PS Creativity > Reviews > The Classic Series > The Tenth Planet

Very rarely is our enjoyment of a story judged on its qualities alone, things like its storytelling, sets and script. These things help of course, and a Doctor Who that excels in all of these things will always be a pleasure to watch. But some stories are saved by other factors, often relating to their time of origin or the weight of retrospective myth.

"The Macra Terror", for example, was a fairly mundane monster tale from a period now generally known as "just before the Troughton era got good". Yet over zealous appraisal, inappropriate re-dressing of the balance and the subsequent idea that it might be excellent after all, have continued down the years in the absence of any footage existing from the story at all. The missing stories are of course always more interesting because they are missing, and it's helped by the faint suspicion that some of them might just have been some of the best ever Doctor Who stories anyway. But more certain is the fact that no-one would ever have talked about half of them so much if they existed.

"The Tenth Planet" has the twin saving grace of being both the final William Hartnell story and the first Cybermen adventure, and it also manages to challenge both claims by making neither of them really true. Hartnell is absent from much of "Tenth Planet", not appearing in episode 3 at all and being curiously redundant plotwise at all other times. And although the final defining moments characterising his Doctor passed with "The Smugglers", he gives him some outrageous clout here, bellowing loud enough to bring the roof down on the Cybermen and putting his all into his duels with General Cutler and his final weakened moments on screen in episode 4.

The Cybermen are more intriguing and fascinating here than in any of their other stories, contrary to myth. No other story has tried so hard to emphasise their emotionless state without using it as a shorthand for evil, which is of course itself an emotion. Here thier calm, logical explanation of their cybernetic development falls at neither side of good or bad; it's more a case of arguing with a horribly logical computer that deduces that its life is of more value than yours. There is a lovely exchange of dialogue, unfortunately going on off-camera while we cut to Ben handing Barclay a Cyber Weapon, which culminates in a Cyberman being asked "Have you no heart?"
"No," it replies. "That is one of the things we have replaced".

"The Tenth Planet" is so stuffed full of interesting ideas and concepts that it doesn't need more than a basic invasion-of-Earth plot to be entertaining. What there is stretches credulity to breaking point; one man in charge of a South Pole tracking station has the means to destroy a planet with a nuclear warhead, which can then be disabled by a rogue seaman with a screwdriver; the plot is like "The Invasion" except done by an idiot. But it all moves at such frantic pace that there hardly seems time for it. Instead, there's more fun to be had being distracted by the lovely scenes of the Cybermen in the snow, and wondering what the strange, towering, absurdly dressed visitors want. There's something about the look of the Cybermen here that inspires awe. Is it solely the benefit of hindsight that makes them seem a bit special?

The Doctor being 'renewed' at the end of the story is still a moment that sends shivers down the spine. After all these years it is still cloaked in unanswered questions; why do his clothes change? Why does he initially try and lock Polly and Ben out the TARDIS? What exactly forces him to renew himself? "The Tenth Planet" is an underated goodie bag of a story, of scant interest to anyone else in its current state but a historical treasure to us. We deserve to have it in the archives in its entirety.

Originally posted by Si Hunt on April 22th 2003 at 10:00am.

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