Originally
published in Celestial
Toyroom Issue 395
“The
Daleks'
Master Plan” is
generally regarded as
a classic of early
Doctor Who,
and the most successful product of the chaotic creativity which defined
Season Three. However, some of its most fascinating aspects come not
from the story itself, but from the complex processes behind the scenes
throughout its creation and rewriting.
On Tuesday 6th October, 1964, Dennis Spooner, in his capacity as
Doctor
Who's story editor, briefed
the BBC's Copyright Department to
commission from Terry Nation a new six-part adventure for the
second recording block, with a target delivery date of 30th
January 1965. Nation wasn't keen, and in December gave an interview to
the
Daily Mail were he stated,
“I don't want the Daleks back.
The BBC do. They've insisted on it.” Nation's draft scripts
for
“The
Chase” were finally
delivered in mid
February 1965, and Spooner was required to perform extensive rewrites.
However, Terry Nation was now a household name, and so Spooner and
producer Verity Lambert were soon asking Nation to supply another
six-part Dalek serial for season three. Nation agreed, and on 25th
February was also commissioned for “Dalek Cutaway,”
a one-episode trailer for this new adventure which wouldn't feature the
Doctor or the regular cast at all.
Following the broadcast of episode one of “The
Chase,” which received ten million viewers, the new Head of
Serials, Gerald Savory, requested from Lambert that the next Dalek
serial should be extended from six to twelve parts. This request had
come directly from Head of Drama Sidney Newman, who was responding to a
request from the BBC's Managing Director Huw Wheldon that there should
be more Daleks in the programme (Wheldon's mother-in-law, Mrs L.G.
Stroud, liked the Daleks, and Wheldon believed her opinions reflected
those of the average viewer). On 28th May, Lambert responded that,
subject to negotiation with their respective agents, the upcoming Dalek
serial would be extended to twelve parts and jointly written by Nation
and Spooner.
On 5 July 1965, incoming story editor Donald Tosh briefed the Copyright
Department to commission Spooner for six episodes of
“The Daleks' Master Plan” (Spooner was unable to
commission himself as that would have been a breach of restrictions
regarding story editors writing for their own shows) and eleven days
later Spooner briefed the Copyright Department to commission Nation.
This would seem not to leave Nation or Spooner a great deal of time to
complete their scripts, as the shooting of film inserts was
scheduled to begin at Ealing on 27th September. However, according to
Tosh, extensive discussions concerning “The Daleks' Master
Plan” involving Nation, Spooner, director Douglas Camfield,
incoming producer John Wiles and himself took place, at least a month
before the scripts were officially commissioned. Clearly Nation was
still writing “Devil's Planet” when Wiles decided
to drop Maureen O'Brien from the regular cast, as he notes in his draft
script that “not knowing the name or character of the girl
who will replace Vicki, I have continued to refer to her as Vicki
throughout the script. Her dialogue has been reduced to a minimum to
assist in rewriting her. T.N.” According to Tosh, the point
where he realised Katarina was not going to work as a replacement
ongoing
character was when he received Paul Erickson's early scripts for
“
The
Ark,” episode one of
which was
delivered on
18th August 1965. This would suggest that Nation's draft script for
“The Traitors” (which killed off Katrina and
introduced new companion Sara Kingdom) was written sometime after this
date, since it is clear that some form of character outline had been
provided as his script for this episode notes that following her death,
the Doctor should give “a speech here to cover the character
of the girl, and her belief that indeed she would be the daughter of
the gods.” Nation continues, “I'll leave this to
you as the speech depends on what you have previously
established.”
Although we do not have Spooner's draft scripts for his episodes,
copies of Nation's do exist, and the rewrites give some indication of
how the story developed. Nation's draft scripts appear to have been
delivered sometime prior to the 7th September, because it was on this
date that John Wiles sent Nation a letter thanking him for his scripts,
but also raising a number of suggested changes that had been put
forward by Camfield, Tosh and himself. These mainly related to name
changes, the argument being that, in another two thousand
years, contemporary names will have been corrupted into
something else. Therefore, “Brett Walton,” for
example, becomes Bret Vyon. There was also some concern about the
references to “New Washington,” in that they felt
that by the year four thousand the world would be united, and owing
allegiance to nothing that we would recognise today.
Clearly Nation was following a similar tack to the one he had pursued
when writing
“The Dalek Invasion of Earth” which,
while nominally set in 2164, was actually, for all intents and
purposes, set in 1964. Consequently, the political machinations of
“New Washington” were meant to recall the then
fairly recent political manoeuvrings of US foreign policy, in
particular the Cuban Missile Crisis. In broadly fictional terms, Cuba
becomes Kembel, Kennedy becomes the charismatic Mavic Chen, the Soviets
become the Daleks, and their nuclear missile bases become the Time
Destructor, a device that can blast a planet back to the stone age, and
is powered by Taranium, a name derived from Tarrant (Kate Nation's pet
name for her husband) and uranium. The plot point regarding the process
of mining a full emm of Taranium taking fifty years also points to
this, as Werner Heisenberg, working on the development of the atomic
bomb for Nazi Germany, famously estimated that it would require at
least fifty kilograms of uranium-238 (which turned out to be far in
excess of requirements), and thus that it would take a considerable
amount of time to mine enough of the element to produce such a device.
The production team, nevertheless, felt it would be in the story's
interests to give it a more abstract and universal tone.
However, although the core of the story and the scene sequence remained
the same from Nation's initial submissions through to the camera-ready
scripts, the differences between the final screened version and
Nation's
draft scripts go much further than changes
of personnel and naming. One thing which Nation's scripts do have is a
lot of description: character description, set description, action
description, even suggestions based on his own past experience on how
certain special effects might be achieved, but, for a TV show running
on a small budget, not a lot of dialogue. In the sequences involving
the experimental station in “The Traitors,” for
instance, there are a couple of additional exterior scenes of
Sara Kingdom and her team scouting the area with a pair of "space age
field glasses," using walkie-talkies, and taking positions before
making their attack. These scenes, which were later
dropped,
have a cinematic feel not typical of BBC
television at that time. Nevertheless, although the final version does
contain more
in the way of dialogue and explanation, it still remains one of the
more visual stories of
Doctor Who's
history: Karlton's special force,
the “Technix,” for instance, who were deliberately
all cast to resemble Maurice Browning so as to suggest that they might
be clones of Karlton, were an almost entirely visual detail which is,
consequently, largely lost to current audiences. The final version,
therefore, retains the visual flavour of Nation's initial concept, but
brings it more into line with the conventions of 1960s public
television production.
Nation's original dialogue also contains less in the way of interesting
and subtle characterisation compared to the final version. A good
example of this is the scene in CCE between Lizan and Roald from
“The Nightmare Begins.” In the draft script (in
which the two characters are men called “Reinman”
and “Gilson”), both speak of their respect and
admiration for Mavic Chen, and the plot point is established that Chen
has claimed that he is taking a holiday. The final version, although
conveying the same plot point and also establishing that Chen is much
liked by the populace, is made more interesting by contrasting the
views of Lizan, a woman who is a fervent supporter of Chen, with Roald,
a man whose views of the politician are slightly more cynical.
However, the most extensive changes due to Tosh and, to some extent,
Camfield's rewriting of the script relate to the characterisation and
intentions of Mavic Chen. In the original version, Chen comes across as
an uncontrolled maniac, with what the draft script describes as
“a glint of madness and fanaticism,” rather than
the outwardly calm, experienced political player of the final story:
the scene in which Zephon questions Chen's logic in, essentially,
betraying his own people, which in the final version shows Chen
skilfully manipulating his interrogator, in the first draft features
Chen leaping up and toppling his chair as he explodes with rage at the
suggestion. The political one-upmanship as Chen subtly engineers the
deaths of the various delegates is also missing from the original, as
is Chen's suspicion of his Dalek allies. The initial version also lacks
the element of counterplotting as Chen, in dialogue with Karlton,
attempts to outmaneuver the Daleks.
Chen's original plan, also, was much less subtle and, indeed, credible.
The Daleks intend to use the Time Destructor's ability to
“put an entire planet back into the past” to occupy
worlds at times when the inhabitants' technological and social
development is too limited to permit effective resistance. In the first
draft, Chen is aware of this property of the Time Destructor right from
the very beginning and collaborates with the Daleks in order to return
the Earth to an earlier time so that he can take over himself: he says
“the Earth can start again, but without the shackles of
infantile philosophies like democracy. It will be a new and virgin land
which can be shaped... into the image that I design.”
Dialogue indicates that the Daleks will permit him to save fifty
individuals from the contemporary Solar System, who will presumably
become the new ruling elite; however, Chen also maintains a hidden
force, with the intention that these will attack and defeat the Daleks
once Chen's plan has been put into effect.
In the final, Chen is aware that his position with the Daleks and their
allies on the Universal Council is precarious, and his plan, as deduced
from his and Karlton's dialogue in “Counterplot,”
as they engineer an alternative strategy in the wake of the Doctor's
theft of the Taranium, is more complex. Chen's original intention is to
sow dissent and suspicion among the Daleks and their allies, then, once
their invasion of the Solar System is launched, he will counterstrike
with a tactical force hidden on Venus. The destruction of the
Dalek-led attack, would deal a final death blow to the
alliance, and also allow him to begin a justifiable
counteroffensive against the alliance's members, using the incident to
unite the galaxy and ultimately, through military means, the known
universe, under his leadership. Again there is historical precedence,
as this strategy is much in line with the tactics used by
Stalin
to
take over most of Eastern Europe at the close of World War II. Chen's
gambit only fails because
the Daleks have outmaneuvered him, in that the alliance is
simply
a front (this time echoing the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939)
under whose cover the Daleks have assembled both a powerful
invasion fleet of their own and the means to construct the fearsome
Time Destructor. Where the original version has Chen as more of a
Quisling-figure, the final gives him a political acumen in line with
the most successful political leaders of the twentieth century.
The result of the collaboration between Nation, Spooner, Wiles, Tosh
and Camfield over “The Daleks' Master Plan” is to
make it one of the best (and arguably,
the
best) stories of the series' history, combining melodrama with a shrewd
sense of realpolitik. “Master Plan” goes beyond
simple allegory or action-adventure, making it as fascinating now as
when first broadcast.
