The Daleks' Master Plan

Notes

• The twelve episodes of the serial had individual titles. They were, respectively, "The Nightmare Begins", "Day of Armageddon", "Devil's Planet", "The Traitors", "Counter Plot", "Coronas of the Sun", "The Feast of Steven", "Volcano", "Golden Death", "Escape Switch", "The Abandoned Planet" and "Destruction of Time".
• According to the credits, the serial was written by Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner, with the credit "From an idea by Terry Nation" on Spooner's episodes. Script editor Donald Tosh claimed in an interview that the work done by Nation on the serial amounted to less than 20 pages of work, and that he wrote most of his episodes. However, Doctor Who historian David Brunt disputes this, saying that Nation submitted over 30 pages of script for each of his episodes and that Tosh only polished the dialogue and/or cut scenes out for time or budget reasons.
• Possibly because of the multiple authors and/or typists, virtually every conceivable variant of the title The Daleks' Master Plan was used in contemporary documents, though this version is on a plurality of camera scripts and is the most grammatically correct form. During production the story was referred to as Twelve Part Dalek Story on some documents.
• The series' regular composer, Dudley Simpson, did not work on this serial owing to a serious dispute between him and director Douglas Camfield. Some time after the production of the serial The Crusade, the two had a small falling-out. On the next serial that Camfield directed (The Time Meddler), Camfield elected to use percussion music, feeling that it lent to the story's atmosphere. However, Simpson interpreted this as a snub by Camfield, causing the dispute to escalate. By the time this serial had entered production, relations between the two had grown so bad that Camfield refused to even consider Simpson, instead hiring Tristram Cary. The dispute was still unresolved at the time of Camfield's death in 1984.
• Tosh and producer John Wiles would later claim that the scene where the Doctor and his companions celebrate Christmas wasn't in the script originally, and the scene was hastily written by Camfield when the episode ran short due to Hartnell omitting some of his dialogue (it appears on Camfield's camera script). It was indeed common practice at the time for BBC shows to have a direct address to camera for a Christmas episode.
• The original intention was that the police station scenes of the Christmas episode would feature a cross-over with the characters and location of the BBC's popular police drama Z-Cars. However, the Z-Cars production team vetoed the idea, although the Liverpool-area location of the police station survived in the transmitted episode. John Peel's novelisation of the serial references this plan by using the cast names of the Z-Cars actors for the police characters' names.
• The Christmas episode was the only time the series directly broke the fourth wall by addressing the audience. However, Tom Baker would sometimes give his lines while looking directly at the camera. In The Caves of Androzani, the character Morgus would make his private comments as an aide to the camera, whilst Colin Baker delivers one of his first lines as the Doctor directly to the camera as well.
• All twelve episodes were at one time considered "lost". Episodes five and ten were returned in 1983 after being discovered in a trunk inside a Mormon temple in Clapham, South London. Episode two was returned to the BBC in early 2004 by Francis Watson, a former BBC engineer. All three surviving episodes were released on DVD in the UK in November of 2004 in a three-disc set titled Doctor Who - Lost in Time: A Collection of Rare Episodes.
• This was the only Hartnell story that was never screened outside of the UK, which makes recovery of the missing episodes from overseas sources (unlike other missing serials) unlikely.
• Kevin Stoney, who plays Mavic Chen, would return as Tobias Vaughn, another master villain working with an alien force — the Cybermen — against the Earth, in the Second Doctor serial The Invasion (1968). Additionally, Stoney also played Tyrum in the Fourth Doctor serial Revenge of the Cybermen in 1975. A younger version of Mavic Chen appears as a minor character in the Virgin New Adventures novel Legacy by Gary Russell.
• The Meddling Monk's presence in the serial made him the first Doctor Who villain, apart from the Daleks, to make a return appearance, albeit this one being his last.
• The death of Katarina marked the first time a companion of the Doctor had been killed. Sara Kingdom is also considered a companion by some, even though this was her only televised serial.
• Terry Nation would later recycle a few concepts from this serial, one being a similar prison planet to Desperus in Blake's 7 — Cygnus Alpha, where Blake was sentenced to life imprisonment in the first episode. Another was the concept of invisible aliens, featured in his Third Doctor serial, Planet of the Daleks (1973).
• Features guest appearances by Peter Butterworth and Jean Marsh - see also Celebrity appearances in Doctor Who.
• Nicholas Courtney, who played Bret Vyon in the first four episodes of this serial was far more famous in Doctor Who history as having played Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in numerous episodes alongside every Doctor from the Second Doctor through the Seventh Doctor (either in a regular television episode or a charity special in the case of the Sixth Doctor). Courtney has also reprised the role for several audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, including alongside the Sixth Doctor in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor and the Eighth Doctor in Minuet in Hell.
• The story was novelised in two volumes. The first, Mission to the Unknown, consisted of an adaptation of Mission to the Unknown and episodes 1-6 of Master Plan. The second, The Mutation of Time, adapted episodes 7-12. Both were written by John Peel.
• Episodes 1, 2, 4, 5, 7-9 are listed among the first Doctor Who episodes ever ordered to be junked, on 17 August 1967.