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, barely even the cast or production team (who only found out in rehearsals), not even the actor himself. There he is, our hero Doctor, still ‘the’ Doctor for everyone watching on first transmission who’ve never heard the words ‘regeneration’ used on Dr Who before (they still won’t: it’s not called anything on screen and referred to as a ‘rejuvenation’ behind the scenes, 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. No other series would ever think of doing this before (I mean, recasting happens all the time, but the likes of James Bond and Bewitched go out of their way to act as if it’s business as normal, they don’t make it a part of the plot). 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 Dr Who production team down on what exactly his background was). The early days of the show are all about maintaining the mystery, but nothing ever happened in the show quite as mysterious as The Doctor swapping one body for another one. And nobody beyond a select few in the know were expecting it at all. There are 7.5million people watching this story go out live, 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 about to happen. Even the Radio Times talked about the monsters in their publicity for this story, not the impending cast change. Dr Who 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. The sheer audacity of this series, changing the thing that had made most people tune into the show in the first place (it’s forgotten how much the show relied on Hartnell’s reputation as a film star for publicity at the start), then have a new actor 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 with atherosclerosis, 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 and didn’t go willingly, whatever the first few guidebooks written about this show, taking all their info from the ‘official sources’ presumed. I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like, having got the best job on television that’s reinvented your career and made you a hero to millions, then having to read those lines in the script about changing and then having to lie on a cold studio floor watching someone else take over the part you’ve 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. If we can’t have ‘An Unearthly Child’ or the pilot episode on there because of ‘creative and financial differences’ then it’s the perfect introduction to the show’s early years). Hartnell had clashed with the last two production teams and was getting a reputation for being ‘difficult’ but that was because he cared for the show and believes in it when no one else did, whilst all the people who came along after it was a success seemed to be using it to further their career. Hartnell also resented the way the emphasis in the series had been changed from a pioneering work of mystery that helped educate as well as entertain children to a science-fiction/action move clone that was exciting but generic, with this the first story that new script editor Gerry Davis and new producer Innes Lloyd have worked on from scratch a good example of that (with Hartnell’s Doctor seeming very out of place in the sort of ‘base under siege’ situation the Troughton 2^nd Doctor will thrive in). The earlier production team had tried to remove Hartnell already, making him mute and invisible in ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ when Hartnell’s contract was up, but the admin team never even considered the show would run without him and sent him an automatic extension the actor signed before they could get rid of him. Even so, he wasn’t expecting the end as late as working on ‘The Smugglers’ at the end of the show’s third year (they held the story over to start season four) and it was only whilst on holiday that he learned of the plans to remove him.

Rather symbolically he was back in Cornwall at the time, where The Tardis had only just left, as if he’d been abandoned there when everyone else went back to TV centre. Officially Hartnell is contracted as a ‘guest artiste’ on ‘The Tenth Planet’, brought back for four weeks’ work only, like an extra on his own show, which must have been galling for the man who worked so hard at this series. 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) 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. Chances are it’s neither: Hartnell gives his all in the first two episodes and is as electric as always with notably less fluffed lines (he was always strongest in the first few stories after a break) but got sick with bronchitis – the stress of the backstage politics arguably not helping - and had to skip episode three under Doctor’s orders, only waking up midway through episode four (with a lot of his lines given over to companion Ben, who has ‘just had a word’ with him off screen). Whatever the cause, the one thing about ‘The Tenth Planet’ that doesn’t quite work is the way the ‘old’ Doctor is written out, Hartnell given unbelievably shabby treatment by the show he turned into such a success even before he got sick. He doesn’t get the ‘star turn’ all other Doctors get in their last story, there’s no last great Doctory showdown and more than that The Doctor’s usual way of going about things, by taking charge and being a natural leader, just doesn’t work in a story filled with American military men giving orders to their underlings. Instead The Doctor is parked in the sidelines in a cell, despite proving multiple times that he knows what’s going on and leaving things to Ben and Polly to run around and fix. Only during his slight revival in episode four does Hartnell have any of the old twinkle, defying Ben’s waiting arms to lunge at the camera in a grandfatherly stern-but-kind postmodern wink to us that ‘it’s far from being all over’. Had ‘The Tenth Planet’ given Hartnell the starring role he deserved this story would have been top ten in my rankings for sure.   

For all that, though, the concept of regeneration is such a brilliant one and so perfect for this show that I still marvel at it now. After all, since its first episode Dr Who has been all about change and second chances, so much so that changing the Doctor himself seems an obvious thing to do in retrospect, but it still took a person to actually sit down and come up with the idea. That person seems, by most accounts, to have been Gerry Davis, who threw out the idea during a meeting with Innes Lloyd about what to do with their lead man (although, like many great inventions, other people have said its them down the years). It was seized upon immediately and then added into a script that didn’t originally feature the change at all. For though everyone thinks it was his grand plan after the co-credit on ‘The Tenth Planet’, actually Davis wasn’t meant to be writing this story at all and it ended up the regeneration story by chance as much as anything. Davis was the first of many script editors to come into Dr Who with the ambition of injecting more ‘hard science’ into the show and to that end he decided that there ought to be a ‘scientific consultant’ on the show (exactly the sort of job title The Doctor himself gets in the 1970s when he’s working for UNIT). Davis kept his eyes and ears out and one day found himself watching the science documentary series ‘Horizon’, impressed by what the guest Dr Kit Pedlar was saying in a discussion on heart transplants and the effects on the rest of the body. Pedlar, though a surgeon at the University of London who specialised in eye surgery, mentioned that he liked writing in his spare time and considered creativity to be of prime importance to the human condition. Davis phoned him up and asked his opinion on what sort of monsters might roam around contemporary Britain (see ‘The War Machines’ for his answer, compute-controlled robots, the first real new-look story from the new production team). Pleased with that story Davis dangled another carrot in front of his new friend, a story idea he’d suggested to many other writers: what would happen if it turned out that Earth had a long lost planet that acted as a sort of twin and who might live there? It’s not that original an idea maybe (Dan Dare did it first and arguably Superman had a go with the planet Krypton; while I often give writers the benefit of the doubt that they can’t read everything someone who clearly knew was Kit himself, who wrote an introduction to a Dan Dare re-issue admitting how many ideas he’d nicked for Dr Who!), but it does have a lot of scope to let writers start worldbuilding. Who would live there? How like Humans would they be? What would the threat to Earth be like?  

Kit took the idea home to his wife Una, a Doctor herself (and who never gets the credit, not least because they divorced by the time Kit hit the convention circuit and told people it was all his ideas. The ‘10^th planet’ part is her idea) and they threw a few ideas around. One thing that really concerned him and which he had indeed been talking about on ‘Horizon’ was 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? Why would we struggle to do more with our lives or make the world a better place for our children? 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. Many 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). There’s also one other aspect that never really gets mentioned with the Cyberman: the late 1950s into the 1960s saw a boom in the prescription of chemically mood-altering drugs, things like anti-depressants and schizophrenia controlling pills designed to take away extreme mood-swings from colossal highs to depressive lows. In these early days especially taking away those extremes of mood often left patients feeling like ‘zombies’, as if all their feelings had been repressed, much like the Cybermen here. As a medical man who’d trained before such tablets had been in vogue it’s easy to imagine Pedlar being appalled at younger Doctors handing them over like sweets without properly knowing what they might do long-term. 

The Cybermen, suggested by Pedlar and developed by Davis, feel like a combination of all those worries about where mankind might be heading, with a near-future setting just twenty years away (1986) where the worst fears of these longterm side effects might come to pass. The setting, too, makes good use of current fears of space technology and where we might end up: this is the era of the American and Russian probes sent to orbit the Earth in preparation for going to the moon (Gemini 10 launched between the writing of these episodes and the filming of them, still a recent memory for all those watching ‘The Tenth Planet’ on first transmission). There was still the thrill of the unknown about sending men into space and not quite knowing what they might find outside the Earth’s orbit no matter how many tests and how much research they’d done (this is also, I suggest, why this story is set at the South Pole: the last point on Earth that man had reached, with space the next logical step. The Edwardians didn’t know what the Scotts Shackletons Mawsons and Amundsens of the world might find there either). Maybe they’d even find a new planet, one just like Earth in an elliptical orbit that couldn’t be seen from the planet, like Mondas! These Cybermen have a great back story that’s all but ignored for future stories: 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 our 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 Dr Who terms and this is one of the first examples of a Who story set in the ‘near future’ that could plausibly happen to the children watching when they grew up) The Cybermen stand out from the first amongst the Dr Who monster rolecall, a tragic race who are only doing what we too might do in their shoes, surviving. Their beef with the Earth (at least this first time round) is nothing personal: it’s a simple case of us and them, while they offer what they think is a fair deal in return: the chance to be like them, to have our feelings removed, to never suffer. The Cybermen, though, have had their hearts and empathy removed so they can’t see what we can, that they’ve been slowly stripping themselves of the one thing that made us both different to animals: their – for lack of a better word – humanity. Even so, they have a point, especially in a telling line where Polly calls the wicked and they retort that she doesn’t feel pain for all the people suffering on her planet she doesn’t know so why should it matter? (Mondas One – Earth Nil). The story asks big questions as part of this: Is it worth surviving when there’s nothing left you that thinks or feels? It’s such a perfect concept for a show like Dr Who, that asks big questions of mankind’s morality and the lengths we might go to in order to survive, that again you’re surprised someone had to sit down and come up with it first but they did.

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 Dr Who production teams update their look, they’ll never be quite as good ever again after that) but the concept is still utterly terrifying and utterly brilliant: the genius of The Daleks was that you couldn’t see them in their tanks and when you did they were so different to us, a big green blob of hate. But The Cybermen are recognisably like us, albeit a fractionally taller version of us (all the actors are six feet two inches plus). The whole thrill of The Daleks is seeing humanity come up against something utterly alien, but The Cybermen work because they aren’t that alien, just us with upgraded technology and downgraded emotions and they aren’t driven by hate and emotions but logic. Which is hard to fault, especially in their first story: other species wipe out other creatures if faced with the choice of death, so why not the Cybermen? They’re a worryingly plausible conceit and while the script messes up rather a lot of the physics, chemistry and the astronomy (Davis seems to have forgotten that there are different branches of science – he needed four scientific advisors really) the biology is spot on. 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.

What’s so clever about 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. The Antarctic too was, at least in the 1960s, a symbol of hope for what might happen in the space race in the future: after a few decades of being claimed by different countries it was eventually decided that the research was too important for humanity and we ought to work together, beyond the barriers of nationalism. Today there are scientific teams sent there made up of people from different countries (just as there are in the space station, more often than not). Pedlar imagines an unusually utopian future by Dr Who standards, a base with people of all nationalities (and admittedly stereotypes) and a space shuttle that is piloted by an Australian and a black commander from Bermuda. Even Star Trek, which started this same year, made the token black character a glorified secretary! Talking of Star Trek, if this base was inspired by the Americans it must have been 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). Yet the similarities are plain: this is a multicultural base, 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 and trying everything from appeasing them to swindling them, in a story that asks the audience what they would do in the same snow-shoes (if this was Trek Captain Kirk would have found a Cyberwoman to snog, while the Vulcans are pretty close to Cybermen without the metal). The human race is diverse, with characters as different as any you’ll find who all react to The Cybermen in different ways: some are scared, some are anxious, some are angry, some react in a macho way, some are as emotionless as they are. They still haven’t found a way of fully dealing with the cold, which is their biggest shared threat. The contrast with The Cybermen, marching unthinkingly through the blizzard (why? It’s peak Summer in the Antarctic if this is December – Davis needed to hire a history and geography advisor too) with The Humans all doing their one thing is so poignant without a word being said about it.

I wonder too, if the story and the South Pole setting was inspired by the tale of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition – it had only taken place fifty-four years before this story’s transmission and the fuss for the 50th anniversary, only the January the year before Dr Who 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 Doctor’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). A polar base is perfect for this scenario, with everyone cut off from home and nowhere to go, a setting I’m surprised the series didn’t use more (there’s a Krynoid in the snow too, you know).

Cutler, the head of the Antarctic base, is particularly interesting: he’s your typical hard-nosed sergeant major type who won’t put up with scifi nonsense even when its under his nose – the first real time The Doctor had ever come up against a character like this. Robert Beatty (brother of film star Warren but with an even more interesting career and so one of Dr Who’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, starring in ‘The Odd One Out’ and ‘The Magic Box’ together. The line where Cutler retorts to The Doctor’s ‘I don’t like your tone’ with ‘well, I don’t like your hair!’ is almost certainly an ad lib given the wig Hartnell always wore as The Doctor ) but also perhaps to mirror him and its notable how much Beatty plays Cutler just like the vast majority of Hartnell’s pre-Who 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 Dr Who to make lots of heavy emotional calls home in the middle of a busy day (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) The moment when he thinks all hope is lost and vows to survive long enough to see his son one last time is easily the most moving of all the times Who tried this trick though: it’s moving both because it makes him different to The Cybermen (who no longer see themselves as individuals) and because, by risking all by defying government orders to blow up Earth in the hope of saving his son from a fate worse than cybernation he effectively becomes what the Cybermen are, a race committing genocide to better survive themselves. 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 honourable and how is it different to what the Cybermen are doing just because it’s your child not yourself? 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.

Ben and Polly though are humanity’s best representatives, staying calm despite being put through the emotional wringer themselves in only their third story and with the Doctor pushed into the background they have to carry a lot of this script between them, 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. He’s horrified when he has to kill a Cybermen in cold blood, still thinking of them as people with feelings, while Polly is more outraged in an abstract way, far more terrified at the thought of losing her personality than losing her life. 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 jabolite fake snow on the set (very convincing it is too, far more so than the modern series’ Christmas episodes). Unbeknown to her Michael had just had an operation for a broken nose just before getting his part on Who and it had been quite the injury – during an operation to remove a bone chip a blood vessel had burst and left him quite poorly. The scar tissue hadn’t fully healed yet and the snowball had set it off so badly poor Craze had to be carted back to hospital. Horrified at what she’d accidentally done, Edwina accompanied him to the hospital to hold his hand, offering to do anything he asked to say sorry, He asked her for a drink – they got married – and they ended up holding each other’s hands 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 Dr Who just to rub the point about differences in. 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 it’s 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: clearly it’s not just those from Mondas who have eradicated pain). 

Some fans have questioned the jarring way Ben and Polly get most of the Doctor’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 2nd Dr stories across the next three years, maybe half of all the 3rd Dr stories to come and a sizeable minority of all the Who stories in the future too and yet this is the only time we see the 1st Dr in a story that’s set out like this. Even when the 1st Dr’s awake and spouting orders it never works in the same way it will in the Troughton stories: the ‘base under siege’ episodes are all about seeing how mankind will cope in impossible situations, with the Doctor off to the side muttering ideas and taking over at the end when they get stuck. The 1st 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 Doctor 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 1st Doctor 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. Instead he’s a guest star in a Troughton story where the new lead hasn’t turned up yet. So they park him to the side and ignore him (admittedly partly a side effect of Hartnell’s bronchitis where he’s replaced by Gordon Craig in the Doctor’s cloak with his face away from the camera). When the 1st 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 as we stay with Ben and Polly rather than follow him we don’t fully know quite what until ‘Twice Upon A Time’ at Christmas 2017, when the 1st Dr regenerates alongside the 12th). The one great loss in this story is that they didn’t do more with the Doctor’s collapse: the hint in the script is that Mondas is somehow draining energy from him too, which makes no sense now we know he isn’t from a future Earth. The best guess is that, after losing so much life force being frozen (‘The Space Museum’), turned invisible and mute (‘The Celestial Toymaker’), hypnotised (‘The War Machines’), life-drained (‘The Savages’) and affected by the time destructor (‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’) recently this was just the last straw for an old body that was already wearing a bit thin. Or maybe it’s Avery’s curse from ‘The Smugglers’ coming true?

Whatever the cause when The Doctor mentions his body wearing a bit thin 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. The Tardis console rises and falls even though it’s not travelling anywhere (the first time its ever done that stationary), the Doctor’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 Doctor 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 in a way the others don’t, something impossible that has no right to exist. Even though, alas, it barely does; all we have of this final episode is that regeneration scene, 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 Dr Who 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 Dr Who 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. The rumour is half-true by the way: Blue Peter actually lost a copy of ‘Episode 4’ of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’,  the swines! It seems odd that just this one episode is missing. A hoax went round fandom that a ‘Roger K Barrett’ had a copy he would sell to the BBC who were so convinced it was true they went to the trouble of getting Michael Craze to do some links for a video version before they found out it was a hoax. I mean, I could have told them that name was suspicious – it’s the real name of Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett). If the ending all feels a bit made up on the spot, well it was comparatively: though they’d hashed out the idea behind the Cybermen as a partnership, Davis had left pedlar to write the story alone. Only Kit got really sick with ulcerative colitis and had to be hospitalised (another one!) having only got as far as episode two, with Davis taking over. The Doctor regenerates in this story basically because Davis was writing it anyway and didn’t have to write a story specially for it, which is why The Doctor suddenly grows weak (and would have done even if Hartnell hadn’t had bronchitis), there’s no more to it than that and its mere coincidence that The Doctor dies in a story featuring a future famous monster’s first appearance, only a ‘big event’ in retrospective. You might notice too that the writing changes sharply between the first two episodes and the last: we go from a story that’s all about Pedlar’s scientific curiosity, imagining a future base and a future humanity full of transplants, to a pure action story. Davis, unsure what Pedlar was going to do with the story, ignores a few plot strands (such as the cyber invasion,  who are still out there when the story ends) and adds a few more of his own ut of nowhere, such as the ‘z-bomb’ Cutler suddenly decides to use to blow up the Mondasian meanies.

So, that’s a story that contains the first ever regeneration and the first ever appearance of the Cybermen, two of the greatest inventions Dr Who ever came up with, a pair of 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 Dr Who episodes to sit through: there’s a fleet of Cybermen parked in space, ignored for twenty 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 Doctor’s grand total of lines for the episode amounts to ‘Eurrrrgh’.

For all that I wouldn’t change a word: ‘The Tenth Planet’ is too cool for school, in both the original ‘temperature’ meaning of the word (being set at the South Pole), the ‘uncaring’ adaptation of the word (as per the Cybermen) or the more modern version of ‘cool’ as something amazing hip and trendy. This is Dr Who 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 fifty-nine years and counting. There’s a reason this becomes the template for so many future, some arguably better stories: it’s very good, gripping and stakes feel high  even without regeneration. It even kickstarts a love affair between Dr Who and ventilation shafts as an unlikely means of escape, something that by the Pertwee and early Tom Baker years will seem more like ‘home’ than The Tardis. This script contains some great little moments throughout, especially when The Doctor or Polly discuss emotions with a Cybermen who’s totally forgotten what they are or when Cutler is desperately trying to keep it all together in the face of a threat that even he hasn’t been trained or prepared for. the acting in this story is superb throughout, from Michael Craze and Anneke Wills trying to make Doctory speeches sound natural to Robert Beatty being amongst the most complex and multi-layered of guest parts to Hartnell himself in his last hurrah (especially the first episode where he’s sharp as a tack). It seems impressively modern as well, with a pace that doesn’t let up or is filled with padding the way a few early stories can be, while the touches of having newscasters showing this is a global problem – something ‘classic’ Who only did once more, with the archaeological dig in ‘The Daemons’ - is a detail Russell T Davies will turn into an artform in forty years or so. For once a classic story actually sticks the ending too, with Cutler turned into a bigger threat when he talks about using the Z-bomb and the Cybermen killed off not by fighting back but by natural radiation from the Earth, the Mondasians having under-estimated the Humans.

While Pedlar didn’t get much about 1986 right (we haven’t had any twin planets and sadly his utopian vision of the future was wrong too) he got one chilling thing right: we really did lose a rocket with ‘all hands’ in 1986, when Challenger blew up (while Cutler is the sort of part that the president of 1986, Ronald Reagan, used to play in films) which made watching this in the mid 1980s extra chilling. Whatever time period you watch ‘The Tenth Planet’ in though, this is one of the most moving and emotional stories in the Dr Who canon, as you get involved with this story in so many ways on so many levels – despite or perhaps because of featuring Dr Who’s most emotionless monster. By the time the Doctor 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, the moral that life goes on – maybe not for you but the people you love (and that’s what makes us different to the Cybermen ultimately). 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 Dr Whoy moral than that? Sometimes the big stories in this series especially the ones that weren’t intended to be big at the time, let you down but not this one – it might not be a top tier classic in every single scene like the very best of stories but for the most part it’s a superb little story, thoughtful, exciting, intelligent so moving it would hurt had I not remembered to turn my pain receptors off.  

POSITIVES + 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, you’d think they’d be shorter). The ‘accordion’ chestbox on their fronts, so unwieldy for the poor actors that 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 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 coming somewhere in the middle of the only two colours available– and you have one of the best designs of the series. They made seven of them too, rather than the usual two or three, so they actually look like a decent sized army for once. You can see some cyber-sticky tape when they’re in close up in episode two as well, but it doesn’t matter: these aren’t yet world conquering monsters but ordinary people making do who got a bit carried away. I’m with Peter Capaldi actually, who considered this early version of the Cybermen  Dr Who’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 for me the ‘definitive’ version, halfway between Human and functional. 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 and one of the best cliffhangers in the series. It helps that snow really shows up in black and white (and a surprise that they didn’t use it more after seeing how well it worked in ‘Marco Polo’ ‘Keys Of Marinus’ and here). ‘We don’t know what we’re in for’ says the Doctor at the start of this story as he looks out on scanner for last time. Not half! This series has never been the same again, in so many different ways.

NEGATIVES - That said, the Cybermen 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, which goes up and down all the time, 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.

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘Emotions! Love, pride, hate, fear! Have you no emotions, sir?’  Cyberman: ‘Come to Mondas and you will have no need of emotions. You will become like us’. Polly: ‘Like you?’ Cyberman: ‘We have freedom from disease, protection against heat and cold, true mastery. Do you prefer to die in misery?’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Uniquely, the TV story ‘Twice Upon A Time’ (2017) takes place in the middle of an episode of previously televised Dr Who: ‘The Tenth Planet’ episode four (it’s what the 1^st Doctor gets up to when he walks out of the base and into the South Pole blizzard, just before regenerating). See also the excellent Big Finish story ‘Spare Parts’ (reviewed under it’s almost-as-good TV remake ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’).

‘Mondas Passing’ (1998), a short story by Paul Grice from the first ‘Short Trips’ prose anthology, sees Ben and Polly return to watch events unfold in Antarctica in ‘real time’ from a safe distance. By now they’re twenty years older and have been married but have since split and haven’t been in contact for some time. Ben narrates the story, sat in a hotel room wondering if Polly will show up like she promised, wondering why the arrival of Mondas isn’t on the news (it turns out that the world governments knew it was coming but didn’t want to panic the population so hushed it up). Polly does arrive though and they reminisce about old times in a sweet but guarded way, sort-of but not-quite rekindling their old flame for each other. Not the future I’d always planned in my head for these two, but the chance of the companions living through the near-contemporary dating was too good to miss and the result is sweet, if a bit short. 

The 1^st Doctor was rather busy in his final moments; if ‘Twice’ was too much for one lifetime then there’s another much sweeter cameo in ‘The Locked Room’ (2015), one of Big Finish’s better ‘Companion Chronicles’. By now Steven is retiring as head of ‘The Savages’ home world and preparing his grand-daughter Sida to take over. Steven is confused and lonely, unsure of how well he’s lived his life and desperate to talk to The Doctor again, afraid of the changes that are happening in his world and death from old age he feels right around the corner. By using telepathic trickery he happens to locate his old friend down right at the point when he’s regenerating and feeling anxious about change himself. Steven takes comfort from the idea that change and death isn’t necessarily the end, with The Doctor imparting one last piece of wisdom that it isn’t as scary as it seems and that he’s content with what happens next. Which doesn’t quite fit with what happens in ‘Twice’ but never mind – it’s a sweet moment in a sweet story all the same.   

A surprise entry in Big Finish’s ‘Lost Stories’ range we thought had come to the end long ago, Gerry Davis’ ‘Genesis Of The Cybermen’ (2025) is the origin script he submitted to the Dr Who production office in 1982 before they decided to go with ‘Earthshock’, adapted for audio by David K Barnes. A sort of cross between ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’, superlative Big Finish story ‘Spare Parts’ and ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’  (but for Cybermen), it’s an origin story that many fans have been eager to hear ever since the ‘sneak preview’ David Banks discovered and published when researching his ‘Cybermen’ book in the early 1990s. Alas Banks only seems to have used the ‘good’ bits. As with ‘The Tenth Planet’ the population of Mondas is in big trouble, the waywardness of their planet’s orbit causing their population to need energy supplements to get them through the day and with an average lifespan of a mere fifty. The planet is ruled by twin princes, one interested in the arts and one in science, and neither can agree on the best way forward. By the time the 5^th Doctor arrives on Mondas with Tegan, Nyssa and Adric (all generic characters in the original script as none had been cast yet) he wants to help but knows that the planet’s fate is inevitable – not what the princes want to hear. So he tries to give what help he can in an artistic sense, only for the Tardis to arrive back on Mondas a few decades later, ‘The Ark’ style, to find that all his help has pushed the planet towards science and caused the cyber revolution instead. You can see why this story never got made, not because it’s bad but because it’s weird and the double prince idea doesn’t work at all (no civilisation is ever built on arts or science alone – if it was Mondas wouldn’t have even got that far). It’s also a very 1960s moralising/explorative idea of the series that wouldn’t have fitted into the 1980s at all (despite a surprising amount of gore and suffering) and it feels very much a first draft without the emotional impact of ‘Earthshock’ (which beats it in some ways) or ‘Spare Parts’ (which beats it in every way). Even so, it’s very welcome to hear after all these years and with enough time and encouragement for Davis to work on redrafts could yet have been great.

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