Day 68 — March 9th 2021
The Tenth Planet — Episodes Three and Four
The Tenth Planet — Episode Three
I’m still finding it really strange just how much our regulars are being sidelined in this story. It’s perhaps telling that Doctor Who is taken out of this entire episode by a last minute rewrite and you don’t feel as though you’ve lost anything in particular. I certainly can’t work out exactly what his role would have been, and I can’t see him doing all the crawling around in the ventilation shafts, somehow!
It’s with luck that we know he’s changing at the end of the next episode, because Polly’s line about him seeming ‘worn out’ ties in quite nicely, and if you didn’t know he’d had to drop out last minute, I’m not sure that you’d guess. It helps that the guest cast are decent, and I’m particularly enjoying General Cutler getting angrier and more desperate as the story progresses. We’re going to be seeing a lot of bamboozled and crazy people in his sort of position — as the head of a futuristic scientific/military base — over the next few months, but I’m not sure that they’ll all be given as much character and depth as the performance is here.
I’m even quite fond of poor Barclay, trying in his own way to save the world without directly disobeying orders, and it’s nice that his role in the story gives Ben something to do, even if Polly is stuck making the coffee and watching over the sleeping Doctor Who.
There’s a kind of irony about the last surviving Hartnell episode featuring neither Hartnell himself or very much of the Cybermen who were introduced the week before. It makes this episode fall a little flatter than it perhaps deserves to, and I find myself with surprisingly little to actually say about it. I find the massacre of the new Cybermen effective (helped, of course, by being all on film), and I’m surprised by it because I’ve always thought of this one as just having the same four Cybermen throughout. I’d totally forgotten that they were all wiped out in Episode Two and then we have a new batch show up in each one after that.
It adds to the inevitability of the Cybermen, I think. You strike them down and there’s more waiting in the wings to come stomping out at you. And after noticing the other week that they’d only built a single War Machine for the programme, it seems impressive to see seven Cybermen marching through the snow. It’s probably their most effective moment, as they make their way towards the base before being taken out.
It’s a 5/10 for me, despite some decent drama in this one. I think I resent a little that we have this but not the next one, when this is the episode of the story we could lose with the least impact.
The Tenth Planet — Episode Four
Something else which becomes a bit of a hallmark of the Innes Lloyd era is the TARDIS crew slipping away before they get cornered with too many questions. A point is made of it in The War Machines, they slip away during the climactic battle in The Smugglers, and here after Ben leaves the Snowcap Base to rescue Doctor Who and Polly they don’t return. Of course, we’ve had stories like this before this era, but it feels like Lloyd has brought in a blanket policy of having them leave as quickly as possible and leaving characters to lament the lack of a goodbye.
But it wasn’t always that way! After listening to the episode itself today, I sat and read an earlier draft, written about a month before Hartnell decided to leave the series, and therefore featuring no hint of a regeneration. It’s a version of the script long thought lost which turned up among writer Kit Pedler’s personal effects in 2013.
In this version of the story, once Ben has rescued his friends they return to the Base for a proper farewell. Ben even gets offered a job (‘You’re not leaving! The planes will be here soon, and I’m sure Secretary Wigner will have a post for you when he learns of your efforts today.’ ‘Thanks, but I’ve got a job already,’ Ben replies). The alternate version contains a rather touching moment for Doctor Who, too, when he says that Cutler’s son ‘must never find out the truth of his father’s last hours’ before the three of them decide it’s time to leave. It ends on a suitably comic moment, as Barclay wonders ‘If the Cybermen came from Mondas… where did they come from?’ as the TARDIS fades away watched on a screen.
As for the episode as broadcast… well, it’s dominated by the regeneration sequence, isn’t it? There’s lots of great material in this one, and Cutler’s decent into madness and then his death are really effective. Ben gets to be the star of the show again among the regulars, and it’s a bit of a shame that his being offered a job gets cut from the final version, as he’s the only one who really does anything in these four episodes! It’s interesting, though, just how much Ben is the companion in the Hartnell stories. Polly’s along for the ride, but Ben is willing to put his life on the line without a second thought. From tomorrow’s first episode he’ll become more suspicious of Doctor Who, and Polly sort of takes over as the favourite. And once Jamie comes along Ben barely gets a look in. It’s a shame, because I’ve really enjoyed him up to this point.
I’ll tell you what, you forget just how effective the regeneration sequence is in this one, don’t you? It takes up the last third of the episode, from Ben breaking into the Cyberman spaceship, right through to the closing seconds. And whereas so much effort is put into regenerations these days to reassure the audience and ease them through the transition, here they go for completely the opposite approach, making the whole process strange and scary.
I don’t think you could get away with doing it like this every time, but I love that it’s the choice they made on the very first one. Several people claim that the whole thing came as a total shock to the audience (I think even Anneke Wills has said so on one occasion), but that wouldn’t have been the case. Hartnell made the decision to leave the series in July (his wife’s diary records it as happening on the 16th), and Troughton was both cast and announced to the public before that month was out, well ahead of all this happening on screen. I’d imagine therefore that most people already knew what was going to happen (and the way the viewing figures for The Tenth Planet seem to bear that there was interest in it, too), so I love that they’ve decided to not just simply swap between the two men, but to make it something bigger.
And as much as I complained about Hartnell not having much to do in this story, I quite like that he goes out in such a quiet and understated manner. It makes the strangeness of the regeneration even more appealing, because ben and Polly don’t know what’s happening or why. They’re both baffled by Doctor Who’s sudden weakness, and that makes it scary for them too.
If anything, the whole sequence is even more terrifying as scripted, with Doctor Who actively trying to battle against the change he’s about to undergo. That’s the only slight disappointment for me in the scene as televised — Hartnell has his final line in the Cyberman ship (a rather touching ‘keep warm’) but then we don’t hear any more from him. It might work better if you could actually watch him in his final moments, where he seems to get a little lost on audio because he’s not got any more to say. And then you get that brilliant cliffhanger moment, with the reveal of Troughton’s face emerging from the bright light! Ooh, I think this is probably the best regeneration sequence in all of Old Testament Who. It’s a bit ropey, and the faces don’t quite line up with each other, but that’s all part of the beauty. It seems to tie in with the whole unnerving quality of the sequence.
It’s all enough to bring this episode up to a 7/10, but the story as a whole is just a bit middling. Some brilliant ideas and moments that we’ll see recreated stronger in the next couple of months, and as brilliant as the last five minutes are, it’s just a little too late for me.
Tenth Planet Episode Four isn’t the last episode for just William Hartnell, though. The studio floor plan for the episode indicates that the TARDIS ‘porch’ doors were to be erected outside the Control Room set, and as with fan memories of The Massacre, some people recall seeing these doors from the inside when Ben and Polly enter the ship.
There’s too many missing episodes, and gaps in the retention of floor plans, after this point to say definitively that they never showed up again, but this is the last time their use is documented to the best of our knowledge. There’s something oddly charming about the little porch being an entirely Hartnell-era thing, and I like to imagine he took them home with him. They’d have looked lovely on the front of his shed, I’m sure…!
The First Doctor Overview
I’ve been debating how to handle looking back over the eras when I reach the end of each Doctor Who. On my last marathon, I started off doing a full look back at each era but while it works for the earlier Doctor Whos who stick around for a while, by the time you reach the late 80s you’re only looking back over two or three weeks’ worth of stories.
So I’m going for a simple approach this time around. At the end of each era, I’ll post the scores for the whole era, based on taking the rating for each episode and averaging them out. Then when I reach the end of this whole marathon in December I can do a final big look back over all of it.
So for the Hartnell years of Doctor Who, The Aztecs came out as my highest-rated story, averaging 8.75/10. The Time Meddler, The Savages and The War Machines are all tied for second place with scores of 8/10, with The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Ark joint third with 7.5/10 each.
After that we’ve got Marco Polo (7.29), The Romans and The Massacre (7.25), An Unearthly Child and The Crusade (7), The Sensorites (6.83), The Gunfighters (6.75), Galaxy 4 and The Tenth Planet (6.50) and then a long run of Dalek episodes with The Daleks at 6.29/10 and The Daleks’ Master Plan at 6.
The Keys of Marinus and Planet of Giants both average 5.33, with The Edge of Destruction and The Reign of Terror at 5/10.
The final seven stories languishing at the bottom of the list are The Myth Makers (4.75), The Smugglers (4.50), The Space Museum (3.75), The Chase (3.33), The Rescue and The Celestial Toymaker both with 3, and the lowest rated story so far was The Web Planet with just 2.17.
It’s an impressive spread for these 28 stories, and there’s also Mission to the Unknown with a 9/10, but as a one-off episode it feels unfair to compare with other stories.
