The Tenth Planet: Ranking - 18

 

The Tenth Planet

(Season 4, Dr 1 with Ben and Polly, 8/-29/10/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writers: Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, director: Derek Martinus)

Rank: 18

   'Oh the weather outside is whiteful 

And the monsters are so very frightful 

There's only one way mankind can go

While it snows while it snows while it snows!

 

The Cybermen show no sign of stopping 

They're all tired of planet-hopping 

They don't care much for humans we know 

As it snows as it snows as it snows!  

When the Dr finally says goodnight

And heads out into the storm

It really is quite a sight 

With just a Tardis to keep him warm   

Well mankind was really dying 

But there's no point in crying 

This is a story about the bravery of letting go 

In Winter snows winter snows winter snows 

Ah but next comes Spring...'

It’s the end #1 - and the moment has been prepared for by almost no one, not the audience, not even the actor himself, barely even the production team. There he is, our hero Doctor, still ‘the’ Doctor for everyone watching on first transmission who’ve never heard the words ‘regeneration’ used in the series (they still won’t: it’s a ‘rejuvenation’ right up until Dr 3 turns into Dr 4 at the end of ‘Planet Of The Spiders’) standing firm and strong against an implacable foe with a stern look on his face, only to weaken and collapse to the floor of the Tardis at the end of the story, his face morphing into a stranger’s. No other series had ever done this before. No other series could have done this before. There are 7.5million people, who back in the pre-internet days hadn’t heard the news or read the few tiny notices that were in newspapers, who haven’t got the foggiest idea what’s going on. DW has always prided itself on being a series that thrived on delivering the unexpected, but few events in its sixty year history are as unexpected as this. After all, until 1966 we’d never heard the words ‘timelord’ or ’Gallifrey’ either – for everyone watching the Dr’s background was so vague that he could plausibly have been a time-travelling human from Earth’s future or even an eccentric inventor building space-time machines in his shed somewhere (that’s the take on it the Peter Cushing films assumed, with having never been able to pin the first DW production team down on what his background was).The sheer audacity of this series, changing the thing that had made made most people tune in originally (Hartnell’s reputation), back in the days when most viewers thought the Dr was still a time travelling human from the future, making our hero that we’d come to know and love so well, change his face and then sit up to carry on as if everything was normal. Even for a show where the everyday and fantastic sit side by side this was such a daring move I still can’t quite believe they got away with it – or even thought they could. It was even more of a shock to poor William Hartnell who never had any plans on leaving, whatever the first of many misleading official statements from the BBC publicity department might have said at the time. 

Yes he was poorly, yes he was finding it harder to remember his lines, yes the job wasn’t as enjoyable for him since all his co-stars had left/been fired and all his friends behind the cameras had moved on, to be replaced by newcomers he felt didn’t understand the programme or love it as much as he did. But still he loved this job too much to ever give it up voluntarily; I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like reading those lines in the script where he changes and then to have to lie on a cold studio floor watching someone else take over the part he’s created, sweated buckets to make real and believed in when almost no one else did (the drama ‘An Adventure In Time and Space’ does a great job of trying to imagine though – and the sooner that’s on the i-player the better as if we can’t have ‘An Unearthly Child’ or the pilot episode on there its the perfect introduction to the show’s early years). ‘The Tenth Planet’ may have been the second story of season four but it was the first one recorded after the traditional Summer break (‘The Smugglers’ having been recorded at the end of series three and held over to give the show a few weeks’ rare stability when it came back on) and officially William Hartnell is contracted as a ‘guest artiste’ for four weeks’ work only, which must have been galling for the man who believed the show couldn’t work without him. Fans have debated back and forth ever since as to whether Hartnell’s slow sluggish delivery (and almost total absence from episode three) proves the production team right that Hartnell’s arteriosclerosis (the furring of his arteries, making it difficult for oxygen to travel through his bloodstream and affecting memory first) proves producer Innes Lloyd right that he was becoming a liability or whether it was one last great power play by the star to show how much they needed him, to hold up production as one final great act of the rebellion and stubbornness that had got the show off the ground in the first place. Either way the one thing about ‘The Tenth Planet’ that doesn’t quite work is the way the ‘old’ Dr is written out, Hartnell given unbelievably shabby treatment by the show he turned into such a success. Yes the star was cantankerous and opinionated and difficult, at times sexist and racist (though no more than your average white man born in Edwardian England), but when this show started his star shone far bigger than anyone’s else’s and people tuned into that first episode mostly to see him. For all that, though, the concept of regeneration is such a brilliant one and so suitable to this show, which since its first episode has been all about change and second chances, that it seems odd to us now that anyone had to sit down and think of it.

 That person seems, by most accounts, to have been new script editor Gerry Davis, who is the first of many script editors to come into DW wanting to inject more ‘hard science’ into the show (although, like many great inventions, other people have said its them down the years). Davis has been having lots of extended chats with a scientist friend of his Kit Pedler, whose ideas are so key to this era of the show that he even gets a credit as the show’s ‘scientific advisor’ – surely no coincidence that its the same credit the 3^rd Dr will get when he works with UNIT in four years’ time. After thinking up rogue computers controlling London, Pedler comes up with a doozy for this story: his phobia about where the new vogue for transplants and cosmetic surgery might take humanity if left unchecked and the morality of replacing body parts and maybe one day preventing humans dying (because if we die then where is the jeopardy? That’s why the Dr effectively dying in this, of all stories, is so perfect: he’s the opposite of the Cybermen in every way including their quest for eternal life). The first human heart transplant took place in December 1967 roughly fourteen months after the broadcast of this story and what seems routine to us now felt like magic back then. Transplants had already been carried out using other animals, mostly chimpanzees given that they were our nearest ‘relative’, and there was already a lot of ‘folk stories’ growing up over how the people who’d woken up on the operating table had felt a sort of trace element of their transplant, 99% human but 1% monkey or pig. There were a lot of questions being asked, too, about how your personality might be changed by being given the body parts of someone else – this is the era of scifi tales in magazines and B-movie films about men who were saints given the body parts of sinners who turned out to be mass murderers and vice versa and how someone’s emotions could change beyond recognition, depending which body half was ‘stronger’ in personality. Botox wasn’t around till the early 1970s but Pedler had enough contacts in the science world to know all about the early breakthroughs in that too and man’s immortal quest to ‘better’ him or herself, to improve on their natural appearance though fake means (although the idea of cosmetic surgery had been around in some form since 800BC).

Davis and Pedler go one natural stage further than either though, creating the Cybermen, a race who take over the Earth not to exterminate it or conquer it but as a resource for spare body parts, slowly stripping humans of the one thing that made them different to the animals: their humanity. It’s such a perfect concept for a show like DW, that asks big questions of mankind’s morality and makes us different, that again you’re surprised someone had to sit down and come up with it first. Compared to their later appearances the Cybermen don’t look quite right yet and they certainly don’t sound right, with bits of their humanity still peeking through in their Humans hands and cloth faces and voices that haven’t yet been electronically treated (they’re even more threatening and other-worldly in their second appearance in ‘The Moonbase’ – and for all the many, many tweaks as DW production teams update their look, they’ll never be quite as good ever again after that) but the concept is still utterly terrifying: a lot of people like to kid themselves that they could probably reason with an emotional person pointing a gun in their face by calming them down and appealing to their logic by talking some ‘sense’ into them, but an emotionless zombie with cyber technology who is already working from a place of logic? No chance. These Cybermen have a great back story that’s all but ignored for future stories too: in space terms they’re basically Earth’s next door neighbours, closer geographically to us than anyone barring The Ice Warriors, from a mysterious ‘tenth planet’ named Mondas (back in the days when Pluto was still counted as our ninth – see ‘The Sunmakers’ for more hi-jinks there), a planet that doesn’t have our nice rigid orbit around the sun but a rogue elliptical one that causes them to be up close and personal with the sun one lifetime and as far away as you can get the other. The Cybermen have had to learn to adapt to impossible conditions from the start, which has made their evolution scattered to say the least and reduced life to the basic struggle for survival. They look at mankind with the stability of our planet and their time for art and knowledge and cookery and friendships and growth with deep jealousy and envy – or at least they did, before a series of necessary transplants from other dead Mondasians removed all trace of emotion so they lost even that luxury. Mondas is in an orbit that lasts approximately 75 years, enough time for Mondasians to have experienced every extreme weather condition going in their natural lifetime – clearly inspired by the irregular orbit of Halley’s comet in real life, something traditionally said to be an ‘omen’ of bad times for humanity (this story is set in 1986, when the next visit was due at the time of transmission, just for added terror value – twenty years in the future really isn’t that much in DW terms and this is one of the first examples of a DW story set in the ‘near future’ that could plausibly happen to the children watching when they grew up). What’s so clever abut this first appearance is the direct comparison with The Humans who are trying to eke out an existence at the South Pole, Earth’s most extreme weather climate and the last great bastion of the unexplored world in the days before we headed into space. Mankind has had to learn how to adapt to adverse weather conditions himself, but for the purposes of science and learning – not mere survival. When the Cybermen arrive, though, the Humans have to fight to survive in much the same way, doing anything in their desperate need to survive, from bargaining with the Cybermen to appeasing them to swindling them, in a story that asks the audience what they would do in the same snow-shoes. By invading us the Cybermen risk making us like them, uncaring beings who will do anything to live a little bit longer. I wonder too, if the story and the South Pole setting was inspired by the tale of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition – amazingly it had only happened 54 years before this story’s transmission and the fuss for the 50^th, anniversary, only the January before DW started, would have still been fairly fresh in the minds of the writers and viewers both. A tale of mankind’s desperate struggle to survival against the odds in impossible conditions, its full of tales of increasingly ‘humane’ moments in amongst a saving landscape, none more so than an injured, Captain Oates, aware that he was holding everyone up, heading out into the snow and saying ‘I might be gone sometime’, not unlike the Dr’s last exit here. There are shades of Douglas Mawson’s following expedition too, full of tales of death, starvations and rumours of cannibalism (I have particular interest in this as my Great Grandpa was one of the explorers – thankfully one that survived or you wouldn’t be reading this now). Cutler, the head of the Antarctic base, is particularly interesting: he’s your hard-nosed sergeant major type. Robert Beatty (brother of film star Warren but with an even more interesting career and so one of DW’s biggest guest stars at the time) was brought in partly to make Hartnell feel at home in his last story (they were buddies going back to their early film days) but also perhaps to mirror him and its notable how much Beatty plays Cutler just like the vast majority of Hartnell’s pre-DW film roles: tough, square-jawed, authoritarian, stubborn. He’s not all that far removed from a Cybermen himself, taking no nonsense from his men in these tough Antarctic conditions where nature doesn’t care about you and you can so easily be killed, closing down his humanity to cope in conditions where life is particularly fragile and precious and you just don’t have time to give in to emotions. Only as the story goes on we see the differences between him and the Cybermen more: that tough-guy front is just hiding how much he cares for his men and how anxious he is to keep them safe, while Cutler is the first of many base personnel in DW to make lots of heavy emotional calls home (at the time perhaps the most scifi element of the whole story, the idea that you could receive calls from somewhere as far away as the South Pole) when he thinks all hope is lost, vowing to survive just to see his son one last time. 

Is that really so different to the Cybermen, the writers ask? Where is the thin line between wanting to survive for the sake of others different to what the Cybermen are doing? They’re just doing what they do to have their loves ones survive too – the question we have to ask ourselves is how far we’d be prepared to go in order to survive before the price is just too high. The base itself might have been inspired by Star Trek (though if it was its probably from one of Pedler’s American scientist friends describing it rather than seeing it – Britain didn’t get the series on TV for another three years yet), multicultural, from a future when people from round the world are working together for a common goal, all the things the Cybermen, who are all near-enough copies of each other, aren’t any longer and thus returning to the xenophobia of the Daleks. This story tells a very different view of humanity to the ever optimistic Star Trek though: most of the base go to pieces quickly, turning on each other in stark contrast to the rigidly uniform Cybermen. Ben and Polly are put through the emotional wringer too and with the Dr pushed into the background they have to carry a lot of this story between them (its only their third one), something they do quite brilliantly. We’ve already see how resourceful Ben can be and that makes him a great match for the Cybermen, though he’s loyal too, putting himself in danger to save his friends several times over – something the Cybermen can never match nor understand. This story is also the source of one of my favourite DW anecdotes which is so apt for this story about emotions: Ben actor Michael Craze fell in love with makeup girl Edwina Verner during the making of this story. She’d fancied him for weeks but had been too shy to say anything until, seizing her chance in time between filming, she flirtatiously threw a snowball at him using the polystyrene fake snow on the set. Unbeknown to her Michael had just had an operation for a broken nose just before getting the DW part and the snowball made the scar tissue that hadn’t quite healed yet flare up so badly he had to be carted off to hospital. Appalled, she accompanied him to the hospital to hold his hand – and held it all the way to his death in 1998. Ah love: the one thing the Cybermen can never understand, that’s what wins the day in this story. I’m surprised actually that they don’t do the obvious and give a ‘base romance’ sub plot to Polly, who is one of the most emotional companions we ever see in DW. Which is not the same as saying she’s cowardly by the way– Polly’s first reaction to a monster is to scream, but she has a practical side that kicks in soon after and its her imagination and ability to come up with solutions to problems no one has ever had to think up before that makes her different to the Cybermen too (honestly if I’d been stuck in a miniskirt at the South Pole then I’d be screaming long before the Cybermen even turn up). 

Some fans have questioned the jarring way Ben and Polly get most of the Dr’s lines in episode three, all but running a scientific base from the future they’d have no understanding of, but for me it fits (and is at least better than the alternative, of having the supporting cast do it while Hartnell gets a week off to lie on the floor): this pair’s greatest feature is their joint resourcefulness and adaptability, the way they can turn even the most hopeless situation round, so it makes sense that by throwing out enough wild ideas eventually they’ll come up with one the base staff can put to good use. It still feels odd though in retrospect: ‘The Tenth Planet is the template for the vast majority of 2^nd Dr stories across the next three years, maybe half of all the 3^rd Dr stories to come and a sizeable minority of all the DW stories in the future too and yet this is the only time we see the 1^st Dr in a story that’s set out like this. Even when the 1^st Dr’s awake and spouting orders it never works in the same way it will in the Troughton stories: the ‘base under siege’ stories are all about seeing how mankind will cope in impossible situations, with the Dr off to the side muttering ideas and taking over at the end when they get stuck. The 1^st Dr is always the central focal point of any room he’s in (especially in the first two episodes here, where Hartnell’s old school film and stage training mean he tends to stand stock still glaring, in a room of motion and commotion). You just can’t argue with a threat that’s off-screen for half the story and for maybe the first time since ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ the Dr is totally out of his depth, doing his normal thing of taking control even though the people there know their jobs too well to let him. One of the best things about the 1^st Dr was the way the writers made him feel at home anywhere equally, whether it was rubbing shoulders with Kings, Khans, soldiers, peasants, cavemen, schoolteachers, swinging London or exotic lands filled with Daleks, Sensorites, Voords and giant ants. This is the only ‘world’ it feels as if he doesn’t belong in, that his time is up even before the Cybermen turn up, because he no longer fits in the stories the production team want to make. When the 1^st Dr walks out so fraily to the Tardis, the episode apparently over, leaving even the viewer’s gaze temporarily, we know that something is up. But we don’t know quite what (we don’t know fully know what until ‘Twice Upon A Time’ at Christmas 2017, when the 1^st Dr regenerates alongside the 12^th). 

 Nobody guesses what’s coming next when he talks about his body wearing a bit thin (something that doesn’t fit what we see on screen and its odd they didn’t write this in as part of a script that’s otherwise full of close attention to detail – is it Mondas’ magnetic pull perhaps? Or the cold? Or the delayed side effects of the time destructor from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ catching up with him?) Nobody guesses he means that regeneration which, out of all the many many ones we’ve had down the years is still my favourite, in a shot that stretched the BBC technicians to their limits and still seems like magic. The Tardis console rises and falls even though its not travelling anywhere, the Dr’s face bleaches white and then, using the same ‘dematerialisation’ shot that makes the Tardis disappear by panning between a ‘full’ set’ and an ‘empty’ one, the Dr wakes up a changed man. Over the years I’ve read all the background in the guidebooks, all the explanations, seen all the future regenerations many times over, and this one still feels like magic, something impossible that has no right to exist. Even though, alas, it barely does; all we have of this final episode is that regeneration, re-created from telesnaps and a few stray bits of moving footage (legend long had it, since disproven, that ‘Blue Peter’ borrowed the final episode as part of a DW tenth anniversary retrospective they were putting together in 1973 and forgot to put back, leading to a long standing rumour that Shep had eaten it – actually it seems to have been wiped, as so many DW episodes were, later and seemingly at random; frustratingly our last glimpse of Hartnell in ‘proper’ moving footage is him collapsing to the floor in episode three. Blue Peter actually lost a copy of ‘Episode 4’ of The Dalek’s Masterplan’ while making that documentary, the swines!) So, that’s a story that contains the first ever regeneration and the first ever appearance of the Cybermen, two of the greatest inventions DW ever came up with, two things that go together hand in robotic Mondasian limb: a truly remarkable feat that makes this story one of the greats. The story in between the first appearances of those things is, admittedly, not always as strong. Future base under siege stories do a better job of increasing the tension senseless death by senseless death and, Cutler aside, this is a load of weak-kneed humans you’re surprised can manage to survive at the South Pole at all for very long, even in a centrally heated one. Even though I approve of the idea of having different strands of humanity working together in the future, I’m not at all sure about the ethnic stereotypes that, for instance, have the French base employee shout ‘sacre bleus!’ when everyone arrives (although a shout out to Earl Cameron as the black astronaut in space – back in a day when virtually no black actors were on British TV and never got to be ‘heroes’ like this, rather than the butt of racist jokes). 

Episode three is, in fact, one of the hardest of all 1960s DW episodes to sit through: there’s a fleet of Cybermen parked in space, ignored for 20 minutes while we get that old standby an atomic bomb (it could have been a valid plot point about the lengths mankind will go to for their own ‘kind’ to survive, even at risk to themselves, but just comes out of nowhere and leaves again just as quickly) and the Dr’s grand total of lines for the episode amounts to ‘Eurrrrgh’. Legend has it Kit Pedler fell poorly with a cold when the deadlines for this part were looming and left it to Gerry Davis, which is why we get more Tv-literate ideas this episode suddenly and less sciencey ones. For all that I wouldn’t change a word: ‘The Tenth Planet’ is DW at its scariest and works on multiple levels all at once: as a simple tense story about people in impossible conditions, as a bigger story about survival and the lengths mankind will go to in order to live another day and as one of the most important milestones in the history of the series, the story without which we wouldn’t have had the next 57 years and counting. This is one of the most moving and emotional stories in the DW canon in fact, as you get involved with this story in so many ways on so many levels – despite or perhaps because of featuring DW’s most emotionless monster. By the time the Dr all but dies at the end its hard not to shed a tear, no matter how many times you’ve seen this story. And yet, at the same time, there’s something brilliantly uplifting about that ending when everything ends yet everything continues all the same, that life goes on – maybe not for you but the people you love (and that’s what makes us different to the Cybermen ultimately, that feeling of sacrifice). This is a series all about change after all and how the only way to embrace the future sometimes is to let the past go - even when it hurts. And has there ever been a more human or DWy moral than that?

+ The Cybermen costumes are jaw-droppingly good. As with all their future appearances only the very tallest actors were hired for the parts (although it seems odd, genetically, that Mondasians struggling with such an odd eco system as Mondas has would grow to be taller than us). The ‘accordion’ chestbox on their fronts, so unwieldy for the poor actors they’re changed for all their future appearances, look impressively alien yet remotely plausible, recalling a portable ‘iron lung’ machine of the sort used to help patients (mostly TB patients) breathe in British hospitals in the 1960s. The cloth masks and the bare hands remind you that this isn’t some clunky robot but a person who used to have a life and emotions and feelings. And there’s a helmet with distinctive handlebars that gives the Cybermen one of the best profiles of any monster, recognisable purely from their shadows. Throw in the fact that they’re silver – always a good colour for black and white filming – and you have one of the best designs of the series. I’m with Peter Capaldi actually, who considered this early version DW’s scariest monster (it was his idea to bring them back for ‘World Enough and Time/The Dr Falls’), even if their next stage look for ‘The Moonbase’ is better still for me. Unlike a few other monster appearances in this era there are lots of the Cybermen hanging around too and the shot of them walking like the world’s toughest army platoon, unstoppable, through a snow blizzard that would have finished off humans in seconds is another of the greatest shots of the series, incredibly good for 1966. It helps that snow really shows up in black and white.

- That said, their voices are awful. I can see where they were going: unlike the Daleks, who are one-note and always speak the same way, this is a race who used to talk like us so the production team just took some of the frequencies away and treated them electronically. But the odd distorted sing-songy speech sounds like they’re trying to lull babies off to sleep, not conquer the universe. Thankfully the re-think for ‘The Moonbase’ next time out gives these baddies the scary voices they deserve.