O'BSERVATIONS: "THE OWNER OF THE INTERNET"

"Dalek" takes place underneath the Utah desert in 2012. The subterranean facility is a private museum of alien artifacts owned by Henry Van Statten.

Van Statten boasted that he owned the Internet, and when Rose scoffed at the idea, because "nobody owns the Internet", he was secure enough in the claim that he preferred everbody to keep on thinking that way.

Apparently he's so rich and powerful that he can even control the outcome of presidential elections. It looks as though he chose the last President (whoever is elected in 2008), but now doesn't like what his money bought him. As to who the nexT President should be, Van Statten leaves the choice up to the whims of his staff - should the next one be Republican or Democrat?

So who was Henry Van Statten, and how was he able to make a claim to a title that even Bill Gates has yet to secure (despite all his attempts)?

Who was the "Owner Of The Internet"?

I have an idea where he might have been working behind the scenes in the TV Universe before, but as usual, it's all hypothetical. (It's my favorite word for the week.) I can't prove this, and yet at the same time it can't be disproved.

That's the fun of Toobworld.

Let's start with Henry Van Statten's age. If we assume that he's the same age as the actor who portrays him, (Corey Johnson), then Van Statten is 39 in 2012.

So he was born in 1973, (Corey Johnson was born in 1966), and he would have been about 25 in 1998, more than old enough to have established himself as a computer genius. Hell, never mind what we see in the Real World, Toobworld has several times established the premise of teenaged hackers screwing up the system.

And as one would expect in Toobworld, there would be forces out there who would take notice of such geniuses and ensnare them into their organizations.

Such an organization would have been a shadowy group known as the Praetorians who were going to take over the world through control of computer systems.

One of the stumbling blocks in their way was a woman named Angela Bennett, who discovered one of their plots. They erased her existence (as far as computers go) in order to easier erase her totally. But she stayed one step ahead of them, thanks to an email contact known only as The Sorceror.

Eventually we met Sorceror... and found he was no more than just a skateboarding kid named Jacob Resch. (As for that voice of Sorceror, I think Jacob took audio recordings of an actor named Simon Ferguson and fed them into the computer to reconstitute into a computerized voice for the system.)

But Jacob had to get his inside info from somewhere, and that's where Henry Van Statten comes in.

As we saw in "Dalek", Van Statten was ambitious and ruthless in getting what he wanted. And he would never have stood in the background and let Mr. Trelawney grab all the glory as the leader of the Praetorians. By working from the inside using treachery, and by helping Angela Bennett through Jacob Resch, it's my belief Van Statten was able to rise to the leadership of the Praetorians and then used his power to take control of the Internet.

And that's how things stood when we officially met him in Utah in 2012.

Shows cited for this essay:
'Doctor Who'
'The Net'
'Over The Top'

BCnU!
Tele-Toby