30: The Power of the Daleks

Before Watching

Well, I’ve already mentioned the Daleks on a conveyor belt memory. That kind of dominates all of my thoughts about this story, and I can’t say that I have any great recollections of reading the synopsis years ago. I obviously did, since I read synopses of every Hartnell story and every Troughton story, but it just hasn’t stuck.

I’ll be interested in a couple of things particularly. The way the Doctor’s relationship with Ben and Polly develops is one of them, as is the way that the first Dalek story not to be scripted by Terry Nation works out. OK – The Dalek’s Master Plan did have episodes scripted by Dennis Spooner, but this is the first complete Dalek serial in which Terry Nation didn’t script any of the episodes at all. A quick check in my trusty “Doctor Who : The Television Companion” – David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, first published in 1998 by BBC Books – reveals that the story was scripted by David Whitaker. Now, with a Terry Nation script you pretty much know what you’re going to get. My impression of David Whitaker’s stuff, though, is that he’s far more difficult to pigeonhole – he wrote both “Edge of Destruction” and “The Crusade”, for example, and it’s difficult to think of two Doctor Who stories by the same writer that are as different as these two.

I think it’s a shame that this is a full recon. It would have been fascinating to actually see Troughton acting for the first time as The Doctor. You can only get so much from voices and photos, at the end of the day.

After Watching

That was a great story by anybody’s definition. Here’s the basic idea: - the newly regenerated Doctor lands the TARDIS on the planet Vulcan. Yeah, it’s a bit of a coincidence that Star Trek would use the same name for a planet at around the same time (I think that Doctor Who came first, just) Having said that, though, it’s no great surprise considering that Vulcan is a Roman God, and all the planets in our own solar system are named after Roman Gods and Goddesses, with the exception of Earth. The human colonists on the planet are expecting a visit from an Examiner from Earth. Who, unbeknownst to most of them, has been murdered, and dumped in one of the planet’s mercury swamps. All this in the first few minutes of the first episode, mind you. The Doctor is mistaken for the Examiner, which handily gives him the run of the colony. He meets the scientist Lesterson. Lesterson has found and retrieved an ancient capsule from the planet’s mercury swamps. When the capsule is opened, they find three deactivated and cobwebbed Daleks. That’s a great cliffhanger on which to end the episode, only slightly spoiled by the fact that you knew the Daleks were coming because of the title of the story.

Lesterson and the other colonists fail to see the deadly danger they are in. Instead, some of them see a great tool to help them in their mining, and some of them see them either as a weapon to use for their rebellion against the colony’s government, or a weapon to suppress rebels. Despite the Doctor’s warnings, Lesterson powers up one of the Daleks, who pretends to be his servant. This enables him to reactivate the other two Daleks, and then to obtain raw materials and power to begin manufacturing more Daleks on the previously mentioned conveyor belt. Once the Daleks are ready they attack the humans, rebels and government forces alike, and only the Doctor can save the day.

This brief synopsis doesn’t really do this story any justice, but then you ought to watch it yourselves to prove or disprove this. Anyone who thinks all Dalek stories are rather simplistic and samey really should. So, what’s so great about Power of the Daleks?

The first ‘difficult’ regeneration

Patrick Troughton acts extremely oddly at times in the first episode especially, speaking of The Doctor in the third person, as if he really isn’t the Doctor himself, ignoring Ben and Polly largely, and playing that flipping recorder. The fact that this is a six parter for once works in the show’s favour as it allows Troughton the time to grow into the part, and start to develop a relationship with his companions by the end of the story. It’s such a shame that this is a recon, which means that apart from a few very brief fragments we don’t get to see Troughton move, and it’s difficult to tell how much screen presence he has. It’s worth noting that some of the little pegs on which he seems to be hanging his portrayal of the Doctor will gradually fade away in time. I’m thinking of his silly hat fetish, for example, and his overuse of that flaming recorder.

The way that the Daleks are used

This is very clever. Every time we have met the Daleks so far they have been two dimensional malevolent killing machines. This story explores what happens to them, what they are like, when you take their guns away from them. There’s a beautiful use of dramatic irony in this story. Lesterson and his fellow colonists don’t really know the Daleks at all. All they have to go on is what the Doctor says, and they ignore that largely. We, the audience, like the Doctor, know exactly what the Daleks are like, and know that it’s not a matter of IF the Daleks go on the rampage, just when. This makes scenes like those where the three Daleks chant ‘we are your ser-vants’ even more effective. The story adds another facet to the Daleks, since we see their cunning, and their ability to manipulate, which is something we’ve only really seen before in the original Dalek story.

The Political Drama

Yes, underpinning the reappearance of the Daleks is a tense political drama. “The Power of the Daleks” is an obvious title for the story, since the Daleks need power to reactivate and then start reproducing themselves. However it is also an ironic one, since much of this story is about the power of the humans, or rather the human desire for power over fellow humans. These colonists are a nasty bunch, the smart ones are amoral, and the decent ones are fools. The leading Dalek at one stage asks Lesterson “Why do humans kill humans?” What a brilliant piece of scripting that is. Think about it. If the Dalek had just said words to the effect of – you are no better than we are – it wouldn’t have had the same effect, yet essentially that is the conclusion that the Dalek is inviting the viewers to draw for themselves. Lovely writing.

It’s telling that the Doctor advises Ben and Polly that they should all leave quickly at the end of the last episode, since rather than thank them for ending the Dalek menace, the surviving colonists are far more likely to present them with a bill for all the damage that was done in destroying them. That’s just the last example of the wonderfully cynical edge this story has, remarkable considering that it was made in the mid 60s.

Very Good Acting

Bernard Archard brings a touch of class to any production, and he would go on to play Marcus Scarman brilliantly in one of my all time top 10 stories, Pyramids of Mars. You just knew that his character Bragen was going to turn out to be a villain. His self-delusion that he can still control the Daleks once their attack has started is played to perfection, and totally convincing. Robert James as the misguided scientist Lesterson has his own descent into madness, and does so very convincingly, and Pamela Ann Davy puts in a good turn as the rebel turncoat Janley, who is gunned won brutally by the Daleks without warning. It’s hard to think of anyone who doesn’t put in a good performance in this story, helped, no doubt, by the excellent script that they were working with.

Is “The Power of the Daleks” perfect? No, not quite. The only obvious deficiency of the script is in the denouement. It’s just not clear how the Doctor has managed to destroy the Daleks. He has installed something onto the power console, and messes about with the switches, but it’s not clear whether his success was by design or accidental. It’s not explained in any great detail exactly how this works – there’s a hint that the Doctor has overloaded them with power, but it’s not clear, and that’s a bit of a shame, especially considering the excellent if somewhat downbeat end to the episode.

It’s interesting, if ultimately rather pointless, to speculate how “The Power of the Daleks” might conceivably have been done as a William Hartnell story. This may be rather controversial, but I reckon that Hartnell could have pulled it off as well. He’d certainly have had some good confrontations with Lesterson and Bragen. But it would have been a different story, and that’s the point. Doctor Who has now embarked upon a different course from what we’ve seen before, and judging by this first story everyone involved embraced the change whole heartedly.

What Have We Learned?

Daleks can convert electric current into static electricity, but need a large amount of it to really get their motors running.

Daleks can reproduce exceptionally quickly given enough power, raw materials and equipment.

Dalek capsules, like their own time machines, are dimensionally transcendental.

The kind of human being who’d willingly live and work on a colony like Vulcan is a very nasty piece of work.

You don’t have to be Terry Nation in order to write a classic Dalek story, in fact the evidence from this story suggests that it is probably helpful not to be.