Golden Death (The Daleks' Master Plan Episode 9)

The one where the Monk allies himself with the Daleks...

Poor old William Hartnell is still suffering from a throaty cold during Golden Death, and although it doesn't seem to dent his enthusiasm or commitment, it does have the unfortunate yet amusing side effect of making him sound quite peculiar at times, especially when he has one of his giggling fits. It demonstrates the brutal schedule the production team were up against back in the 1960s though - there were just three weeks between studio recording and transmission at this point, and this would be reduced to just two weeks after the Christmas break, with episode 10 being recorded just a fortnight before transmission. There was little room for error, and everyday maladies such as the common cold simply had to be endured.

Luckily, Hartnell has fewer lines to say in this episode because he spends much of it silently following the Monk around and listening in to what he's up to. I have to ask myself again, why does the Monk continue to dress as a monk when being a monk serves no practical purpose any longer? It made sense for him to be disguised as a monk in The Time Meddler, but to still dress in habit and sandals on the volcanic planet of Tigus, or in Ancient Egypt, makes no sense. It means he must genuinely have a "thing" for dressing up this way. Kinky!

Rather wonderfully, the Monk also wears a pair of sunglasses, 40 years before the Twelfth Doctor took to wearing sonic shades. Maybe the Monk's wearing sonic shades for all I know? Maybe he's got an electric guitar in his TARDIS as well - he's already wearing a sort of hoodie too! The Monk bumps into Mavic Chen and the Daleks and agrees to fake an alliance with the Doctor in order to get the taranium core off him. He hasn't much choice but to team up with the Daleks really, because if he said no, they'd just exterminate him.

These Daleks are pretty bloodthirsty, after all. As soon as they arrive, they're gunning down innocent Egyptians for no reason other than they can. Daleks are evil, and they kill people for no reason, and this is perhaps the first time we see Daleks exterminating innocent people wantonly, rather than for a strategic reason (the execution of Trantis in episode 8 was also pretty unnecessary). They do it again towards the end of the episode when they learn that the Monk has failed to secure the taranium core - they take to murdering innocent Egyptians when it does absolutely nothing to help their cause. This is how Daleks should behave, and certainly how the viewing public expects them to!

Back to the Monk... He's a silly sausage, isn't he? I mean, he's hardly a serious threat to the Doctor. He's not deadly, he doesn't take to killing people to get his own way. All he really wants is to have his revenge on the Doctor by hijacking his TARDIS (tit for tat). The Monk has no stomach for murder, he's simply a meddler ("It's a pity we're having this feud," he says at one point). He's not all that clever either, because yet again he fails to lock his TARDIS door, allowing the Doctor to creep inside and wreak havoc once more. The Doctor manipulates the Monk's TARDIS's chameleon circuit and then steals his directional unit. The series of different disguises the TARDIS goes through sounds bonkers - a Greek column, a silver-leafed tree, a stagecoach, an igloo, a biplane and a rocket ship - before settling on a police box. Ah, I can see what the Doctor's doing here...!

There's not much for Steven and Sara to do except get captured by the Egyptians, then escape. Jean Marsh seems to be running on autopilot quite literally now. Sara was never really fleshed out much beyond her introductory episode, but now she barely has any lines and virtually nothing to contribute to the story at all. Marsh delivers her lines like a robot, as disinterested in proceedings as the viewer is in her character! There is a brief fight scene where she saves Steven from a burly Egyptian with what the BBC CD soundtrack narration describes as one of those ubiquitous chops to the neck. You see neck chops so often in TV and films from this period, in place of what might normally be a punch, because they seem less violent for younger viewers, but I was curious as to whether a neck chop could actually render someone unconscious, so I Googled it. And yes, it can, if done the "right" way. It can, in fact, be lethal if the force of the chop adequately interrupts the carotid artery, so when we see all of these half-hearted neck chops in shows like Doctor Who, The Avengers and in the Bond films, remember that the poor victims are probably dead rather than unconscious.

The cliffhanger sees Steven and Sara witness a sarcophagus slowly opening, and a bandaged hand creeping from within. Doctor Who's first mummy?!

First broadcast: January 8th, 1966

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Daleks are wonderfully violent and bloodthirsty, murdering countless innocent Egyptians just because they're there.
The Bad: Dennis Spooner doesn't seem to know what to do with the Doctor's companions. He had similar problems with The Reign of Terror. A better writer wouldn't make their disinterest so obvious.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Escape Switch...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Mission to the Unknown (prelude); The Nightmare Begins (episode 1); Day of Armageddon (episode 2); Devil's Planet (episode 3); The Traitors (episode 4); Counter Plot (episode 5); Coronas of the Sun (episode 6); The Feast of Steven (episode 7); Volcano (episode 8); Escape Switch (episode 10); The Abandoned Planet (episode 11); Destruction of Time (episode 12)

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/mission-to-unknown-aka-dalek-cutaway.html

The soundtrack to The Daleks' Master Plan is available on CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-original-television-soundtrack/dp/0563494174