T: I remember being shocked as a kid when I read the novelisation to this story – it had “The First Exciting Adventure with the Cybermen” on the front cover, and yet it was hard for me to rationalise that statement with the cloth-faced creatures depicted in the illustration. And yet... I think they’re brilliant for all the reasons you outline above. We’re Doctor Who fans, so our default mode is to look for existential body horror where others would mock primitive technology. To put it another way, we don’t allow an arrogant modern perspective to colour the impact of these impressive creatures. The Cybermen’s voices could sound silly, yes, if you were inclined to take it that way, but there’s something very apt about its distortion of our speech patterns and the almost benign computerised lilt. It’s like being threatened by a Speak & Spell machine.
And what about those open mouths that the Mondasians have?! No wonder they don’t bother to synch up the voices – the technology makes the sound variation, so lip movement is redundant. This might initially look a bit laughable, but why wouldn’t manufactured speech be issued in this way? Besides, it makes them look all the more like dead men walking. The only shame here is that the Cybermen don’t know how to pronounce – of all the words at their disposal! – “cybernetic”. It’s like Monoids being unable to properly say “waddle”.
It’s also a bit eerie that these Cybermen are so polite compared to the ones to follow... certainly, they seem to keep inviting the humans to Mondas in a jolly way that suggests tea, cakes and perhaps a cucumber sandwich. In addition to this anomalous social etiquette, one of the Cybermen has one of the most ridiculous names I’ve ever heard: “Shav”. Granted, all of these Cybermen have pretty rubbish names, but you can at least rationalise the likes of “Krail” because there’s something a bit metallic about it, and while “Talon” simultaneously sounds scary and a bit stupid, you know can tell how they got there. But “Shav”? I’ve no idea what the thinking was behind that one.
As for the humans that inhabit Snowcap Base... well, you know how I wrote last episode that this all seemed a bit American? Here it almost goes too far in that direction, as we get the dreadful cliché of the bullish commander finding out that his son has gone up in the second capsule. This is a very, very silly and spurious addition to the script, I have to say – all we need to discover now is that they haven’t spoken for several years, or that the son is engaged to Barclay’s daughter. But if General Cutler’s motives seem a bit wooden, there are some lovely little touches of realism in his control room – Barclay has a drink, Cutler yells at him, and Dyson asks off camera if he’s all right. That sort of thing would only normally happen if Barclay was about to snap under pressure, but here it’s just a little moment of truth that helps build up the drama. And Dudley Jones, playing Dyson, also sells what’s a very strong line for this programme – I’m quite shocked to hear him say “Oh, for God’s sake, Barclay!” The new production team may have rejected the offbeat experimentation sought by the previous regime, but they do know little boys get excited by tough, grown-up language and situations.
March 9th
The Tenth Planet episode three
R: It’s the penultimate outing for Hartnell’s Doctor – and he doesn’t even appear. The actor fell ill during rehearsals, necessitating a quick rewrite. In retrospect, his absence is rather galling; give it a few episodes, and I know I’ll be missing this first incarnation like mad, and in his dying fall, I want him to get as much screen time as possible. (It’d be unthinkable to have any other Doctor end his tenure with so slight an appearance – even poor old Colin, knocking his head against the console, gets a better build-up than this.) But even though it’s an accident, it does suggest that something very wrong is happening to the Doctor, which at least will make his departure less abrupt. And Hartnell’s loss is Michael Craze’s gain. He takes over a lot of the Doctor’s lines, and his character gets an added depth it sorely needs, becoming the focus of the rebellion against General Cutler. (There’s a lovely moment when Dudley Jones, playing the scientist Dyson, warns Cutler that “the old man may be right” – clearly he didn’t get the rewrites!)
So the Doctor is missing – but, strangely enough, the Cybermen are barely in this either. They get one beautiful sequence where they’re massacred in the snow; director Derek Martinus ensures they die so gracefully, you almost feel sorry for them. And that shift of allegiance seems apt this week. The enemy now is, for the moment, not a race that by losing their emotions have ceased to be human, but General Cutler – a man whose emotional concerns for his son have blinded him to reason. It’s a terribly clever conceit, and Robert Beatty does a fantastic job making Cutler both a dangerous warmonger and a loving father who can hardly bear to listen to his son’s jokes when he first talks to him over the tannoy. As Ben struggles through ventilation shafts trying to prevent an ill-advised attack on the Cybermen, and advising everyone that their best line of defence is to wait, I’m struck by how much a volte-face this is from Doctor Who’s usual stance. Time and time again, whether it’s Ian persuading the Thals into action against the Daleks, or Vicki leading the Xerons into revolution, or Steven urging the humans to fight the Monoids, Doctor Who has always suggested that active effort is a stronger force than passive acceptance. And quite understandably so – this is an action series after all. It’s a mark of just how odd The Tenth Planet is that it’s pushing so hard in the opposite direction.
T: It’s a testament to the quality of the previous episode that I got so carried away with it, I forgot to acknowledge that it was the last full episode with Hartnell’s Doctor that we can actually see. I should have given Hartnell a valedictory nod – I’m like that, I salute magpies and everything.
Without Hartnell and the Cybermen though, the cracks really start to appear in this episode. If all the central characters have to do is wait for matters to resolve themselves, then they’re probably being invaded by the stupidest creatures in the universe. And if your invasion plan leads to your own destruction and you haven’t picked up on that, it obliterates any potential for menace you may have. It’s like being invaded by those kamikaze blokes at the end of Life of Brian. Or held hostage by lemmings.
That overriding problem aside, there’s much to enjoy here. Derek Martinus continues to be game, and just about successfully sells what’s happening to us. He’s helped immeasurably by a solid cast, the best of whom is the undemonstrative, plausibly professional and likeable David Dodimead (playing Barclay), who keeps things real whilst selling the jeopardy. Plus... hooray for the first major use of ventilation shafts, as Ben attempts to disable the rocket! They’re not just adopting clichés, this production team, they’re establishing a few of them too, which is no mean feat.
Given the developments in the next episode, I suppose you could say that William Hartnell’s illness here was serendipitous... the Doctor’s collapse is incorporated into the script relatively simply, and it helps to foreshadow the astonishing transformation that’s going to happen in episode four. This isn’t some random instance of getting the Doctor out of the way for a bit (such as his suddenly passing out at the start of The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode four, or all the times Troughton will be knocked unconscious); it’s part and parcel of one of the greatest make-overs the series will ever get.
The Tenth Planet episode four
R: It’s a shame; the Cybermen were much more interesting as something amoral rather than predictably evil. Previously, they actively wanted to help humanity become like them – now they’re just thugs who want to blow up a planet. (And although their sing-song voices were weird and eerie when their intentions were so much more ambiguous, they really don’t suit the galactic conquerors they are here. The high-pitched Cyberleader Gern exulting from an office in Geneva that he’s master of the world is very, very funny indeed.) And there’s not an awful lot of tension to the episode, as we know that Mondas is going to destroy itself. Having established how the story is going to be resolved, the only suspense comes from finding out
when it’s going to happen. And it’d have been a pretty safe bet that it’d happen just a few minutes before the end of the episode. Oh, look. It did!
But of course, we don’t care much about such things as plot or monsters by the end of the episode. That must be the strongest, strangest cliffhanger the series has shown yet – the lights in the TARDIS going mad, the Doctor falling to the ground... and suddenly, Hartnell’s gone. What’s astonishing is how little attempt there is to make this remotely reassuring. Ben is indeed put out by the Doctor’s behaviour, saying that he’s lost his sense of humour – and as he shuts himself away in the TARDIS, there’s a real sense that he’s entirely forgotten his new friends and may well abandon them at the South Pole. Certainly, they’re nothing to do with this transformation he’s undergoing, and he only lets them witness it as an afterthought. When so much has happened over the last three seasons to shape Hartnell’s Doctor into someone grandfatherly and cuddly, it seems wonderfully apt that in his last few minutes’ screen time, he’s as alien and unknowable and dangerous as he’s ever been. And Hartnell is typically brilliant, finding even in his last gasp new ways to play the part – he’s driven and insane when released from the Cyberman’s spaceship, almost as if he were reeling drunk. Just about every other regeneration sequence (not that we’ll call it that yet, of course) has allowed a moment of sentiment, a chance for the audience and the companion to say goodbye to the Doctor. Tragic or triumphant, only here is it sold to us as something frightening. Doctor Who is doing something very brave again, all of a sudden. Better hold on tight.
T: Here at the end of the Hartnell era, I’m flooded with mixed emotions. In the first place, I’m in disbelief that the BBC managed to hang onto last week’s Doctor- and Cybermen-lite episode, but they misplaced episode four, which is a milestone! The fact that it’s gone seems both a criminal shame and, to be fair, symptomatic of just how much television at the time was regarded as virtually unrepeatable and inherently disposable. It’s such a marked departure from the world we live in now, where, for instance, the DVD of Torchwood: Children of Earth was on sale the week after broadcast.
I’m also struggling a bit to keep up with the technobabble at work here. I’m quite happy with such made-up terminology if it facilitates something exciting, adventurous, satirical, moving or witty, but a whacking great planet travelling through space – that conveniently takes the Cybermen with it when it melts – really doesn’t do it for me. (You could have anticipated this reaction, I’m sure, Rob, after I made your ears bleed after the transmission of Journey’s End.) All of this seems such a shame because there are some really neat concepts in this story – a Tenth Planet is a nice idea, as are the Cybermen. But in implementation, everything seems to fall apart in the final episode. Even the supporting cast seem to undergo personality transplants – Cutler goes from solid, gravelly authority to drooling ham, Gern the Cyberleader just sounds daft and Dyson has turned into an irritating whinger. A bright spot, though, is that the technician Haines doesn’t die as he does in the book, poor chap. I always felt sorry for him, as he goes uncredited in the cast list (he’s played by Freddie Eldrett, whose partner, Philip Gilbert, played Tim in The Tomorrow People). Dying would be bad enough, but dying and not getting a namecheck seems horribly ignominious.
But most of all, I feel sorrow that William Hartnell – who made such a commitment to Doctor Who, enabled its early success and has given me such great enjoyment over these three seasons – is here pushed out of the series with so little ceremony. I will credit that the final TARDIS scene re-injects some of the oddness I’ve been missing – the Ship is once again this weird, unsettling environment, in a way it hasn’t been for a couple of years! But this doesn’t paper over the fact that the Hartnell Doctor doesn’t perform a brave or clever act in his final adventure; instead, it’s as if he bows out after having a kip. Even at the end, Hartnell manages to infuse the proceedings with some nuance – his statement that, “I must go now” is wonderfully laced with double meaning, and is quite powerful – but he seems to be finding such depth in spite of the script, not because of it.
And astonishingly, no explanation is given regarding what’s happening with the regeneration – not even a perfunctory “Look, he’s changing!” from Ben or Polly – and the event is so whited out and in such extreme close-up that, had I been watching on first broadcast, I’m not altogether sure I’d have known what the hell was going on. (I probably shouldn’t complain about that, though – I’ve been wanting more mysteriousness in the series, and God knows, this passes the mark.)
For all the nice things I’m sure I’ll say about Patrick Troughton, I’m going to miss William Hartnell. Watching his performance from beginning to end has been a real eye opener, and even if I don’t buy that his muddled delivery was a deliberate acting choice, it frequently didn’t do any harm, and he tended to successfully ad lib himself out of trouble, or to rely on the rock solid support he was given by William Russell and then Peter Purves. He was very good at some forms of comedy, and he had a natural ability to flit between the imperious and the gentle. He certainly gives a great performance when you consider the arduous production schedule and limited recourse to retakes in this era. It would be enough to send most modern actors scurrying back to their Pilates classes, but Hartnell was largely up to the task.
And in the end, he generously came back to hand the role over to his successor... and then wound up collapsing on the floor of the TARDIS, and changing for what seems to be the most spurious of reasons. They may as well have saved him the bother, not had him back at all, and just got Troughton to lie on the floor and put on a wig.
March 10th
The Power of the Daleks episode one
R: The first thing that Patrick Troughton does is thoughtlessly step into a dead man’s shoes and assume his identity. Whether it’s William Hartnell’s Doctor, or Martin King’s Examiner, it comes to much the same thing; watch out for this man, the story says, he’s an impostor. It’s remarkable just how little this episode wants to endear you to the new man in the TARDIS. He is at turns desperately irritating, only answering his companions’ questions with blasts on a recorder, deliberately unhelpful, always referring to the Doctor in the third person just to give his friends more reason not to trust him, and even strangely sinister – that moment he takes out a dagger, only to identify it as something Saladin once owned, plays directly upon our fears that the man’s a threat.
And of course it’s wonderful that the episode risks alienating Ben and Polly, and the audience at home into the bargain. The job of this story is to show that Troughton is the Doctor, not tell it outright. You wonder why the Doctor is making it so difficult for his friends to accept him, even at moments of great tension. Why, when they discover the Daleks in the capsule, he still wants to keep his silly game going – as if to suggest that he may not be the Doctor after all. And it has to be because he wants his actions, not his words, to be the proof. It’s very clever, this; when Ben hits upon the idea that the Doctor has renewed himself, Troughton repeats the line back at him – not in assent, but as if he too is being persuaded by the idea. He wants his audience to do the job of working out this mystery for themselves. He’s got other things to do than waste time explaining himself.
T: It’s so easy for the two of us to be blasé about this... when we started learning about Doctor Who, things like “regeneration” and “different Doctors” were the norm. Last week we had flashing lights and a silent denouement; there were no valedictory speeches, self-sacrificial set pieces or climactic explanations. This week, the show – like the Doctor himself – is wilfully oblique. It’s now deemed a bad idea that Colin Baker spent his first story being difficult and unknowable, but the production team at the time could reasonably cite The Power of the Daleks as a precedent. I mean, we’re currently experiencing the extreme (and, it has to be said, sensible) measures employed to reassure the audience that the move from David Tennant to new boy Matt Smith will be all right... yet with
this episode, the trailer doesn’t even bother to mention that there’s a new Doctor at all!
It helps to establish the new boy’s credentials, though, that he’s put through the mill from the start. The “renewal” sounds like a pretty shocking and painful process, and he wails like he’s suffering cataclysms, and thus spends the rest of the episode slightly off kilter. The few snatches of 8 mm off-screen footage that we have from episode one (recorded by an anonymous Australian and his cine camera) are very helpful in this regard – we can see, albeit a bit murkily, how jolted the new Doctor seems by his transformation, and can witness that poignant bit where Hartnell’s face stares back at Troughton from a mirror.
Aside from the new lead’s tantalising work – and the way he’s helped by a believably irritated turn from Michael Craze – the depiction of the colonists contains some pleasing little subtleties. It’s clear that Bragen and Quinn (respectively the colony’s head of security and deputy governor) aren’t pals, with the latter making disparaging remarks about the intellectual shortcomings of the former’s guards. It establishes their difficult relationship well, whilst hinting at the power at Bragen’s disposal. Meanwhile, Janley’s bunch are referred to as – at this stage at least – a pressure group rather than rebels. Everything seems a tad more believable and less generic than the set-up otherwise might have been.
But even if the central character isn’t too keen to let us know that it’s business as usual, his greatest enemies are. With Tristram Cary’s music again employed to great (and – not to be sniffed at – fiscally sound) effect, the emergence of the Daleks draws this episode to a close. It’s surely no accident that in his fright, Ben blurts out the final line, and it is but one word...
Doctor.
The Power of the Daleks episode two
R: So, this is the situation. We’ve got a Doctor who doesn’t seem like he’s the Doctor. And we’ve got Daleks who aren’t behaving like Daleks. In one fell swoop, the whole series has been turned on its head. And my God, doesn’t it feel fresh and exciting?
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 40