Doctor Who: Mission to the Unknown

There's no Doctor in this Who.

When you tune in for an episode of the Doctor Who TV series, you basically know what you’re going to be in for with any given episode. Chances are that you’re going to see a story about the Doctor and his companions travelling through time and space in the vehicle known as the TARDIS, going on adventures at different points in history or on different worlds. But Mission to the Unknown doesn’t deliver anything you’ve come to expect from this show. In fact, it’s the only Doctor Who serial that doesn’t even feature the Doctor! His travel companions and the TARDIS are also absent.

So what is it all about? Well, BBC1 granted the show an extra episode after the Planet of Giants serial was shortened by one episode, but it was specified that this extra episode couldn’t feature the regular cast. So story editor Dennis Spooner decided to drop a “cutaway” episode into the season to set up an upcoming epic serial called The Daleks’ Master Plan. Terry Nation, who created the alien menace known as the Daleks at the start of the show’s run, wrote this set-up episode with daydreams of a Dalek spin-off dancing in his head. The story finds members of the UN Deep Space Force stranded on a jungle planet called Kembel, trying to fix their spaceship so they can take off. An endeavor that is complicated by the fact that one person in the group seems to have gone mad – and after he’s shot dead during an attack on his pals, he becomes even more dangerous because he’s mutating into a monstrous plant called a Varga. Something that was developed by the Daleks.

One of the Deep Space Force astronauts is revealed to be a Space Security agent – and when Nation was writing about this character, named Marc Cory and played by Edward de Souza, he was envisioning him as being a space age James Bond type. (Complete with the line “Space Security Service, licensed to kill!”) The spin-off show could have been all about Space Security Service agents tracking and attempting to thwart Daleks... but while an pilot episode was written, the show didn’t go into production. And if the thought was that Cory could be the next Bond, that thought didn’t last long, because things don’t go well for the character in this episode. If the spin-off had been made, we would have had to follow a different Space Security Service agent.

The story is set one thousand years after the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and during that time the Daleks have been busy conquering other planets. More than one hundred worlds are now under their control – and the Space Security Service has caught word that they might be plotting something big. Sure enough, they are. They have set up a base on Kembel where the Dalek Supreme will be meeting with representatives of the six other great powers of the outer galaxies to form a war force with plans to conquer Mars, Venus, Jupiter, the moon colonies... and first, and most importantly, Earth. We’ll get to see this plan put to action. But not the next Doctor Who serial. We’ll have to wait through an entire other serial before we get to the next Dalek invasion epic.

The single standalone episode of the show’s original run, Mission to the Unknown is one of the many episodes that have been lost to time – but as with all of the other missing episodes, fans have spent time and effort reconstructing it with still images, animation, or even live-action recreations. This is possible because, thankfully, all of the audio from the missing episodes are still available to listen to, allowing fans to image what would have been on screen... and there are some incredible fan reconstructions out there. 

This oddball episode is easy to skip, since the Doctor and his companions aren’t around, but it’s worth checking out to get a bit of build-up to The Daleks’ Master Plan and to experience some creepy moments where Varga plants advance on the UN Deep Space Force and give some characters horrendous infections. Then, after taking in this 25 minute diversion, you can move on to the next adventure.