Happy Birthday Mr Chesterton

 

Wishing William Russell a very happy 98th birthday today. His cameo appearance in The Power of the Doctor was a highlight for me.

No symbol for "ruby" on Instagram...

So, the red diamond was actually supposed to be a ruby. That's the name of the Doctor's next full-time companion - Ruby Sunday. She's played by 18-year-old Mancunian Millie Gibson, who hails from Coronation Street apparently.

What's Wrong With... Death to the Daleks

 

The title for this story came from the new Script Editor, Robert Holmes. He hated the Daleks - finding them terribly dull - and wished death upon them. This was a view shared by the person playing the Doctor in this story, as well as his successor. Even Terry Nation was realising their deficiencies by now - which is why he introduced Davros in the very next story he wrote.

As the writer is Nation, we have yet another militaristic expedition having a bad time on a hostile planet, which is named after a plot point (before it became a mineral, the expedition had come to the planet Exxilon in search of an elixir). The expedition members squabble amongst themselves over what to do next - one urging caution and the other hot-headed. A mysterious figure stalks the companion - only to turn out to be a friend. A pyramid full of death traps. The Daleks turn up at the end of the first episode, to no-one's surprise.

All that's missing is a jungle setting... Oh look - it was set in a jungle, but the director and script editor had it moved to a quarry planet.

The TARDIS interior is supposed to exist in a totally different dimension, so how can the Exxilon beacon possibly affect it? Also, this is the era when the TARDIS was supposed to be of infinite size, so surely the beacon could never have drained all the power without overloading itself. Terry Nation always treats the ship as if it were a conventional spacecraft.

The last time the Doctor had to open the main doors during a power loss, he used his ring and a device in the ship (The Web Planet) - but here we see that he has to use an old-fashioned, very low-tech hand crank to manually open and close them.

Once again Nation comes up with a number which he thinks is really, really big - but isn't at all when you think about it. 10 million people will die on some planets. That's not very many in planetary terms.

If parrinium is so vital, why did Earth send such a small mission?

With a beacon capable of draining every bit of energy from a TARDIS, how did the Earth people find out about the mineral in the first place?

In normal circumstances we can understand why the commander might not want Galloway to take over - but, in their current dire straits, surely he would make for a more effective commander than the wet Hamilton?

Saying that, Galloway attacks the Doctor long after he already knows what Exxilons look like. Did any previous ones have velvet jackets, frilly shirts and bouffant hairstyles?

A couple of very poor cliff-hangers, one due to some drastic reordering of scenes, and another due to the editor not cutting in time.

The latter is the end of Part One. We know that the Dalek guns don't work as we see one firing away far too long with nothing happening.

The third episode ending is regarded by fans as one of the Top 10 worst - "the floor tiles of doom". The Doctor stops Bellal stepping on a patterned bit of flooring for no discernible reason - thanks to this scene being shunted out of sequence and the real cliff-hanger being moved into the body of an episode.

You have to ask why the Exxilons made this bit of floor different in the first place - thus drawing attention to it.

Things aren't helped by the fact that the Doctor's description of the tiles doesn't match what we see. Bellal clearly steps out of the tiles the Doctor tells him to step on, and he doesn't copy the Doctor's steps (no doubt because Bellal actor Arnold Yarrow couldn't see a thing).

The Exxilon city has its ways of stopping people accessing it. We see that to get inside in the first place, you have to touch the wall to light up the hidden symbols. In the first chamber are a load of skeletons. To have got there they must have worked out the technique of touching the wall etc. How then did they fail to find and solve the much simpler maze puzzle?

There are automated defences in the cave system, and in a pool of water - but there don't seem to be any similar defences around the city itself. Anyone can just walk right up to it.

And who was it that lit all the candles in that underground tunnel which is guarded by a lethal defence mechanism?

What's worst about the city defences is that you can simply climb up the exterior and plant a bomb, encountering zero defences.

Inside the city we see an Exxilon who appears to be observing events but turns out to be long dead. It is implied that the Exxilons look like they do because they degenerated - yet this one looks the same.

The Doctor attacks the city via its electronics. The city responds by producing "anti-bodies" - but instead of attacking the person doing the actual damage, they just go after the Daleks.

How have the Daleks ever managed to conquer galaxies and gain the reputation they have when they self-destruct every time they do something wrong? They are always being beaten by the Doctor, so there shouldn't be all that many left by now. And in committing suicide, the Dalek guard actually makes matters far worse, as it allows Sarah and Jill more time to steal back all that parrinium.

The Daleks decide to launch a plague bomb to stop later humans landing on the planet - despite the fact that, with the beacon now destroyed, they could just land robot miners to do the work, or people in biohazard suits.

Not something wrong - just an annoyance. All the Daleks look the same apart from one which has orange dome lights instead of clear ones - yet they don't make something of this like making him the leader.

New Companion Reveal Tonight

It has been announced that the new companion, who will accompany Ncuti Gatwa's 15th Doctor, will be unveiled at some point tonight during the annual Children in Need programming. Presumably this will be some time in the first half of the evening, pre-9pm.

As a clue, RTD put out his usual two hearts image on Instagram (the Doctor), with a red diamond (the companion). 

Some have taken the colour to be significant - suggesting possibly another ginger-haired person - whilst others think the shape is the significant thing.

Whoever it may turn out to be, they would have been spotted in December anyway, as that's when Series 14 filming gets underway.

Inspirations: The Lazarus Experiment

 

The main inspiration for this story is apparent in the title... 

A man begins to mutate following a big scientific experiment and goes on a killing spree, leaving his victims drained of their life-force. He is finally tracked down to a major London church where he is killed.

The scientific experiment in 1953's The Quatermass Experiment (later filmed by Hammer in 1955 as The Quatermass Xperiment, to tap into the new X-rating which had replaced "H" for Horror) was the first manned mission into space. The sole surviving astronaut - Victor Caroon - starts to turn into a bloodthirsty vegetable monster, which is finally tracked down to Westminster Abbey. As it sits on some metal scaffolding, electrical cables are attached and it is fried.

Here, Professor Lazarus' great experiment is a rejuvenation process. Unfortunately, it reactivates long dormant genes which cause him to mutate into a monster which sucks the life-force from his victims. He seeks sanctuary in Southwark Cathedral where the Doctor uses acoustics to cause him to fall to his death.

Writer Stephen Greenhorn took the basic structure of the earlier BBC serial for his Doctor Who story, referencing it in the title.

He did have some other inspirations in mind - namely certain Marvel villains. He was thinking of the Green Goblin and Dr Octopus from the Spider-Man comics, and who had featured in the first two Sam Raimi / Toby Maguire movies. Both were well-meaning scientists who experimented on themselves, only to be transformed into evil villains. When it comes to any scientist changing personality after self-experimentation, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde obviously comes to mind.

Another influence was The Fly - first filmed in 1958, then remade in 1986. In this a scientist enters a pod-like device and ends up monstrously altered.

To guest star in this story as Professor Lazarus we have Mark Gatiss. He was best known for being one third of the on-screen talent of the League of Gentlemen comedy group. Before this, he had been one of the first batch of writers to be approached by Virgin Publishing to write for their new range of Doctor Who 'New Adventures' novels.

Target had begun the range back in 1973 with the reprint of three Hartnell stories. The releases had quickly caught up with the televised stories, coinciding with the final season on TV. (In 1990 only Planet of Giants and The Space Pirates remained to be published of the older stories - not counting those where permissions hadn't been granted such as the works of Douglas Adams, Eric Saward and David Whitaker's Dalek stories). The Target imprint was taken over by Virgin, who discovered that they had little else to do with it but reprints. As fans had been asking for new material for a while, the BBC and Virgin finally agreed this.

Mark Gatiss' first contribution was Nightshade - which just happened to be inspired by the Quatermass serials of the 1950's. One of the guest characters was an actor who had portrayed "Professor Nightshade" on television - a figure based on Quatermass.

Gatiss would later write an audio for Big Finish which had amongst its cast his friend David Tennant. The two were acting together in a live remake of the first Quatermass story when Tennant found out about his casting as the Tenth Doctor.

Gatiss had already written for Series 1 in 2005 (The Unquiet Dead) so his appearance in this story made him the second person to have both written and acted in a Doctor Who story - the other being Glyn Jones (writer of The Space Museum and Krans, in The Sontaran Experiment).

Doctor Who references had been included within the League of Gentlemen's repertoire - not least the potholing tour guide who mentions that the programme had been recorded in his cave system back in the 1970's, when they were full of Cybermen. This is a reference to the Wookey Hole filming of Revenge of the Cybermen.

One of Gatiss' regular characters was the hapless vet, who accidentally killed his animals in various horrible ways. He was based on Peter Davison's Tristan Farnon character from All Creatures Great and Small.

For this Gatiss wore a blond wig, and when it came to playing the younger version of Prof. Lazarus Gatiss suggested bringing this bit of costume in from home, rather than have another specially made up. He was paid for the use of it.

The script was changed to have Lazarus growing up above a butcher's shop rather than a bookshop - a nod to his Hilary Briss butcher character in The League of Gentlemen.

The biblical character of Lazarus appears in John 11 - 12. He was the brother of Martha (no relation) and Mary and is the man who was brought back from the dead by Jesus. This has led to his name being used in other contexts - such as the Lazarus Effect describing the recovery of a terminally ill person. The Lazarus Sign is some physical movement in a person believed to be brain-dead.

More relevant to this story is the Lazarus Species or Taxon - one believed to have become extinct but is subsequently found to be still living (such as with the Coelacanth). The Professor's body mutates when a mix of long-dormant genes are activated - showing as various animal life-forms which the human race might have evolved into but didn't.

In 2006 scientists discovered a desert-dwelling microbe which can resurrect itself after it dies, thanks to a genetic repair mechanism. It is known as the Lazarus Microbe.

Sharp eyed viewers will have recognised the Genetic Manipulation Device capsule as a reused prop - the lift from The Impossible Planet.

The Doctor turning the organ's volume up to 11 is a reference to This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary about an English heavy metal band.

It had been hoped that the ending might have been filmed in St Paul's Cathedral, but there had been a recent suicide from the Whispering Gallery and the cathedral authorities declined their assistance.

The Doctor mentions reversing the polarity of the Genetic Manipulation Device - paraphrasing Jon Pertwee's famous phrase (which he actually only ever used once during his tenure as the Doctor, in The Sea Devils).

As far as the season story arc goes, Lazarus and Lady Thaw mention Harold Saxon funding his work, and we also see a mysterious man sowing seeds of suspicion about the Doctor to Martha's mother.

Next time: a story inspired by 24, called 42...

L is for... Lethbridge-Stewart, Brigadier Alistair Gordon

 

The Doctor first encountered Lethbridge-Stewart when he was a Colonel in the Scots Guards. He had been sent to take over command of the Goodge Street underground fortress following the death of its previous commander. This was during an invasion attempt by the Great Intelligence which had paralysed central London with a dense fog, under cover of which robot Yeti were operating. The Intelligence manifested itself as a thick web-like substance which moved around the Underground network, but had also taken over the corpse of an army Staff Sergeant named Arnold. The Colonel had been travelling to Goodge Street in a convoy which had been attacked and destroyed by Yeti. He had found himself alone in the tunnels, where he encountered the Doctor who was himself wandering lost following a meeting with the robots.

At the time no-one knew about Arnold and so everyone was suspicious as to who the human agent of the Intelligence might be. Being the sole survivor of the convoy, some suspected Lethbridge-Stewart.

After leading an expedition to the surface in search of supplies at Covent Garden, the Colonel witnessed another massacre of his men by the Yeti - an event which almost broke him. He later seriously considered handing over the Doctor to the Intelligence if it would depart. He was also open to the idea of the Doctor having a time machine, capable of fitting inside a Tube station, and was happy to lead a mission to find it.

Following this incident, Lethbridge-Stewart was instrumental in setting up a specialist force designed to tackle similar events. Military-led, it would have a scientific foundation. The resultant organisation came under the auspices of the United Nations, with its command based in Geneva. Lethbridge-Stewart was promoted to Brigadier and placed in command of the British section of UNIT - the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. The Brigadier based himself in a converted cargo aircraft for mobility purposes. Under him he had a Captain - Jimmy Turner - and a Sergeant named Walters. Another member of the team was a Corporal named Benton. 

Soon after its formation UNIT was called upon to investigate a series of UFO sightings clustered around the factory compound belonging to International Electromatics, owned by Tobias Vaughn. IE made electronic components which were used in equipment all over the world. A number of people seen entering IE's headquarters were later found to be changed in terms of personality, whilst others disappeared altogether. Of concern to Lethbridge-Stewart was that his immediate superior - Major General Rutlidge - was one of those who had changed. Initially supportive of the Brigadier's investigations into Vaughn, he suddenly turned against them shortly after a visit to IE's London offices.

The Brigadier was extremely pleased to be reunited with the Doctor, who had come to Earth to repair some TARDIS circuits. He helped to reveal that Vaughn was in league with the Cybermen. 

Following the death of Vaughn and the destruction of the Cyberman invasion attempt, the Brigadier decided to recruit a scientific adviser of his own, who could replace the absentee Doctor.

A small fall of meteorites in Essex was followed six months later by a larger fall. The Brigadier sought out an expert in the field and had Dr Liz Shaw come and meet him at UNIT's London HQ, built beneath St Pancras Station.

As he was interviewing Cambridge-based Liz, word came in that the TARDIS had turned up in the same location as the most recent fall. He and Liz went to see the Doctor in the local hospital, but he was disappointed to find a stranger. However, the man recognised him. It soon transpired that this was the Doctor after all, but a regenerated one with a new face and personality. 

The Brigadier once again had to deal with an antagonistic superior - this time an Auton duplicate.

Once the Nestene attack had been repelled, the Brigadier offered the Doctor a full-time role with UNIT as scientific adviser - knowing that he was now unable to leave Earth in the TARDIS. Liz agreed to stay on as his assistant. The Brigadier made him his own personal responsibility.

Great friends for the most part, the relationship between the Brigadier and the Doctor could often be a stormy one. The Doctor deeply resented his exile to Earth and longed to get back into Time and Space to explore. He disliked having to be part of a military organisation, but felt trapped. This frustration would often be taken out on the Brigadier, but he would good humouredly shoulder the Doctor's insults.

He would always defend the Brigadier when he in turn had to deal with civil servants and other officials. The two trusted each other implicitly. A good example of the bond between the two was when the Brigadier was ordered to destroy the Silurian shelter in Derbyshire, which the Doctor hoped to exploit for its scientific secrets. Some would have walked away from UNIT, but the Doctor accepted that his friend was bound by his orders.

On an authoritarian parallel Earth the Doctor encountered a version of the Brigadier - the Brigade Leader of the Republican Security Force - who was a coward and a bully, lacking any of the Brigadier's attributes.

When Liz Shaw returned to Cambridge, the Brigadier had no need to replace her. After a run of captains on secondment from the Regular Army the Brigadier obtained a full time captain named Mike Yates. Corporal Benton was promoted to Sergeant. At the same time the Brigadier had an eager new recruit foisted upon him, thanks to an influential uncle. He decided to give Jo Grant to the Doctor as a new assistant. When the Doctor rejected her, the Brigadier ensured that his scientific adviser should be the one to tell her - knowing that the Doctor would relent.

The arrival of Mike Yates and Jo Grant coincided with the first appearance of the Master on Earth, an evil rogue Time Lord. He brought a number of alien menaces to the planet, which the Brigadier and UNIT had to combat with the Doctor's help.

One threat was an ancient one that came from the Earth itself - a long-dormant Daemon, which took over the village of Devil's End. The Brigadier had been attending a regimental dinner and awoke to find that his helicopter had been taken by Yates and Benton. By the time he followed, a heat barrier had sealed off the village. He witnessed the destruction of the helicopter when it crashed into this, after being stolen by one of the Master's followers.

A living stone gargoyle posed no danger to the Brigadier, who simply asked one of his men to shoot it.

Throughout their time together, the Brigadier had never set foot in the TARDIS, and often doubted many of the stories told by the Doctor. One day UNIT HQ came under attack and the Brigadier was forced to take refuge in the TARDIS. He was also confronted by the Doctor in the form he had first encountered back in the London Underground, and again fighting against the Cybermen.

This combination of events almost broke the Brigadier, who thought the TARDIS an illusion, and he explained away the Doctor's change of appearance as him having reverted to his earlier incarnation - rather than accept there might be two Doctors. He then had to confront the idea of a third.

When the entire HQ building was transported through a Black Hole to an alien world, the Brigadier was convinced they had only moved to another country, though it was more likely they had only moved as far as Cromer in Norfolk.

Once he accepted he was on another planet, the Brigadier made the most of available resources - co-opting game warden Mr Ollis into his two man army.

Following the lifting of the Doctor's exile by the Time Lords, he tended to spend less time on Earth.

When UNIT came to investigate the activities of Global Chemicals, the Brigadier found himself caught in a conflict of interests. He was compelled to provide security to the company, despite the Doctor and Jo allying against it. He got round this by placing Mike Yates inside the company as a mole.

Jo left soon after, and then the Brigadier was confronted by a conspiracy which involved his Regular Army superior General Finch and the Government official Sir Charles Grover.  Worse - Mike was also involved. The Brigadier was prepared to commit mutiny to stand up to Finch, such was his trust in the Doctor.

It was towards the end of the Third Doctor's incarnation that some of the Brigadier's personal life slipped out. A clairvoyant named "Professor" Clegg had been given his wrist-watch, and was able to identify that it had been given to him in Brighton by a young woman named Doris by way of a thank-you...

During an encounter with a huge robot, the Brigadier thought that he had a means to destroy it without the Doctor's help. He used a powerful energy weapon on it. However, it absorbed the energy and grew to enormous size, making things much worse. The newly regenerated Doctor had to sort things out after all.

With this new regeneration, the Doctor decided to distance himself from Earth and from UNIT. The Brigadier met him only one more time in this incarnation - at a village near Loch Ness in Scotland. The Brigadier had been left a device to summon the TARDIS back to Earth in the event of an emergency, and he used it when a number of North Sea oil rigs were attacked and destroyed by an unseen force. For the occasion of revisiting his ancestral home, the Brigadier adopted a kilt of his Clan Stewart tartan.

Once the Zygons had been defeated, the Brigadier found himself increasingly spending time at UNIT central command in Geneva. He also held an office at the UK Space Defence Agency, but rarely used it.

Irritated by the amount of time spent at Geneva, away from front-line operations, the Brigadier elected to retire from UNIT in 1977.

He took up a teaching post at Brendon, a minor public school for boys. Here he taught mathematics, coached rugby, and ran the school regiment. Shortly after arriving he found his past catching up with him. The TARDIS arrived, and he met the Doctor's latest companions Tegan and Nyssa. With them was the regenerated Doctor, who was gravely ill. He joined them in the TARDIS when it travelled to a spaceship in temporal orbit above Earth. 

The Doctor, meanwhile, had arrived at the school in 1983 using a transmat pod from the spaceship, and he met the Brigadier from that year - a man who had suffered some nervous breakdown, his memories of the Doctor missing. The Doctor helped him regain his memories, then the two travelled to the spaceship by pod. The Brigadier erroneously assured the Doctor that he had not gone with Tegan and Nyssa. When the two versions of the Brigadier encountered each other it shorted the temporal differential and triggered his nervous breakdown - but also resolved the issue of Mawdryn and his fellow mutants.

Soon after, the Brigadier attended a UNIT reunion at his old HQ, hosted by Colonel Crichton, his replacement as UK section commander. He met the Doctor in his second incarnation, who had read about the event in the next day's newspaper. As the two reminisced in the grounds they came under attack by a time scoop, which carried them both to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. He met all five incarnations of the Doctor, plus the latest incarnation of the Master, as well as a number of the Doctor's companions - of whom he already knew Sarah and Tegan. He also had to confront the Cybermen again, plus a rogue Yeti. When the Master attempted to capitalise on the situation, it was the Brigadier who knocked him out with a well-aimed punch.

On leaving teaching, the Brigadier married Doris and settled down to a life of quiet retirement in the country. He remained on reserve with UNIT, however, and so was recalled to duty when it was discovered that the Doctor had been seen at the site of an incident involving a UNIT missile convoy.

Despite two regenerations, the Brigadier recognised his old friend immediately - just because of the bizarre situation he found him in.

The Brigadier was happy to act as the representative of the human race against the witch-queen Morgaine and her demonic ally the Destroyer.

When it appeared that the Brigadier had sacrificed himself to kill the Destroyer the Doctor revealed that he was aware of his old friend's fate - that he was due to die in bed of old age. The Brigadier had survived however, but decided that he was now too old to support the Doctor.

Knighted, he refused to settle down completely. He became a noted ambassador, and it was in this role that he found himself stranded in Peru during an invasion attempt by the Sontarans and a later attack by the Daleks.

When Sarah Jane Smith needed to gain access to UNIT's Black Archive, it was to the Brigadier that she turned. He was annoyed at the way the organisation he helped to found was now run, so was happy to assist her - smuggling her and her companion Rani into the Archive compound.

He helped capture an alien Bane which had been impersonating the Archive's commander.

In what he thought to be his final incarnation, facing his own mortality, the Doctor tried to contact the Brigadier for advice. He was now living in a care home, where he would keep a glass of whisky by his bedside should the Doctor ever call in for a visit. The Doctor was saddened to hear that he had just missed his old friend, who had died peacefully in bed as he had foreseen.

UNIT was to rebrand itself as the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, and came under the command of the Brigadier's daughter Kate. She only used the surname Stewart, not wishing to ride on her father's coat-tails. She was a scientist rather than a soldier, and her father had told her that science should lead for the organisation to be successful.

When the female incarnation of the Master - Missy - resurrected the dead to become an army of Cybermen, Kate Stewart was saved by one of them. The Doctor suspected that this might have been the Brigadier. The Cyberman saluted him then flew off into space.

Played by: Nicholas Courtney. Appearances: The Web of Fear (1967), The Invasion (1968), Spearhead From Space (1970) to Terror of the Zygons (1975), Mawdryn Undead (1983), The Five Doctors (1983), Battlefield (1989), SJA 2.6 Enemy of the Bane (2008).

• Nicholas Courtney was back-up choice to play King Richard in The Crusade. Director Douglas Camfield, who frequently employed him, thought that Julian Glover would turn the role down.
• Camfield later cast him as Bret Vyon in The Daleks' Master Plan. William Hartnell convinced him to change agent (to his son-in-law) but Courtney then found himself out of work for a year.
• When not acting he worked in a model soldier shop in Kensington.
• Courtney was due to play Captain Knight in The Web of Fear (Camfield again) - a character who dies. However, the actor due to play Lethbridge-Stewart (David Langton) pulled out late in the day, and Courtney was promoted, in more ways than one.
• When it came to The Invasion, Courtney's was the easiest and cheapest character from Web to be brought back, as any replacement officer would be too close to the Colonel anyway. Prof. Travers and his daughter Anne were replaced. 
• Courtney was asked about becoming a regular for Season 7 during the making of the Cyberman story.
• He and Pertwee did not hit it off immediately. Pertwee accused him of drinking too much on their first story together. Courtney did like a lunchtime drink, which helped settle his nerves. He also suffered from depression.
• During the making of Terror of the Autons he had a minor breakdown, and is replaced by a double in some of the location scenes.
• Many of the Brigadier's best known lines were Courtney's own, ad libs, or ones that he fought to retain when Terrance Dicks threatened to cut them (including his iconic "Chap with wings... five rounds rapid").
• The Brigadier was almost killed off on a couple of occasions - including the original draft version of The Hand of Fear and then again in Battlefield. Courtney was okay with this, so long as it was a brave death.
• With the Brigadier featuring less and less in the series, Courtney embarked on stage work which prevented him from featuring in The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom. He and John Levene had foreseen this situation during the making of Robot.
• The Brigadier was actually third choice to appear in Mawdryn Undead, after Ian Chesterton and Harry Sullivan. Neither William Russell nor Ian Marter was available.
• The Five Doctors saw the first real moustache for the Brigadier.
• Ill health prevented him from featuring opposite David Tennant's Doctor in The Sontaran Stratagem and The Stolen Earth two-parters.
• He and Lis Sladen died within a couple of months of each other in 2011. Reference to the Brigadier's death was added to The Name of the Doctor by way of a tribute. Steven Moffat then screwed things up by having him resurrected as a Cyberman. Moffat was very good at undermining his own work.

L is for... Lesterson

 

Lesterson was the chief scientist of the Earth colony on the planet Vulcan. He discovered a crashed space capsule in a nearby mercury swamp and had it transferred to his laboratory. Examining it, he was able to open it and found a trio of robotic creatures within. He and his junior colleagues Janley and Resno removed one of these in order to experiment on it. They were able to reactivate it. It identified itself as a Dalek, and offered its services to the colonists. For example, it knew how to greatly improve the colony's meteorite defence system. Many of their satellites were being destroyed before this.

The Doctor arrived at the colony with companions Ben and Polly, and discovered what Lesterson was up to. The scientist refused to heed his warnings - convinced that the Daleks would make ideal servants. He had learned that they had positronic brains.

During one experiment, the Dalek exterminated Resno. Janley kept this secret from Lesterson. A member of a rebel group, she could see the potential of the Daleks as weapons with which to overthrow the governor.

Lesterson began to suspect the Daleks when they began to demand increasing quantities of raw materials and a power source. He then spotted one Dalek too many in the corridors of the colony. His suspicions led him to sneak aboard the capsule, where he witnessed a Dalek production line.

This information caused his mind to snap. He tried to warn the authorities as the Doctor had done, but was not believed due to his manic behaviour. He later came to believe that the Daleks were a superior race - come to replace humans. He offered to be become their servant, but was exterminated by them as they launched their attack on the colony.

Played by: Robert James. Appearances: Power of the Daleks (1966).

• James returned to the series in 1976 to play the chief priest of the Cult of Demnos in The Masque of Mandragora.