Has there been a more important episode of Doctor Who than Power of the Daleks? Possibly only Rose in terms of needing to get everything absolutely right.
I spoke about the impact Dennis Spooner had on the show when I talked about The Web Planet1, and how without a change of impetus the show may well have fizzled out after three years. Well, at the 3 year stage that was still a possibility. It’s not a hot take to suggest that behind the scenes the show was a mess: there was a revolving door of production staff and cast, with the biggest member – the star of the show – next in line for the chop. William Hartnell’s well documented health problems were making it harder and harder for him to perform and meet his commitments to the show; when he finally agreed it was time to step down, the show could have ended right there & then. After all, how can you have Doctor Who without Doctor Who?
If it has been clearly established who came up with the idea of regeneration, then I haven’t heard it – and would like to know if anyone out there has the answer. But what seems to us like part & parcel of the success of the show 60 years later needed someone to come up with the idea in the first place, and the guts to go through with it. This wasn’t just recasting the lead, or making someone else the main character à la Blake’s 7, this is taking your lead character and turning them into someone completely new, while also keeping them completely the same. It’s a genius idea when you stop and think about it; it solved the issues of the day and secured the future of the show indefinitely2. And it was a total gamble: after three years getting to know & love William Hartnell, would the audience still watch if he wasn’t there?
So there’s a lot riding on the replacement: Patrick Troughton. He has to come in, win the audience over straight away, being the same person while also different. Not an easy task, but one he totally pulls off. It’s fair to say that it takes Troughton a few stories to settle on how he’s going to play the character, and a lot of his success comes from having Frazer Hines to play against on screen (and clart about with off), but right from the off he makes an impression. He’s a more childlike Doctor than Hartnell, having to work harder to assert his authority, but if anything he’s smarter than before; it’s just hidden well behind the twinkle in his eye & his outward, clownish demeanor.
Great as Troughton is, though, it needed more than just him to make a success of the change. Reader, come in & meet The Daleks… Nation’s creations were the obvious choice to usher in the new Doctor; in fact, if you’re going to have a recurring element come back to help ease the audience’s transition, then it’s either them or the Monk, and I doubt you could get a good enough story from him. Crucially, though, it’s not Nation that is writing the Daleks this time, it’s David Whitaker – and my hero Dennis Spooner in episode one. There’s two reasons why this matters. Firstly, you have the guy who was there at the start, shaping the first season of Doctor Who and therefore the character of the first Doctor Who – at this point there’s no one better placed to introduce a new version of the Doctor.
Secondly, it’s in the way he writes The Daleks. Whitaker makes them secondary to the plot for most of the story, skulking in the background and growing in menace throughout; Terry Nation would no doubt have them front & centre from the start, as the dominant force. Whitaker puts them on the back foot, makes them sneaky and manipulative; he remembers there’s intelligent creatures inside the pepperpots, and makes the most of that. This not only allows us to focus on the new Doctor, but also leaves room to do interesting things with the colony of Vulcan.
The main thrust of the story is a tale about revolution & back stabbing. It starts off as a murder mystery, before morphing into a very political tale of citizens plotting to overthrow the government – for better or worse. Whitaker is savvy enough to not make either side clearly the right one, there’s shades of grey & good and bad eggs on both sides. But all the time this is going on, the Daleks are becoming more and more powerful, the tension and menace building and building until it all comes to a head at the end. It’s a masterful bit of plotting over six episodes that doesn’t feel that length.
Power of the Daleks is a story so good that they animated it twice – I can’t see many other stories getting that treatment. But for once this is a story I experienced first in a different medium: through audio. having been able to collect every other Doctor’s first story on VHS, Power was a hole that I filled with the cassette of the soundtrack (with bridging narration by Tom Baker). It worked perfectly for me, and I spent many an hour playing it back & enjoying the atmosphere that builds to its crescendo. The animation(s) are fine, but I’m always tempted top just close my eyes and enjoy it that way.
It would be another 8 years before the term “regeneration” would be introduced, and I think it’s a strength of this story that there’s no explanation given to what’s happened to The Doctor; it adds to the mystery, and lets us explore the change through the eyes of the companions: the sceptical Ben and Polly the Believer. It takes real bravery to just change your lead unexpectedly to start with; even more to just handwave it away & hope the audience just gets on board without the sort of explanation that would be demanded nowadays. Thanks to that move, the quality of this story and the new leading man, Doctor Who would carry on until this very day.
COMING TOMORROW: “Half way out of the dark…”
- https://skiesfullofdiamonds.wordpress.com/2023/10/29/26-the-web-planet/ ↩︎
- The “Rule of Twelve” would come along later, and as we’ve seen is totally open to retconning ↩︎
Skies Full of Diamonds 