Henry van Statten
Information from the Dalek novelisation and his police bulletin in The Doctor: His Lives and Times; information from PROSE: Henry Van Statten should be added.
These omissions are so great that the article's factual accuracy has been compromised. Check out the discussion page and revision history for further clues about what needs to be updated in this article.
Henry van Statten (sometimes misspelt as "VanStatten" (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"], Support Site & FAQS [+]Loading...["Support Site & FAQS (feature)"])) was a multi-billionaire who had a vested interest in the collection of alien technology — stemming from a childhood fascination of the universe — to reverse engineer into products sold by the corporation GeoComTex, of which he was CEO. He owned the Internet by 2012 and gained enough influence to sway the course of the next presidential elections.
Biography
Early life
Van Statten was the son of Edward Van Statten, the billionaire owner of the Van Statten Corporation, a wealthy business dealing in oil and armaments during the later 20th century. Henry felt isolated from his father, who was endlessly away on business trips throughout most of his childhood while Henry was left to live in isolation in a housing complex within the Utah desert. (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) Henry grew up watching Star Wars. (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"]) Henry found comfort in Otto von Donitz, one of Edward's personal assistants charged with educating and caring for Henry in his father's absence. On his seventh birthday, Otto gifted Henry a telescope, claiming his father bought it him as a gift to look out at the stars and aspire to one day reach them, and demonstrate ambition. However, when Edward returned home and learned Otto had gifted Henry the telescope, Edward fired Otto and had two henchmen destroy the telescope six weeks later.
Embittered by his father's action, when Edward neared death and gifted Henry inherited one million dollars from his father on his fifteenth birthday,[statement unclear] he used the knowledge of Keynesian and Friedmanite economic models Otto taught him to invest the money into the telecommunications business and the internet, a decision which infuriated his father, who wanted the money to be cycled back into arms dealing. Henry refused and insisted his father sign the Van Statten Corporation to him rather than his lawyers on the assurance his skill in investing would ensure his father's name survived beyond him. Reluctantly, Edward conceded and Henry took over the company, eventually renaming it Geocomtex.
When Edward eventually died from his illness, Henry had all his workers mourn the man's death for ten minutes before firing them all and redesigning the entire corporation to achieve his childhood dream of exploring the concept of space and alien life, (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) to be an astronaut who would befriend an alien on Mars, as he wistfully later put it. The first piece of otherworldly material acquired by Van Statten was moondust, which he found at an ammo fair. While this had been easy for him, he found it to be "ultimate" to have alien grit run through his hands. He then began collecting actual alien artefacts, which was more of a challenge. (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"])
He began utilising the Gray Market, an underground trading scene, addictively purchasing alien "leftovers and curios" with the large sums of money earned from his firm as it began to "take off" (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"]) in the dotcom boom of 1995-2001. (PROSE: The Time Traveller's Almanac [+]Loading...["The Time Traveller's Almanac (reference book)"]) He also knew how to differentiate real alien objects from the fakes, which were "easy pickings" in the Market. (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"]) Winning these artefacts at auction, he reverse engineered them to create "new" technologies which he exploited commercially. (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"]) Some of the objects he acquired included: an unidentifiable material; a curious rock around the size of a Jolly Rancher that took the combined force of three people to lift; (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"]) and technology salvaged from the Roswell crash which he used to create broadband. He kept these artifacts in a private collection, inside a bunker called the Vault more than fifty floors below ground in Utah near Salt Lake City. Henry also now owned the Internet, and influenced American elections to favour his desires. (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"])
Although in the early few years of the new millennium Van Statten did not publicly discuss his belief that aliens had visited Earth, (PROSE: The Time Traveller's Almanac [+]Loading...["The Time Traveller's Almanac (reference book)"]) after the Slitheen's attempt to plunge Earth into a nuclear war (TV: Aliens of London [+]Loading...["Aliens of London (TV story)"], World War Three [+]Loading...["World War Three (TV story)"]) Van Statten allowed himself to be interviewed by conspiracy theorist Mickey, owner of the website Who is Doctor Who?, about his thoughts on aliens; he talked about the "event" that happened just the week prior and his ambition to collect alien artefacts, which he admitted was fuelled by his childhood dreams. (PROSE: Henry Van Statten [+]Loading...["Henry Van Statten (short story)"])
Acquiring the Metaltron
On his forty-fifth birthday, Henry decided he wanted to finally purchase a living alien creature rather than parts of now deceased ones. Using his influence, he learned one such creature was in the hands of a private collector Hiram Duchesne, a middle-aged businessman in the ice cream industry. Henry offered the man twenty-five million dollars for the creature, but Duchesne refused. Angered, Henry bought out the man's company and left him bankrupt but Duchesne still refused to sell despite needing the money. (PROSE: Dalek) By 2006, (PROSE: Operation London) Duchesne was ill with cancer and, having heard rumours Henry's scientists had used alien technology to create a cure, he finally agreed to sell the creature to Henry. By now Henry was fifty-three years old. (PROSE: Dalek)
That same year, UNIT noticed that something called "the Object" was sold at an auction, and, while UNIT couldn't afford the Object at the auction, they tried to identify the seller and buyer; (PROSE: Object Auction) the buyer was van Statten, who was invited to the auction, which had a $1000000 entry fee; according to this account, the Object was already called "the Metaltron". (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) UNIT had been tracking the Dalek for years, but they lost track of it in Utah. (PROSE: Object Auction, AUDIO: The Dalek Transaction) Sven tidied the museum in preparation of van Statten's purchase. (WC: Sven and the Scarf) Van Statten tried to make the Metaltron talk through torture, but all it did was scream. (TV: Dalek)
In 2007, while the Tenth Doctor was researching H.C. Clements, several websites relating to van Statten were seen, including his GEOCOMTEX website and his interview on the Defending the Earth! website. (TV: The Runaway Bride)
Henry's immoral influence on the world stage using his wealth had concerned personnel working within the FBI. The organisation implanted Diana Goddard and Owen Bywater into Henry's security personnel within the Vault to spy on him. (PROSE: Dalek)
Downfall
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. They were quickly captured by van Statten's guards. At this time, Diana Goddard, van Statten's personal assistant, and Adam Mitchell, a scientist, worked for him. Learning the Doctor was alien, van Statten examined his Gallifreyan physiology. He 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 van Statten got a taste of his own medicine: she ordered van Statten to be taken away, mind-wiped and dumped on the streets, "somewhere beginning with an 'S'," due to him causing the death of 200 personnel. (TV: Dalek) According to another account, however, he willingly wiped his own memory, mentally regressing himself to an infant, after being shown a nightmarish vision of brutally killing everyone he had ever harmed. (PROSE: Dalek)
To the public, Statten mysteriously disappeared. (PROSE: The Whoniverse) On 2 May 2012, Van Statten, now akin to "a homeless, brainless junkie" was involved "a disturbance" at Riverside Boulevard on Sacramento, where when cautioned by police officers, simply asked "Don't you know who I am?". When the incident was submitted five days later, one person noted the vagrant's resemblance to Van Statten, which another flatly denied. (PROSE: The Doctor: His Lives and Times)
Personality
Intelligent, arrogant and selfish, van Statten treated his employees as though they were expendable human livestock, 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 mentioned Davros, the Dalek creator, to him and secretly compared them, calling Davros "a genius, a man who was king of his own little world" and telling van Statten, "You'd like him". However van Statten was not entirely heartless and apologised to the Doctor when they thought that Rose Tyler had been killed. He claimed that he wanted to touch the stars, unaware of how detrimental his treatment of alien life and artefacts had really been so far. (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."
- Henry shares some similarities with Nigel Rochester from Jubilee, which Dalek was adapted from: Both of them are collectors of alien technology, both of them own a Dalek which they torture in an attempt to get it to talk, and both are betrayed by a woman whom they hold in their confidence.
- To explain how van Statten was unfamiliar with the Daleks, The Time Traveller's Almanac suggested that the Van Statten Incident took place in a timeline where the Cult of Skaro did not emerge from the Sphere and precipitate the Battle of Canary Wharf in 2007 and so did not go on to influence the construction of the Empire State Building, nor was the Earth transported to the Medusa Cascade since the personal timelines of both the Doctor and the Dalek race had not progressed to the point where those events occurred.
- Alternatively, the events of Dalek occurring within 2012 place them after the events of Series 5, during which the memories of those alien incursions were lost due to the time field.
- However, as Van Statten acquired the Metaltron circa 2006 as per the information revealed on the U.N.I.T., then the time field wouldn't have happened soon enough to avoid the identification of the Metaltron as a Dalek.
