Day 50 — February 19th 2021
The Feast of Steven and Volcano
The Feast of Steven (The Daleks’ Master Plan — Episode Seven)
It’s a tricky one to judge, this. On the one hand you have to take into account that it’s the Christmas Day episode of Doctor Who. And I mean the Christmas Day episode. There wasn’t another one for 40 years. On the other hand you have to admit that this episode is dreadful.
I can see the thinking, to some extent. The Feast of Steven is the seventh episode of a twelve-part story, but Christmas Day is a day when people will be visiting their relatives, spending time with family, and the television will be switched off. When they started doing Christmas episodes again in 2005 the landscape had changed — television had become a part of Christmas Day where it really wasn’t in 1965. Funnily enough, we’ve started going back to that now, and the kinds of ratings Who enjoyed on December 25th during the Russell T Davies era could only be dreamt of now. Television just isn’t important at Christmas any more.
Anyway. The middle episode of your Dalek episode falls on Christmas Day, and you’re concerned that people are going to miss it. There’s no iPlayer, no repeats, what do you do? You make an episode which isn’t at all vital to the ongoing plot of the episode. I get that, I really do. And I reckon that decision was vindicated, because this episode had over a million viewers fewer than any other episode of the story so far.
But that’s where my understanding of their choices in this episode end. Because they decided to do a comedy runaround for a week, and take a break from the Daleks entirely. The thing that really annoys me about it is imagining the kids in 1965 who’d opened their new Dalek toys that morning (Christmas 1965 was the second big Dalek-themed Christmas for bestsellers, and the last for 40 years). They sit down for the next episode of their favourite TV series and they’re faced with… well, this. There’s not a single Dalek in the episode, and they only get a brief mention when Sara says she’d quite forgotten about them!
It doesn’t help that a lot of the humour in this episode doesn’t really work for me, either. Partly I think it’s because I’m not watching it in context in 1965, so so lots of the Z Cars stuff goes over my head, but at least that section raised the odd smile from me. Everything that happens after we land in Hollywood is pretty awful, and I honestly struggled to get through it.
When The Daleks’ Master Plan was sold abroad it was billed as an 11-part serial, with this one missing from the middle. We skip straight from Coronas of the Sun to Volcano, and I think when I next watch this story I’d be tempted to do the same thing. It’s an interesting curio, but not 25 minutes I fancy sitting through again. 2/10.
Okay, there’s three other things I briefly want to touch on before I leave The Feast of Steven behind.
One; Doctor Who recognises the man in the police station as the same person he stole clothes from in The Crusade, despite this story being set several centuries later. I’m amazed that spin off media haven’t yet suggested that the man is a Time Lord.
Two; I always think of Doctor Who’s line ‘This place is a mad house! It’s full of Arabs!’ when people say that Doctor Who has always been an incredibly progressive show fighting for social justice.
Three; I really like Hartnell turning to the viewers and wishing them a Merry Christmas at the end, and I can’t believe that Peter Capaldi didn’t get to do that in one of his Christmas episodes. When I take over Doctor Who, I’m definitely having them do that.
Volcano (The Daleks’ Master Plan — Episode Eight)
The thing that’s really surprised me about this episode is that it’s not structured how I’d expected. Coronas of the Sun ends with the TARDIS arriving somewhere new and Doctor Who telling his companions that there’s a very poisonous atmosphere outside. In The Feast of Steven that gets revealed to simply be… a bit of pollution. The narration on the soundtrack describes it as ‘no more than inner city pollution’. It’s a bit of an anti climax to an already dull cliffhanger, but I overlooked it because I thought it was used to link Episode Five to this one, for when they cut an episode in overseas sales.
In my head, Volcano opened with the TARDIS landing on… well, a planet of volcanic activity, and the poisonous atmosphere was caused by them, meaning that you can drop an episode without it really mattering. But that’s not the case, because we arrive at a cricket ground before we reach the volcanic planet. So maybe it would have felt like an odd jump in the narrative to overseas viewers? We can’t ask anyone though, because despite this being considered the ultimate Dalek ‘epic’, and the only Doctor Who story (I think?) which was made with overseas sales specifically in mind — with regards to planning to cut an episode out — this one wasn’t actually screened outside the UK at all. Australia bought the serial in 1966 but deemed it too violent, so the sale fell through.
The cricket stuff in this episode feels oddly out of place, and I can’t help but wonder if it was another idea for The Feast of Steven which there wasn’t room for in the script, but was instead reused here? It would certainly fit with the themes of that episode — the TARDIS lands in one BBC programme in Z Cars (well, sort of), so why not show up during some sports commentary? I think I’d have preferred more of this in that episode and we could lose the Hollywood stuff entirely.
Elsewhere, this episode brings back the Monk from The Time Meddler, and for the first time we see something that I really hate — the idea that he’s still a ‘monk’ when he’s not in 1066. That earlier story made it clear that he’d arrived in that period and disguised himself as a monk as it was the most convenient way for him to go about his business. Everyone in the time period respected him because of his perceived position, and it meant that he could hide out in the abandoned monastery. It makes sense! What doesn’t make sense is that he’s still dressed as and referred to as ‘Monk’ here. I can just about accept that having escaped his imprisonment in 1066 he’s come straight after Doctor Who and hasn’t even had the time to change yet, but when the spin off media — books, audios, whatever — call him ‘The Meddling Monk’ it really annoys me. It’s one of my proper Doctor Who peeves.
I’ll tell you what is clever, though, and I’d never noticed before; when he thinks he’s marooned Doctor Who on this planet he calls out to him ‘Perhaps I’ll come back one day and rescue you,’ which paraphrases Doctor Who’s letter to him in The Time Meddler. Truth be told, I was impressed as I thought it was the exact same line, but a quick check proves me wrong there. Still, it’s a neat little call back, in a time when you don’t necessarily expect those things.
Sadly, the middle phase of The Daleks’ Master Plan really does fall flat for me. 4/10.
Something that gets a full 10/10 for this episode, though, is a number of colour photographs taken during production. A few of these have appeared online in recent years, and there’s something genuinely magical about them. I think part of the appeal is that when they show up they’re brand new — it feels like you’re getting a glimpse of something that you’re not supposed to. My favourite one that’s ‘out there’ is this view of the studio taken from up in the lighting gallery, giving a view down on the whole studio and all the sets. The TARDIS (inside and out!), confirmation that the Daleks’ Time Machine was orange, and the little peeks at the Dalek operators waiting to go for a rehearsal. It’s gorgeous.
