There are two things that really wind the continuity obsessed part of my brain up. The first is when, for whatever reason, an approximate year isn’t given for a story where it could easily be put into the script. Okay, there are lots of times when the year isn’t relevant or even possible to work out (which goes double for stories like “The Mind Robber”) but if we’re dealing with humans of some description, my brain wants to know when these humans are. As I think I’ve possibly made clear by now, my brain really likes to slot things together and as Doctor Who isn’t an anthology (well, not a proper one anyway) but a linked short story collection, it would be nice to know that (within a reasonable window of stories) there’s been some attempt made to keep the universe consistent. Admittedly there are also large numbers of stories in which the future is seemingly changed, and thus space year xxxx might look very different on either side of the change, but you could at least then use the different looks/feels to work out which timeline you’re in. “The Power of the Daleks” is a great one for this as, without knowing which year it’s set in, it’s difficult to fully know just why the colonists don’t recognise daleks for what they are. The other thing that routinely winds my brain up… is when they do put a year in. Though the paperwork for “The Power of the Daleks” gave a year of 2020 that never made it to the screen, the previous story, “The Tenth Planet” had a very definite year of 1986. Whether you like it or not, that story has a definite date and thus my brain always wants to try and fit the events of the story (and, more importantly, the events after the story) into the main Doctor Who timeline which, as we’ll see when we get there, is going to cause problems. The other side problem is that once a story has a definite date set for it, other stories have to be set relative to that and the jigsaw work really starts to kick in. This being the blog of things my brain wants to get onto paper though, we will start with a relatively minor problem of including years in stories. In this case, our nightmare begins with one Steven Taylor.
It took me an absolute age to work out why Steven triggered the continuity part of my brain so badly and it wasn’t until this marathon that it finally clicked. The Daleks’ Master Plan is definitely set in the year four thousand (dear science fiction writers, please avoid always using either round numbers for years or ones that are conveniently an exact number of centuries ahead, it gets very dull). This is part of the dialogue in episode one and thus has to be our starting point. Episode six then has an exchange between Sara and Steven about the use of gravity force to power spaceships and from this we learn that Steven is from several centuries before 4000. We don’t get an exact date but it can give us a very rough idea that Steven is probably from 3200 at the earliest (so his time period was still using it, then some time after that it was abandoned and then a few centuries later we hit 4000). Whilst this handily gives us a rough date for the Mechanus part of “The Chase”, it then begs the question as to why Steven seems to wear clothes that are about 1200 years out of date. It would be the equivalent of Ian going into the TARDIS wardrobe and picking out an outfit that was fashionable in about 850AD. Sadly this is a very common issue with science fiction from the last millennium. The BBC (or whoever is making it) usually has access to a vast selection of modern outfits, a plentiful supply of historical costumes but would always have to make the future stuff from scratch and that means trying to design something futuristic, which usually means a regular outfit with some tin foil stuck to it. In terms of the story though, it really doesn’t make sense. The implication seems to be that we are “now” at the absolute height of fashion and style and we will stay looking like this for the next two thousand years or so. Keep in mind though that, in the previous story, the TARDIS wardrobe seemingly had a dressing up box for those days when Hartnell just HAD to donn ancient Greek battle dress so just exactly why does it seem to stop at the second part of the twentieth century for everyday wear? The reason that I’ve chosen this story to mention this in is because of the long standing question about Steven getting dressed either some time towards the end of episode one or off screen between one and two. The usual question is about who actually helped him get dressed given that his arm is pretty much useless thanks to the sword injury but my brain goes down the more unusual route of just who picked out the outfit. There are three people in the TARDIS at the time. It’s probably pretty safe to say that Katarina wouldn’t have had a clue as to what outfit Steven should wear, which means we get to pick between Steven and Bret. Bret is native to the year 4000 and doesn’t strike me as the fashion historian type. Had there been more recent outfits in the wardrobe then Bret probably would have selected one of those. Which basically means that Steven, our thirty third century pilot, deliberately went for “that” outfit of corduroy jacket and slacks. What’s the betting he has Marks and Spencer underwear on as well to complete the ensemble? The really weird thing is that by the time Zoe gets onboard, the wardrobe will have a field day with her outfits and Leela will even get a range of animal skins to select from. Romana gets to pick a few natty outfits as well. The only explanation is that, for some reason, Steven really wants to wear what is, to him at least, ultra historical outfits. In the animation for “Galaxy 4” it even looks as though he’s chosen a cardigan to wear. I wonder if he has slippers onboard the ship somewhere.
Whilst we’re on the subject of clothes, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” also highlights what is seemingly the other cliche about attire. If an alien is humanoid then they’ll wear clothes. If they’re not particularly humanoid then they’ll seemingly go around naked. “Galaxy 4” is once again an interesting example of this, with the Drahvins in their stylish uniforms and the very alien looking rills…. In their ammonia chambers. In this story though we have an almost unique set of scenes which don’t just conform to this rule but they also raise a really weird question about the future. I’m talking, of course, about the delegates. These have always been a topic of discussion and debate and some of the answers were provided when episode 2 turned up unexpectedly. Mavic Chen (more of whom in a short time) is fully clothed as he’s apparently human of sorts. Other of the delegates are in what look like life support suits and there are delegates in flowing robes and cloaks (handy for when the Doctor needs to infiltrate proceedings). The pale delegate with the black blobs looks like he has some sort of body suit on but it’s not clear if it’s supposed to be his actual skin (and the suit is just there for the costume people to stick things to) or a real body suit. Then there’s the delegate who looks like an angry Christmas tree. Apart from wondering how on earth (or elsewhere I guess) evolution came up with that as a practical design for living, there’s the question of “Are they naked or in a costume?” Is the Christmas tree look some sort of formal attire (and, if so, what’s his day wear like?) OR is the delegate standing around totally naked with his baubles (or equivalent thereof) on display? What is the protocol, I wonder, for these multi species gatherings? If your species hasn’t invented clothes then are the others just expected to accept your nudity as a cultural thing? And yes, Mavic Chen, The Guardian of the Solar System himself. We see quite a few humans of the year 4000 in this story and they all look “normal”. Mavic though, according to one of the few colour photos that exist for this story, is dressed in blue, has white hair/beard and… orange skin? There is the absolutely terrifying thought that, somehow, Doctor Who in the 1960s predicted that Donald Trump would be the President of the USA and so decided that all delusional dictators in the fictional world of Who would have bad orange makeup and very dodgy looking hair. I guess the other possibility, which I would definitely like to see explored, is that Chen is actually of mixed species heritage. He’s Guardian of the whole solar system, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that if other planets do now have life on them that there would be interplanetary marriages? Mind you, that then opens up whole issues over biology and I think we’ll save that for “Delta and the Bannermen”. Option three, which at least has some basis in the dialogue on screen, is that he’s old with a capital ancient. It’s not clear from the script how long he’s been planning this but the fact it’s taken fifty years for the mining to produce enough for the Time Destructor does seem to suggest that he had to arrange for the mining operation to be set up specifically for this purpose, which suggests he was already in a position of power high enough not just to arrange it but also to be able to contact the Daleks and make the promise that they’d get it in fifty years time. Either that or fifty years worth of mining just happened to be laying around in a museum somewhere and Chen stole it, because otherwise why would the Daleks come up with a weapon that they wouldn’t be able to even test for fifty years. Daleks are many things, but patience doesn’t seem to be high on the list of Dalek characteristics.
There is also, weirdly, the question of why the Daleks are even bothering with a Time Destructor (especially one they have to wait for at least fifty years for delivery) when they have a time machine. By now the series has pretty much abandoned the “you can’t rewrite history” stance and, let’s face it, even if there was some sort of moral law stopping you rather than a physical one, the Daleks were never going to obey it. For them, a time machine would be the only extra weapon they needed other than their guns. WIth no hint of Time Lords being around to protect the web of time, all they need to do is pop back to the dawn of whichever planet was winding them up, exterminate the first fish that crawled out of that particular ocean and voila, no more enemy race. And given the time machine also goes through space as well, why didn’t they make the deal with Chen, nip forward 50 years and then exterminate him and just take the taranium? These are probably the most tooled up daleks we’ve ever seen, in terms of the hardware they have access to. Scramble a space ship’s trajectory from the safety of your base? Easy. Lock onto a ship using a magnetic beam with pin point accuracy and drag it off course, piece of cake. Build a sound system that broadcasts your plans to anyone listening in? Already done it. Tooled up and also remarkably thick it seems.
It is also worth noting that, once again, we are in a new season and the Doctor has once again had something of an upgrade to his knowledge and skill set. He seems remarkably knowledgeable about the planet Mira and the Visians and, as we first saw back in “The Sensorites”, he’s exceptionally gifted when it comes to knowing about whatever random spaceship he happens to find himself in that week. Rather worryingly this extends to knowing how to pilot dalek ships (which, I hasten to add, he also knows well enough to know how to use things on them to make a fake taranium core). Just exactly how much time passed between seasons two and three (other than enough to make Steven need a haircut) and what did they get up to in that gap? Is there another dalek story that is as yet untold, in which the Doctor gained all this knowledge? Certainly he’s been brushing up on his planetary knowledge as, along with Mira, he knows all about Tigus and its sun. Mind you, given he also states that “the sun in that particular galaxy has very unusual powers” he should probably brush up on his cosmology and remember that a galaxy is made up of millions or billions of suns. Actually, it’s in a Terry Nation originated script, I’m surprised the TARDIS translation system even attempts to translate scientific terms for us!
“The Daleks’ Master Plan”, when it’s not re-running “The Chase”, brings up huge numbers of questions that we’re never going to get an answer to. In episode one, we even get a debate about which television channel people should watch… now I want to know what’s on all the other stations! Just exactly what is the fetish for bald men all about? How can you be master of a whole galaxy (see “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and scale the issue up by a factor of a billion) and, more importantly, just what exactly did they plan to do with the single-use Time Destructor anyway?