The Power of the Daleks

Imagine it from the companions' point of view: you've been travelling with this mysterious old man through time and space for a little while, you've seen other worlds, aliens, historical figures, and the wonders of the TARDIS itself. And then one day, your guide, your friend, falls down in front of you, seemingly dead. And when you blink your eyes, there's someone new in his place. Someone who knows your name, knows the TARDIS, claims to in fact be the Doctor, but bears no resemblance to him whatsoever. But you saw it happen. But you don't believe it. It is this myriad of conflicting thoughts that faces Ben and Polly now as they are faced with the second Doctor. He's visibly younger than his predecessor, and acts in a mischevious fashion, and plays a recorder now; he doesn't need glasses anymore, and the ring that the first Doctor used to wear and guard against all as if it were sacred has been casually discarded as if it were nothing more than a trinket. Ben is suspicious, he can't come to grips with this concept, but Polly, who was first to embrace the reality of what the TARDIS was capable of, is ready to believe that the Doctor is capable of changing his form on top of everything else she has seen him do in past.

With this uncertainty hanging over them, the TARDIS crew are thrust into the political upheaval of the Earth colony called Vulcan. The Doctor is mistaken for an official from Earth who has come to investigate the goings on in the colony, and through the course of his exploration of the colony he discovers a mysterious capsule that was dragged out of the mercury swamp. The capsule is not empty though, and inside are two inert Daleks, and a space on the floor where a third one was. The chief scientist of the colony has secretly removed and reactivated the third Dalek, and believes that the Daleks are nothing but machines and can be made to serve the colony, and others in the shadows believe that they can be used to aid in the coming rebellion. The truth, of course, is that the Daleks will allow this charade to play out while they quietly establish themselves and feed power to their capsule, which is a Dalek seed ship capable of building an army of machines and placing mutant creatures inside. The Doctor warns everyone of the Daleks' plans but the colonists will not hear any of his protests and blindly allow the Daleks access to everything they request, and by the time they do heed the warnings it is too late and mass exterminations follow.

I really REALLY wish this adventure had some better representation in the BBC archives than the few clips that survive today. Not only is this the historic first adventure of the new Doctor, but these Daleks are cunning mean ones, at their best for the time. I enjoyed all six episodes on audio while in the car and making dinner at a friend's place the other night, and found myself feeling truly cheated for the first time by the stupidity of the BBC when it came to preserving their shows. From all accounts, Patrick Troughton's new Doctor reacted with sheer fear and terror when he came face to face with one of the Daleks, which is something no other Doctor ever did until this season's Dalek from the new series. And the Dalek in question itself appeared to recognize the Doctor right away but continued to play out its role as a servant of the human colonists. A few times through the story you can hear the Daleks restraining themselves and submitting to the humiliation of being servants to an inferior race, biding their time until they can start the killing that they so enjoy. I actually found myself noticing dialogue similarities when it came to Polly rationalizing why Daleks do what they do, and the lines the ninth Doctor himself would say later on in the 2005 series; the truth is, the Daleks are just plain bad, they see no good in anything else, and they're determined to wipe out everything that is not of their creed. They are the ultimate in racial hatred, no conscience, nothing. It's best summed up by one of the Daleks, when it says "We are not yet ready to teach these humans the Law of the Daleks!" which is something no other Dalek ever really says; in future they will just exterminate, or they will be planning some conquest, there will never be any indicator of this being a conscious way of life for the Daleks. Maybe that's down to David Whitaker's writing, which is reportedly something that Dalek creator Terry Nation was not pleased with. Mind you, I personally find that Nation's future criticisms of what other writers would do with the Daleks seemed to stem from some kind of jealousy that his creations were evolving out of his hands; Nation publically condoned the way author John Peel would handle the novelizations of four Dalek adventures into target books, but those books were not really that good. Future scripts from Eric Saward and Ben Aaronovitch would be met with scorn by Nation, but they would demonstrate some good initiative and take the Daleks into the future. I sometimes wonder what Nation would have said about the Dalek scripts for Big Finish's audio range, and indeed about the "new" Daleks on the new series. Probably nothing good, in the end.

One can see (or hear) Troughton trying to find his role as the Doctor after taking over from William Hartnell, but having the Daleks in the script to distract the audience from what has just happened works quite well, so the Doctor doesn't need to do any soul searching and can more or less just deal with the Dalek menace and worry about who he "is" later on. And it won't take long for him to be established and in character; the next televised episode will see him pretty much right where he will be for the rest of his time in the role.

But before we go there, some more adventures in the world of printed fiction. Polly may have accepted that this is indeed the Doctor, but Ben is still convinced, so why not see what effect that suspicion has on the team dynmic in between episodes...

NEXT EPISODE : THE MURDER GAME