The Nightmare Begins (The Daleks' Master Plan Episode 1)

The one where the Guardian of the Solar System allies with the Daleks...

Welcome back to Terry Nation and his fabulously colourful and melodramatic episode titles! You can rely on Nation to raise expectations by promising things like a sea of death, a screaming jungle, the death of time (and Doctor Who!) or a journey into terror. This week he's basically promising a three-month-long nightmare, which I hope is for the characters and not the viewers!

The nightmare begins almost where Mission to the Unknown left off, with two more Space Security Agents lost and on the run on Kembel, which as you may remember is the "most hostile planet in the universe". Kert Gantry is injured and feels he is slowing his colleague Bret Vyon down, so insists that he leave him behind so that he has a better chance of getting the vital message back to Earth (that the Solar System is to be invaded by seven other galaxies!). Brian Cant makes Gantry a tragic figure, one who's willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good, and when he is finally caught by a Dalek, his death is swift and sad. RIP Kert - we barely knew you, but we have much to thank you for.

Terry Nation does so much world building (or universe building!) in this episode, zipping from location to location, planet to planet, sculpting the beginning of a story that already feels more epic than anything Doctor Who has done before. We've got Daleks and Vargas, intergalactic spies, rotting skeletons, spaceships and space ports! One moment we're in the TARDIS, then in the jungles of Kembel, then in the Dalek base, then in Earth's communications centre. Nation was able to expand Doctor Who's world much more creatively than the average writer. We visited multiple locations in stories like The Keys of Marinus and The Chase, and here he depicts a galaxy/ universe (he's flexible on the definition!) that feels populated by real people and real technology.

Take the scene set in Earth's communications centre with Roald and Lizan, two incidental characters who are great value. He just wants to catch the Venus vs Mars game on TV (it's not stated what they're playing, but I instantly think of Shanghorns playing football with Ice Warriors!), but Lizan is an admirer of the Guardian of the Solar System, Mavic Chen, who is interviewed on TV about his holiday plans. He's just secured a mineral agreement with the fourth galaxy (a reference to Galaxy 4 and the Drahvins?) and now intends to take a break. He won't tell the public where he's going, just that he's going to "drift about the Solar System" in his Spar ship (space car - geddit?). This is the year 4000, but Earth still has nosy interviewers and dry political broadcasts.

Side note: Roald says he wants to watch the news on Channel 403, which on my Sky+ box is actually Sky Sports Football, so maybe he's trying to trick Lizan into watching the Venus/ Mars match after all? Either way, it's sobering to think that Rupert Murdoch's empire still stands 2,000 years from now...

Elsewhere we have the rather brash and no-nonsense Bret Vyon, written from the same mold as his late predecessor Marc Cory. Bret holds the Doctor at gunpoint in the jungle, then apparently assaults him and steals his TARDIS key, before breaking into the Ship and holding the blood-poisoned Steven and frightened Katarina prisoner. He's a man who gets things done and I love him for that, even if he does go about it rather forcefully (the Doctor variously calls him a "young ruffian" and a "violent young man"). However, about the only thing Peter Purves gets to do as Steven in this episode is clobber Bret with a spanner and knock him out, and then the Doctor can hold the Space Security Agent prisoner in what he calls a "magnetic chair". I'm not sure how the chair works, as it must require the occupant to be wearing a good amount of metal. Perhaps Bret is wearing copper-bottomed underpants? The Doctor's claim that the chair could "restrain a herd of elephants" is equally as curious.

Katarina, as a character, is so wet. She is naive, innocent and unworldly and has no comprehension of where she is or what is going on. She believes she is in Limbo, travelling through the Underworld to her ultimate destiny. She hasn't the remotest understanding of space, time, technology, weapons, monsters or robots. Katarina is not a character that sits easily in this world, especially Nation's grimmer, grittier world, and it's not clear how the production team expected the dynamic to work. Hartnell treats Katarina with kid gloves, but Adrienne Hill doesn't really give the character anything beyond wide-eyed innocence. On top of that, she speaks as if she's been sedated. To be honest, it's not a great performance.

The episode concludes with the double whammy of the Doctor discovering the Daleks are on Kembel (the scene where the Doctor spots them and says "Daleks!", followed by that familiar electronic sting, is hair-raising), and that Mavic Chen's holiday is actually a treasonous trip to Kembel to help the Daleks "conquer Earth and all the planets in the Solar System"!

What a total shit.

First broadcast: November 13th, 1965

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Nicholas Courtney makes a strident impression as Bret Vyon. The character is quite brutal, but for some reason I'm on his side!
The Bad: Adrienne Hill as Katarina really feels out of place. The character's vulnerability will inevitably be her downfall.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★☆

NEXT TIME: Day of Armageddon...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Mission to the Unknown (prelude); 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); Golden Death (episode 9); 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