Story 174 - The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

In which the TARDIS materialises in a storage bay, and the Doctor is worried that something may be wrong with it. Emerging, he and Rose find that they are in a Sanctuary Base - structures designed for hazardous regions. This is Sanctuary Base 6. In one of the main rooms they see graffiti scrawled on a wall - the words "Welcome to Hell" and a language which even the TARDIS cannot translate. The Doctor deduces that it must be incredibly ancient. They are confronted by a group of Ood. These are bipedal aliens with large bald heads and a mass of fleshy tendrils where their mouths should be. They communicate using hand-held spheres, which appear to be grafted onto their faces. The base security chief, Jefferson, arrives with his team, and they are shocked to see the new arrivals. They are taken to the central command area, where they meet the rest of the crew. This comprises science officer Ida Scott, archaeologist Toby Zed, ethics officer Danny Bartock, and trainee engineer Scooti Manista. In charge is Zachary Cross Flane. All are shocked to see them. Rose queries the howling gale she can hear outside, so Ida opens the roof panel. It is the Doctor's turn to be shocked, as they appear to be on a planet that it is in a fixed geostationary orbit close to a black hole.

Ida explains that the planet has no name, but legend calls it Krop Tor - the bitter pill. It was claimed that the black hole - K37 Gem 5 - was a demon, and it spat out the planet as it was toxic. Zach tells them that they discovered a funnel of stable space reaching out from the planet to a region beyond the black hole's influence, and used this to land here. A number of the crew died in the process - including the original commander. A power source of great magnitude has been detected, and they have come to drill down into Krop Tor to locate it. The base is struck by an earth tremor, and part of it collapses into a ravine. This includes the storage bay where the TARDIS had landed. The Doctor and Rose are trapped here. That night, Toby is alone in his room studying ancient pottery sherds when he hears a sinister voice addressing him. The entity possesses him. His eyes turn scarlet, and the script on the pottery appears on his skin. Scooti is making sure the base is secure when she hears someone exit through an airlock. Looking outside, she sees Toby standing unprotected on the surface. He motions for her to join him. When she refuses, he breaks the window with the power of his mind. The breach alerts everyone, and they find Toby in a corridor, claiming not to know what has happened. When they search for Scooti, they see her lifeless body floating outside towards the black hole.

A number of strange things have been happening. Rose hears a voice on her phone, and Danny hears the computer state "He is awake" instead of its normal door access wording. One of the Ood had also said something similar. The Doctor and Rose learn from Danny that the Ood are a subservient species, who thrive on being told what to do. They are telepathic, and monitors suggest that something is shouting in their heads. The drill reaches its destination, and the Doctor insists on joining Ida on the descent. Donning spacesuits, they travel down the shaft and emerge in a vast cavern, which shows signs of the ancient civilisation which once lived here. There is a huge metal hatch in the ground, covered in the ancient language. Toby becomes possessed once more - witnessed by Jefferson and Rose - whilst the same force takes over the Ood. Their eyes glow red, and they start to attack the crew. They claim that the Beast has arisen, and in the cavern the hatch begins to open...

The lift cable snaps, leaving Ida and the Doctor trapped. In the base, the crew have to defend themselves against the Ood, whose translator globes have the power to electrocute. Toby seems to have been freed of the malevolent presence. Zach is isolated in the command area. Danny comes up with a means of disabling the Ood, but he can only use it from Ood Control. He, Rose, Toby and Jefferson must get across the base whilst avoiding the Ood. They take to the airducts. Zach must aerate these section by section to allow their progress. The Doctor decides to descend into the pit which has been revealed by the opening of the hatch, using the lift cable. In the airducts, Jefferson sacrifices himself to hold back the pursuing Ood - dying when Zach removes the oxygen. Unbeknownst to the others, Toby has remained possessed all the time. Danny's plan - to broadcast a psychic flare that will disable the Ood - works. Zach announces the evacuation of the base using their shuttle rocket.

When the cable runs out, the Doctor decides to drop into the darkness. He falls and lands on a shelf of rock. There are two ornate vases on plinths, and on the walls are drawings that depict a huge red devil and the black hole. He discovers that the beast is close by - a massive, horned being with skull-like features - which is chained up. Rose refuses to leave the Doctor, and the others are forced to drug her. She wakes in the cabin of the shuttle. She threatens Zach with a nail gun, but he refuses to let her go. He has lost too many people already. The Doctor hears the rocket take off. He has heard the Beast speak through the Ood, and knows it to be highly intelligent, and yet what he sees in the pit is pure animal. He realises that this is only the shell, and that the Beast's mind is elsewhere. If he smashes the vases, the planet will tumble into the black hole - but so will the rocket. He elects to do this. In the rocket, the creature manifests itself once more in Toby. Rose fires the nail gun at the cockpit window, and unlocks his safety belt. He is sucked out into space, to fall into the black hole. The Doctor finds the TARDIS as the planet begins to fall out of its orbit. As the rocket crew prepare to die in the black hole, the ship is seized by a tractor beam generated from the TARDIS and pulled towards safe space. The Doctor calls to say that he was able to rescue Ida, but did not have time to save the Ood. After returning Ida to her colleagues, he and Rose continue on their travels.

This two part adventure was written by Matt Jones, and was first broadcast on 3rd and 10th June, 2006. Jones was a long time fan of Doctor Who and had written a number of New Adventures novels and short stories. He was best known at the time of his commissioning for the Channel 4 series Shameless, and the ITV series P.O.W. He had also worked on Children's Ward, as had a number of new series writers. To date, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit are his only Doctor Who TV episodes, though he would go on to write a Series 2 episode of Torchwood after this.
These episodes see the first visit to a wholly alien planet in the revived series. One of the cliches that the series had hoped to avoid was the "all alien planets look like quarries", but here they embrace that. The cavern sequences were filmed in a Welsh quarry, but the use of establishing CGI vistas, plus night filming, allowed them to get away with it.
It will probably surprise you to learn that these episodes were supposed to be quite cheap ones, as a lot of money was going to be held back for a later story. This is why we have the small cast. The alien servitors were going to be the Slitheen, so recycling existing costumes. The Beast wasn't going to be a CGI devil. That later story was shelved, and its replacement became the cheap one, so more cash could go into this. Russell T Davies insisted that the Doctor's relationship with Rose would be pivotal to the defeat of the Beast. It's his belief in her - after all the talk throughout of belief systems - which prompts him to smash the vases that hold the Beast captive.

The cast might be a small one, but it's a good one. Jefferson is Danny Webb, who is rarely off UK TV screens. He was the sole survivor of the penal planet in Alien 3. Zach is Shaun Parkes, who had appeared alongside David Tennant in Casanova, and would go on to work with Matt Smith on police series Moses Jones. Ida is Claire Rushbrook. Toby is Will Thorpe - a regular on Casualty. Scooti is MyAnna Buring, and Danny is Ronny Jhutti. Paul Kasey is the lead Ood, who are all voiced by Silas Carson (Star Wars Episodes 1 - 111, and the Adherents of the Repeated Meme in the previous season). Voicing the Beast is Gabriel Woolf, who had been Sutekh in The Pyramids of Mars back in 1976). His presence in the cast list led many to believe that the last of the Osirans would be back in this, and in a way he was - as the Fourth Doctor names him using some of the Beast's aliases.

Story Arc: The expedition is said to have been sent by the Torchwood Archive, and the Beast claims that Rose will die in battle very, very soon...
Tardisodes:

1. Captain Walker is given his mission to find the power source on the planet orbiting black hole K37 Gem 5. He is shown a notebook full of some ancient writing and informed of many superstitions surrounding the planet. He passes the notebook to an Ood as he leaves, and it says "And the Beast will rise from the pit...".
2. On a spaceship, an Ood hands a case to a man named Curt. It contains the personal effects of the late Captain Walker - including the notebook from the previous prequel piece. As he leafs through it, a monitor flashes up the message "The Beast is awake. He shall rise from the Pit". Controls move by themselves and the book bursts into flames. When a colleague arrives she finds Curt deranged, with the strange alien script on his skin.

Overall, a very good two-parter that builds well, and goes at a gallop in the second half. A great cast and some fine VFX. We'll be seeing more of those Ood soon - as well as one of the Beast's relatives.

Things you might like to know:

• In creating the Ood, Davies was influenced by the Sensorites, from the 1964 Hartnell story - hence the telepathy, big bald heads, and the tendrils here replace their fluffy beards. The influence will be reinforced in their next outing.
• As a pre-existing monster, using the Slitheen costumes might have been cheap, but Davies felt that they might take over the story.
• Ideas for the Beast when this was still an inexpensive show - a young girl or a little old man. The former idea was dropped when the expensive Episode 11 was ditched, and Fear Her was brought forward from Series 3 to replace it.
• VFX firm The Mill came up with a black hole that was based on how scientists think they might actually look. This was deemed not quite visual enough, so something more akin to what Disney's The Black Hole had shown was created instead.
• As you will see from the Tardisodes, both were prequels, and show that there were two commanders before Zach got the job. The Beast also seems to be able to influence things over a very great distance - all the way to Earth - which the episodes themselves don't seem to suggest. Some dialogue referring to the second Tardisode was cut from the broadcast episooes.
• Rose picks up on the slave status of the Ood straight away, but the Doctor doesn't even comment on it. Ordinarily, this would have been the thrust of the whole story. Davies was troubled by this from the outset, which is why he started planning a follow up in which these issues would be raised.
• In Canada, The Impossible Planet was followed by a three month break before The Satan Pit was broadcast - acting as a mid-season cliffhanger.
• When the second episode's title was announced, a small number of people - the kind who ban their kids from reading Harry Potter in case it inspires them to sacrifice the family cat to Beelzebub and take up Black Magic - voiced their concerns. Back when Victor Pemberton had wanted to call his story "Colony of Devils" the title got vetoed for fear of offending the religiously sensitive - becoming Fury From The Deep instead. Move ahead a little and they can get away with Daemons, but the Master's coven isn't allowed to gather in a church crypt - it has to be a cavern under the church. The very next year, "Devils" is allowed, so long as they're "Sea" ones. Chris Boucher, however, won't be able to call his first story "The Day God Went Mad". It gets stuck with Face of Evil. Thankfully, Doctor Who can now happily have Satan Pits and God Complexes.
• Mind you, The Satan Pit was broadcast in the week containing the 6th of the 6th, 2006...
• Horned demons mentioned on screen - those of the Draconians, Daemons and Kaleds. The Tin Vagabonds get another mention in the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, where Sarah states that she has encountered them.
• The closing TARDIS scene - the "stuff of legends" bit - was the last thing Billie Piper recorded before her departure from the series. There was a wrap party for the series after this. David Tennant had to sneak out of this to film a secret scene to be added at the end of the season - Donna Noble's sudden appearance in the TARDIS. Will Thorp and MyAnna Buring had to get up early the next day to jump into a swimming pool - to film their floating in space sequences.
• The Sanctuary Base corridor set was used throughout the Series Two junior "making of" series - Totally Doctor Who. One of the presenters of this will get a crowd scene role in the next story, as well as having to perform at one of the Doctor Who Proms as part of his Blue Peter duties.     

B is for... Benik

The sadistic henchman of Salamander, the Mexican entrepreneur who wanted to become ruler of the world. Theodore Benik was Salamander's deputy, and was based at his Kanowa research centre in Australia. Benik took charge of his leader's personal security guards, and used them to eliminate his enemies. He took great pleasure in doing so. When Jamie and Victoria were captured, it was clear that Benik would employ torture to make them talk - specifically targeting Victoria. Despite his lofty position, he had no idea of the full extent of Salamander's schemes. He knew of the assassinations and blackmailing, but was quite unaware of the secret chamber built deep below the research centre, where a group of people had been duped into causing natural disasters in the belief that they were attacking enemies following a nuclear war. Neither did he know that Salamander's rival Giles Kent was really a co-founder of this scheme.
Once Salamander had been exposed, Benik was captured by the Security Chief, Donald Bruce, and was last seen pleading for a fair trial - something he never gave to any of his own victims. The implication is that he won't get one.

Played by: Milton Johns. Appearances: The Enemy of the World (1967/8).

• This is the first of three villainous roles for Johns in the series. All three are quite different characters. Benik is downright nasty. Guy Crayford (The Android Invasion) is a bit of a dupe, manipulated by the Kraals. Castellan Kelner (The Invasion of Time), meanwhile, is an obsequious politician who will side with whoever he thinks is ahead - even if they are aliens invading his homeworld.
• Johns is one of that select group of Doctor Who actors who has also played an Imperial Officer in the Star Wars Universe. He is Captain Bewil, seen reporting to Darth Vader in the Carbonite chamber in The Empire Strikes Back.
• He has also appeared in the X-Files - in the first movie Fight The Future.

B is for... Bellows

Fiona Bellows was one of the scientists at the Arctic research base which was visited at Christmas, 2014, by the Doctor and Clara. Four of her colleagues were in the sickbay with parasitic creatures stuck to their faces. Everyone was surprised when Father Christmas and a pair of Elves turned up soon after. The Doctor was able to demonstrate that the four figures in the sickbay were really Bellows and her three still active crew mates. They were trapped in a dreamscape created by the parasites - alien Dream Crabs. This dreamscape was eventually broken, and Bellows awoke to find herself at home with her family on Christmas morning. Confined to a wheelchair in real life, Bellows had imagined herself with full mobility in the dream world.

Played by: Maureen Beattie. Appearances: Last Christmas (2014).

• Maureen is the daughter of Johnny Beattie, who is showbiz royalty in Scotland.

B is for... Bellboy

One of the founding members of the Psychic Circus. His speciality was robotics, and he built and maintained the robotic clowns, as well as a number of other automatons. These included a Bus Conductor and a huge robot which later became half-buried in the sands of the planet Segonax, where the Circus made its home.
The Psychic Circus had previously embarked on many long tours throughout the galaxy.
On Segonax, the Circus people became enslaved by an ancient powerful force for evil - the Gods of Ragnarok. They corrupted the Circus, forcing the crew to kill guests for their entertainment. Bellboy and a girl named Flowerchild escaped and ran into the desert. He sacrificed himself to allow her to get away, but she was killed by the Bus Conductor robot. Bellboy was captured by the Chief Clown and returned to the Big Top, where the Gods punished him. A broken man, and distraught at Flowerchild's death, he programmed his own robots to kill himself.

Played by: Christopher Guard. Appearances: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988).

• Guard's brother Dominic had previously been in Doctor Who - as space pirate Olvir in Terminus. Dominic's partner, Sharon Duce, would go on to appear as Control in Ghostlight in the following season to Christopher's appearance, whilst his own partner at the time - Lesley Dunlop - had been in Frontios, and would make a return appearance in The Happiness Patrol.

B is for... Bellal

A native of the planet Exxilon, Bellal belonged to a subterranean faction which opposed the majority surface dwellers. His group had evolved to be smaller, and their bodies had a natural glow. They did not believe that their great City should be revered as a holy thing, nor that sacrifices should be made to it. Bellal rescued Sarah Jane Smith and the Doctor from one such sacrifice, which involved them being sent down into a cave system to be destroyed by one of the City's defensive automated roots. He joined forces with them and a group of Earth marines against the Daleks, who had allied themselves with the other Exxilons. The surface dwellers wanted the humans and Daleks to help them exterminate Bellal's people.
Bellal joined the Doctor in breaking into the City. At one point he became mesmerised by its defences and was compelled to shoot the Doctor with a Dalek gun, but the Doctor was able to break this mental conditioning.
Once the City had been destroyed, Bellal and his people would have gone on to help other Earth people collect the mineral Parrinium which they needed to combat a space plague.

Played by: Arnold Yarrow. Appearances: Death to the Daleks (1974).

News Update

Haven't said anything about "news" for a while - mainly because there wasn't any really, but the last week has seen some major announcements.
First of all, I was naturally devastated to hear of the passing of John Hurt at the weekend. One of my favourite actors, it was wonderful to see him become part of this mad old show that we all love - and as a Doctor as well. Apparently he was overjoyed that he got to play "Doctor Who". As much as I loved The Day of the Doctor, there is so much of his earlier work I admired - be it his appearance in Alien, or his take on Caligula in I, Claudius, or his performance as Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington Place, or as that infamous naked civil servant Quentin Crisp. So many other performances of note. He'll be sadly missed.

Then, just a day or two later, Peter Capaldi announced that his next season will be his last. A great shame, as he will only have done the three series, and I would have liked to see more of him.
He bows out at Christmas this year.
Mark Gatiss has announced that the Doctor will be meeting up with the Ice Warriors (hopefully plural this time) at some point in Series 10. BBC America says this commences on April 15th - so the UK should look to that date as well.
It has also been made known that Chris Chibnall's Series 11 won't be shown until the Autumn of 2018. Filming won't start until the New Year, with the new Doctor making his first appearance on December 25th and the regeneration.
An announcement as to who this might be won't be made for 6 months or so, so don't bother with all the bookmaking / odds-on favourites stuff going on at the moment. All the usual suspects have been dragged out - including the ones from when Capaldi got the gig. Because of her Broadchurch connections, if they do go for a female Doctor, Olivia Colman obviously stands a very good chance.
Back in November, one UK newspaper quoted one of those fabled "insiders" as saying that Bill would go out with Capaldi and Moffat, to give the new show-runner a blank page with his new series.
Interesting times ahead.

Inspirations - The Daleks

AKA "The Mutants".
Before we look at the story itself, a quick word about where writer Terry Nation came from. He was born in 1930 in a suburb of Cardiff - Llandaff, where many an episode of the post-2005 series and its spin-offs has been filmed. So he was an impressionable youth when the Second World War broke out. Between 1940 and 1944, his home city was bombed repeatedly. At the same time there was the constant threat of invasion. The Germans weren't just enemies, as any child of that period would have told you, they were intrinsically bad. Downright evil. Once the full horror of the Nazi regime had been exposed at war's end, the total evil was revealed. It was only to be expected that when this Cardiff youth wrote about evil beings they would have more than a hint of Nazism about them. After the success of his first Doctor Who script, Nazi surrogates invading Britain was an obvious next step. We'll come to that in a few week's time, but first he has to invent them.
It ought to be mentioned at this point that there was one other major influence on the young Terry Nation - cinema. Many's the time the air raid warning sounded when Nation would be sat in the local movie house enthralled by what he saw on the big screen - often when he should have been in school.
A writing career brought him to London in the 1950's, but it was as a gag writer that he started out, rather than the author of drama (Sci-Fi or otherwise).
He claimed that he got his first break when he sold a joke to Spike Milligan, who felt sorry for him as he looked hungry. He joined Associated London Scripts, which is where he came into contact with a number of Doctor Who's initial writers.
1962 saw him working, fairly unsuccessfully, for Tony Hancock. When Hancock moved away from the BBC, and from Galton & Simpson and from Sid James, his career took a downward turn. A 1963 tour with Hancock saw the comedian often drop Nation's jokes in favour of his old material. ("And what of Magna Carta..? Did she die in vain?!" I doubt if Nation's stuff was that good, so no wonder Hancock reverted to the old stuff).
Asked to write for Doctor Who, Nation discussed it with Hancock, and he argued against it - claiming it was insulting to ask a writer of his "caliber" to write for a kid's show. Nation turned down the gig, but was then promptly sacked - so rushed back to his friend David Whitaker to see if the job offer was still on the table. It was - and The Daleks is the result.
The ghost of Hancock lingers around the series to this day. His one-time agent is Steven Moffat's mother-in-law, and his brother, Roger, became the guardian of the Daleks' legacy as Nation's terrier-like agent.

So what of the story itself. Nation was a very good plot deviser, but had little time for dialogue or for description. Designer Ray Cusick claimed that Nation would sketch only the most basic description of a locale or piece of equipment in his scripts, leaving him and his colleagues to visualise them fully and make the damned things.
Of the Daleks themselves, the main thing Nation stressed was that they should not have arms or legs, and so not look human-like in any way. By way of movement he suggested the Georgian State Dancers, who he had seen on TV. They had stiff gowns which reached down to the floor, and when they moved they seemed to be gliding. Cusick did not base his design on a pepper-pot in the BBC canteen, but he did use one to illustrate their motion to a colleague.
The name "Dalek" Nation claimed to have got from looking at the spines of a couple of telephone directories on a shelf - but no UK volumes are known to have had these letter sequences. Another version of this story has it a pair of encyclopedias. Nation admitted he made this up as a good story for the press. "Dalek" is an old Slavic word meaning "far" or "distant", however. Somehow I don't think Terry was aware of this, but who knows what they talked about at A.L.S. as they were bouncing ideas around.
Once he had his villains, Nation then had to come up with a story to put them in.
It's still 1963, so the shadow of the Bomb hovers over all. The Daleks won't be purely robotic. They are just mobile life-support systems for the survivors of a nuclear war. Verity Lambert had to stress this to Sydney Newman, as he was fiercely opposed to having any BEMs in this show (as in 1950's B-Movie Bug-Eyed Monsters). There are two races of survivors on this alien planet. It has been scarred by war - so let's call it Skaro. (Nation will be the king of naming alien planets after some significant feature about them or their people).
Both sets of survivors are mutants. In the case of the Daleks, the mutation has become stuck, due to their harnessing themselves to technology and trapping themselves in their machines. The Thals, meanwhile, have seen the mutation go full circle and they have become beautiful, blond haired humanoids. They are peaceful and pacifist, whilst the Daleks retain hatred, fear, xenophobia. It is their mentality which makes the Daleks the Nazi surrogates.
They have a dislike for the unlike, as Ian puts it, and want to embark on a genocidal purge of these people who are nothing like them - even though once upon a time they were very much the same.

Through the course of events in The Daleks, the Thals will be taught that they will have to fight if they want to survive. Their pacifism will get them killed. It's the Doctor and a couple of Earth people who show them this - which doesn't say much for human nature.
Nation will have seen any number of movies - Westerns in particular - which have a similar theme. A small community will be threatened by a bunch of baddies (probably led by Brian Donlevy) and someone - usually a stranger in these here parts - will bring them together into some kind of fighting force so that they can defend their homes and rid themselves of the black-hatted villains. Sometimes it will take seven of these out-of-towners to achieve this, in magnificent fashion. (The Daleks will eventually get black hats - but not until Evil of the Daleks).
Last time we mentioned that the Doctor had a touch of the Professor Challenger about him. Literature is littered with obsessed scientists putting people, including themselves, at risk in order to learn something new. The Daleks begins with the Doctor spying an interesting-looking city, and he is determined to give it a closer inspection. When his companions say no, he goes as far as sabotaging his ship to get his own way - putting even his beloved grandchild in harm's way. The Doctor is assuming that the people who built this city must be scientists, and so must therefore think exactly as he does - so no way will they be belligerent and murderous. He doesn't learn from this experience, for he'll still be making the same mistake towards the end of this incarnation (see The Savages).
Time then to mention The Time Machine. Nation will certainly have read the book, but it will be the George Pal movie that will probably be at the forefront of his mind when writing this story. Released in 1960, it sees the time-traveller witness a nuclear holocaust before being thrown into the far future to see the results of the conflict. The Eloi are all blond and beautiful and pacifist - though mainly because they have been bred that way. Their food is prepared for them. They don't have to work, and so can spend their time in a vacuous indolence. The time traveller is shown ancient records of this people. The people manipulating them are mutated creatures that live in an underground city. They are the Moroks, and they use technology whilst the Eloi have none. The Moroks feed on the Eloi.
The parallels are there, but it is by no means a wholesale lift. The Thals might look like the movie Eloi, but they have a hard life, are usually self sufficient, and they have minds of their own. The Daleks do not prey on them. There's no symbiosis between the two races.
They have a shared history and clearly know of each other, but there can't have been any contact between them for generations.
This story started life as a six parter, but the uncertainty over the programme's continuance led to it gaining a seventh episode. Watching it now, it looks like padding, but the whole ordeal thing is one of the basic forms of story-telling. It used to be claimed that there were only a handful of basic story concepts (the quest, the revenge, the reunited family etc), and every drama was simply a combination of these elements. Disregarded now, as there are too many exceptions to this theory. To fill two episodes, Nation sends some of his characters off on a trek through a hostile environment. It is a varied hostile environment at least - with monster-filled swamps and deadly caves. One character is even set up just so he can fall down a hole - because he hasn't bought into this new "we have to fight now" ethos. To make it even more interesting, he is the sibling of one of his fellow trekkers.
I'm surprised Nation didn't have Ian and Barbara's group plant a bomb when they broke into the Dalek city. Where Eagles Dare and The Heroes of Telemark are a few years away from a screening at his local cinema, but he would have known about real life sabotage missions from the war.
Instead they have to struggle further to get into the heart of the city, only for the Daleks to get killed by one of their own bumping into a bit of machinery.

It must be noted that Terry Nation did not leave much of his working-out behind him. It is often extremely difficult to know what is his, and what has gone in from the story editor. It would seem from later Dalek stories that the static electricity stuff has come from David Whitaker, though it has been claimed that this actually came from Mervyn Pinfield. The TARDIS food machine - capable of dispensing bacon and eggs flavoured Mars Bars - is definitely one of Whitaker's. Food machines will be providing full Sunday dinners by the time he gets to The Wheel In Space.
As mentioned above, Nation did not like to go into too much detail in his scripts.
The Daleks are wiped out at the conclusion of this story, after the series' first use of the dramatic Countdown to Oblivion. We know they will be back, with far more Nazi imagery and allusions to HG Wells' other famous novel. (I'm thinking War of the Worlds, but Things To Come also sees a society which has survived a cataclysmic war dividing between those who embrace technology and those who oppose it - so another inspiration for this story). Back in 1964 (as this story has straddled the New Year) the viewers knew this was always going to happen. Despite seeing them destroyed, they ignored what they had watched, and wrote in and asked for a rematch - and the production team were on to it in a flash.
It might have been a different story if the original ending had been retained, however. That's the one where the Daleks and the Thals settle down to live in peace and harmony, with the leader of the Dalek Council showing Alydon how you go about growing food using synthetic sunlight, and Ganatus taking some Daleks on a nature ramble round the Lake of Mutations after they solve that reliance on static electricity business.
For it was originally intended that the war that started all this was the result of a third party. The Daleks blamed the Thals, and the Thals blamed the Daleks, but a spaceship would turn up with another bunch of aliens who would admit it was all their fault, they fired the first missile. Now they are very, very sorry, want to be forgiven, and hope that the two Skarosian races will become friends.
Had they gone with this draft of the story, Doctor Who would probably have ended in 1964.
Next time - The Thing From Another World, and a haunted house.