Oh, my giddy aunt... The Daleks’ Master Plan reaches a point
where everything goes very, very wrong – and typically, it’s the last episode
of the serial written by Terry Nation.
The key reason I’m analysing this as a stand-alone episode is that it
doesn’t really fit in with the framework of the rest of the serial. Predominantly a Christmas episode, there is
no real function to it – it is simply a series of bizarre sketches, climaxing
in one of the most bizarre scenes in the show’s history.
Where to start...?
Rather than just listening to the audio with some telesnaps, which is an
even more confusing experience, I elected to watch an animated recon, available
on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeakujB2nA
. Whilst the animation isn’t perfect by
any means, it fits with the existing telesnaps and helps to make some sense of
the more confusing sections, such as ‘the chase’.
Entitled The Feast of
Steven, a clever play on words hinting at the theme of the episode (it was
originally transmitted on Christmas Day 1965), the story picks up where we left
off last week – a planet with horrifically high levels of poison in the
atmosphere. Of course, the planet is
Earth, and the poisonous atmosphere is high smog levels of an inner-city
somewhere up North.
What makes this episode work, though, is the willing
suspension of disbelief. If we look at
it as a big, silly run-around, then it almost works. Some of it is evidently funny, but only
because of the very metatextuality of it all;
for weeks, the TARDIS crew, in its varying forms, has been running away
from the Daleks, pursued relentlessly across all of time and space. Indeed, the same thing happened in The Chase, which was also a ‘comedy’ in
one way or another. Here though, despite
being part of the ongoing saga – and it surely must be, or the references to
the story arc involving taranium cores and Daleks would not have been included –
the Daleks do not appear. Whilst in The Chase they were used to add to the
comedy, mumbling and stuttering and coughing and falling over, instead Nation
elects to focus entirely on the folly of humans. 
Starting outside a police station – a perfectly normal place
for a police box to appear – the humour is milked from the disassociated police
officers, world-weary and evidently bored of Christmas hijinks. There are some obscure comedic moments – the sequence
with “Man in Mackintosh” discussing his moving greenhouse is rather
entertaining, but the knowing comment made by Hartnell is even better –
recognising him from “the marketplace in Jaffa!” is a metatextual stroke of
genius, highlighting the series’ habit of casting recurring actors as a variety
of different characters is a habit of the show, and one which continues to this
day, with actors returning to the series several decades later.
Hartnell gets some great comedy to deliver here –
particularly in his interview with CID, where he refers to himself as a “citizen
of the universe, and a gentleman to boot!”
Likewise, his disgruntled attitude towards Steven rescuing him,
specifically about being referred to as an old man, is wonderful. The use of false identities is another cliché
of Doctor Who, and so to knowingly
mock the convention is both clever and brave.
Once inside the TARDIS, having escaped from the police in a
farcical scene, we are reminded of the threat hanging over the crew – and about
the Daleks desire for the taranium. I
actually think this episode would have worked better with absolutely no
reference to the ongoing epic – instead acting as a perfunctory bit of
silliness aside from the main storyline, in a similar manner to Mission to the Unknown interrupting the
flow from Galaxy 4 to The Myth Makers. When Sara says “I’d forgotten about the
Daleks”, it is working a signpost for the audience at home, and to some extent
is misleading – bearing in mind the way in which The Chase was structured, we now half expect the Daleks to turn up
too.
The second half of the episode, though, is where things go
horribly wrong. Whilst there is still
some humour here, it is mostly just noise.
Without any visual clips to base our interpretation on, this is just a
mess – on Purves’ audio commentary, he sounds exhausted trying to cover what
exactly is happening, with background shouting throughout.
The arrival of the TARDIS on a silent movie studio lot in
Hollywood allows for even more metatextuality though – the suggestion that the
whole crew are simply players in a drama, or a comedy, throws the audience
completely, predominantly because everything is so cheesy and corny and
over-the-top, it is doing precisely what the show has been avoiding as much as
possible since it started. The scenes
with the two film directors are ridiculous, filled with posturing men demanding
the best, and yet what we are given is pure insanity. The use of diagetic an non-diagetic music,
along with title-cards with captions thrown in, makes us painfully aware that
we are watching a work of fiction, a television show, where actors go to makeup
and wardrobe, collect their outfits and perform. It’s madness...
But that’s what I like about it. It’s awful, and ridiculous, but fun at the
same time. Whilst the audiotrack is a
confusing jumble of noise, what the production team have done is very
clever. We must bear in mind that the
series was recorded ‘as live’ mere weeks before it aired – and that it was on every
Saturday for more than three quarters of the year. In 1965, Saturday was Christmas Day, but the
Doctor and his companions were in a story about alien plotting and death and
destruction; we’d already seen two companions die (depending on your classification
of a companion, of course), and there was still a third to come. This story was emotionally draining and
exhausting. There was, simply put, no
way that the serial could continue over Christmas Day and New Year’s Day
without having the mood lightened. And
as such, it was a brave decision to, instead of throwing in some levity to this
nasty epic, simply do a one-off, crazy chase sequence.
There are some moments of wonder here, though – Hartnell’s
exclamation that “This is a mad house!
It’s all full of Arabs!” is
wonderfully un-PC, and his conversation with a miserable, griping clown is
perfectly delivered – by cutting back and forth to the Doctor and the clown
outside the TARDIS, with all of the insanity and noise in the other parts of
the studio, it allows us to lull in and out of giggles – the complaints that
all of the material the Clown had planned has been “done by Chaplin” is
brilliant, and the revelation that he is actually Bing Crosby, and intends to go
into singing instead of slapstick is brilliant too – “custard pies and Bing
Crosby!”
Finally we reach the relative safety of the TARDIS, and the
most bizarre moment of all – the breaking of the fourth wall. After the episode we’ve just seen, in which
the characters purposefully break down all of the conventions of television, it
is a strange moment that throws us once more – once back in the TARDIS, one
expects the series to return to its de facto position, bringing us back to
normality. Instead, Hartnell practically
leans out of the screen, and wishes “a happy Christmas to all of you at home!”
And I’ll end this by running a title-card with the following
caption:
(And so they all lived happily ever after...)
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