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Saturday, September 24, 2011
The Tomb of the Cybermen
No. I have a better idea. I'll leave you to the Cybermen. I'm sure they'll have a use for you. Or parts of you.--Klieg
Episode 1, 2 September 1967
Episode 2, 9 September 1967
Episode 3, 16 September 1967
Episode 4, 23 September 1967
Written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Victor Pemberton
Produced by Peter Bryant
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon (earliest extant appearance)
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (earlier extant appearance)
The TARDIS has just acquired a new crew member: nineteenth-century gentleman's daughter Victoria Waterfield, whose father was murdered by the Daleks at the end of the last (lost) story, "The Evil of the Daleks". For Victoria's first trip, the TARDIS lands on a rocky, desolate landscape. Soon after arrival, our heroes make contact with an archaeological expedition from Earth, from whom they learn that they are on the planet Telos, home world of the Cybermen.
It has been five hundred years since the Cybermen vanished from history, and the expedition are here in search of the legendary Tombs of the Cybermen, the hidden catacombs where stories say that the last of the Cybermen sleep in waiting. (The Doctor is genre savvy enough to realise what a bad idea this is.) The expedition can be divided into three groups: there are the archaeologists themselves, British and with a healthy respect for how archaeology is supposed to be done. There's the crew of the expedition's rocket ship, American, brash and brusque, but not very bright. And then there are Mr. Klieg and his associates. Klieg is funding the expedition, and he's brought along with him a woman, Kaftan, and her servant, the lumbering, silent hulk, Toberman. (Toberman has quite rightly been criticised over the years for being a rather racist depiction; it's unfortunate he's Doctor Who's first major black character.)
Klieg and Kaftan are indeterminately foreign, probably Arabic. Kaftan's relationship to Klieg is unclear, but while she doesn't have any clear authority over him, she's definitely able to manipulate him fairly easily. And she, Klieg and Toberman clearly have another, more sinister agenda that they're keeping secret for a moment.
When the Doctor and team arrive, the expedition have just found the entrance to the Tomb of the Cybermen--and they've just lost their first life, a crew member from the rocket who was electrocuted when he grasped hold of the doors of the tomb in order to open them. The Doctor works out that the door will now have been drained of the electricity with which it was charged, and the doors are safe to open.
Inside they find a labyrinth of corridors and control rooms. They're deserted, but the computer terminals are still in working order--if only someone can figure out their operating system, which appears to be based on a symbolic logic puzzle. It's not entirely free of menace, though--Victoria gets briefly trapped inside a "revitalising chamber" for the Cybermen when its door closes on top of her (no one realises it was Kaftan who sealed her inside, flipping its closing mechanism in order to see what effect the chamber would have on a human being), and one of the archaeologists is killed when he and Jamie accidentally trigger a Cyber gun in a weapons testing room.
And there's a massive steel hatchway, leading down into the belly of the facility, where Klieg is certain the Cybermen's actual tombs lie, but at first, no one can figure out how to open the hatch.
And there's something sinister afoot, too--someone has sabotaged the expedition's rocket. (Toberman, acting on Kaftan's orders.) It's going to take at least three days to fix, and during the repairs, the ship's captain, Hopper, is unwilling to allow any of the expedition aboard, because he doesn't know who it was that sabotaged the ship. That means they'll have to spend their nights (when the temperature on the surface drops dangerously) inside the ominous warren of the tombs.
Klieg manages to decipher the controls that open the big hatchway. There's an amusing sequence where the Doctor follows behind him as he flips switches, surreptitiously flipping them back again in an attempt to stop the hatchway from opening--only it turns out that the Doctor's subterfuge puts the switches in exactly the pattern that they really need to be in to open the hatch.
The expedition descends to the lower level of the tombs, leaving behind only Kaftan and Victoria. Victoria initially balks at staying behind just because she's a woman, until the Doctor explains that really, he wants her to stay behind to keep an eye on Kaftan. As soon as they're alone, however, Kaftan drugs Victoria by slipping a mickey into her coffee, and once Victoria has fallen asleep, she closes the hatch again, declaring that she'll only open it upon receiving a prearranged signal from Klieg.
Down below, the expedition come upon the actual Tombs of the Cybermen, a massive steel honeycomb crusted over with frost. Great, manlike shapes are visible through the tombs' doorways: Cybermen, dormant and sleeping. There's a control panel next to the tombs, and Klieg immediately sets about trying to decipher it, declaring that it must be an opening mechanism for the hatch that has closed above them. (The expedition realise the door has closed over them, but they don't know it was because of Kaftan's treachery.) Of course, both he and the Doctor realise what the control panel is really for--awakening the Cybermen in their tombs.
And this Klieg soon manages to do, and an army of Cybermen emerge from their dormancy and advance on the expedition. It's at this point that Klieg reveals his true plan: he is a representative of the Brotherhood of Logicians, an association of Earthmen dedicated to the supreme power of rationality and the intellect. The Logicians wish to make contact with the Cybermen--who are also, of course, dedicated to logic--and ally with them, using Cyber might to help them take over the Earth.
Of course, the Cybermen are having none of this. Now that they're awake again, they see no reason why they'd need the help from any human group to conquer humanity. The Cyber Leader makes clear with its first words what their plans are: "You belong to us. You will be like us."--In other words, the humans are going to be converted into Cybermen.
Back up at the tomb's entrance, Victoria has woken from her drug to find the hatch closed and Kaftan holding a gun on her. But the day is saved when Kaftan is attached by a Cybermat--basically, the Cyberman version of a mouse; like the Cybermen themselves, lethal and made of steel (though Kaftan survives this particular attack). This allows Victoria to open the hatch, and just in time, too. A struggle has broken out down below between the expedition and the Cybermen, and the hatch opens just in time for the expedition to escape--though the Doctor is almost dragged back down into the tombs when a Cyberman grasps him by the ankle as he climbs out. Only Toberman doesn't make it; he's been captured by the Cybermen.
Safe upstairs, the expedition are able to seal the Cybermen down below by closing the hatchway again. But they still can't escape--Captain Hopper hasn't finished his repairs on the rocket yet, and he still refuses to let anyone else aboard. The expedition imprison Kaftan and Klieg in the weapons testing room, because it has only one exit, but--rather unsurprisingly, considering the room's name--once they're in there, Klieg is able to find a Cyber gun, capable of killing both humans and (unlike the handguns a few of the humans are carrying) Cybermen.
Klieg and Kaftan therefore emerge from the weapons testing room and take the other expedition members captive at gunpoint. Klieg is still intent on forging an alliance with the Cybermen, and he thinks that possession of a Cybergun will give him the leverage to do that, so he opens the hatch.
Down in the tombs, the Cybermen have been on the verge of collapse from a lack of energy; the Cyber Leader has therefore ordered them back into stasis to conserve energy. It is therefore only the Leader who emerges from the hatchway, accompanied by Toberman. The Leader now agrees to Klieg's proposal in exchange for being allowed access to the revitalising chamber (where Victoria was trapped back in episode one), to restore his dangerously low levels of energy. The Doctor helps the Cyber Leader into the revitalising chamber in hopes of trapping it there, but once revitalised, the Leader is too strong for the ropes Jamie ties over the door and easily breaks free.
Another fight breaks out, between the Cyber Leader and the humans, and at this point Klieg and Kaftan discovers Toberman is now under Cyberman control--he has been partially Cyberised, with his right arm replaced with a steel limb. He knocks Klieg unconscious, and the Cyber Leader picks up Klieg's Cybergun and shoots and kills Kaftan.
The Doctor is able to use Kaftan's death to get through to Toberman, exhorting him to break free of Cyber control. Toberman turns on the Cyber Leader, picking it up bodily and smashing it into the floor. It appears the expedition have won. The Doctor, Toberman and Jamie descend back into the tombs so that the Doctor can seal the Cybermen inside permanently--but they find Klieg, recovered from Toberman's blow, already there, waking the Cybermen up again. He's still fixated on his plan of an alliance.
But he's killed by the first of the Cybermen to revive, who then turns round to the controls so that it can wake up the rest of its brethren. Toberman sneaks up on it from behind and destroys it, and the Doctor ensures that the controls have been set to return the Cybermen to complete dormancy.
Back upstairs at the main entrance to the catacombs, the Doctor electrifies the doors, just as they were when they killed one of the rocket's crew when the expedition first arrived, so that no one else can ever release the Cybermen. But before he can then close the doors again, the Cyber Leader revives and starts to shuffle toward the humans. The Doctor can't close the doors, as they've been electrified. Toberman steps forward and slams the doors shut on the Cyber Leader (who is thereby electrocuted as well), sacrificing himself to save the others.
Captain Hopper and the expedition's only other survivor, Professor Parry, head back to the rocket, while the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria leave for the TARDIS. The story ends with the camera drawing in on a single Cybermat, which, unnoticed by the humans, has escaped from the tombs and is trundling off into the desert.
What Lisa thought
This was actually the very first Doctor Who Lisa saw, when I first started buying Doctor Who DVDs. She hadn't been interested in watching with me, but she was sitting next to me on the couch cross-stitching while I watched, and by midway through episode one, she was asking me to go back to the beginning so she could sit and watch it properly. So it's one she likes. Particularly, she likes Klieg, who she thinks is wonderfully portrayed by George Pastell.
She does complain about the Cyberman voices, and she's right to. They're lost in an electronic drone that makes them almost indecipherable--definitely the worst Cyberman voices, and possibly the worst alien voices full stop, in the history of the programme. Which is a shame, because besides that, the Cybermen are actually very well realised. They've evolved significantly since their first appearance, which came, let's remember, less than a year before this, and it's the Cybermen of "Tomb" who really serve as the template for all Cybermen that have followed--for those who would show up again in the 1960s and in 1975, for the ones that would return in the 1980s, and for the ones that would return in 2006.
No longer is there any visible flesh and blood to their appearance (which is a shame, because that was pretty neat in "The Tenth Planet"). They're now entirely steel men. Instead of the actor holding his mouth open while his lines are piped out, the Cyber Leader has been given a steel facemask, with a slot that slides open to serve as the mouth piece. When Toberman kills the Cyberman who has just murdered Klieg, he rips its chest piece off, and white foam Cyberman "blood" comes bubbling up out of its corpse in copious amounts. It's really cool. (Lisa said, "Ewww.") There's even some rudimentary visual effects--we see mental waves passing between the Cyber Leader and Toberman as it silently transmits instructions to him, and electric bolts shoot from the Cybermen's hands to kill the humans--an idea that would be subsequently abandoned before returning when the Cybermen made their first New Who appearance in 2006.
For a long time, "Tomb" was amongst the missing Doctor Who stories (meaning that Victoria was the only companion for whom not one full story existed), until a complete copy was unexpectedly discovered in Hong Kong in 1992. We did have the story's soundtrack during that period (as we having the soundtracks of all the missing episodes), and from that audio track "Tomb" developed a reputation as a missing masterpiece, a gem of tension and atmosphere.
One of the Doctor Who DVDs--it's probably Lost in Time, the DVD release of all the orphan episodes--has a documentary about missing episodes, in which Mark Gatiss talks about the disappointment everyone felt upon actually seeing the real product in 1992.
I think that's crap. It's true that I never listened to the "Tomb" audio track, so I never had the opportunity to build it up into The Perfect Who in my head (though anyone who does that should be intelligent enough to realise that the TV show we construct in our head is always going to be superior to the actual TV show that shows up on the screen). But speaking as someone who has only ever seen "Tomb" as an extant story (it was one of the first Who VHSes I bought, back in the mid-90s), it's an absolutely cracker--for my money, the best extant Patrick Troughton story.
It's a brilliant, claustrophobic science fiction horror story, in the tradition of Who Goes There? (the great John W. Campbell novella upon which the film The Thing is based) or Alien. Its first two episodes are, indeed, palpably tense and atmospheric, as the expedition explore the catacombs and we wonder just what Klieg and Kaftan's design is. The latter two episodes suffer a bit from the loss of that tension, but they're nevertheless good action storytelling, with the ever-dwindling human band trapped in the tombs with the Cyber menace.
Narratively, the real genius of "Tomb" lies with Kaftan, Klieg and Toberman. A small band of humans in a remote, inaccessible location is the basic template for five of the first six Cyberman stories (besides "Tomb", there's Polar Base in "The Tenth Planet" (1966), the Moonbase in "The Moonbase" (1966), the Wheel in "The Wheel in Space" (1968), Nerva Station in "Revenge of the Cybermen" (1975) and the cargo freighter in "Earthshock" (1982)), but it's the addition of the Brotherhood of Logicians that gives that premise a fresh spin. Instead of humans vs Cybermen, we now have three factions, making shifting allegiances with each other, and it means the story never lulls.
The next story after this is "The Abominable Snowmen", in which the Doctor fights the Yeti for the first time, in 1930s Tibet, but it no longer exists, so the next story on our rewatch will be "The Ice Warriors".
I
Monday, September 12, 2011
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
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.
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.
I
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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.
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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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