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Henry van Statten was the CEO of the American corporation GeoComTex and 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 enough to even 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. (DW: Dalek)
Sometime between 2006 and 2012 by auction, van Statten acquired a living but unresponsive Dalek (WEB: unit.org.uk) who had survived the Last Great Time War. He called it a "metaltron". (DW: Dalek)
In 2006, van Statten's image appears while the Doctor is researching H.C. Clements along with the Guinevere website, UNIT website and GeoComTex website. (DW: The Runaway Bride)
In 2012, the 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.
When the Dalek freed itself, he gave the Doctor free reign to deal with it. By the time events came to a conclusion, two hundred GeoComTex personnel had died before the Dalek eventually 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'." When last seen, van Statten was being escorted away by his own guards to his fate, ironically with the same method he had used on his own employees. (DW: Dalek)
- Although van Statten had used such mind-wiping on other people, it is not known for certain that Goddard followed through with the order.
Personality
Brilliant, arrogant and self-assured, van Statten treated his employees like chattel, to the point of mind-wiping them when they left his employ so they could not betray his secrets. Van Statten had a wry, dark sense of humour and treated other Humans, as well as aliens especially, as things he could use to amuse himself or turn to his advantage. The Doctor compared him to Davros, the Daleks' creator. (DW: Dalek)
Behind the scenes
- One of van Statten's helicopters had the callsign Bad Wolf One.
- It is not known whether van Statten really "owned" the Internet or if he was just making a bombastic claim. Technically whoever owns the computer that a website is hosted on effectively "owns" their website.
- Van Statten is not the only collector to obtain a piece of a Telosian Cyberman; Henry Parker, a collector in Wales, reportedly had an arm and a chest unit from a Cyberman in his collection (TW: A Day in the Death, as per[1]).
- In an early draft script for Dalek, van Statten's character was called "Will Fences", as a parody of Bill Gates.