Henry van Statten
Henry van Statten was the CEO of the American corporation GeoComTex and a collector and exploiter of alien technology. He was the billionaire owner of the Internet in 2012.
Biography
As head of GeoComTex, Henry van Statten had enough influence to sway the course of the next presidential elections.
Van Statten had been collecting extraterrestrial artefacts on the grey market for years, buying bits and pieces of alien technology at auctions and then reverse engineering them to create "new" technologies which he would then exploit commercially. He claimed to "own" the Internet, and said that broadband was derived from technology scavenged from the Roswell crash. He kept these artefacts in a private collection, inside a bunker called the Vault more than fifty floors below ground in Utah near Salt Lake City. (TV: Dalek)
In 2007, van Statten's image appeared while the Tenth Doctor was researching H.C. Clements, along with the Guinevere website, UNIT website, and GeoComTex website. (TV: The Runaway Bride)
Sometime before 2012, van Statten acquired a living but unresponsive Dalek, who had survived the Last Great Time War. He called it a "metaltron". Van Statten tried to make the Dalek talk through torture but all it did was 'scream'.
In 2012, the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler arrived in the Vault in response to a distress signal, unaware that the signal came from a Dalek. At this time, Diana Goddard, van Statten's personal assistant, and Adam Mitchell, a scientist, worked by him.
Van Statten captured the Doctor instead, to examine his Gallifreyan physiology and had plans to make use of his binary vascular system in a marketing venture, branding it as his own creation through a patent.
When the Dalek freed itself, he gave the Doctor free rein to deal with it. By the time events came to a conclusion, two hundred GeoComTex personnel had died and the Dalek had self-destructed. Goddard took charge at this point and ordered that van Statten be taken away, mind-wiped and dumped on the streets, "somewhere beginning with an 'S'," due to him causing the death of so many personnel. (TV: Dalek)
Personality
Intelligent, arrogant and selfish, van Statten treated his employees as though they were chattel, to the point of mind-wiping them when they left his employ so they could not betray his secrets. He also displayed no concern for their safety and even when there was a deadly Dalek on the loose, he ordered them not to cause any damage to it and was willing to let them die just to keep the Dalek in one piece. Eventually he decided to help the Doctor stop the Dalek but only did so to protect himself, telling the Doctor that the only reason he was helping was because he didn't want to get killed. Van Statten had a wry, dark sense of humour and treated other humans, and aliens especially, as things he could use to amuse himself or turn to his advantage. The Doctor compared him to Davros, the Dalek creator. However van Statten was not entirely heartless and apologised to the Doctor when they thought that Rose Tyler had been killed. (TV: Dalek)
Behind the scenes
- In an early draft script for Dalek, van Statten's character was called "Will Fences", as a parody of Bill Gates.
- According to Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale, the original script for The End of Time had Henry van Statten name-dropped as a billionaire like Bill Gates and Joshua Naismith.
- In the online game The Last Dalek, which presents an alternate version of the events of Dalek, van Statten does not appear, but he has an entry in the Dalek's memory files. He is described as "Male subject. Age 40. American. Effortlessly powerful. Always with a glint in his eye. The sort of man that won't allow himself to be bored for a single second. Consider potentially dangerous."
