Day 44 — February 13th 2021
Mission to the Unknown
It’s amazing to think that 20 years ago there would have been a run of missing episodes that streteched from Galaxy 4 Episode One right the way up to and including The Daleks’ Master Plan Episode Four. Thirteen consecutive episodes — a three month period — having only missed nine in total from the first two seasons. This gap gives me hope for the future of missing Doctor Who, because that thirteen week run has been punctured by discoveries at either end; The Daleks’ Master Plan Episode Two came back in 2004, and Galaxy 4 Episode Three came back in 2011.
That still leaves several missing episodes between those two, but one of them has been plugged in a really inventive way in the last couple of years. In 2019, thanks to the work of Andrew Ireland and a team of students and staff at The University of Central Lancashire, Mission to the Unknown was recreated as a full-scale live action production.
When I was planning this marathon I debated long and hard about this one. Do I do the soundtrack of the original and then watch the remake? Do I simply do the original and ignore the remake entirely? In the end, I decided to go with perhaps a controversial plan; I’m watching the remake and ignoring the original version entirely.
I don’t feel like it’s a problem. I’ve heard the Narrated Soundtrack of the original before, and I’m sure I will again at some point, but the remake is so good that I reckon it’s a worthy substitute for watching in any Doctor Who marathon. I mean just look at the attention to detail in the jungle set featuring the heroes’ rocket;
This is about as close as we’re going to get to the actual episode turning up, and it’s a huge achievement. Mission to the Unknown is also fairly unique in being the only missing episode I reckon you could do this with. It doesn’t feature any of the regular cast (and it’s fair to say that I’ve zero interest in seeing other remakes with the regulars recast), and we don’t even have pictures of the guest characters from 1965. This is pretty much a blank slate.
Anyway, enough trying to explain my reasoning! On with the show!
Mission to the Unknown (The Daleks’ Master Plan — Episode 0)
This episode received an ‘official’ release via the BBC’s Doctor Who YouTube Channel, so it’s weird to think that it’s the first time the Hartnell title sequence has been applied to a new episode of the show in over 50 years. I’ve not really commented on the titles so far in this marathon, because they’re so familiar and I just take them for granted. But I’ll state here for the record that they’re wonderful, and probably some of the best the show’s ever had.
I wondered if it might be tricky to reconcile what I thought about the episode itself — in terms of the characters and the story — with what I thought about the remake of the episode, but it’s remarkable just how closely the remake follows the original camera script.
There’s a point, for example, where our heroes watch a rocket arrive overhead. On screen it’s achieved with some sound effects and lighting, and by having the actors stare off up above them. ‘Surely,’ I thought, ‘That would have featured a model shot in the original broadcast.’ I even made a note to double check the camera script once the episode was over, and when I did I was amazed to discover that, no, there wasn’t any model shot, or cut away. It was likely achieved exactly the same way in 1965 as it was in 2019.
Indeed, the only real difference between the two productions is that the remake uses model Daleks for a single scene inside their spaceship, cutting to the full-size Dalek props for close ups. It makes sense — it’s a large set with an expensive central prop to try and recreate for just the one scene, and it’s telling that I didn’t actually spot that I was watching models in this sequence, so I think they get away with it.
Anyway, the point is that when talking about Mission to the Unknown, the remake is remarkably close to what we’re likely to see if the original ever turns up, so separating the two isn’t really an issue I need to worry about.
The episode itself is an odd one, because it doesn’t even attempt to explain the absence of the regulars. It seems bonkers in retrospect. We get a brief scene at the end of Galaxy 4 in which Vicki and Doctor Who see the planet Kembel — where we spend this episode — on the TARDIS scanner and wonder what’s going on there… but that scene doesn’t even get a reprise today! The script confirms that it didn’t get a reprise in 1965 either, so I wonder what viewers made of this?
The regular cast were still credited in the Radio Times (although Hartnell is the only one of them who gets a credit on screen), so I reckon people might have wondered what was going on.
And yet… I kind of like it! I think you could probably get away with doing the odd episode like this and peppering them throughout the series in the 1960s. In fact, maybe it would be a better solution to the cast needing a couple of weeks off — simply pop off and have some adventures with the Daleks for a bit! They were at the height of the popularity in 1965, with the Daleks comic running in TV Century 21, the second Dalek Book on the shelves, the release of their first feature film… yeah, you could do this as often as you like and I’m not sure the audience would mind.
And our guest characters are brilliant, too. There’s something a bit bleak about the fact that they all die before the episode is through, but I also kind of like that. It feels like the Daleks are being reset to a serious threat again after the larking around in The Chase. They’re a genuine threat here, and it’s almost as though the programme is saying that you need Doctor Who if you want to defeat them.
We also get the Varga plants. I should be moaning about Terry Nation pulling out his old favourite — plants that are more animal than vegetable — but they’re genuinely scary! They look absolutely ridiculous (in both versions of the episode), but somehow that doesn’t matter. The idea of them is brilliant, and you genuinely feel for the ship captain when he unwittingly gets stabbed with one of the thorns, knowing what’s to become of him.
They’re also responsible for my favourite part of the episode — the really scary moment when the dead Garvey’s hand twitches. It sounds ridiculous, but it actually gave me a fright! There’s something a bit Quatermass about it, and that’s no bad thing.
In some ways this episode feel a bit like 50s science fiction, but whereas that feeling harmed several stories in Season Two, it actively adds to my enjoyment here. Talk of ‘Moon Colonies’ and ‘Dalek Factories’ which should feel a bit odd and out of place somehow work. It reminds me a lot of The Dalek Invasion of Earth — a whole world beyond the edges of the screen which is painted in for us in throwaway mentions.
If there’s one thing which slightly disappoints me in the remake, it’s the Daleks themselves. I feel like that’s just me being difficult, though. There’s something about the look of 60s Daleks which is impossible to recapture (even the ones that attempt it in New Testament Who fall short), and I think you can tell that the Daleks here are cribbed from fans who’ve built their own. As I say, though, I’m being pedantic now!
In all, Mission to the Unknown is a massive success when it really shouldn’t work — and I mean that for both the 1965 original and the remake. As for the original, it’s an episode of Doctor Who that doesn’t feature any of the original cast, and is dropped in between two unrelated stories as an island of its own. And yet it succeeds in being a brilliant episode, and the perfect teaser for the larger Dalek story to come.
The remake is something that I should be really cynical about. A group of university students trying to recreate a 1960s episode of Doctor Who and make it as authentic as possible? It’s a ridiculous idea that could never work. And yet it does! It really does. As I’ve already said, this is about as close to the original as it’s possible to get, and I really hope that having been given the official nod by the BBC this episode will be included on the Blu Ray whenever they get around to releasing Season Three.
It’s a solid 9/10 from me.
