Hartnell is once again displaying a rare gift for the lines he’s fluffing – this episode, it’s the line with the words “to be precise” that he doesn’t deliver precisely!!! He does, however, successfully utter the line, “That’s why we’re stuck on this pimple of a planet whilst you footle with a fusebox!” Why fans haven’t quoted this for generations escapes me – its awfulness makes it utterly brilliant!
But I’m trying to find some levity in an episode that is otherwise pretty grim – the desperates of Desperus (which is to say, the convicts exiled there) do seem a grotty bunch, and it’s clear that these bedraggled beardies will stop at nothing to escape. It’s odd though, with so many thugs on display, that Nation elects to use the weediest of them – Kirksen – as the one who sneaks aboard the Spar for the brilliantly screamed cliffhanger. Mind you, the only reason Kirksen takes Katarina hostage is because the Doctor forgot to shut a door. He’s becoming a menace, this man.
February 17th
The Traitors (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode four)
R: William Hartnell exposes Bret Vyon’s associate Daxtar as a traitor, and by the most simplistic means possible – it’s because, once again, the silly villain has revealed information he could never have known unless he was on the wrong side. We’ve had this little bit of plotting going on as far back as The Keys of Marinus – and it’s fun for the kids, because they can point out before the TV characters do that a mistake has been made. And then the episode turns down this bit of childlike problem-solving on its head – Daxtar is shot down in cold blood, and Hartnell is left reeling and furious at Bret Vyon’s callousness. It’s no greater demonstration that this story isn’t quite playing by the same rules we come to expect from Doctor Who; Katarina’s death is shocking and sudden and leaves you utterly floored, and then, later in the same episode, Bret Vyon is killed too. And if anything, Vyon’s death is even more surprising – at least Katarina was given some sort of eulogy by the Doctor, whilst Vyon suffers the indignity of no more than his executioner going through his pockets, and then not even pausing to give him a backward look.
We know that Hartnell was unhappy with the new direction John Wiles was taking the show in, and felt that it was getting excessively brutal. This episode has to be the crowning example of that. Even the Daleks dispassionately kill their own kind when they fail to catch the Doctor on the planet Desperus – failure will not be tolerated. It’s a far cry from the comedy “thick” Dalek of The Chase who stuttered a lot; you rather suspect he’d have been exterminated without benefit of a court-martial by these chaps. It’s not just the dispassionate attitude towards death that the episode exhibits; there are real power struggles taking place here.
The warning that the Daleks give Trantis – that they will eliminate their allies if they fail them – mirrors Chen’s own warnings to his henchman Karlton. Now that we see Chen away from the Dalek influence, we can at last appreciate him as a powerful character in his own right, and Kevin Stoney excels. There is a gritty cynicism to each character, and nowhere before have the Doctor’s childlike ideals of goodness and pacifism seemed more out of place. The Daleks are depicted as active, ruthless strategists; they’re neither simply bogeymen to resist nor clowns to laugh at. And the simple sequence with Daxtar elegantly demonstrates that no-one can be trusted on Earth at all – and that the entire mission of the last two episodes to warn the authorities there has been naive. It’s very clever – what was settling down into becoming a repeat of The Chase has had the carpet pulled from under its feet.
I love it all, of course, because I’m 39 years old. But was Hartnell right? Up to this point, the show has never really been about the corruption of mankind, but about its innate morality. Never before has Doctor Who’s basic worldview been so casually shattered.
It’s clever, too, how the script hides from the viewer the fact that the ruthless killer working for Chen is a woman. Chen and Karlton only ever refer to Sara Kingdom by her surname – they clearly see no importance in her gender whatsoever, merely in her efficiency. After the awkward sexism of Galaxy Four, in which military women were clearly something to be ogled at, it’s refreshing to see Sara treated immediately with far more dignity.
T: Ah, this is a rare example of a reblocked cliffhanger – Kirksen’s appearance aboard the Spar had to be a surprise last week, and come out of nowhere. But this week, we open on him, it seems, and he engages in the stalemate that results in (depending on how you define terms) the first death of one of the Doctor’s companions. Given that the Daleks are the major protagonists in this adventure, it’s odd that such a milestone is achieved by a relatively banal villain whose grand, evil scheme is to force our heroes to literally change the direction they’re going. It comes across as a bit of a wasted opportunity, but it’s brilliantly sold. Purves really gets his teeth into the stand-off, and the thumping silence after Katarina’s self-sacrifice – as she ends the impasse by blowing both her captor and herself out of an airlock – is extremely effective.
As Daxtar, Roger Avon imbues his defiance of the Doctor’s cross-examination with a hefty note of hysteria in his voice. Tension is heightened, and events get even more dangerous when Bret coldly shoots him down. Hartnell has time to berate Bret with some wonderfully righteous indignation, and then Bret himself is slain. One half of the team we’ve been watching – Katarina and Bret – are both dispatched in the same episode, and the Doctor and Steven are on the run. Whether this adventure is working for you or not, the stakes just got very, very high.
Counter Plot (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode five)
R: What a very bizarre story this is – tonally, this episode is nothing like the one before it! It’s almost as if the writing staff were making the whole thing up as they went along, and took Hartnell’s criticisms of its brutality to heart. (I don’t know whether that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me.) So this week, the only characters to get exterminated are... a couple of white mice.
I’ve no problem with that, actually – it’s something of a relief to get a bit of comedy into a story that’s been so relentlessly grim and pessimistic. There’s almost the sense of the plot catching its breath here – after all, we’ve got (my God) another eight episodes to go, so the best way to pad it out still further, just as the Doctor and Chen are in striking distance of the other, is to have our heroes broken down into atoms and sent spinning halfway across the universe.
And this gives everyone a chance to work out how the relationships should be played out from this moment on. Sara Kingdom, as played by Jean Marsh, needs to be reinterpreted as the new girl companion instead of being viewed as an inhuman killer – and if dramatically the scene in which she comes to see the Doctor and Steven as allies is a bit rushed, Hartnell and Purves go a long way to helping her with the transition. Hartnell is full of sad sympathy, Purves shows angered impatience – and then Marsh drops the bombshell that by following her soldier’s orders, she’s just killed her brother. As melodramatic as that revelation obviously is, the scene just clicks into place beautifully.
And isn’t Maurice Browning outstanding as Karlton? He’s sly, he’s ambitious, he’s rather camp – and he’s wonderfully bald into the bargain. The scene where he silently realises that his master Mavic Chen is insane is brilliantly understated – and Stoney too is terrific here, almost embarrassed to catch himself on the slide to megalomaniacal lunacy. And I’m very fond too of the scientist Rhymnal, as played by John Herrington – as the universe is threatened, and fascists stomp over his planet, he has the innocence to obsess over his experimental pet mice.
T: As with Day of Armageddon, it’s nice to have moving pictures again. It almost makes up for the fact that I’m no longer with Katherine in sun-drenched California, luxuriating amongst the nicest bunch of people I could ever hope to meet, and instead am jet-lagged in Manchester, on my own, in the rain.
The survival of this episode on video reveals some interesting quirks on the part of the baddies – for a start, Karlton goes
about his business with a limp, and I think it’s a real one. I’ve seen Maurice Browning in something else – an episode of The Avengers, I think – and he hobbled in that as well. Actually, Browning’s delivery, expressions and movements are such that he reminds me a little of Servalan... yes, that it! He’s a bald, male Jacqueline Pearce, so good for him! And Kevin Stoney continues to be terrific as Chen – his ability to express himself while wielding a pencil remains second to none, and the bit where he proclaims his suppressed appetite for power is even better. In lesser hands, this sort of bombast would be awful, but Stoney is spot on, pitching it perfectly.
And the video also lets us know that the set design, considering how much the story jumps from location to location, is rather impressive – once again, we get an effective establishing shot (on film) of an expensive-looking jungle with bubbling water pools and smoke. Things don’t look nearly as shoddy as they did on other multi-location sagas like, say, The Keys of Marinus, and this jungle has a very different character to the one on Kembel.
I should also mention how sad I feel that the Daleks exterminated the mice – poor little things, they’re the first mice ever to be successfully disseminated through space and reconstituted on an alien planet, and all they get for their trouble is zapped. Conversely, isn’t it funny that we only see Sara and Steven bouncing through space, even though the Doctor is transported with them? Maybe that’s why Hartnell really fell out with John Wiles – he was livid at his producer for trying to force him to jump about on a trampoline!
February 18th
Coronas of the Sun (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode six)
R: It’s a lovely (albeit irrelevant) episode title. But “coronas” aside, this is all a bit drab. The Doctor and friends capture an enemy spacecraft – again. There’s a lot of anxiety as the spaceship readies for take-off – again. The Daleks drag them off course by overriding their navigation – again. The lovely yarn that Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner wrote this story as a series of “get-out-of-that’s” is all well and good, but it’s a bit unfair on the audience when we see the same trump cards being played over and over.
There’s a nice attempt of character reversal with Steven, though – having been a futuristic space pilot when compared to Vicki and Katarina, he’s here reduced to primitive caveman status alongside the Doctor and Sara. It almost justifies the act of bravado by which Steven illuminates the fake Taranium core and puts himself in a handy Dalek-proof forcefield for the rest of the episode. But it’s all fairly desperate plotting, to be honest – the entire instalment marks time until the Doctor can confront the Daleks, fool them with a forgery he’s just knocked up in ten minutes, and recover the TARDIS.
There is, inevitably, the odd good moment. I love the shift of power when the Black Dalek at first interrogates Chen for his failure in recovering the Core – “You make your incompetence sound like an achievement” is a great line – and is then reduced to justifying itself and its race hysterically. And the subtle way in which Sara shows her disgust for her treacherous leader is quiet and powerful. But there’s a real sense in the repetition here that the story has run out of steam, and that the strengths of character manipulation and machiavellian intrigues suggested in episode four have been lost for good. It’s the first time that this strange epic adventure, which keeps darting about from planet to planet and from tone to tone, stumbles – and that’s a pity.
Never mind. It’s Christmas next week!
T: I hate to sound like a broken record, but Kevin Stoney remains the best thing on offer here (and I say this without the benefit of visuals for this episode – he’s even better when we can actually see what he’s doing). He’s such an inventive and surprising actor, I can only guess at his reaction to Sara calling him a traitor – a sustained music cue suggests he gets a lengthy close-up at this point, but it’s hard to say. None of the lines Stoney delivers are done predictably – even when he says something as perfunctory as, “It appears everything is going according to plan,” it’s done with purred amusement, almost as if he’s daring things not to go to plan, and that he’d actually enjoy the fallout if things went wrong. Then the Dalek Supreme tries to get a word in edgeways, and Chen keeps interrupting, resulting in the Supreme screechingly justifying itself and losing its composure and confidence. Chen is such an arch manipulator – you might think that this scene was included to send the Daleks up, but it doesn’t. It’s there to underline Chen’s brilliance. If he can control this lot with his silver tongue, he’s a powerful enemy indeed.
Otherwise, this is a very strange episode. We’ve now gone from Earth, which has loads of supporting characters and increasingly complex machinations, to the swampy planet Mira, where only one of the guest actors isn’t playing a Dalek. And where there is a lot of blather. It’s almost as if the Daleks’ cunning plan is to take the TARDIS crew away from the interesting places in an attempt to (excuse the phrasing) bore the Taranium out of them. Perhaps this is why Steven behaves very out of character, resulting in a piece of technobabble so horribly contrived, if anything of its ilk appeared in the new series, the Internet would probably commit suicide rather than contain the fan-reaction.
And so we’re halfway through one of the longest (if not the longest, depending on how you view The Trial of a Time Lord) Doctor Who stories ever made. It’s started to tread water a bit, and it doesn’t help that Hartnell delivers the cliffhanger line – that the air outside the TARDIS is poisonous – with all the gravitas of a weatherman. Still, with the Doctor’s party having regained the Ship, it seems that we can somewhat clear the decks and move into the next phase of the story.
Plus, as you say – next up is a Doctor Who episode broadcast on Christmas Day! They never had those when I was a lad.
The Feast of Steven (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode seven)
R: It is some measure of Doctor Who’s popularity at this stage that it was given its own Christmas special. Quite how much you enjoy it depends on how much you appreciate the series poking fun at itself – back when I became a fan, in the very earnest early eighties, the episode was mentioned in hushed tones of horror. Audio recordings had the infamous last line – in which Hartnell raises a glass to the viewers at home, demolishing the fourth wall – cut out. And in subtler ways, earlier in the story, he acknowledges the BBC’s habit of casting actors who’ve already appeared in the show when he recognises Reg Pritchard – here appearing as Man in Mackintosh – as a bit player in The Crusade. The delightful thing about The Feast of Steven is that although you can see the whole thing as a rather clever breaking down of the show’s limitations, it’s clearly all being done in fun, and the audience is required to do nothing more than bask in the comedy.
Which is fine – much of it is actually quite funny. The laconic policemen are great, and the increasingly surreal conversation about rebels stealing a man’s greenhouse is positively Pinteresque. Having Steven disguise himself as a policeman (complete with comical Mersey accent) to rescue the Doctor is a witty comment on the clichés of the show, as well as a nice piece of farce. The second half of the episode, set in a Hollywood film studio, is rather messier, and trying a bit too hard perhaps; it’s all a big chase, consciously or unconsciously parodying the main Master Plan plot, as everyone runs after the TARDIS crew and gets horribly confused. Complete with silent film captions and tinkling piano background, this is perhaps the single oddest piece of comedy ever seen in the series – but its inventiveness is really quite surprising. Hartnell loves comedy, of course – and the exchanges between him and a depressed clown who realises that every gag he wants to perform has already been copyrighted by Chaplin is a real highlight of comic timing.
The only real downer of the episode is the killjoy moment when it bothers to remind us of the Daleks and all that Taranium core business. Not because it’s a bad thing in itself to remind the audience of the ongoing story – but because it all sounds just as silly as the rest of the proceedings! The seasonal runaround also plays a clever tri
ck on the audience – we more easily accept Sara as a fully fledged member of the TARDIS crew, and we’ll be all the more shocked by her death in a few weeks’ time. It’s typical of Doctor Who that even when it promises innocent fun, a darker consequence is around the corner.
It’s of interest that the production team resisted the idea of sending up the Daleks alongside the TARDIS crew. Only six months ago, Nation was fully prepared to use them as comic relief – now, in a fully fledged humorous romp, he’s unwilling to sacrifice them for cheap laughs. It’s a telling shift in tone.
T: I dunno, Rob... one of my chief rules with comedy is that the louder something is, the less funny it generally tends to end up. So it’s ironic that the whole section dealing with the silent film studio is bloody loud – Sheila Dunn screams and wails, Royston Tickner bawls and everyone in the background shouts. Obviously, we can’t actually see what they’re going on about, but the physical comedy here would need to be bloody hilarious for this to work, considering the lines themselves aren’t up to much. It’s really difficult to discern what’s going on at times, but it’s hard to imagine that this is the laugh-a-minute that the script is aiming for. It just sounds messy, with everybody thinking that the way to make it funny is to belt it out.
It’s not all a waste, though. It’s nice to have Norman Mitchell showing up – he’s one of those “I know the face but...” actors without whom Britain wouldn’t have won the war, and he makes for a very sweet and kindly copper in his dealings with Sara. Mitchell could have interpreted the lines he’s given as requiring overbearing comedy exasperation, but the much softer tone that he uses makes him all the more likeable. He even tells the departing Sara to “have a swinging time” – as if he’s trying to be down with the kids!
And it warms my heart that Robert Jewell – here appearing as a clown – finally appears in the flesh; he’s only been “seen” inside Daleks and Zarbi before now, and he’ll spend the rest of the 60s stories he works on as Daleks or the Macra. (Camfield made a habit of promoting extras and people inside monsters so they could have a shot at the limelight – in future he’ll cast John Levene, who starts out his Who tenure operating a Yeti, as Benton – and good on him for doing so.) Jewell also took some off-screen stills, so he’s the reason why we still have the odd image from this, the most elusive and visually unrepresented of Doctor Who episodes. I saw these pictures when missing episode rumours were the meat and drink of fanzines, and they were published with a frenzy along the lines of, “...and The Feast of Steven was never sold abroad, but these pictures were found in Australia, so it could actually exist after all, and if this episode could exist, then statistically all the other episodes could too!”, etc, etc. All of which is terribly amusing, considering the photos were actually taken in England on its only broadcast there, by a man who subsequently moved back to Australia, so they provide absolutely no indication about the potentiality of anything else turning up anywhere, anywhen. But why let the facts get in the way of some returning episode speculation?
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 29
