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.

I

"The War Machines"

Doctor Who is required.--WOTAN

Ben and Polly meet for the first time

Episode 1, 25 June 1966
Episode 2, 2 July 1966
Episode 3, 9 July 1966
Episode 4, 16 July 1966

Written by Ian Stuart Black
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet (final appearance)
Anneke Wills as Polly (first appearance)
Michael Craze as Ben Jackson (first appearance)

The TARDIS materialises in London in 1966, the first time it's landed on postwar Earth (at least, in its normal size and apart from a brief interlude atop the Empire State Building) since abruptly abducting a pair of schoolteachers from Totter's Lane in 1963; since this raises the possibility that someone might now mistake it for an actual police box, the Doctor leaves a notice on the front door: OUT OF ORDER.

The Doctor and Dodo have arrived in London shortly after the completion of the GPO Tower, whose futuristic, highly technological silhouette dominates the skyline. Fascinated, the Doctor decides to visit the Tower. On its top floor, he finds WOTAN (Will-Operating Thought ANalogue), the most powerful computer the world has ever known. WOTAN, effectively a functioning artificial intelligence, is so powerful that it is able to instantly solve the mathematical problems the Doctor sets it.

(I think it's a wonderful artefact of its time that the production team apparently think that the greatest challenge a human being could pose to a computer would be in presenting it with a straightforward maths question.) Rather more impressive is Dodo's question for WOTAN, "What does TARDIS stand for?", which it also manages to answer correctly.

From WOTAN's operator, Professor Brett, the Doctor learns that in a few days, all the computers in the world will be linked up under WOTAN's control. Intrigued, he decides to learn more by heading across London to a meeting of the Royal Scientific Club, which is holding a press conference about the linkup chaired by Sir Charles Summer. Dodo, means while, heads off to go clubbing in London with Brett's assistant, a pretty twentysomething named Polly.

But of course, all is not well with WOTAN. The machine has apparently determined that humanity has reached its maximum potential, and that further development of Planet Earth cannot occur with us in charge. It therefore decides to take control itself. After the Doctor, Dodo and Polly have left, the machine uses some sort of thought ray to take control of Brett, and shortly thereafter of a second operator, Professor Krimpton, and the security chief for the Tower, Major Green.

Polly takes Dodo to the Inferno, "the hottest nightspot in London", where they meet Ben Jackson, a Royal Navy able seaman. At first, Ben and Polly take a dislike to each other, as Polly finds Ben rather grumpy. But when Ben comes to Polly's defence after a male clubgoer tries to impose himself on her, the two soon become fast friends.

Dodo misses out on this, as she's been called away by a phone call--from WOTAN. The machine has determined that in order to take over the world, it needs to add the Doctor to its hypnotically controlled army. It therefore takes control of Dodo over the phone, so that she can gain control of the Doctor. (In my head, when Dodo put the phone up to her ear, she heard the class 1990s staticky whistle of a modem, which instantly hypnotised her.)

The next morning, the Doctor is having breakfast at Sir Charles's house when Dodo gets him on the phone with WOTAN. The machine transmits its hypnotic signal, but the signal has no effect on the Doctor. At this point the Doctor realises that Dodo is under mind control, so he places her into a hypnotic trance to remove WOTAN's influence from her. She then falls into a deep sleep; the Doctor says she'll probably sleep for two days. Sir Charles therefore orders her taken out to his country house, where his wife can take care of her while she recovers. This rather underwhelming departure moment is Dodo's very last appearance in Doctor Who--we won't see her again.

From Dodo, the Doctor has learnt that WOTAN has ordered the construction of "war machines" at strategic points around London, to facilitate its takeover of the city and from there, the world. When Polly fails to show up for a lunch appointment, the Doctor sends Ben to look for her.

She has, of course, been hypnotised by WOTAN. Ben finds her at a warehouse in Covent Garden, where she and a team of other WOTAN-whammied labourers are busy constructing one of the war machines, which are essentially small, unmanned robotic tanks. Ben doesn't understand that she's under hypnosis, and so attempts to rescue her, but this results only in his own capture by WOTAN's servants.

He's put to work on the war machine's construction, albeit without being hypnotised. Soon enough, he escapes; Polly, though still under mind control, sees him but fails to raise the alarm. Ben returns to the Doctor and Sir Charles and tells them about the war machine.

At Sir Charles's instigation, an army unit descends on the warehouse, but the war machine makes short work of them. As the army retreats, the Doctor stands his ground with the war machine bearing down upon him, and he's able to get behind the machine and pull out its connections, cutting its power.

But the danger isn't over yet--other war machines are under construction all across London. And one of them now emerges, trundling its way through the streets and sending Londoners fleeing in panic. The streets become deserted, and for the first time in Doctor Who, we get a faux-news report, with a real television news anchor (Kenneth Kendall, in this case) warning Londoners that the government wants them to stay inside.

At the Doctor's direction, the army lure this new war machine into a three-sided square of giant electrical cables. As soon as the war machine enters the square, Ben drags a fourth electrical cable across the ground behind it, closing the square and completing the circuit. This cuts the war machine's signal from WOTAN, and it powers down.

The Doctor is now able to reprogramme the captured war machine, and once that's done he restores power to it. He then leads it to the GPO Tower, where it destroys WOTAN, thus freeing all his victims from mind control.

The Doctor now makes plans to leave London once again. He's standing outside the TARDIS, waiting for Dodo to arrive, when Ben and Polly approach him with a message from her--she's decided to stay behind and won't be returning. A little disappointed, the Doctor heads inside, preparing to depart for points unknown. But as she and Ben are leaving, Polly realises she forgot to return the TARDIS key that Dodo had given her. She and Ben therefore head back to the TARDIS, which they of course think is just a normal police box. They find the door unlocked and, despite Ben's protestations that he has to be back to his barracks soon, head inside. Of course, as soon as they do, the TARDIS dematerialises.

What Lisa thought

I don't know that this one made much of an impression on her. She says only that she was constantly surprised that the war machines being constructed kept turning out to be war machines and not Daleks.

We did both get a chuckle out of WOTAN's famous line that, "Doctor Who is required," rather than "The Doctor is required." My theory? Well, it's established when WOTAN deduces the meaning of the word "TARDIS" that it's capable of understanding things without having any input that should enable it to reach that understanding. I think WOTAN has correctly deduced that it's in a television programme.

The next story is "The Smugglers", in which the Doctor, Ben and Polly land in seventeenth-century Cornwall and get caught up with a band of pirates trying to discover the whereabouts of Avery's Gold. (It's not until the 2011 prequel "Curse of the Black Spot" that we discover what actually happened to Avery's Gold--it was dumped overboard by Captain Avery, the Doctor, Rory and Amy Pond to prevent the Siren that was hosting their ship from having any reflective surfaces in which to manifest itself.)

"The Smugglers" has now been lost, so our next story will be "The Tenth Planet".

I