C is for... Cory, Marc

A member of Earth's Space Security Service, Cory was sent to the hostile jungle planet of Kembel in the year 3999 to investigate the inordinate amount of space traffic which had been reported around that inhospitable world. He travelled there in a spacecraft operated by astronaut Gordon Lowery and his co-pilot Jeff Garvey, keeping his identity and purpose concealed. The ship crash-landed, and Cory had to assist with repairs. One alien spaceship in particular had interested the authorities - one belonging to the Daleks. Cory found out that the Daleks were planning an attack on the rest of the cosmos, beginning with the Solar System. To achieve this aim, they had assembled an alliance composed of members from the outer galaxies. Garvey became infected with the venom from a Varga Plant, and Cory was forced to kill him. He told Lowery of his mission, and of how he was licenced to appropriate his spaceship and to kill without compunction if necessary. Later, Lowery was also infected, and Cory had to kill him as well. The Daleks found the ship and destroyed it. Cory recorded his findings, intending to fire the message into space using a rocket, but he was tracked down by a Dalek patrol and exterminated before he could do so.

Played by: Edward de Souza. Appearances: Mission to the Unknown (1965).

• Terry Nation clearly had James Bond in mind when he created Cory, as he actually uses the phrase "licenced to kill" at one point. The plan was to spin the Daleks off into their own TV series, with a group of space secret agents as the new protagonists.
• De Souza, whose name derives from Portuguese-Indian descent, has strong Hammer connections, having appeared in The Phantom of the Opera, and Kiss of the Vampire. He appears in one of the Bond movies - The Spy Who Loved Me - as an Arab sheikh who turns out to be an old university chum of Bond's.
• The Doctor finds Cory's skeletal remains, and his message recording, in The Daleks' Master Plan. He plays it to Bret Vyon, Steven and Katarina, and it is different to the one which Cory has recorded in this episode, and not voiced by De Souza.
• It should be noted that no images of Cory exist from this episode. The only official BBC pictures were of the Daleks and their alien allies (including Malpha chatting up outgoing producer Verity Lambert). No screencaps exist either, as the episode was junked, so the image above comes from one of the fan reconstructions which can be found on You Tube.