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Doctor Who - Mission to the Unknown by John Peel Published: September 1989 Edition read: Target first, 1989Coolest Cover: Alistair Pearson, although it’s even more fun now that we’ve seen ‘Day of Armageddon’ and can distinguish the Spar and the alien delegates- I particularly like the implication of a face on his Warrien- or is it Sentreal? The one on the right hand side wearing a full helmet anyway.The TARDIS dematerialises...with "a wheeze and a groan", surprisingly. Childhood Recollections: By the finger marks I must have read this, but I can’t remember it to save my life. Ramblings: In Target’s tidying-up exercise of the 1980s, as far as the Hartnell era was concerned one title loomed head and shoulders above all others. ‘The Dalek Masterplan’ was, at least until Terry Nation had been suitably buttered-up, untouchable, but once John Peel had adapted ‘The Chase’, the news that it would be followed up with a two-part adaptation of both the twelve-part epic and the prologue ‘Mission to the Unknown’ couldn’t have been bettered if somebody had found William Hartnell alive and well and living in a bungalow in Herne Bay. It’s a brave soul who takes on a task this big, though- not only is the story (or stories) constructed on an epic scale, taking in the far future and ancient Egypt, and the Daleks’ plan nothing less than the wholescale destruction of human civilisation, but it’s also oddly-paced and just when it’s built up a head of steam it digresses into comedy. A word on the structure, then- as with the recent BBC audio release, Peel begins with a recap from ‘The Myth Makers’ and then goes straight into ‘Mission to the Unknown’, with the result that of the impressive 174 pages of the book, the Doctor and his companions are missing between pages 11 and 43 bar a couple of interspersed paragraphs. The device works well and allows us to gain a real sense of the universe in the year 4000, where a group of alien races each have their own sphere of influence and after several centuries, the human race discovers that the Daleks are about to return, not least through the fate of Marc Cory’s mission and Bret Vyon’s return to the planet which is variously referred to as Kembel and Kembal throughout the book. Equally, the alien delegates give a real sense of the wide variety of spacefaring powers in this universe and of the galaxies beyond Earth and Kembel. From the Doctor’s arrival on Kembel onwards, however, the main action of the story builds quickly; although to an extent the casting of Nicholas Courtney has in retrospect made it difficult to see Bret Vyon as a character in his own right, in print it’s clearer just how coolly efficient the character was meant to be, and the sections of the story set in between Kembel and Earth come across as purposeful and focused. One curious effect of splitting the adaptation after the sixth episode of the main story is that it ends (with a temporary lull in the ongoing story) just as the first phase of the epic is starting to run out of momentum- what those of us who are more familiar with the surviving episodes tend not to appreciate is that the sixth episode is basically concerned with getting the Doctor, Steven and Sara back to Kembel and the TARDIS so that the next few episodes of madcap careering through the universe can be set up, and it’s at that point that the pacing starts to become odd. But for the first half of the epic (or the third book in John Peel’s Dalek trilogy, if you want to see it that way) it’s not bad at all, and Peel’s style has enough detail and interest to make this an engrossing read. |
