The Power Of The Daleks: Ranking - 65

 

The Power Of The Daleks

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben and Polly, 5/11/1966-10/12/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: David Whittaker, director: Christopher Barry) 

Rank: 65

   'I am your servant, Vulcan!' 

'That seems illogical. You have no hands or feet' 

  'Well...you have big pointy ears! I mean...I am your servant!' 

'Did you just shoot one of my men in a red shirt?' 

'No...I exterminated them!!! I mean...I am your servant'

< 

 Usually I find it quite easy to put myself in the place of a viewer seeing DW stories for the first time, whether it be in 1963, 73, 83 or 2023. After all, my collection is pretty equally divided between all eras of surviving telly so I know roughly what other shows the DW stories were up against and how they’d most likely be judged. For the life of me, though, I can’t possibly imagine what it must have been like to have been a DW viewer of this story for the first time in 1966. There we are, three stories into the fourth season, and without a warning, without even a write-up in the Radio Times (who concentrated on the cybermen and the daleks) and the leading man has fallen to the floor of the Tardis, his features have been absorbed into a white light and he’s just woken up with a new face. He isn’t the same age, the same height, the same weight, even the same personality as the person he was just a minute ago. For a while he won’t even refer to himself as the ‘Doctor’ and talks about him in the third person, as if he’s someone else. Even the Doctor’s ring, the most precious thing he owned pre-sonic screwdriver, has just fallen off this new man’s thinner fingers to the floor of the Tardis never to be used again. Series just didn’t do things like that in 1966 (the few that tried it, like ‘Bewitched’ or the James Bond franchise, just ignored the new casting and pretended it was business as usual) and the few series that have tried anything remotely like this since just get compared to DW. Even if you’ve come to this story backwards and know how Patrick Troughton will turn out he’s so shifty and unreliable in these opening episodes you find yourself agreeing with companion Ben: this can’t be the Doctor, he’s an imposter, he’s the opposite of the tough confident safe presence the Doctor used to be he can’t possibly save the day – especially up against The Daleks. The usual story in guidebooks and forums goes that the series takes the safe route by putting the Dr up against the Daleks so the series can return to more normal form, but even this isn’t quite right: this is a story that’s all about people pretending to be something they’re not and the Daleks we meet here aren’t anything like the straightforwardly scheming Skaro natives of their previous four appearances; this lot are shifty, devious, cunning, over-running a Vulcan human colony not by direct invasion but by stealth (and no we don’t meet any Vulcans and no we didn’t pinch it from Star Trek – DW got there first, if only by a few weeks. Vulcan was really popular in 1966 or some reason!) They set themselves up in this story as the harmless servants of the humans, there to help humanity and do all the jobs they don’t want to do and the Vulcans have never seen them before so take them at their word – only the Doctor knows better. And nobody’s listening to him because nobody trust him, including Ben. This is the one story where he can’t bring his usual Doctor authority to bear on the situation – because he hasn’t earned it yet, including with the audience at home (Ben and Polly don’t know the Daleks after all; they only have the Dr’s word for it how dangerous they are and they don’t know exactly how trustworthy this Dr’s words are just yet). Somehow its fitting his first planet should be one filled with mercury – the 1^st Dr was a solid presence in every situation he was in, across time or space, but this Dr is mercurial and unpredictable, changing with the wind. We’ve seen the Daleks do similar things to this since of course and we’ve seen more than enough regenerations for the scenes of the Doctor acting a bit odd to lose its effect nowadays, but coming to this story fresh, for the first time, must have been the single most confusing bit of television 1960s viewers could watch. Somehow, though, something keeps you watching instead of turning off until, slowly, this story goes from being nothing like DW to being the most DW story ever. Even the incidental characters, who resemble the sort of ‘base under siege’ people we’ve just seen in ‘The War Machines’ and ‘The Tenth Planet’ and will see again for the next three years at least, don’t act like any other colonists we’ve ever seen. All of them seem to be lying about something, whether its Lesterson’s insistence on how he came to invent the Daleks, or the true story of how the real examiner came to be murdered, or the true emotions of people on the base (Janley seems to like playing the men against each other buy flirting with all of them; she’s not your usual sort of vetted placid futuristic emotionless drone at all), not to mention that if the Dr really had been an ‘examiner’ he should have been given right to look round the whole base automatically; it feels as if everyone here is hiding something from someone, even when they don’t need to be. Against all this only Ben and Polly are in any way reliable and they get a nice lot to do this story, Ben’s cynicism and Polly’s sarcasm far more explored and pertinent to the plot than in some others than their others (as the only story to feature the 2^nd Dr without at least one of Jamie/Victoria/Zoe along for the ride its notable how independent they are, not taking the Dr’s word for anything and doing investigations of their own – Jamie especially would be following loyally and thus remove a lot of the drive of this story about trust and accepting people at their word. Whittaker will build on this a lot for the sequel ‘Evil Of The Daleks’). Sensibly the production team brought original script editor David Whittaker to write this story and steer the ship, given that he has as good a claim as anyone to have invented what DW is and he cleverly puts together a script that starts off odd, then gradually becomes more normal in stages until by the end the Daleks’ ruse has been revealed and the Doctor has proved himself against his greatest foes, even if he does it through manipulation and suggestion, in a very different way to the 1^st Dr (for a start he pretends to be an ‘examiner’/inspector in episode one after finding a dead body, simply because its the easiest way to investigate what’s going on –a sort of lie the Hartnell Dr would never even have contemplated; its also hard to imagine the 1^st Dr getting a seat suck to his posterior as the 2^nd childishly does here too). After half a story of agreeing with Ben that this new man can’t possibly be the Doctor, you end it agreeing with Polly that he’s still the same underneath it all, with the same characiertistic of bravery, kindness and cleverness, just shown in a very different way (same flagpole; different flags). And out of the ashes DW is reborn and safe (for the next three years, before we got through it all again – only in colour this time). We owe a lot to this story which might not necessarily have done anything best but did it first and is the giant many later towering stories get to stand on that wouldn’t be a quadzillionth as good without this trailblazer to make them possible. The regeneration rightly overshadows this story and so it should; the opening episode of the new Dr checking up in his 500-year-diary (such a great joke!) and looking back at his old self in a mirror have rightly gone down in DW folklore, even though they’ve long since been wiped and restricted to being a sort of folk memory of something nobody under sixty can possibly remember firsthand. The rest of the story is a strong one too though, even if its one of those ‘classic’ stories that’s great in parts rather than all the way through. There tends to be one great powerful moment per episode that overshadows the rest of it: the Dr’s regeneration, the discovery of a Dalek lurking in the shadows; best of all their ‘creator’ Listerson’s discovery of a Dalek production assembly line at the end of episode five where he discovers that rather than four Daleks as he thinks there are millions of the things, all creating themselves as far as the eye can see. Even though its been reduced to a few seconds of surviving material (cut by censors in countries apparently more squeamish than Britain and still miraculously held in foreign archives still decades after the episodes themselves were wiped), the audio soundtrack and a rickety animation, this scene is still one of my favourites in DW, yes even with Louis Marks Dalek toys and cardboard cutout blowups at the back to save money. It’s a huge payoff: the moment the Daleks are proven to be lying and the Doctor is proven to be right and even Vulcan’s biggest denier can’t ignore the Doctor’s pleas anymore. However the moments in between these moments are less interesting (they’re mostly the old DW standbys of getting captured, then escaping) and there are a lot of them this being a six parter, while by 1960s DW standards the acting is...variable (so much of this story depends on Lesterson’s slow crumble from confident belligerent scientists to broken man that actor Robert James is the weakest link on audio, though for all I know he’s brilliant and did it all with his eyes, not his voice – its so hard to tell). Even Troughton isn’t quite as great as he’ll become, though that’s understandable given how hard he hit to the ground running (he has a lot of lines, more than Hartnell had for years) – impressively all the aspects of his Dr are there already, including the recorder and the baggy trousers, though I for one am sorry he dropped his fascination with hats after another couple of stories. Anneke Wills and Michael Craze are great though; the story rather falls apart in episodes 4 and 5 when they have a week off each. The sets aren’t great either, though again it helps a lot seeing actors actually move around them rather than as static photos where you can study them and see how they were put together so that view might be wrong too. So is this a great story or just an important one? As ever its hard to judge this story against most others – they actually ‘exist’ still whereas this one doesn’t, bar a few scraps and photos, and this one is harder to judge than most: rather fittingly for a script that’s all about things not quite being what they seem this one seems to have been filmed to ‘con’ the viewer more than normal with its models and cardboard backgrounds –.but is the script good enough to work despite these problems or not? We know from the likes of ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and ‘Galaxy 4’ how flimsy a great story can feel when we can actually see it, as opposed to imagine it in our heads. Even as a soundtrack its hard to get a full measure on what’s going on as this is such a ‘visual’ work and even the much delayed novelisation (one of the last, as Terry Nation was reluctant to have anyone else write for the Daleks, but was too busy to write them himself) feels quite ethereal and hard to pin down. There’s no denying that ‘Power’ clearly had a big impact on the people who saw it at the time and it continues to be well loved even by those who can only imagine it (at a ranking of #19 in the 50^th anniversary poll, this is the highest of the DW stories with any bits ‘missing’ bar ‘Web Of Fear’ which is 5/6ths complete and thus the missing part is easier to imagine, with ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ next on the list at a lowly #34). Part of that ranking, too, must be because the scraps we have look so good: the shots of the Daleks chanting in unison that stretch on for minutes or the Daleks going round and round in circles as if there’s a whole army (instead of a clever set that enables the four props to run round and round in circles): if the rest of this story genuinely looked like this then it would be in my top ten. I suspect if we had it the whole story wouldn’t hold our interest enough for ‘Power’ to get away with so many conjuring tricks we fail to notice when things go wrong, but that the set pieces would, if anything, have even more impact when seen in the context of the whole story. One thing I do know is that ‘Power’ is a powerful script that takes one hell of a lot of chances and if this story had got them wrong then this would have been the end of the series right here (well, the end of the season maybe) and instead of writing 312 reviews for a 60^th anniversary I’d be mentioning DW in a list of worthy but forgotten scifi serials that ended before their time. ‘Power’ really is that crucial to the DW story and for that alone deserves a high placing in this list.

+This is a story with notably strong cliffhangers but the best of all comes at the end of episode two when we see our first ‘awake’ Dalek, working for the humans and apparently working as a good little slave. Just to rub the point home he keeps intoning ‘I am your servant’ in the monotone Dalek voice. Only the Dr knows the truth and, still a little manic after his regeneration, goes into a long mad emotional speech about how these Daleks are killers and no one in the colony is safe because they’re going to be wiped out, all while the Dalek stays rational and placid and just won’t shut up. We know the Dr’s right of course because we know our DW and like the Dr are desperate for everyone to listen to him, but to the colonists its this untrustworthy interloper whose clearly emotional and mad and you can understand their scepticism against these seemingly calm and placid creatures. It’s a great chilling moment of drama, as two world views come up against each other and clash and we at home are, well, powerless to do anything about it (Whittaker’s scripts are always good at this).

- Not to bring it up again but how exactly did they think they were going to get away with a still photograph of a bunch of Daleks at the back of the set? Till now we’ve had static Dalek bases and they’ve been obvious enough, but this just seems ridiculously hopeful that viewers won’t notice anything. Even on a grainy TV set I’m willing to bet it stands out a mile. I’d love to see the scenes we have properly back in context though as I have a sneaking suspicion we’d all be too wrapped up in the whole thing to notice – but working with what we’ve got this seems a budget cut too far.