Doctor Who A-Z #30: The Power of the Daleks (1966)

So, here we are. The first Patrick Troughton story, an attempt to sell a “post-regeneration story” to an audience who, two weeks ago, weren’t even aware they were watching a pre-regeneration story. Persuading an audience that this completely different man is, in fact, the same man they were watching last week is not going to be easy. Good thing that, as well as the one obvious new arrival, there’s also a very important figure in the show’s history coming back here. It’s David Whitaker, the show’s first script editor and the author of the series bible that turned C.E. Webber and Sydney Newman’s pitch for a new BBC science fiction show into Doctor Who. If any writer can ensure that the show’s essential spirit isn’t lost in the change of lead actor, it must be the one who defined that essential spirit in the first place.

Even without this unique qualification, Whitaker is almost certainly the best writer the show has at this point, and The Power of the Daleks might be the best-constructed script he’d produced to date. Even the best Hartnell stories can feel a little improvisatory, throwing new threats at the heroes purely because some time needs to be filled, rather than because they affect the story. The Power of the Daleks was meant to be watched over six weeks, but it works phenomenally well as one 150-minute narrative, a focused exploration of an escalating threat with a well-drawn cast of consistent guest characters. The Daleks, here, are a Hitchcockian bomb-under-the-table: we know they’re bad news, and the Doctor knows too, but the other characters can’t see them as anything other than the loyal robot servants the colony’s chief scientist Lesterson believes them to be. And the longer this situation persists, the more unbearable the suspense becomes.

The Power of the Daleks has obviously been influential on the two new series episodes which use the same trick, Victory of the Daleks and Revolution of the Daleks. The most important mark, though, is the one it left on Robert Shearman’s script for Dalek, which introduced the creatures to Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor (and therefore to 21st century television). Both scripts feature a scene where the Doctor warns that one Dalek is easily enough to wipe out a whole city of humans, and in both cases you absolutely believe this is possible. It’s the same basic scene, but Shearman and Whitaker are using it for the exact opposite reason. Shearman needed to re-establish the Daleks as a major threat, but Whitaker is consciously de-escalating. The model for Dalek stories in the Hartnell years – where each one had to be bigger and more epic than the last one – could not continue indefinitely, so Whitaker re-positioned them from spectacle to scare. The Power of the Daleks isn’t about an army of Daleks taking over the galaxy, it’s about a small number of Daleks killing well-realised characters we care about, and the final episode seals the deal with a remarkably grim pan across the corpses of the guest cast.

This de-escalation is often forgotten about when people discuss The Power of the Daleks. The serial is doing so many crucially important things that it’s inevitable some of them will be lost in the shuffle. But it’s very important in allowing the serial to deliver what Whitaker wants, which is a mano-a-mano confrontation between the new Doctor and his oldest enemy. Whitaker’s next script will prove he can deliver a time-hopping, planet-crossing Dalek epic in his own unique fashion; the restrictions of The Power of the Daleks are a deliberate choice. Again, Whitaker’s past contributions make him ideal to deliver this, having turned in the two most paranoid, claustrophobic scripts of the Hartnell era with The Edge of Destruction and The Rescue. Both of those stories had more mundane reasons to adopt this tone than The Power of the Daleks. They were both just two episodes long, and the first was written to get some extra value out of the TARDIS set. Part of the wonder of The Power of the Daleks is that, at an expansive six episodes with fewer budgetary restraints, it is if anything even more remorselessly tense.

It helps that The Power of the Daleks feels, in retrospect, like the perfect curtain-raiser for the whole Troughton era. This claustrophobic suspense, such a rare ingredient in the show’s history, would be the main mode of the show by the next season. Whitaker is certainly attentive to the ways in which the show is changing, even picking up The Tenth Planet‘s baton and injecting a little body-horror with the Dalek production line scene. But even he couldn’t have known what the show would do in the future. What he knows – and what the whole script is designed to deliver – is that he needs to write a moment where the audience realises that this weird stranger is inarguably the Doctor. Had Ian, Susan and Barbara still been travelling with him, they might have had the necessary authority to deliver that verdict, but Ben and Polly are more recent travellers. The only other characters in the show who carry that much weight, as of late 1966, are the Daleks. And so one of Lesterson’s pet Daleks, a creature whose entire plan depends on maintaining its cover as a harmless servant, sees Patrick Troughton’s face and reacts in complete panic, frenziedly shooting its deactivated gun at him.

As brilliant as this construction is – and it’s hard to imagine how the show could have done it better – the final victory comes from the fact that we, as viewers, have already warmed to Troughton so much. We want him to be the real thing. Which is strange, because his performance doesn’t feel like the work of a man on a charm offensive. It’s easy to see why this Doctor, with his consciously irritating recorder-playing and penchant for novelty hats, got pegged as the clownish, Chaplinesque Doctor, but in this story it doesn’t feel remotely comforting. Even by Troughton’s usual standards, he’s a very chaotic presence here, mocking the powerful, keeping his plans to himself and chuckling mischievously at the carnage he unleashes in the final episode.

In the end, though, his plan to defeat the Daleks looks a lot like the impish sabotage that William Hartnell’s Doctor deployed at the end of The Daleks. I wrote in my review of that story that the real power of the Daleks is that they can bring something unexpected out of the Doctor: in this case, the simple fact that he is, actually, the Doctor. The 1960s audience would be well within their rights to reject Troughton. After all, there’s been no prior hints that the Doctor could just change his appearance like this. Whitaker uses the companions to vocalise the audience’s uncertainty: Polly clings to the possibility that this might be the Doctor, a shred of familiarity on a dangerous alien planet (her first!), while the more cynical, streetwise Ben rejects him. It therefore falls to the Daleks, the baddie whose pop-culture profile was threatening to eclipse their parent show, to cement the process by which that show becomes immortal. Troughton’s Doctor might scare us, at this early, uncertain stage. But he also scares the Daleks, and there’s only one person in the universe who can do that.

Next: The Highlanders (1966-7)

Graham’s Archive – The Power Of The Daleks

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