Published: October 1989

Edition read: Target first, 1989

Coolest Cover: After the crowded cover to ‘Mission to the Unknown’, it’s perhaps a disappointment to have just William Hartnell and a Dalek in a colour scheme which cries out "Blackpool Exhibition!", but they’re very nicely rendered.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: "At one stage they were taken across a catwalk hundreds of feet above a huge hangar. Within the vast room were hundreds of Dalek saucers, all of them being prepared for launch. Thousands of Daleks were swarming around the base..." (p.137) You can just imagine Jack Kine popping down to Woolworths to clear out their stock of Rolykin Daleks and lampshades.

Childhood Recollections: Again it looks as if I may have read this at some point, but I’m really not sure.

Ramblings: For a number of reasons, adapting the second half of ‘The Dalek Masterplan’ must have presented John Peel with a rather different set of challenges from the first half of the story. Rather than several episodes of gradually building tension and a jaunt from Kembel to Earth and back again, you’ve got two episodes of Christmas and New Year madness, two of the confrontation in ancient Egypt and then the final two episodes to wrap things up. It’s less focused (in part no doubt due to Dennis Spooner’s involvement) and while that may have been a necessity forced on the story by the need to accommodate Christmas and New Year viewing tastes, it also allows (or forces, depending on your point of view) Peel to take a slightly more flexible approach to his source material and the odd event gets moved around. The six episodes are also curious in that they don’t really introduce any new characters of any significance- the alien delegates have a couple of return appearances, and there’s also the Monk’s involvement in the Egyptian interlude, but apart from that it’s very much focused on the Doctor, Steven, Sara, Mavic Chen and the Daleks.

Of all the main characters, the one who comes across best is surely the Monk- it helps having one of the episodes to see Peter Butterworth’s performance, but there’s barely a line that you can’t hear spoken in Butterworth’s voice. Mavic Chen doesn’t quite come across with the same success- ‘Mission to the Unknown’ established that the Daleks intend to dispose of him as soon as they have the Taranium core for the Time Destructor, so much of the time he comes across as vainly bombastic and essentially a dead man walking, while Sara is only developed in a few token directions- she has nightmares over killing Bret Vyon and a determination to defeat Mavic Chen and the Daleks, but while the idea of allowing several months to pass in between the first and second volumes may seem to be a gift to future writers looking to use Sara as a companion in other adventures, she doesn’t particularly come across as having a great deal of room for development.

In many ways, it’s a brave decision on Peel’s part to adapt ‘The Feast of Steven’ in particular, as it’s a Dalek-free excursion into light comedy which dissipates the focus of the earlier episodes. Although the adaptation is particularly faithful, it’s clear that the comic element of the scripts is neither overt enough for the episode to be genuinely funny, nor subtle enough to allow the ongoing story to continue in the background. However, by giving the Liverpool policemen the surnames of the actors originally intended to appear when this particular segment was written as a Z-Cars crossover, if anything it does improve on the televised episodes and allows the reader to imagine what the episode would have been like if Brian Blessed and Frank Windsor had been allowed to make their Doctor Who debuts a little earlier. Similarly, while the segment set in silent-era Hollywood is full of madcap action (and I’d be very surprised if the original episode had William Hartnell dressed as a Keystone Kop and dangling from the back of a police car) the humorous elements come across as "business" rather than either good comedy or good Doctor Who.

Fortunately Peel is on more solid ground when it comes to the climax of the adventure, although again the structure of the original story works against him as the supporting cast (including an ever-decreasing supply of alien delegates) and setting are more or less disposed of in the penultimate episode, leaving the final section of the book with the Doctor, Steven, Sara, Mavic Chen and the Daleks, and a certain amount of space and time for Chen and the Daleks to be defeated and the Time Destructor to burn itself out. Although Sara’s death and the terrible power of the Time Destructor come across well (giving some weight to the fan theory that the First Doctor is never quite the same after he’s exposed to the Time Destructor’s ageing effects), there’s an underlying sense that the other aspects of the conclusion are simply tying up the remaining storylines, and apart from Mavic Chen’s final display of insanity, it doesn’t matter how things happen as long as they happen-but as I say, that’s a survival from the original scripts which Peel if anything improves on, bringing Karlton to justice for his complicity in Mavic Chen’s plan and moving the Monk’s enforced exile on the ice planet from the end of the tenth episode to the very end of the story. The second half of ‘The Dalek Masterplan’ is, by most accounts, not quite as good as the first, but still has the excitement of the Daleks against ancient Egyptian warriors and the tension of a hidden Dalek fleet poised to attack the Solar System, and while Peel’s fidelity to the original scripts isn’t in question, he also manages to bring out the best aspects of what’s there in the overall concepts of the story.