The Tenth Planet

The TARDIS arrives at the South Pole in the year 1986 just as a standard orbit by a manned space capsule starts to go awry. The Doctor, Ben and Polly encounter a hidden base in the ice where an international team commanded by the growly General Cutler and tracking the capsule and trying to guide it back to Earth. The Doctor discovers a power drain affecting the capsule and accurately predicts that another planet is about to appear in the sky, and then he predicts that they will receive visitors from that planet. Cutler doesn't care and is suspicious of the time travellers, but he has bigger things to worry about when the base is overrun by natives of the planet, now known as Mondas; they are mechanical with visible human hands, their faces wrapped in fabric but their eyes and mouths still disturbingly visible as if they are rotting beneath the coverings. All emotion has been removed from their brains, they are the Cybermen. Their planet is Earth's twin but has drifted off its orbit, and desperately low on energy it has returned to gather energy from Earth. Mondas does indeed begin to suck at Earth's power but times have changed since they were twin planets and there is a lot more energy going around in industry and technology, and under the overload, Mondas burns out and the Cybermen are destroyed. The Doctor becomes steadily weaker as the adventure unfolds, only barely managing to set the TARDIS in motion before he collapses onto the floor. Ben and Polly rush to his side, and as they watch, he regenerates into a completely new person...

Oh where to begin.

The big news is the regeneration. William Hartnell has been the Doctor for the last three years at this point, and he wants to leave the role, citing health reasons for the most part but in a letter he apparantly sent to a fan he states that he was having creative differences with the BBC about the direction the show was moving in, and then left. Regardless, the problem of replacing the lead character was solved by introducing the concept of regeneration, a process unique to the Doctor's people wherein an old worn out body can undergo a complete cellular renewal and continue to live, but completely altering its physical appearance as a side effect. This would be a big risk on any program, but as Doctor Who is still very much on the go here in 2005, obviously one that the fans were ready to buy into. The regeneration is handled well on screen, slowly blending the face of William Hartnell into that of his successor, Patrick Troughton.

Then there are the Cybermen. It is hard to believe that these mummified creatures would go on the be one of the series' most notorious monsters, but they would indeed return numerous times over the series, seeming to update their appearance every time. These Cybermen were a very primitive breed, with bits of their previous human physionomy still very much visible as stated above. One of the Cybermen alludes to them still very much posessing organic brains, just with their emotions surgically removed along with their hearts and most of their organs to ensure their survival. There is a tremendous opportunity to explore the background of the Cybermen, and it will come in the Big Finish audio Spare Parts, but that's not for a while. One of the creepiest things about these Cybermen is the dull dead processed voices that come from their mouths; the mouths open but do not actually move with the words they speak as if there is a speaker buried within them.

I recruited my friend Jay for viewing purposes once more, and we noted the stylized titles for the adventure, but realized that the computer sounds of the control room were provided by the same effects that were used for WOTAN so recently inThe War Machines. Jay made note of a more professional look to the opening of the show, but that goes right out the window when the snow machine is parked right beside the camera to simulate a blizzard as the TARDIS arrives. The staff of the Antarctic base are all from different nations and are played a bit too over the top, with some not-too-convincing American accents and a really lousy Spanish dude complete with girlie mags and pin-ups by his bunk. Polly is of course ogled by the men seeing as there are no women on the base (so it's 1986 but there are still no women in the military eh? Actually that's really the only thing that was inaccurate about the social dynamic in the episodes, at least from what I can remember of 1986) and reverts to her typical 60's girl role by offering to make evryone coffee in a time of crisis. "Why doesn't she just take a dictation and be secretary too," Jay says from his chair. The concept of the United Nations working as one on a space program is interesting, even if they appear to have Americans running the bases, but then come the scenes at the UN buildings in Geneva where everyone wears distinctive tribal outfits to represent their nations and show us just how multicultural the world is in 1986. Uh, yeah.

The Tenth Planet is unfortunately incomplete, with episode 4 missing somewhere in the ether (although it is suspected that someone somewhere has it and is hanging onto it just to be a dick... dude, if you're reading this, you ARE being a dick, give it back to the BBC dammit). For the VHS release episodes 1 through 3 were cleaned up and episode 4 reconstructed using the intact audio tracks, stills, and a few choice moments of moving images recorded with film off a television screen during the original broadcast. The regeneration clip did mercifully survive as it was used in another program and lifted from it, so at least the first glimpse of the Doctor's truly alien ability is there to be seen. The reconstruction was done very well, and if enough material had been available a similar approach to the missing episodes from The Reign of Terror would have been a nice project, rather than forcing Carole Ann Ford to sit and read from a teleprompter.

So that's the end of the first Doctor. Gone. On with the new. The BBC are rolling the dice that people will still watch the show even though the character they have been with for three years is as good as dead to them, with a strange newcomer at the helm of the TARDIS. What better way to keep viewers onside though than to pit the new Doctor against his oldest foes....

NEXT EPISODE : THE POWER OF THE DALEKS