The Tenth Planet

This old body is wearing a bit thin, I suppose.

The final First Doctor story and the introduction of the Cybermen. You would think that this story would be more memorable given all that it has going for it. But, it is almost completely unknown outside of those two points and that probably tells you all that you really need to know about the plot of this story.

Plot Summary

The TARDIS lands just outside an international underground base in Antarctica in December 1986 used to track and communicate with various space missions. The TARDIS crew is arrested by base personnel and brought inside. However, they are shunted to the side when the base begins having issues with one of their recent rocket launches. The space craft is off course and suffering a power drain.

Observing quietly, the Doctor formulates a theory and offers it to the CO, General Cutler, on a slip of paper. Cutler ignores him but his senior scientific advisor, Barclay, takes the note and stuffs it in his pocket. As they try and aid the spacecraft, it drifts further off course and loses more power. The spacecraft also reports seeing a new planet approaching Earth and send back images of the planet.

The Doctor points out on the images that the land masses are very similar to Earth except that they are inverted. He then directs Barclay to read his note and Barclay is astonished to read that same statement. General Cutler, suspicious of their origins, orders a team topside to break into the TARDIS. As they head out, a spacecraft lands nearby and a group of Cybermen approach in the snow. They catch the team by surprise and kill them. They put on the team's cloaks and slip into the base.

The team in the base continues to work to try and get the spacecraft down. However the Cybermen appear in the base and seize control. They knock out General Cutler and lock Ben in the A/V room when he tries to resist. They force the base to send a signal back to control in Geneva that everything is fine.

The Cybermen do not impede the team in attempting to get the spacecraft down. However, they warn that the attempt is futile. The spacecraft attempts to slow down to reenter but it's fuel reserves are exhausted and it enters the atmosphere at too high a velocity. It burns up as it enters.

In the A/V room, Ben turns on the projector and then calls the guard. As the Cybermen enters, it is blinded by the projector and Ben seizes his weapon. He guns him down and sneaks out. Ben slips the weapon to General Cutler as he regains consciousness. Cutler then guns down the Cybermen. Cutler signals Geneva about what happened and warns them of further attacks. Cutler is informed that a second spacecraft was launched to attempt to aid the first one before it was destroyed and it is being piloted by Cutler's son.

Before being killed, the Cybermen informed the base that they intended to drain the energy of the Earth and transport the inhabitants back to Mondas to be converted to Cybermen. They begin to read power drains across the globe. They also spy a fleet of spacecraft approaching Earth. Cutler orders his men topside to set up a defense using the captured Cybermen weapons.

The Doctor suddenly collapses and is taken away to the barracks to recuperate. Cutler, becoming increasingly unhinged in fear for his son's life decides to launch a Z-bomb rocket at Mondas to destroy it. Barclay is horrified and warns against the potential fallout. Cutler ignores him. Cutler phones Geneva to get permission but is denied the outright use of the bomb. He is however granted rights to use methods he deems necessary to fight the Cybermen. Cutler uses this as a fig leaf to prepare the bomb.

Ben protests, stating that the Doctor assured them that Mondas would be unable to control the energy draw and would burn up if given the time, meaning they only had to hold out against the Cybermen. Cutler, refusing to be inactive, orders him taken to the barracks with the Doctor. Polly is allowed to stay behind and she works on Barclay to help them stop the missile launch while Cutler and others make the missile operational.

Barclay goes with Polly to the room with Ben and the Doctor, who is still unconscious. Barclay gives Ben instructions on how to sabotage the rocket so that it will not launch but be undetectable for several weeks. Ben sneaks through the air ducts and lowers himself into the launch bay as the workers leave. Barclay heads outside the room, distracting the scientists with mathematical checks.

One Cyberman spacecraft lands but the squad of Cybermen that emerge are cut down by their own weapons hidden in the snow. Military men seize the weapons of the fallen to add to their arsenal.

Cutler prepares to launch the rocket so that it's blast will occur while his son's spacecraft is on the far side of Earth. He notices that Barclay is missing and goes looking for him. Alarmed at the lack of people inside the silo, Cutler storms in and finds Ben in a compartment. He pulls him out and throws him off the gantry. Suffering a concussion, Ben is taken back to the control room to be looked at by Polly while Cutler orders the launch of the missile.

The missile fails to launch due to Ben's sabotage and Cutler reacts angrily. The Doctor reenters the room and Cutler turns on him as the source of the failure. He is momentarily distracted by a call from his son who has the power of his ship flickering on and off. He ignores warnings from the communications officer about an approaching Cyberman ship. When communication is lost, Cutler flies into a blind rage and prepares to shoot the Doctor as the source of the problem.

Cybermen enter the base at that moment and General Cutler is killed when he shoots at them. The Cybermen order the retraction of the missile and the removal of the nuclear device. Ben, Barclay, Dyson and a couple of other base personnel are sent in to do the job while Polly is taken to the Cyberman ship as a hostage. The Doctor is initially left in the control room to communicate with Geneva but he is also eventually taken to the Cyberman ship.

In the missile silo, Ben and the others work but eventually realize that the Cybermen have become aware of the potential of Mondas absorbing too much energy and are planning to use the Z-bomb warhead to destroy Earth as a means of stopping the flow. Ben also realizes that the Cybermen are vulnerable to radiation as they refuse to enter the room. Ben has the crew all lie down while he pounds on the door as though they are all dying of radiation poisoning. The Cyberguard enters and immediately buckles from radiation exposure. Ben seizes his weapon. They also then cut the communications out of the room.

Ben and Barclay pull the radioactive rods out of the nuclear reactor. They give them to the crew who hide down the hallway. As the Cybermen approach due to the time limit of warhead removal being up, Ben lures them towards the door, felling one with the captured weapon. The crewmen approach with the radioactive rods, weakening the Cybermen to allow Ben to cut them down with the weapon.

The group returns to the control room where they use a Cyberman communications device to lure the rest out of the ship and attack them. As the Cybermen enter, they notice Mondas beginning to burn up due to energy absorption. As the planet begins to crack and disintegrate, the Cybermen collapse and wither. Barclay signals Geneva and finds similar instances around the globe. They also reacquire communication with the orbiting spacecraft flown by Cutler's son to find him ok and his fuel levels stabilized.

Ben leaves the base and pulls Polly and the Doctor from their bonds in the Cyberman spaceship. Polly is fine but the Doctor is exhausted and barely conscious. The three manage to get back to the TARDIS where the Doctor briefly locks them out. He thinks better of it and takes off after letting them in. As they enter, he collapses and regenerates into the Second Doctor.

Analysis

Despite having the introduction of the Cybermen and the First Doctor regenerating, The Tenth Planet is ultimately not a particularly good story. I think a good portion of this is due to how much William Hartnell was sidelined due to poor health but there are several faults that lead to it's overall problem.

The story starts off fairly well with the space capsule, the arrival and detention of the Doctor and his companions and the appearance of Mondas. It even ends well with the Cybermen arriving and killing the team trying to get into the TARDIS. It does fairly well as a start up. But Episode Two is where things start to go downhill. The Cybermen seize the base and then we are treated to a heavy dose of exposition where the Cybermen talk at length about their plans. While I'm sure things are interesting from a technical point of view, it doesn't make for very compelling drama.

The story picks up again when the initial Cyberman invasion is driven back but this also starts the two central mistakes of the story. First is the removal of the Doctor. This obviously couldn't be helped as William Hartnell fell ill. It works to reinforce the idea that the First Doctor is dying and needs to regenerate, but much of the Doctor's lines are split between Ben and Barclay and it just doesn't ring quite as true to see the companions going about with some other guy when it should be the Doctor.

The second mistake is the shift in villain focus. Through the first two episodes, General Cutler is a by-the-book military man who is a bit of a jerk but ultimately trying to do the right thing. The potential loss of his son unhinges him and the Cybermen take a backseat as the villain to Cutler. This is a problem as Cutler has done nothing to deserve villain status and his shift to crazy should cause an uprising among his own men. It's also an unnecessary stalling detour as the Cybermen should always be the main focus enemy. Episode Two ends with a fleet of Cyberwarships approaching and they just seem to go on stall mode for an episode while the General goes Dr. Strangelove. It takes what should be a ramp up of the excitement and turns it into a moment of treading water.

A third problem I have with this story is that ultimately nothing happens. One of my biggest pet peeves is where the hero fights but eventually the villain seems to achieve his goal only to find out that achieving this goal results in their own destruction (Planet of the Spiders is a good example of this). In this story, the Doctor and the people of Earth need to do almost nothing. Mondas has already made the critical mistake of trying to absorb too much energy and will destroy itself. The only thing the Doctor and the others need to do is stall the Cybermen to not allow them to stop the process by destroying Earth. It seems overly shortsighted of the Cybermen not to be prepared for that and it also seems to happen far too quickly. There is no epic struggle where a hard choice has to be made nor is there a grand adventure to make the destruction happen. Instead it just happens while nearly everyone waits around.

This is a good story for Ben, I will admit. With the Doctor sidelined for nearly two full episodes, he gets a lot to do and is the real man of action the way Ian and Steven were in earlier days. Polly gets a bit sidelined with her conversion of Barclay in Episode Three being her only real action the entire story.

It's an unfortunate end for the Doctor. He more or less stands around for the first two episodes and the third where he was supposed to start getting involved is where William Harntell got sick. He has a momentary bit of shine at the beginning of Episode Four, especially with his acknowledgement that he is wearing a bit thin, but the second half has him absent or unconscious. It's not a noble end as you would expect for the First Doctor, but it does reveal a bit of sad truth about what truly growing old would be like. The First and Eleventh Doctors remain the only ones to regenerate due to old age but unlike the Eleventh Doctor who regenerated in triumph, the First Doctor simply wears out and wears out as you would expect an old man to. It is authentic, but it is also quite sad.

For the most part, I like the original Cybermen. They were a bit too bulky with their accoutrements but with more skin exposed and a cloth covering rather than metal, they seemed to reflect their humanoid roots more. The metal style which replaced them in The Moonbase is more iconic but it also led them further down the path of robots rather than cybernized humanoids. But I can also get around that with some head cannon. Since the true Mondasian Cybermen died when Mondas failed to provide them energy, the Cybermen left in other parts of the galaxy had to be of a more robust (metal) design and thus became more robotized. I also like imagining that the fleet that arrives in The Moonbase went looking for them after Mondas failed to reappear and assumed that Earth had destroyed Mondas in an attack rather than an energy mishap, leading to their planned destruction of life on Earth.

There is not much to say about the side characters except Barclay. He did a decent job stepping in for the Doctor in Episode Three but it would have worked better if he had had more than a couple lines in the first two episodes. I did like the astronauts in the first capsule and they did a good job of making you like them and feel sympathetic for them when they were killed in Episode Two. It is also a nice bit of history that the pilot was of African decent and it was not an issue. It was just a job filled by a guy and it's nice to see that in any show set in the 1960s.

Overall, I can't get to excited about this one. There is just not enough to engage you full time. The Doctor does nothing notable for his send off and the Cybermen become so radically different that you might as well consider The Moonbase as their introduction. General Cutler annoyed me and his becoming the villain was an unnecessary distraction from the Cybermen. It's good to watch for the regeneration and for some context behind later Cyberman stories, but it is generally a bore to just watch on it's own.

Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5