Matthew Kilburn reviews the newly released
animated version of the classic 1966 story which introduced the second Doctor.
BBC
Worldwide’s animated The Power of the
Daleks is one of the projects one thought would never take place.
We’d seen cold water poured on the volcanic flames of an animated parts one and
four of The Underwater Menace, and
had been assured for years that more than two episodes of a story would never
be attempted again. Then, almost without warning, The Power of the Daleks was upon us, and BBC Store was no doubt
gratified with many more new customers to strain its servers. As widely
trailed, the budget and timescale only allowed for limited powers of expression
and motion for the characters and must have entailed difficult choices for a
talented team of recreators.
Nevertheless the right calls were made. Polly
largely looks concerned, Ben angry or suspicious, the Doctor enigmatic, amused
or intensely curious or alarmed. Particularly striking, though, is the likeness
of Robert James as Lesterson, which manages to track Lesterson’s transition – I
hesitate to call it a descent – from arrogant and self-important giant of
science within the Vulcan colony’s small talent pool, to deranged defeatist
celebrant of the end times. James’s angular distinctiveness and the way he used
it is deftly captured by Martin Geraghty. The backgrounds grasp the design
principles, blending the practicality of the prefab with flourishes reminiscent
of Imperial India or the Far East, particularly in the governor’s office. There
are details which underline that the visuals are a 2016 production, not from
1966: some of the typefaces used on notices, for example, and the in-joke of a
Magpie Electronics logo on the meteor-detecting device glimpsed fifteen minutes
into episode three, placing the production of the new Power after The Idiot’s
Lantern. However, the dominant aesthetic remains consistent with the original
as seen in the telesnaps: the colonists seem largely to live in a white world
of synthetics with the occasional wood furniture, panelling or office equipment
for prestigious office-holders, while the Daleks emerge from a metal canister
with as much resemblance to an oversized bomb from World War Two as something
from the Apollo missions.
As the
Daleks as good as recognize, this is a story about human beings which questions
how much substance is actually inherent to the concepts by which humans
underpin their society. The Power of the
Daleks is remembered for the (literally) killer question, asked by one
Dalek: Why do human beings kill other human beings? This question is supported
before and after by a series of Dalek difficulties with verbal expression used
for both chilling and comic effect: they find it difficult when outlining their
plans not to start escalating into a chant of superiority and conquest, but
they also have trouble with the concepts of friendship and perhaps also
difference, where ‘different’ is a late substitute in one line of dialogue for
‘better’. I’m perhaps anticipating later iterations of Dalek by emphasizing this.
The Daleks, though, are almost uniform. Even their ‘organic component’ (I’m looking
forward again, in this case to Remembrance
of the Daleks) is produced in an automated factory which would surely win
the approval of Henry Ford. The sight, in this animated version, of the Dalek
mutant being scooped inert from a tank, then brought to pulsing life by a burst
of electricity, suggests the Daleks as self-made Frankenstein’s monsters
determined to root out any hint of pathos. They know they can win sympathy, but
they only want to reflect it through a distorting mirror as death.
Meanwhile,
human beings are shown to be jealous, self-satisfied, greedy, vindictive, and
even lustful. Both supporters and opponents romanticize a squalid little coup
run by members of the officer class as a revolution led by ‘rebels’ rather than
recognizing it as a plot by Bragen and Janley who resent the enlightened
paternalism of Hensell and Quinn. Sides are chosen for the wrong reasons and
there is no guarantee of the establishment of equilibrium at the end of the
story, only that the Daleks have been removed from Vulcan and from a colony
which couldn’t grasp the nature of their threat even when mass extermination
was underway. Yet for all their weaknesses, human beings demonstrate and elicit
sympathy and compassion. They pursue their own agendas, subtly, brutally, with
vacillation, by turns, but these are their own rather than the unvaried path to
the destruction of other life forms championed by the Daleks. The gaps between
people can be filled with poison but they are also, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen
as several are this week, the cracks where the light gets in.
The
achievement and tragedy of this animated interpretation is that it brilliantly
shows its audience how much it is missing by not having access to the destroyed
visuals. The animations restore the structure of an episode and its scenes,
often obscured on audio, but they can only suggest what a performance looked
like. The soundtrack, engineered by Mark Ayres from Graham Strong’s off-air
recordings, are of superb quality and so much is gained by it: though I’d
listened to soundtracks and seen reconstructions before, the use of the same
musical sting to accompany the Doctor’s discovery of a piece of Dalek metal in his
chest in the TARDIS, and his later identification of another piece on Vulcan,
struck me for the first time as an uncanny parallel, as if the viewer was being
encouraged to think that the first discovery somehow, through the undisclosed
workings of the TARDIS and the Doctor’s transformation, led to the second. The
stress laid on static electricity as a power source also recalls The Daleks; David Whitaker delves deep
into his memory of working on the series two and three years before to
reconstruct the Daleks as characters with specific needs and qualities rather
than the icons of universe-crushing ambition they had become.
One of
the appreciated details of the story is that while the Daleks never explicitly
challenge the Doctor, they do recognize him; not only does this signal the
moment when the sceptical viewer (represented by Ben) is expected to stop
questioning the Doctor’s identity, it puts in context the revelation of the
destroyed (but not quite inactive) Dalek machine at the end of episode six. It
might well be a sentry specifically despatched to stop the Doctor leaving. Delving
further into fan theorizing, the suggestion in The Daleks that the TARDIS was reliant on mercury as a vital
component might also explain why the TARDIS came to Vulcan – exhausted by
acting as midwife to the new Doctor’s birth (and having eaten some of his
clothes on the way) it has needed to recharge and departs high on mercury
vapour. It’s also an appropriate setting because the TARDIS is mercurial –
difficult to predict or direct – and the Doctor, always thus, has just
demonstrated how fluid his own character and physical shape are. This Doctor is
perhaps more powerful than Hartnell’s; he prefers recorder-playing to hectoring
and doesn’t need to assert his position on the high ground; he just makes a few
impassioned pleas or flippant remarks and then waits for others to notice that
he’s a reservoir of knowledge. In that respect he’s more godlike; a winged
messenger who waits for those around him to interpret events correctly before
acting. In this way the Doctor completes a transition arguably begun as far
back as The Daleks but accelerated
once Verity Lambert had left the series, where the Doctor ceases to be merely a
witness to change and becomes if not its catalyst, than at least a decisive
force in the shape that change will take. The
Power of the Daleks is not quite the beginning of Doctor Who as we know it, because so much was already present and
there have been other remixings since; but it is a major developmental hurdle
and this animation project will enable it to be more widely and deservingly
appreciated.
I've realised I managed to write a review of 'Power' without mentioning Patrick Troughton - so have added some thoughts to the link post I was writing at The Event Library: https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/doctor-who-iv-9-14-the-power-of-the-daleks-animated-edition-bw/
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