planet has special properties, which combined with the Doctor’s ring that has incredibly special properties solves that problem a tad too easily for my liking, in a story that’ all about how grim and tough life can be. Having moved off the Tardis makes a quick jaunt in Trafalgar Square for New year’s day 1966 (the date of transmission) where the Doctor compares the assembled hordes to the ’siege of Mafeking’ in the Boer War surprisingly (just wait till he sees Woodstock!) sadly we’ve lost the transmitted shot of already existing news footage where the production team got incredibly lucky, given that there was genuinely a police telephone box parked on the corner. Another quick joke in this episode, over on the Dalek shuttle: the Daleks asks where the taranium came from. ‘It came from Uranus!’ snaps Mavic Chen, pronouncing it the ‘bottom’ way, at a point where he’s losing patience with the Daleks altogether. 

And then we get the final showdown against a backdrop of Ancient Egypt. Amazingly this is, to date, the only time the Tardis ever lands there – we’ve had alternate timelines caused by alien meddling monks (no not that one, but similar) and an Egyptian God in early 20th century London, but amazingly this is the only time the Tardis lands next to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It looks impressive too, given the one episode we have, designer Barry Newbury somehow re-creating pyramids that look about as well as any set made in 1965 was going to look, complete with perspective by having angles moving away from the pyramids and with extras in authentic dress. They don’t know what to make of the Daleks of curse and uncharacteristically the Doctor doesn’t seem that fussed about either changing time or the amount of Egyptians who die in this story (a sign, perhaps, of just how big the stakes are). Playing up to Mavic Chen’s vanity by making him think he’s won and then giving him a fake taranium core is a clever twist, though, a sign of how manipulating swindlers are always surprised when other people swindle them. After that it’s a quick hop back to Kembel where the Doctor uses the time destructor and it’s all finally over. Much to Steven’s horror, with a final moving scene that finds him wondering about the waste of all their friends who gave their lives along the way that recalls the ne from the end of ‘The Daleks’ where the Doctor told the Thals to talk about the dangers of horror of war and the ‘people who won’t be coming back’ rather than glamorising it and turning it into a ‘legend’. 

The story of the recovery of parts 5 and 10 in 1983 are an epic all of their own, discovered in the basement of a Latter-Day Saints Church, with no one any the wiser as to how on Earth they got there (maybe a passing alien took pity on us and realised the story was so good we deserved some of it to see at least?); part 2 was returned to the BBC as late as 2004 by a former engineer; a large extract of part 4 survives only because it was used in a Blue Peter special about the show’s tenth anniversary in 1973 with Peter Purves then working as a presenter on that show and making lots of cracks about how silly his 1960s hairdo looked (even though to us now his 1970s hairdo looks far sillier; the rest of the episode was lost because Blue Peter forgot to send it back – no one knows where it might be now or if it still exists). It’s a real pity we can’t see the rest of this story because more than perhaps any other Dr Who adventure this is a visual feast, with a different set either every few episodes or multiple ones in the same episode by the time we reach the middle and if all of them look as good as the jungles of Kembel or the Earth of the future we can see then it must have been spectacular indeed (though admittedly Ancient Egypt is just a bunch of awkward looking extras walking past a backdrop in a few scenes). Nowadays it’s impossible to decipher what’s going on during the middle two jokier episodes at all, episode seven at least being one we’ll probably never get to see again, given that it was thought ‘too British’ to sell overseas so there were always less copies of that one kicking around than any other Dr Who episode of the 1960s. Most fans think these two episodes are the weakest of the bunch and judging purely by the soundtrack they’re right, with the story really dipping in the middle. For all I know, though, all these episodes look amazing on screen, especially as the model shots are all so good in the surviving episodes, most particularly Mavic Chen’s rotating ship which breaks the mould of the usual long tube rockets seen in the series; the same goes for the episode with the Visions on the planet Mira which sound really promising as an audio but for all I know (and based on other DW stories featuring invisible aliens) look ridiculous: this is a story that’s hard to get a hold on out of what we have left. Out of the episodes we can see, however, there’s a definite fall from the thrilling episode two through the merely good episode five to the rather clueless episode ten, which just feels like not terribly convincing filler (all these years I’ve waited to see Ancient Egypt properly in Dr Who and then they make it a couple of scenes with extras scratching their heads). T’s all a bit too much for some people. Especially Mary Whitehouse, who raises complaints against the series for the first time in a TV debate about violence, particularly the scene of the Daleks chanting ‘kill kill kill’ (in a sign of things to come she’s told her remarks are ‘twaddle’ during the debate – and by no less than the Harlow councillor too!) 

Even so, no story could remain first class for twelve whole episodes and what’s most impressive about The Daleks’ Masterplan’ is the sheer variety of things on offer – if one thing doesn’t quite work then no matter, we’ll be somewhere else a few minutes later. And anyway this was designed from the first to be a sprawling epic that could go anywhere and do anything in space and time – and on that note it succeeds quite brilliantly, being at different times Dr Who at its most serious and gritty and light and fluffy, driven at different times by both character and plots and with an overall story and main characters strong enough to keep up your interest. Even though every producer and showrunner in the nearly sixty years since have built up at least one story as being ‘the most epic story DW has ever produced’ all fans know that really there’s only one candidate and it’s this one. This is a story bigger and bolder than all others and better than the vast majority too, with a scale, a depth and a threat that’s so colossally huge most other Dr Who stories look tiny by comparison. As much as there are other stories I love even more I find myself returning to the soundtrack of this story (and the slightly disappointing John Peel pair of novels, cutting the story down the middle and ignoring most of episode seven altogether) more than probably any other: there’s just so much going on in this story to get lost in, so many different alien races and customs, that I’m always discovering something new every time I re-visit this story. This is the story that ‘broke’ Dr Who in so many ways, at least as it had been from the start with producer John Wiles, and script edition Donald Tosh handing their notices in soon after, while Terry Nation won’t work on the show that made him famous for the rest of the decade and after one tantrum too many even William Hartnell’s days are numbered, while it’s a long break till respected Who director Douglas Camfield will ever work on the show too. But this is also a story that casts a football-headed blue-tinged shadow over everything else to come and the most ambitious the most ambitious era of the show ever is, a story where the stakes are never higher and the threat never more ‘real’. Given all that maybe some other BBC director generals’ mother-in-laws should have got involved in programming if it resulted in highs like this one?! 

POSITIVES + The costumes for the delegates look amazing, each one distinctly different to the others and yet all recognisably from roughly the same time and place in space. People sometimes ask me who I want to see back in Dr Who from the ‘old’ series and along with Alpha Centauri they’re my answer: I think a modern showrunner could have a lot of fun updating them for whichever group of people happens to be in charge at any one time. They could do a big orange one with silly hair for instance or a blonde one with even sillier hair, or one with a lettuce-leaf head...

NEGATIVES - The Meddling Monk is such a brilliant character that it’s sad to see him so under-used in his second and last appearance. The last we see of him is being stranded on an ice planet when the Dr switches his Tardis’ navigational controls, as if he’s been left out in the cold (again, if this is Dennis Spooner then it might be significant that ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ is his last planned job for Dr Who before he leaves to help Terry Nation with his next commission, the forgotten undercover antique dealer spy series ‘The Baron’, though he does help old friend David Whittaker out with ‘Power Of The Daleks’ as a sort of Terry Nation go-between). Peter Butterworth’s as funny and watchable as ever, but there’s no real reason for him to be there and his meddling monk-eying around rather gets in the way of the tense Doctor-on-Dalek action of the story’s final quarter. 

BEST QUOTES: ‘I suppose you might say that I am a citizen of the universe – and a gentlemen to boot!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Mission To The Unknown’ is the first official Dr Who ‘prequel’ that, weirdly, sets up this story a month early before the action switches to Ancient Greece for the totally unrelated ‘Myth Makers’, due to a quirk involving the scheduling and the actors’ contracts. 

There have been lots of Big Finish audio dramas set around the events of this story – uniquely enough two of them are even set during the middle episodes of this story and are at one with the cricketing/Hollywood/Christmas diversion episodes (though it’s blatantly an excuse to get Jean Marsh to do a few of the ‘Companion Chronicles’ stories as Sara, I’m all for it, though sad she never got to act alongside Nicholas Courtney as her ‘brother’). ‘Home Truths’ (2008) was the first and has sara as an old lady looking back over her adventures. Marsh still sounds remarkably like her younger self, while writer Simon Guerrier really nails the feel of her character, although in truth the unheard story told in flashback isn’t all that interesting (maybe her visitors have got sick of her telling the much more interesting ‘Masterplan’ one?!) 

‘The Drowned World’(2009), also by Guerrier,is more complex and therefore a bit more interesting: somehow this version of Sara knows she died during the use of the time destructor and is a ghost. This story has her trying to make the alive residents of her Ely house keep her on without exterminating her by telling stories of her past, including an adventure to an underwater kingdom, and following her joy that someone called Robert can actually hear her. ‘Guardians Of The Solar System’ (2010) is another tale from the past, when the Doctor ended up stuck inside a giant clock. Yes, it’s one of those stories…More interesting are Sara’s attempts to come to terms with her status as a ghost, watching her ashes be scattered on Kembel.

 Meanwhile, over in Big Finish’s ‘Short Trips’ series, ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ (2010) is a second Christmas episode and a rather good one at that, writer Eddie Robson set immediately after ‘The Feast Of Steven’ episode (with the Tardis leaving the Hollywood film set at the start). The Tardis seems to have developed a taste for all things festive as it keeps landing on Christmas Day, in 1885, 1982, 1946, 1931, 2069, 1914 and 1956, with a small boy staring at them in all timezones. The last of these is best, the Tardis landing during the 1st World war Christmas truce he will revisit in ‘Twice Upon A Time’ (I like to think both are canon and there are two William Hartnell Doctors wandering around the trenches!) I’ll leave the twist of who the lad really is to you (it’s probably not who or what you think!”) but it’s a clever solution to a story that makes good use of both the taranium core and the Tardis fast return switch. My only regret is that it’s read by Beth Chalmers rather than Marsh or Purves and while she does a good approximation of their voices (and a rather good Hartnell!) it’s not quite the same.

 ‘The Anachronauts’ (2012) is a fast-paced, slightly surreal entry that’s told in real time, without use of flashbacks or ghosts. Though written by Guerrier once more this one has a very different feel to it and is more like a 5th Doctor story, with a spaceship that crashes into the Tardis and flings the occupants out to a desert island, with a section also set around the Berlin Wall in 1966 (at the time of Masterplan’s broadcast). Peter Purves is along for the ride too and it’s great to hear Steven and sara playing off one another again so naturally just like they did a full 46 years earlier! 

 ‘An Ordinary Life’ (2014) is the last story in the 1st Doctor box set ‘The early Adventures: Series One’ and stars both Marsh and Purves. It’s a fairly controversial story that says that the tardis trio went into hiding in 1950s London for some time to evade the Daleks – something that seems out of kilter with ‘Masterplan’ as a whole. It’s a good story though, making good use of the Doctor’s immigrant’ status by pairing him with a Jamaican family living in London for a good part of the story Hartnell himself would not have been amused by this, but the 1st Doctor is never more multi-cultural!) Steven ends up working at the docks while Sara ends up cooking real food for the first time (neither with much success!), while the Doctor tries to repair the broken life support system inside the Tardis that has left him drained and weak (hints of his regeneration to come perhaps?) rather sweetly the Jamaican family are named ‘Newman’, just like Who creator Sydney! 

Curiously ‘Men Of War (2018) again returns to the First World War - well nearly. The Doctor knows from the Tardis controls that the Battle of the Somme should be raging outside but there is no side of it. This is one of those ‘somebody’s changed the timelines and they need to be restored’ stories, told from the point of view of an army captain. Perhaps because of this it’s an oddly uninvolving story that doesn’t feel like a ‘Dr Who’ story at all, just a war documentary with some oddly dressed strangers turning up. 

 Switching gears ‘Katarina In The Underworld’ is a Steve Lyons story from the fourth Short Trips book ‘The Muses’ (2003) and is one of the most surreal Dr Who stories of them all. Katarina can’t afford the fare to the afterlife, but a hallucination of the 1st Doctor arrives to help where he both haggles and steals the coins needed to take her across. Katarina is judged to be neutral, not good enough to get into Heaven or bad enough to get into Hell so is condemned to wander as a ghost – which seems a cruel fate for one of the most pure-hearted characters in all of Who.

 ‘Daughter Of the Gods’ (2019), meanwhile, is a Big Finish audio story (part of ‘The early Adventures Volume Six’) that might be the most daring work on this list: it’s a parallel world where the Dalek’s Masterplan succeeds and the universe is entirely under their rule. It’s not a happy place to say the least and takes not one but two Doctors to put everything right, the 2nd Dr, Jamie and Zoe teaming up with the 1st Dr, Steven and Sara. Put together for Big Finish’s 20th anniversary the company say they consider this an ‘unofficial 5th anniversary story’ that could plausibly have been transmitted in 1968 instead! 

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