The Tenth Planet

Our brains are just like yours, except that certain weaknesses have been removed. You call them emotions, do you not?--the Cyber Leader

A Cyberman incapacitates General Cutler

Episode 1, 8 October 1966
Episode 2, 15 October 1966
Episode 3, 22 October 1966
Episode 4, 29 October 1966 (episode no longer exists)

Written by Kit Pedler
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd

William Hartnell as the Doctor (last regular appearance)
Anneke Wills as Polly (latest extant appearance)
Michael Craze as Ben Jackson (latest extant appearance)

Earth's far future.  Space travel is routine, governed by an association of Earth's military and scientific associations called the International Space Command.  People use weirdly but unmistakably phallic telephones.

The year is 1986.

The TARDIS materialises at the South Pole, where the crew are quickly captured by soldiers--because they've arrived at Polar Base, a command centre for the International Space Command.  Currently, the base is coordinating a spaceflight by a pair of astronauts (one is American, the other is ... something else).  But something is going wrong with the mission--unaccountably, the spaceship has started losing power at a dangerous rate.

Learning this information, the Doctor immediately grasps what's going on, but the base's commander, an American general named Cutler, won't listen to his theory.  The Doctor therefore writes down his prediction and gives it to one of the base's scientists for safekeeping, like he's guessed the murderer on an episode of Morse or Poirot.

Soon, the base's astronomers become aware of something momentous indeed: a new, previously unknown planet is drawing close to Earth.  As it gets nearer, the base's inhabitants get a better look at it.  It is exactly Earthlike; even the land masses are identical to our own, with the exception that they're flipped upside down.

This, it's soon proven, is exactly the prediction the Doctor had made, but that's not enough to get General Cutler to trust him.  It soon doesn't matter, anyway, as even more visitors arrive at Polar Base--from space.

A spaceship, undetected by the base's guards, lands a short distance away, and three metal men emerge.  They surprise a patrol of the base's guards, kill them and steal their heavy coats.  Thus disguised, they're able to sneak into the base and make their way to base's command centre, where they reveal themselves and take command of the base.

They are called Cybermen, and they come--unsurprisingly--from the new planet approaching Earth, called Mondas.  Mondasians were originally identical to humans, but their scientists began replacing vulnerable, flesh-and-blood parts of their bodies with superior cybernetic implants.  Eventually, very little was left of the Cybermen that was human; their scientists had even found a way to remove their greatest weakness--emotions--leaving them a cold, pragmatic race.

But Mondas has now begun to run out of energy.  As it draws closer to the Earth, though, it will draw away the Earth's energy.  This will renew Mondas's energy, but leave the Earth a darkened, lifeless husk.  Humans need not fear, though; they will be transported to Mondas to save their lives--and to be converted into Cybermen.

(Planets stealing energy sound ridiculous to you?  Then you, sir, have no sense of wonder.)

Ben and General Cutler are able to steal one of the Cybermen's Cyber-guns, which they use to shoot down the three invaders and free the base.  Cutler immediately gets on the radio to the International Space Command's head office in Geneva to warn them about the coming invasion and the energy drain of the approaching planet.

That spaceship with the two astronauts aboard that was losing power?  It's burnt up in the atmosphere by now, killing the crew, but before that happened, Geneva sent up an attempted rescue--piloted by General Cutler's son.  Cutler now faces the task of trying to get his son back down to Earth as quickly as possible, or the young man will die.

But he's soon distracted by the news that a fleet of over a hundred spaceships has left Mondas, bound for Earth.  Cutler knows that he won't be able to save his son so long as Mondas is in the sky, so he determines to launch a missile at the alien planet armed with something called a Z-bomb (pronounced "zee-bomb", because he's American), powerful enough to crack a planet right open.

(With Earth apparently not having expected to be literally attacked by another planet, one does have to wonder why they troubled to come up with a planet-destroying missile.  We have for many decades had, say, fusion bombs in our arsenal, capable of irradiating the Earth's surface so that no life can survive.  Yet even a complete bombardment with fusion bombs would do next to no damage to the physical rock that is planet Earth.)

The Doctor is horrified by Cutler's plan to use the Z-bomb.  Doing so could well destroy the Earth as well, and at any rate, he says, Earth is in no danger from Mondas anyway: the planet is going to be so overwhelmed by the energy that it draws from Earth that it will be Mondas that gets destroyed in the process.

But Cutler dismisses the Doctor's concerns, and orders him and Ben confined.  And the Doctor is growing strangely weaker, and soon passes out, leaving Ben and Polly to foil the general's plan on their own.

A second Cyberman task force arrives at the Pole, but base's guards, now armed with Cyber-guns, are able to fight it off; we witness Cybermen actually running away to escape being cut down.

Meanwhile, Ben and Polly have recruited an ally: Dr Barclay, the base's chief scientist, who's as horrified as the Doctor at the idea of using the Z-bomb.  Barclay assists Ben in escaping from his cell, then distracts the engineer in the missile launch silo while Ben (acting on Barclay's instructions) sabotages the missile.

But Cutler discovers their plot and stops them, then orders the missiles launched.  The episode three cliffhangers sees the launch about to commence.

Which is as far as I've seen of the story, because episode four has been lost.  It's one of the most unfortunate of sixties Who's many losses, because it means we don't see the base once again invaded by Cybermen, who determine to use the Z-bomb to destroy the Earth.  We don't see Ben discover the Cybermen are incredibly susceptible to radiation, and use this knowledge to defeat them.

And critically, we don't see the Doctor, Ben and Polly head back to the TARDIS at the episode's conclusion, where the Doctor, complaining of feeling tired, collapses.  The TARDIS whirs into flight, and the Doctor changes, his whole body transforming into a completely different person--Doctor Who's first ever regeneration sequence, with William Hartnell leaving the title role to be replaced by Patrick Troughton.  And the programme would never be the same.

What Lisa thought

The Cybermen are fascinating in their first ever appearance.  Soon enough, they'd assume their familiar nature of being, essentially, scaled-down Daleks: a human brain inside an anthropoid robot body.  But not yet.  In "The Tenth Planet", they're recognisably mutilated humans, with human hands and, behind their masks, visible human eyes--blinking human eyes.

There's an interesting approach taken to their speech.  The Cyberman actor opens his mouth and holds it, open but perfectly still, while another actor recites his lines off camera.  It's a really good idea, though two things let down its execution.  The first is the unfortunate fact that the Cyberman actor doesn't seem terribly in sync with his off-camera counterpart, so several times he has to hurriedly open his mouth after he's already started "speaking", while at others his mouth remains open several moments after his dialogue has finished.  The other problem is that the actor delivering the Cyberman lines--presumably attempting to sound emotionless--delivers his lines in a far too quick-paced drone, and actually sounds rather friendly.

Lisa thought the first episode, in which no Cybermen appear until the cliffhanger, perceptibly dragged, but the story really picked up for her once we moved on to episodes two and three.  Like me, she's frustrated that episode four is missing--but I think we have to keep in mind that, as awesome as it would be to have the first ever regeneration, at least the story isn't completely missing.  We still have the first three episodes of the Cybermen's first ever appearance.

It doesn't vibrate, but it does ring.

And those phones.  Man.  Those phones are phallic.

Following "The Tenth Planet", no less than Patrick Troughton's first seven stories as the Doctor are missing.

First, "The Power of the Daleks", which eschews the epic scale of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and "The Dalek Master Plan" to tell the story of the struggle between the crew of a crashed Dalek capsule and the population of a single human colony world, spiced up by Ben and Polly debating with each other over whether this strange little clown of a man is really the Doctor or not.

Then "The Highlanders", in which the Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the Scottish Highlands just after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and end up imprisoned as suspected rebels by the redcoats mopping up the area.  At the story's end, they leave with a new companion, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper in the rebellious Jacobite army.

In "The Underwater Menace", the TARDIS materialises on a deserted volcanic island in the South Atlantic sometime shortly after 1968.  But the crew soon discover that beneath the island lies the continent of Atlantis, its civilisation still thriving after centuries.  (This is the first of three completely contradictory explanations for the destruction of Atlantis that Doctor Who will offer us.)

Then "The Moonbase", in which the TARDIS team and the crew of an Earth outpost on the Moon must save the Earth from being destroyed by the Cybermen.

"The Macra Terror" sees the Doctor and his companions arrive on a distant Earth colony world whose population are being subtly and insidiously manipulated by the Macra, a hideous race of giant crabs.

"The Faceless Ones" features Doctor Who's first attempted alien invasion of modernday or historical Earth, when a race of identity-stealing aliens infiltrate Gatwick Airport.  The major female guest star, Samantha, is played by Pauline Collins, who would later appear as Queen Victoria in 2006's "Tooth and Claw".  Ben and Polly leave at the end of the story, when they realise that the TARDIS has landed on the exact same day that the Doctor first took them away.

And finally "The Evil of the Daleks", in which the Daleks ally with a nineteenth-century mad scientist named Maxtible and a shopkeeper named Edward Waterfield, in an attempt to genetically engineer the "human factor" (ingenuity, essentially) into the Daleks' makeup.  (That's a plot the programme would mine again in 2007.)  The story's climax sees a final battle take place in the Dalek Emperor's throne room on Skaro, in which Maxtible, Waterfield and the Dalek race are destroyed.  At the time, this was intended to be the last ever Dalek story, and indeed, we won't see them again for several seasons.

Waterfield's death in "The Evil of the Daleks" leaves his daughter, the innocent Victoria, orphaned, so the Doctor and Jamie take her along as their new companion.  We'll pick up with her first adventure as an official TARDIS crewmember with the next story in our rewatch, "The Tomb of the Cybermen".

By then, we'll have missed some significant changes in the programme.  The most obvious is that Patrick Troughton will have become firmly established as the new Doctor.  But beyond that, the very nature of Doctor Who storytelling will have changed.

Apart from the Daleks, the Hartnell Doctor had only one enemy in his entire run who appeared more than once: the Meddling Monk, who appeared all of twice ("The Time Meddler" and "The Dalek Master Plan").  But the Troughton Doctor fights the Daleks twice, the Ice Warriors twice, the Yeti twice and the Cybermen four times (they make five appearances in just three seasons once we count their debut here in "The Tenth Planet").

That's because William Hartnell's departure coincides with the transformation of Doctor Who into the monster-of-the-week show that we know and love it as today.  Now, every story has a distinctive vision.  Part and parcel of that is the decision to abandon the straight historical stories; "The Highlanders" would be the last straight historical until 1982's "Black Orchid".  They're replaced with stories set on modern day Earth, in which the world is menaced by mad scientists or alien invasions, the first of which was "The War Machines".

So with "The Tenth Planet", we mourn the end of Doctor Who's roots.  But we can also get excited as the show becomes the adventure romp at which it's at its best.

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