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omegagrimlock1984 · 6 years ago

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The Tenth Planet, a dissection

Today I finished re-watching The Tenth Planet. For those of you who don’t know, this is a Hartnell story. His final story actually. This one is notable for a number of reasons. Not only is it the First doctor’s final adventure, it is also the very first regeneration, and the debut of the Cybermen! It is a smashing success of an story for a number of reasons. I want to address all of these reasons in this dissection. I particular I shall be focusing on how it uses the base under siege format effectively, the way the Cybermen are introduced, and how the Doctor’s regeneration is handled. All of these elements work together to create one of Hartnell’s best episodes.

The Base Under Siege format, or B.U.S. for short, is a classic Doctor Who format. In it the Doctor in a central location, A.K.A the base, that is being attacked by an outside force that is usually aliens. In this episode the Doctor and is companions, Ben and Polly land on the South Pole in the year 1986. They quickly end up with Snowcap space tracking station. Everything seems rather routine at first, but things begin going awry rather quickly when a space ship on its return trip from an expedition begins experiencing serious issues. It is discovered that these issues are being caused by the gravitational pull of another planet. That planet being Mondas. The long lost twin planet to Earth. Its inhabitants, the Cybermen, spend the rest of the story trying to take over the Snowcap station so they can harvest the planet. This story makes very effective use of the singular location. Almost every single scene takes place inside the Snowcap. The tension is built masterfully. While a small location could work against the story by making it seem bland and repetitive, instead it allows for a claustrophobic feeling that permeates throughout every single scene in the story. This amps up the fear on an astronomical level. Making the Cybermen an absolutely terrifying threat. This is what the B.U.S. formula thrives on. A tense atmosphere that expertly utilizes the sometimes limited resources of the BBC in order to craft a tense story regardless of how small the scale is. Of course, this would be useless without a good monster.

The Cybermen. Easily one of the best villains in all of Doctor Who. Not that New Who seems to remember that half the time. In this debut story everything that makes them horrifying is set up. First the design. A perfect mix between inhuman machinery, but with flashes of the horror beneath bleeding through. The exposed hands, the natural shape and lack of joints. The head especially just unnerves me. If you look closely in some shots the black holes of eyes are cruelly shown to have human eyes underneath. Open wide. Almost unblinking. So unnatural, yet clearly human. And that is the heart of a Cyberman. They were all once flesh and blood. But through augmentation they’ve become almost unrecognizable. A horrifying fate to have what’s left of your body trapped in a clunky, unfeeling, metal carcass for all eternity. But that’s not even the best part. The Cybermen aren’t evil. Not in their eyes. Sure they are the villains of this story. And their plan would leave Earth lifeless. Devoid of energy. But they don’t plan to leave the people. They plan to save them. To take every single human back to Mondas so that they too can be upgraded. To live a better life. Devoid of pain and loss. To them, this is a mercy mission. To take what they need to save their planet, while also saving all these primitive people. To improve them. Take away the weaknesses of the flesh and mind. Not to make an army, not to conquer. Purely to help. And they stick to it too. They rarely kill in this episode. Only when they are being attacked do they kill those with weapons. They take prisoners. And even after being attacked and having their brethren killed. They don’t wipe out the base. They don’t even kill Ben. They keep trying. And that, my friends. Is what makes them terrifying. That they genuinely believe they are the good guys. The heroes. This is the best kind of Cybermen story out there. Better, I’d argue, then most of not all of their new Who incarnations. This is what the Cybermen should get back to. Cold unfeeling missionaries. Trying to spread the best kind of life throughout all of space.

Last but not least. The doctor. In his final story we watch him get deadly serious as he works tirelessly, against his ailing body to stop the Cybermen. Now I’m gonna offer a few conjectures. Most of my interpretation is not taken from anything said directly in the show. It is all inferrences and assumptions. But I believe these are well founded, and allow this to be a beautiful send off to the First Doctor. To start, let’s back up a bit. To the beginning of Hartnell’s era. Hartnell starts off as a very cruel Doctor. Ian and Barabara (his first two companions) are kidnapped. In the follow up story Daleks he puts everyone at risk for his own curiosity, and tries to bail as soon as things get tough. He is a cold, self-centered man. But that changes. The third story Edge of Destruction is when we first start to see this. Not immediately. He spends a good bit of the story being rude and biting lashing out at Barbara and Ian. But then at the end something beautiful happens. Not only does his speech about the birth of a sun give a glimpse of the wide eyed explorer buried beneath, but he apologizes. He goes to Barbara and tries to talk to her. He doesn’t give a proper outright apology. But he tries very hard in his own grumpy way to cheer her up. Thus starting a new chapter for the First Doctor. over the next few stories he slowly softens. Not completely of course. He’s still arrogant and pompous. He’s still grumpy and rude. But he genuinely cares and we start to see that. Skipping head to the Planet of the Giants his character growth comes full circle when he rejects the chance of a safe escape in order to save Ian and Barbara. And then we see something else happening. He becomes heroic. Not only has he become protective of Ian and Barbara, but he starts trying to help. The Dalek’s Master plan is a perfect example. In his first Dalek story the Doctor wants nothing to do with this battle. He wants to escape and leave this problem behind. Here? He actively states the Dalek’s must be stopped and he does it. He defeats the Daleks with cunning and his usual pompous attitude. Now all of that is pretty clear to anyone who has watched all of Hartnell’s era. His journey from self-centered cruel man to a noble self-less hero. Here is where I start jumping head first into inferences. Rewinding to the season one story The Aztecs we can see a very powerful moment with the doctor. Barbara is trying to use her perceived position as a reincarnated goddess to end human sacrifices. The Doctor begins to plead with her. Telling her you can’t change history. Now most of this speech could just come off as time traveler who is concerned with the laws of time. (Something the Time Lords are very strict on.) The end, however tells a different story. “What you are trying to do is utterly impossible! I know! Believe me! I know!” This is where my argument starts. That is not the plea of a Time Lord trying to preserve history. It is the desperate pleas of someone who has failed to change history. The passion and pain that slips out for just a second tells the story of a man who has tried to prevent wars and travesties set in stone, and been met with failure every step of the way. When you think about it, doesn’t it make sense? Future incarnations and stories talk about the Doctor leaving Gallifrey as if it was exciting. As if he set off to explore the universe, to see all the stars and to find good in the universe. And some references he makes to adventures pre Ian and Barbara reflect this. They sound like the stories of an adventure-er. His dynamic with Susan makes it clear that travelling on the run in the Tardis has been their life for quite a while. And yet, in An Unearthly Child that is not the an we see. We see a reclusive grump. Someone who has allowed his cynicism to take over as he hides away in a junkyard. His first interaction with anyone who isn’t Susan being one of cruelty and anger. Wouldn’t it make sense if a serious of failed attempts to change history and help people led him from that wide eyed explorer to this cynical old man? All of this leads us to The Tenth Planet. His final journey. Now the more caring and noble Doctor is prevalent here. Pushing on to save the day while his body is growing old. The stress proving too much as he dies at the end of the story. But I have a different interpretation. Early on it becomes clear the Doctor knows more about what is about to happen than it would seem. Getting very serious as he tries to make the scientists listen to him. Clearly to him Cybermen attack of 1986 is history. An event he knows about. This is where my biggest leap comes in. I suggest that not only was this a historical moment, but in the original version, the event the Doctor seems to have prior knowledge of, the outcome was far more devastating. That this attack devastated Earth originally and the Doctor knows that. It wouldn’t take much to see how things would’ve played without the Doctor. The men of the base plan to launch a powerful nuclear bomb at Mondas. While this would destroy the planet and kill the Cybermen, countless people would have died on Earth had the Doctor and his companions not stopped the attack. I suggest that the Doctor knew this and decided, after spending the past few years adventuring and saving people, he would not give in. He would not allow this travesty to happen as history dictates. He would push where he could to create a better outcome. All the while his body was already dying. Forcing him to hold back the regeneration so he could ensure everything worked out. Something we’ve seen the Doctor do since. A bit of a fan theory, but it doesn’t contradict any major events in the Doctor Who mythos, and it allows for his regeneration episode to go from good to great. Bringing his character arc to proper close. Allowing the Doctor whom we first meet as a disillusioned old man to die as a determined hero, who proves to himself that he can do good and help people, once and for all.

The Tenth Planet is one of my absolute favorite Hartnell’s and I hope you can now see why. I love the tension of the plot. The Cybermen are an ingenious creation that I couldn’t love more. And the Doctor’s journey is brought full circle. Putting him in the prime position for the next Doctor who would prove to be very heroic from the beginning. Not only is The Tenth Planet one of the best Hartnell’s, it’s one of the best Cybermen stories and one of the best regeneration stories we’ve seen yet.

#doctor who #1st doctor #cybermen #cyberman #The Tenth Planet #regeneration #william hartnell

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