The Tenth Planet

The Tenth Planet is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from October 8 to October 29, 1966. It was the last story to feature William Hartnell as the First Doctor, and the first to feature the Cybermen. Patrick Troughton also makes his first, uncredited appearance as the Second Doctor.

Synopsis

It is 1986, and Earth's sister planet has come home, bringing with the emotionless, unstoppable Cybermen. At the Snowcap base in Antarctica, the invasion begins, but the Cybermen have not reckoned on the First Doctor and his companions. However, the Doctor's body seems to be wearing a bit thin...

Plot

The Doctor and his companions Ben and Polly arrive in the TARDIS at the South Pole in the year 1986, near to the Snowcap base. The bored guards manning the Snowcap entrance are shocked to see three travellers in such an isolated place, and capture them. General Cutler, the base commander, comes down to the base entrance and questions them suspiciously before returning to the tracking room. The TARDIS crew has arrived while the base is supervising the mission of the Zeus IV spaceship, running a routine probe on the Earth's atmosphere.

Unusual readings on the spaceship's instruments lead to the discovery of a new planet, close to Earth, with very familiarly shaped landmasses on its surface. The spaceship begins to experience power losses, and Snowcap personnel begin arrangements to abort its mission.

Back on the base, the Doctor reveals what he knows about the tenth planet, Earth's sister planet, Mondas, and that its inhabitants will soon be visiting Earth. True to his prediction, three Cybermen land outside, killing the guards and disguising themselves in the dead men's furs to gain access.

While everyone is distracted by their efforts to land Zeus IV safely, the Cybermen are easily able to take over the base. The base personnel and Polly plead with the Cybermen to allow them to save the lives of the Zeus IV crew, but the Cybermen explain that their lives are irrelevant to them. They explain that they are Cybermen, who were once like human beings, but gradually replaced their bodies with mechanical parts, including eliminating the "weakness" of emotion from their brains. The Cybermen allow the men to make contact with Zeus IV, but it is too late as the ship is dragged away by Mondas and explodes.

The Cybermen explain that Mondas is absorbing energy from Earth and will soon destroy it. They propose to take humans back to Mondas and turn them into Cybermen.

Ben, who has been imprisoned in the projection room after attempting to kill a Cyberman, rigs up the projector to blind incoming Cybermen, allowing him to steal his guard's weapon and kill him. Sneaking back into the Tracking Room, he hands the cyberweapon to Cutler, who kills the remaining two Cybermen. Cutler contacts Space Command HQ in Geneva and is informed that they have sent his son on a mission to rescue the doomed Zeus IV.

Cutler decides it is time to take the fight to the Cybermen, and contacts Geneva for permission to use the powerful Z-bomb, in an attempt to destroy Mondas. Secretary Wigner at Geneva refuses permission, but Cutler decides to go ahead anyway. Ben and Polly argue against using the bomb, Ben saying that Mondas might destroy itself anyway when it absorbs too much energy. The chief scientist at Snowcap, Dr. Barclay, is also concerned, saying that the radiation caused by the exploding planet would cause great loss of life on Earth. Annoyed by these interruptions, Cutler orders Ben to be imprisoned in a cabin with the Doctor, who is unconscious and seemingly ill.

Polly manages to persuade Dr. Barclay to help them prevent the bomb being fired. Barclay tells Ben how to sabotage the rocket to prevent it from reaching Mondas, but Cutler notices Barclay's absence, and going to investigate, catches Ben while he is sabotaging the rocket.

Meanwhile, another attack of Cybermen is successfully repelled by Cutler's men using their stolen cyberweapons.

Cutler attempts to fire the Z-bomb, but the engines fail on the launchpad. Cutler, enraged, threatens to kill Ben, Barclay, and the Doctor, who has now regained consciousness. Driven mad with grief by the apparent death of his son in the Zeus V, Cutler is killed by a Cyberman as he attempts to shoot the Doctor.

The Cybermen insist that the rocket pointed at Mondas be dismantled. The Doctor suggests that it would be a good idea to go along with this, and tells the others to play for time, as Mondas cannot take much more energy now. The Cybermen take Polly back to their spaceship as a hostage.

As the Cybermen take over the world, the Doctor realises that their plan is to destroy the Earth with the Z-bombs, thus saving Mondas. He manages to communicate this revelation to Ben and the others over the intercom. In the radiation room, Ben surmises that the reason why they need to use humans to do this work rather than doing it themselves is that they are highly susceptible to radiation. Barclay suggests using the rods from the reactor chamber as a portable weapon against the Cybermen. This proves successful, allowing Ben, Barclay, and the others to regain control of the base. More Cybermen enter the Tracking Room, but just at that moment, Mondas explodes, disabling all the remaining Cybermen.

Cutler's son contacts the base from Zeus V, telling them that his ship is now back to full power, and Geneva tells Barclay that the Cyberman threat is over all over the world.

Meanwhile, Ben has made his way back to the Cybermen's ship, to rescue the Doctor and Polly. The Doctor appears to be very ill and confused and makes his way back to the TARDIS. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor falls to the floor, and before the astonished eyes of his companions, he regenerates into a younger man: the Second Doctor.

Notes

1. William Hartnell did not appear in the third episode. On the Monday before the programme was due to be recorded, he sent a telegram to the production team informing them that he was too ill to work. Script-editor Gerry Davis rewrote the script to explain the Doctor's absence (the Doctor's sudden collapse) and gave his dialogue to other characters, most noticably Ben. This was not as much of an interruption to the episode's production as it would seem, as all four episodes had been written so that Hartnell would have relatively little to do each episode in case of just such an event.
2. The Sixth Doctor serial, Attack of the Cybermen, takes place in 1986 contemporaneously with the events of The Tenth Planet. Ben and Polly, having returned to their own lives in 1966, meet again to sit through the same events in the spin-off short story Mondas Passing, by Paul Grice.
3. The novelization of this episode, released in 1983, places the action in the year 2000.
4. The last episode of this serial is missing, and is possibly the most sought after of the missing episodes, because it contains the historic regeneration scene.
5. Popular myth has it that the only surviving telerecording copy of the fourth episode was lost when loaned out to the children's programme Blue Peter in 1973 when they wished to use a clip from it in a feature on the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who. Although the print loaned to Blue Peter does indeed not seem to have been returned to the BBC Film Library, another department – BBC Enterprises – were still offering all four episodes for sale to foreign broadcacters until the end of the following year.
6. The idea of a cybernetic organism was not new to science fiction but it was only in the 1960s that artificial organ replacement became a serious possibility. The Cybermen are the first example of a race of cyborgs in television science fiction.
7. While the Doctor regenerates at the end of this story, the process was unnamed. In the subsequent programme, The Power of the Daleks, the Doctor stated that he had been "renewed", implying a restoration of youth rather than a change of body. The concept was not called "regeneration" until Planet of the Spiders.
8. Gerry Davis later stated that it was intended for the energy drain from Mondas to be the cause of the regeneration, but that it didn't come across clearly on screen. Another commonly suggested explanation is that the Doctor's prolonged exposure to the Time Destructor in The Daleks' Master Plan caused lasting damage to his body, and the energy drain of Mondas finally caused him to succumb.
9. Hartnell would later reprise the role of the First Doctor in the 10th anniversary serial The Three Doctors.
10. In the opening credits for the first episode, Kit Pedler is incorrectly identified as "Kitt Pedler." In the opening credits for the third episode, Gerry Davis is incorrectly identified as "Gerry Davies."
11. All four episodes of this story featuring a specially designed graphics sequence used for the opening titles and closing credits. Designed by Bernard Lodge, they were intended to resemble a computer print-out.
12. In 1992, a man named Roger Barrett (later revealed to be an alias) claimed to have a videotape recording of episode four of this story, and offered to sell it to the BBC. Before this was revealed as a hoax, the BBC produced a special introduction for an intended VHS release of the story, hosted by Michael Craze. The story was eventually released on video in 2001, with the fourth episode reconstructed by the Doctor Who Restoration Team using still photos and the surviving audio soundtrack.

References

• Howe, David J.; Stammers, Mark; & Walker, Stephen James (1994). Doctor Who The Handbook — The First Doctor. London: Virgin Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 0-426-20430-1.

External links

• Cast and Crew list, on the BBC website

See also: The Tenth Planet, 1960s, 1966, 1973, 1986, 1992, 2000, 2001