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Doctor Who Project: Mission to the Unknown

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It is done. The seven great powers of the galaxy are one.

Obviously, far too much time has passed since the Daleks last appeared on Doctor Who in “The Chase,” a whole eight episodes ago. And so, to set up their epic return in the twelve-part “The Daleks’ Master Plan” one story hence, we are treated to Terry Nation’s “Mission to the Unknown” (Story Production Code T/A), a one episode “prologue” also known as the Dalek Cutaway but mostly known because there’s no Doctor in it. At all.

From the start, one imagines “Mission to the Unknown” to be Terry Nation’s vision of the Daleks outside of Doctor Who, with neither the Doctor nor his Companions even mentioned in the episode. The music itself seems a departure from the established series norm, with an excessive use of musical “stings”—quick, crashing, slightly discordant sounds more commonly associated with horror or thriller films.

Opposing the cumbersome pepperpots this time is not a Time Lord but Marc Cory, an agent of Earth’s Space Security Service (also called the Special Security Service in this episode). Had Marc Cory survived the episode, I would have suspected an Earth vs. Dalek spin-off series in the making. But one feels nothing for the deaths of Cory and his unwitting colleagues Garvey and Lowery; they are essentially set dressing.

Ultimately, the episode serves as an info-dump more than a teaser. The actors (Dalek and human alike) fairly stumble over big blocks of text as Terry Nation spends most of the story in expositional mode, setting up the scenario (a thousand years after the last Dalek invasion of Earth) and letting us know what the Daleks have been up to in the intervening years (conquering planets millions of light years away). And now they’re back for another crack at Earth, this time in a great alliance with the galaxy’s six other great powers, noted in the script as Gearon, Trantis, Malpha, Sentreal, Beaus, and Celation. And note, too the black dome of the Dalek Supreme.

As is somewhat typical of early (and, who are we kidding, current) Doctor Who, astronomical terms are thrown around with imprecise abandon. One of the delegates at the Daleks’ alliance meeting, from Malpha, proclaims:

This is indeed an historic moment in the history of the universe. We six from the outer galaxies, joining with a power from the solar system: the Daleks.

Universe, galaxy, solar system? Even the location of the planet Kembel, where the action takes place, is unclear. Cory and his fellows suggest that Earth has a huge galactic network, though, so Earth is no slouch in terms of colonization and, perhaps, conquest.

As with “Galaxy 4” before it, “Mission to the Unknown” no longer exists on film, and given the effects work hinted at in the publicity stills and the script, one hopes fervently that a copy turns up at a jumble sale somewhere after decades in an attic, if only to see the giant headed cone alien walk around.

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Doctor Who Project: Galaxy 4

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My dear young man, this isn’t a joyride! This is a scientific expedition.

Season breaks in Doctor Who give the writers a chance to step off of the teaser treadmill, as most stories end with a glimpse of the next story to come. So instead of catapulting the Doctor, Vicki, and Steven immediately into yet another perilous setting, the season three opener, “Galaxy 4” (Story Production Code T), by William Emms, starts with a tranquil scene. Vicki is cutting Steven’s hair—in the TARDIS control room, of course—while the Doctor putters around the console, handling what would appear to be another normal materialization. The overarching sense is that this form of time and space travel has become commonplace for the two companions, in an “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Skaro” sort of way.

Once the TARDIS doors open on an apparently lifeless planet, though, the action picks up with a pleasant pace and doesn’t stop for four episodes. No elaborate and detailed exposition here, as our travellers are captured and removed from the TARDIS and then captured again in record speed. After the rather plodding plot presentation in “The Time Meddler,” a bit of immediate action is not unwelcome.

Vicki christens their first captors, squat, apparently vision-less, dome-headed robots, as Chumblies. She’s frankly enamored of them and anthropomorphizes them. Who can blame her? Relative to the Daleks and the Mechanoids, we have soft, rounded robots, albeit with death rays. But then again, Vicki did have a pet Sand Monster before Susan killed it in cold blood, so her cute-meter might need some adjusting.

The Drahvin, emotionless female warriors, quickly replace the Chumblies as the villains in the piece, “rescuing” the Doctor and his companions from the robots. A space conflict between the Drahvin and the Rill, who control the Chumblies, resulted in both parties crashing on this unnamed planet, which will, according to the Rill, explode in “fourteen dawns.” Maaga, the leader of the Drahvin, does not trust the “disgusting” Rill, claiming that they shot her down and killed one of her soldiers, so she holds Vicki as a de facto hostage to force the Doctor to verify the claims. It turns out the Rill were wrong—the planet does not have fourteen dawns left. It has two.

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Doctor Who Project: The Time Meddler

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What do you think it is, a space helmet for a cow?

To end Doctor Who‘s first season, the producers pulled out all the stops in a historical tour de force with a large cast and elaborate costumes aplenty. The second season finale proves equally remarkable, but not for any creatures or effects or epic tales. Rather, Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler” (Story Production Code S) marks the first story where none of the original three companions are present, and we also finally begin to understand something of the Doctor’s backstory. For he is not alone. There’s another time traveller out there, from the same place as the Doctor, with his own TARDIS, a Mark IV, no less. He’s only known in the story as the Monk, but the Doctor knows him as…a Time Meddler.

Of these two remarkable aspects, perhaps the former is the more important, because the show has the confidence to move forward with the Doctor as the central character. Previously, Ian and Barbara played, if not equal roles to the Doctor’s, at least counterbalancing roles, serving as wise and careful adults who keep events from getting out of hand (mostly). They were the literal and figurative teachers supporting the show’s nominal educational mission. The success of “The Time Meddler” is to present a Doctor Who story that is fundamentally about the Doctor and the mythology surrounding him, and it succeeds quite well, arguably the best story of the second season.

“The Time Meddler” could not have been produced earlier in the show’s run, for it relies heavily on the notions of time travel that prior episodes, particularly the historicals, have established. Both the Doctor’s strong reluctance to alter history (“The Aztecs“) and his inadvertent and significant participation in its creation (“100,000 BC“, “The Romans“) inform “The Time Meddler,” as the Doctor must confront one of his own kind who revels in changing history, “disgusting” behavior according to the Doctor. The faults of the Doctor’s TARDIS, elaborated over the course of two seasons, play a role in the story, for the Monk has a far better one that actually works. Even the intentional anachronisms—the Monk makes breakfast with a toaster and electric frying pan in an 11th Century monastery, for instance—play against the established structure of the historical stories, where every last feathered headdress and torn jerkin is properly reproduced by the BBC’s prop department. This is, at last, a time travel story in historical clothing.

While the story does feature the far-too-typical splitting of the party (the Doctor is separated from Vicki and Steven for three of the four episodes) and the inevitable inaccessibility of the TARDIS (underwater thanks to the tides), the Doctor finally has a reason to intervene in events in a historical story beyond the mere desire to escape: he must preserve the timeline. This imperative gives the story a narrative weight that prior historical stories lacked.

Not your typical to-do list.

And indeed, how could anyone not be mesmerized by a story that hinges on preventing the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 by sinking a Viking fleet using an atomic cannon mounted on a Northumbrian cliff…

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Doctor Who Project: The Chase

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Barbara, could I, ah, have your cardigan?

Terry Nation and his Daleks return to Doctor Who in “The Chase” (Story Production Code R), with their own time machine, ready to pursue our heroes through time and space with one aim: to exterminate. The possibilities are endless, the potential locales and eras limitless. And we wind up on a desert planet populated by fish people. And also on Earth three times. And then on a jungle planet with hungry fungi and truculent robots. By the end of the story, one mourns not so much for the departure of Barbara and Ian as for what could have been.

Much like an earlier Nation effort, “The Keys of Marinus,” “The Chase” bounces around from place to place, episode to episode, and as a result, far too much screen time is devoted to establishing the when and what of where the Doctor and his companions have arrived. This influx of exposition overwhelms any sense of anxiety about the Daleks who pursue them just minutes behind in the time and space vortex. And, of course, the intrepid travellers must conspire to get themselves separated from one another in each and every episode. That takes effort, drawing away from any depth of plot.

The action, such as it is, starts on the heels of “The Space Museum,” with the Doctor tuning in various moments in history on the Time-Space Visualizer he insisted on liberating from that eponymous institution. The Time-Space Visualizer is curiously heliocentric, with the names of the solar system’s planets around it, and indeed the entire story resounds with references to the Doctor as human, though likely an unintentional rather than prescriptive description. Shakespeare makes his first appearance in Doctor Who on the Visualizer, and the United States is referenced for the first time as well, as Ian requests a peek at Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

A thousand channels and he winds up on the History Channel

But then, in a fortuitous bit of channel surfing, the Daleks appear, chanting “TARDIS, TARDIS, TARDIS!” as they roll one after the other into their own time machine, ready to chase the Doctor and chums through time and space as revenge for the foiled invasion of Earth. They don’t seem overly concerned about the Doctor’s seeming destruction of their species on Skaro way back when, just the whole Earth thing. Because turning the Earth into a hollow spaceship to fly it around the galaxy was totally going to work.

Of course, our time travellers can’t just leave, because the party is split up on the desert planet Aridius, adding yet another lazy planet name to the Doctor Who canon. The fishy Aridians, whose planet was once water covered and who live in fear of octopus-like Mire Beasts, don’t seem at all surprised by the sudden appearance of the Doctor or the Daleks, who threaten to destroy the Aridian civilization if the Doctor and his companions are not handed over.

Fish men. In a desert.

Thankfully, a Mire Beast breaks through a wall and eats an Aridian, allowing Vicki, Barbara, and the Doctor to escape and meet up with Ian, who has passed out from the first of two head-beatings in this story.

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Doctor Who Project: The Space Museum

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All we have to do is wait here until we arrive!

It took fifteen stories for Doctor Who to finally tell a tale about time travelling rather than time travel. Glyn Jones’ “The Space Museum” (Story Production Code Q) begins the series’ occasional (and frequently contradictory) exploration of the intricacies and oddities of actually travelling across time lines as opposed to merely flitting between different times in search of adventures that can easily be filmed using the BBC’s props and costume warehouses.

When we first meet our travellers in this story, they all stand mesmerized before the TARDIS control console, wearing their kit from “The Crusade” along with blank stares; then, after the TARDIS materializes on a rocky world littered with spacecraft of all kinds, they stand in the same place, wearing their uniforms, their trademark cardigans and blazers and jumpers and knee socks. And the Doctor doesn’t seem to think there’s anything quite remarkable about these sartorial shenanigans, nor the fact that Vicki dropped a glass of water that promptly un-breaks itself.

Still, the Doctor’s curiosity is piqued by the collection of spacecraft from different worlds and eras outside, so a little exploration leads to the titular Space Museum, where our heroes leave no footprints and cannot interact with any of the objects on display nor any of the museum’s visitors or guards. After much wandering through the Space Museum’s labyrinthine corridors, all of which are jumbled with random assortments of gadgets, our travellers find the most interesting exhibit of all (yes, even more interesting than the Dalek shell with helpful notation: “Dalek—Planet Skaro”): they find themselves.

Doctor on Display

And how does our unflappable Doctor deal with this encounter? He becomes positively existential.

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Doctor Who Project: The Crusade

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You arrived?

Yes, in a box.

From the utterly fantastical, web-filled world of Vortis, our intrepid travellers careen back to Earth’s middle ages, landing just outside of Jaffa, where they encounter Crusaders doing battle with Saracens. And you know what? They don’t find that strange one bit. It’s taken them some fourteen stories, but in “The Crusade” (Story Production Code P), our jaded time travellers no longer display amazement at what they discover outside the TARDIS doors. If it’s Tuesday, it must be the Levant, ho hum.

Even when they meet King Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, there’s no real sense of wonder. Ian only wants to persuade Richard, one of the most mythologized of British kings, to help him rescue Barbara (who was this story’s kidnap victim and court intrigue player, just as she was in our last historical, “The Romans“), expecting this favor as payment for the return of the king’s shiny gold belt.

Indeed, the parallels between “The Crusade” and “The Romans” are striking—Barbara is separated from the group and used as a pawn in various court intrigues (Saladin’s court, in this case); Ian spends the entire story trying to rescue her and engaging in sword fights; and the Doctor and Vicki pal around with historical personages, dress in period clothing, talk about changing history, and have a few laughs while narrowly escaping at the end.

Given these similarities, why, then does “The Crusade” rank as perhaps the finest historical story of all of Doctor Who‘s run? Simply put, the quality of the writing and the acting. David Whitaker’s script provides strong enough characterizations of the story’s historical figures that one does not balk at sequences without the Doctor or the companions. The writing itself flows gracefully—aside from some awkward sequences with Arab characters speaking broken English—resisting even William Hartnell’s legendary efforts at mangling lines.

But then, the story would also work without the Doctor and his companions. For all of Barbara’s escaping and running and being re-captured by the evil El Akir, the story centers on Richard’s attempts to end the war with Saladin; the strongest moments of the story revolve around Richard and his sister Joanna’s arguments over her proposed marriage to Saladin’s brother. It’s as though our time travellers were dropped into a BBC period drama and wander around at the margins of the story. Very little time is given to “sightseeing” and explanations of the strange world in which they’ve arrived. Too, the story remains essentially serious, with only a minor humorous aside featuring stolen court clothing, a tone that helps reinforce the laconic response of the travellers to meeting such significant historical figures.

So what makes “The Crusade” a Doctor Who story other than the presence of the TARDIS?

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