Doctor Who A-Z #29: The Tenth Planet (1966)

The hardest Doctor Who reviews to write, for me, are the ones where I have priors. Stories that I haven’t watched before are very easy to write for; stories which I have watched before but produce no strong memories or opinions are also straightforward. It’s the ones that scared me as a kid, the ones that I’ve named as a favourite, the ones I’ve changed my mind on, these ones are where I feel the weight of responsibility. These are the stories where I don’t just have to add context from the show’s history, I have to contextualise them within my own life, a pretty onerous task.

The Tenth Planet is a story that is critically important in Doctor Who history. It introduces the Cybermen and features the first ever regeneration. It is also critically important in my history because, when I finished rewatching it for this project last year, I went upstairs and had a chat with my granddad, and the next morning he was dead. There is something horribly appropriate about it happening after I watched this story; this is, after all, the regeneration story where the Doctor doesn’t die saving his companion from a deadly plague or absorbing a lethal dose of radiation, he dies because his old body is worn out. What does that even mean to a Time Lord? Is it the same thing that happened to my granddad, where after a while organs simply lack the strength to keep pumping blood and inhaling air? Or is it something different?

Considering The Tenth Planet as the culmination of Hartnell’s time on the show suggests another interpretation. If, to quote Steven Moffat, the Doctor Who universe is one where “we’re all stories in the end”, it may be that the First Doctor has just run out of story to tell. Even if the production team had been able to plan this better, if ill health hadn’t forced Hartnell to leave the series, they would have been unable to give him the kind of send-off the Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, Twelfth and Fourteenth Doctors got, where some secret they’d been keeping, some hidden wound or flaw in their plans came back to bite them. Over the course of the last twelve months, the First Doctor has seen a companion die, had another threaten to leave him on extremely bitter terms, wonder if it would be right to turn himself in to the Time Lords and – finally – decisively reject the values he once held. That’s a whole hero’s journey right there. Much like The Giggle did more recently, The Tenth Planet doesn’t earn its big change to the show’s mythology by arguing that this is the Doctor’s most important or dangerous adventure yet. It earns it by arguing that he’s been through a lot, and even he can’t keep going forever.

Ironically, it’s this sense that the Hartnell era is already effectively over that makes The Tenth Planet so vital and fresh. It’s matched only by Logopolis in terms of feeling less like the final story of a particular Doctor and more like the first story of their successor. Not only do we have the iconic villain of the Patrick Troughton years present in the form of the Cybermen, we also have the exact story type they’ll be brought back in: attacking an isolated base with an international crew, set in a more imminent future than the show’s previous attempt at imagining a world of tomorrow. And considering this is the first time the show has attempted such a thing, it’s remarkable how much of it clicks into place immediately. The international crew could, admittedly, use a bit of work – there are moments where you wonder if this Antarctic station really is a scientific base, or whether it’s a penal colony for Earth’s loudest national stereotypes. But the breadth of its vision is laudable, and it contains a major cultural first in the casting of Earl Cameron. The first Black actor to play an astronaut on screen, he serves notice that the Troughton years will be – if far beneath modern standards of representation – a definite step forward in the diversity of the series’ cast.

The realisation of the other elements are nothing short of a triumph. In the hands of director Derek Martinus, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that the Antarctic landscape is a soundstage with a wind machine blowing polystyrene at people. It all feels extremely dangerous even before the Cybermen turn up. Once the Cybermen do turn up, we’re treated to a kind of uncanny horror that the series has barely touched upon before. Even though there isn’t any emphasis on humans being converted into Cybermen, the design of the creatures – their blank “ski-mask” faces, their still-human hands, their unnerving habit of letting their jaws hang slack as the speakers in their throats bark out a sentence – is at pains to emphasise their corpse-like qualities.

The Cybermen would not always be this felicitous in terms of their design matching their meaning. Later stories like Attack of the Cybermen and Rise of the Cybermen would go all-in on the horrors of Cyber-conversion, but with the eventual monsters redesigned as generic hi-tech robots rather than anything that visually reinforced this macabre aspect. Part of the blame has to go to those early series guides which dutifully reported that writers Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis were inspired by “spare parts surgery”, reducing the existential nightmare of the Cybermen to an embarrassingly-dated panic over artificial hips. Whereas this might well have been the original inspiration – and Pedler and Davis would go on to co-create Doomwatch, an incredibly technophobic paranoid thriller – it doesn’t accurately represent how they come across in this, their original appearance. Rather than anything topical or satirical, The Tenth Planet‘s Cybermen are, simply, Death given form, from their skull-like eye sockets to their origin on a dark mirror planet to ours. So naturally, at the end of the story, the Doctor dies.

Except Death doesn’t kill him. Like the Seventh Doctor in The Curse of Fenric or the Fifteenth in Empire of Death, the First is given the divine status of defeating Death itself before lying down and expiring, his work finally over. And, of course, the show itself doesn’t die – it comes back the very next week full of new ideas and a revitalised attitude. None of us will be as lucky as The Tenth Planet‘s leading man, though the fortunate among us may enjoy the same afterlife as the story: being thought of fondly, fifty-eight years after your time is over.

Next: The Power of the Daleks (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The Tenth Planet

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