The Power of the Daleks

The Power of the Daleks is about just that – power, and how it can twist you. Central to this idea is the character of Bragen, the security chief of the colony on Vulcan, Lesterson, the colony’s head scientist, and his assistant researcher Janley. Shortly after his first regeneration, The Doctor lands on the planet Vulcan with his companions Ben and Polly, and quickly discovers a human colony bristling with more political intrigue than The Manchurian Candidate or the American congress, whichever you prefer.

The Examiner from Earth is murdered quite literally just after introducing himself, and The Doctor, possibly hoping to bring the murderer to justice, poses as the Examiner to ingratiate himself with the colony and investigate the place himself. This would have made a pretty good plot for a story as it is, but the introduction of the crashed Dalek factory ship that cranks up the danger level. The Daleks play excellent manipulators here, deviously manoeuvring the humans into giving them the power they need to rebuild a (presumably cloned, judging from their manufacturing machinery) army of Daleks. The Doctor’s warnings of the threat posed by the Daleks go unheeded, as humanity has presumably never publicly had contact with Daleks before, so none of the colonists understand their nature as xenophobic killers.

But perhaps the most important reason why the colonists fail to understand the danger of the Daleks until it is too late, is because the principal movers and shakers on Vulcan see the Daleks as a means to further their own ends. Lesterson sees the Daleks as enormously intelligent servants who can help solve many of the economic problems of the colony, as does Vulcan’s Governor Hensell. Bragen and Janley, meanwhile, believe they can use the Daleks as weapons in their plot to overthrow Hensell’s government. All of them are destroyed when the Daleks, having gotten what they wanted, turn on their former protectors. Lesterson, Hensell, Bragen, and Janley all believe they have power over the Daleks. And that hubris destroys them, as well as Vulcan.

Bragen is the most nakedly ambitious of all the characters in Power of the Daleks. It is slowly unveiled during the course of the story that he is the one behind all the political problems on Vulcan. He successfully has his most dangerous enemy among the Vulcan government, Deputy Governor Quinn, imprisoned. We eventually learn that he masterminded the political instability on Vulcan, having turned a group of disaffected fellow colonists into an armed rebel group. The help of the Daleks allows him to speed up his plan for conquest, taking over from Hensell while the Governor is on a trip to the rural areas of the colony and killing him on his return. To add further to his status as baddest humanoid villain of this story, when he has established himself as dictator of the colony, he orders the murder of the entire rebel group who put him in charge, so that no challenges to his rule remain. The way writer David Whitaker slowly reveals Bragen as the source of all the political uprisings on Vulcan is brilliant, as you see layer after layer of his deception peeled away. 

Janley is, I think, the most interesting supporting character in Power of the Daleks. We first meet her as the vocal leader of political dissent on Vulcan, trying to encourage Lesterson to join the rebel group, and going to ruthless lengths to use the Daleks for her own revolutionary ends. We see how fanatical her devotion to her cause truly is when she conceals Resno’s death in an early experiment on the Daleks from Lesterson. Then uses it as blackmail to prevent the scientist from interfering with her plans. Later, when she is celebrating her victory with Bragen, he casually informs her that the rebels are all to be killed to consolidate his own hold on Vulcan’s government. She is crestfallen here, as she realizes that her ideals have only succeeded in putting a dictator in power. Yet she remains blinded by her original expectations of the Daleks. After the Daleks begin their massacre of the colony, she still believes that they could aid her in defeating the guards. It is Janley who leads one of the Daleks to her squad of rebels, expecting help fighting Bragen’s guards, and she is the most shocked when all her compatriots are exterminated. A minor note – some of what Janley says about the problems of the colony can be interpreted as having vaguely communist overtones. I’m not sure if this was intentional on Whitaker’s part or not, but communist revolutions on colonies in the future sounds like a good idea for the focus of some future Doctor Who story.

Lesterson too dreams of power, but scientific – not political – power. It is through this means that he is most amazed by the Daleks. He is increasingly impressed by their intelligence, and most horrified at his fairly early discovery of the malevolence. Lesterson begins the story just as arrogant and self-centred as the rest of the supporting cast. He doesn’t care about the political instability of Vulcan simply because he doesn’t find it as interesting as the Dalek spacecraft. He wants to use the Daleks as slaves, whether in the mines or as computer engineers. The way he speaks about the scientific breakthroughs he can make with the Dalek’s help shows that he is also keen for prestige in the scientific community, dreaming of a legacy like Einstein or Turing. Either way, he sees himself as holding power – in the literal sense, as he initially controls their flow of electricity – over the Daleks. When he finally sees the Dalek production line at the end of episode four, he understands that they are manipulating him. The Daleks, in allowing the power schemes of the other characters to come true, have taken his power away. Really, Lesterson is the first victim of the Daleks, even though he is one of the last in the story to die. He wants power over the Daleks, but by episode five, the Daleks have power over him. And this is what drives him mad. His last lines before he is exterminated is almost a mockery of the Dalek’s earlier facade of servitude, saying to them, in the Dalek’s own mechanical inflections, “I am your servant.” Lesterson admits that the Daleks have beaten him, but only while allowing The Doctor to destroy them once and for all.

Ah, yes, The Doctor. The most cartoonish of Troughton’s facial expressions on the telesnaps just accentuate what’s gone. But it’s his performance in this story that was the make-or-break moment for Doctor Who. The first ten minutes of Power of the Daleks is probably the most important ten minutes of the show’s history, because if viewers couldn’t maintain their faith in The Doctor, the show would never have lasted much longer. Ben and Polly’s reactions are perfect for an audience getting used to The Doctor’s first change of character. Polly is flabbergasted, but eventually accepts that this odd little man is The Doctor. But Ben is skeptical for the first episode or so, and The Doctor almost punishes Ben for his skepticism by playing mind games with him – speaking in the third person, rummaging through the chest as if it was someone else’s, making up gibberish about a butterfly breaking from its chrysalis, irritating the hell out of everyone with his recorder. Once The Doctor discovers the Daleks, however, he is (almost) all serious. The mind games continue, but instead of his companions, his targets are the colony government and scientists, trying to convince them to destroy the Daleks and discover their motivations for working with the metal creatures. Here was the seed of The Second Doctor’s particular brand of manipulation that we would later see in full force in Evil of the Daleks and Tomb of the Cybermen. He doesn’t only play the fool to put people off their guard about him, as in when he looks for microphones hidden in the fruit bowl in his quarters and tries to break the sonic lock on his jail cell with a dog whistle. But he also finds just the right words to get on the nerves of Bragen, Lesterson, Janley and others in just that way that they reveal their motivations to him. And when the Daleks finally strike against the colony, The Doctor rises to action, leading his friends back to Lesterson’s control room and overloading the Dalek’s power supply, blowing them all to pieces. Why does he take such extreme measures? Well, the Daleks are certainly extreme creatures, and as he put it, “I like to do things MY way!” This proved it once and for all. He’s still The Doctor, and you don’t want to mess with him.

Ben and Polly come off quite well, with very good dialogue trying to get their heads around The Doctor’s regeneration, and when they find themselves embroiled with the increasingly violent Vulcan politics. Ben’s scepticism is an excellent mirror image of Polly’s faith in the cosmic hobo. Polly has some excellent moments of righteous indignation at the unjust imprisonment of Quinn, and the rebels’ working with the Daleks when she is held prisoner in the factory ship. Ben gets a great showcase in episode four helping The Doctor infiltrate the rebel meeting and letting himself be captured so The Doctor can escape. But I think the best Doctor-companion moment comes at the very end, when Ben mentions that The Doctor’s warnings to the colonists about the Dalek threat were not really all that convincing. The Doctor only chuckles mischievously before they are on their way. 

Fanwanky canonicity follows!

No one on Vulcan knew what the Daleks were, so The Doctor knew from this that it was before the Daleks conquered Earth in the mid-22nd century. Perhaps during The Dalek Invasion of Earth, he had done some research and discovered when humanity’s first public contact with the Daleks was. And perhaps it was at this colony on Vulcan. The Doctor, having discovered previously that the Daleks all but wiped out the human colony on Vulcan before the main body of their invasion fleet moved on to Earth, knew that he had to let the massacre happen. It was an established part of history, so he couldn’t interfere. He knew he had to do his best to minimize the damage and destroy this particular Dalek force. But it’s likely that the Daleks from the factory ship would have alerted Skaro when they were reactivated, and the Dalek war fleet set course for Earth for the first time.

Getting back to the story, the Daleks themselves are excellent. They are terribly villainous and devious for the first five episodes, manipulating the humans around them into helping them re-establish their power supply before going on a suitably frightening massacre. The scene late in episode six surveying a city full of dead bodies is suitably chilling, I think moreso with just Anneke Wills’ spine-tingling description over the stark incidental music. The music is another praiseworthy part of Power of the Daleks. It’s spare as to be almost non-existent, and when it does appear, it consists of a low drumming punctuated by a stabbing, low-pitched electronic whistle. It’s gorgeously atmospheric for the scariest scenes in the story, excellent to punctuate the regulars creeping around the Dalek vessel.

Incidentally, the planet Vulcan seen here in Power of the Daleks pre-dates the UK premiere of Star Trek, featuring the planet and race of hardcore logicians, the Vulcan. Star Trek first appeared in Britain on 12 July 1969, according to imdb.com, and Power of the Daleks, featuring the human colony world Vulcan, debuted in Britain on 5 November 1966. This is an entirely nitpicking concern I have over the originality of the word ‘Vulcan’ in this story, which has been so overused thanks to Trek that it can never be mentioned in a new piece of literature for the rest of human history.