Doctor Who: The 10th Planet (2 disc set) featuring the 1st Doctor, as played by William Hartnell. The episode that introduced the Cybermen!

The TARDIS arrives in December 1986 at a South Pole Space Tracking station where the personnel, under the command of General Cutler, are engaged in trying to talk down a manned space capsule that has got into difficulty. The base is invaded by a force of alien Cybermen. The Cybermen's world, Mondas, is draining energy from Earth – once its ‘twin planet’ – and the situation will soon become critical.

4 part story, ends with the introduction of the 2nd Doctor, Patrick Troughton. Writer: Kit Pedler.

Special Features

• Frozen Out Cast and crew look back on the making of the story
• Episode 4 VHS Reconstruction
• William Hartnell Interview
• Doctor 4 Who Stories – Anneke Wills
• The Golden Age
• Boys! Boys! Boys! Peter Purves, Frazer Hines and Mark Strickson reminisce about their time as companions
• Companion Piece
• Blue Peter Tenth anniversary retrospective on Doctor Who's history
• Radio Times Listings (DVD-ROM)
• Programme Subtitles
• Production Information Subtitles
• Photo Gallery
• Digitally Remastered Picture and Sound Quality
• Commentary with actors Anneke Wills (Polly), Christopher Matthews (Radar Technician), Earl Cameron (Williams), Alan White (Schultz), Donald Van Der Maaten (Cybermen Shav and Gern), Christopher Dunham (R/T Technician) and designer Peter' Kindred. Moderated by Toby Hadoke

Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet Review
By doctorwhorevi­ews.co.uk

"The Tenth Planet: one of the most famous Doctor Who stories of them all. Not only can it boast having introduced us to the legendary Cybermen, but it also gifted the Doctor television immortality when in its final moments the features of actor William Hartnell bled into those of Patrick Troughton. But The Tenth Planet’s fame is eclipsed by its infamy: of its four episodes, it just had to be the pivotal final instalment that perished in the 1970s archive purge, leaving fans of the show with only the three less important episodes to enjoy, only two of which featured the outgoing Bill Hartnell. To add insult to injury, a report of a film copy of the missing final episode was circulated in 1992, only to be proven false. History has certainly not been kind to the first Doctor’s swansong.

Doctor Who fans, on the other hand, are seldom anything but – and with good reason. Dr Kit Pedler’s story about the dangers of technology and dehumanised medicine really raises the fear factor to fever pitch. Not only are viewers scared of the Cybermen, they are also scared of becoming Cybermen. These seminal four episodes of television would unwittingly lay the foundation not only for the enduring legacy of Doctor Who, but also for what almost amounts to a sub-genre within science fiction, perhaps best typified today by Star Trek’s Borg.

The Cybermen’s design in this story is certainly original; their cloth masks are particularly impressive as they eradicate any vestige of humanity from their faces, whilst still leaving no doubt that what lies beneath the masks was once human. However, they certainly do not look cybernetic by any stretch of the imagination, and they are far too front-heavy to be practical. Their voices, on the other hand, are flawless; they put the Darth Vader rip-offs of the 1980s to shame. The Cybermen’s high-pitched, disjointed ‘Microsoft Sam’ voices suit them perfectly – I was absolutely thrilled when Big Finish used it in their origin story, Spare Parts, in 2002.

It’s not just how they say it either; it’s also what they say. You don’t get any of that “excellent” nonsense from these original Cybermen; they are completely and utterly devoid of emotion, and their application of cold logic is often frighteningly reasonable. One of my favourite scenes in the second episode sees Polly remonstrating with a Cyberman about how it doesn’t care that two astronauts are going to die. The Cyberman replies by simply stating that people are dying all over the world every day, so why does she not care about them too? It’s hauntingly written, thought-provoking stuff.

Oddly though, despite their patent divorce from emotion, the Cybermen of this serial are far less uniform and far more individual than the ones that the Doctor would encounter henceforth. They even have names, such as ‘Gern’ and ‘Krang’ – a peculiarity never revisited save for in the aforementioned audio prequel, Spare Parts.

However, there is much more to The Tenth Planet than Cybermen and regeneration; the whole backdrop to the story is inspired. In particular, I love the romantic notion of a dead planet – and not just any dead planet, but Earth’s long-lost twin, Mondas – drifting off through space on its own. It may not be predicated on the most sound of scientific premises, but it makes for one hell of a story and moreover, it makes things even more personal for the audience by implying that if the inhabitants of Earth’s twin planet could do this to themselves, then so could the inhabitants of Earth.

The commander of the base, General Cutler (Robert Beatty) is an immense character, and one that it’s hard for the audience to get a handle on at first. The sub-plot involving his son and how far the General is willing to go to save him is executed with real anguish, and actually manages to salvage the otherwise poor third episode. Cutler is one of these brilliant human antagonists that Doctor Who tends to do so well – although he’s a pain in the arse and a menace, he has his reasons for everything that he does, and that’s what makes him such a disturbing character. Watching the serial, you really believe that he could sacrifice the world to save his son.

The Polar setting of The Tenth Planet is recreated incredibly well in the studio; often these black and white stories look more realistic than some of the early colour stories. The high quality of the stock footage together with the unique titles and credits also make the serial feel special and different – for once, it looks like the programme actually had some decent money spent on it (which I’m sure it didn’t). One of the areas where the realisation of the story falls down though is in its depiction of the future, though the programme makers can hardly be blamed for failing to foresee 1986 with any sort of accuracy. I found it especially amusing that Ben and Polly thought that they’d arrived back home in the 1960s, because that’s exactly the decade I’d have guessed had I materialised in this story’s South Pole Base!

Now even though he’s my least favourite of all the Doctors, I have to say that Hartnell really goes out guns blazing here. I didn’t notice a single fluff, and even more importantly he is as intense and as focused as he ever was. He’s buoyed, however, by a script that for the first time since Totter’s Lane puts a bit of real mystery back into the Doctor – he’s no longer just a grouchy itinerant, blundering into trouble and then doing his best to sort it out; he’s the man with all the answers. He knows of Mondas. He knows about the Cybermen’s im­pending arrival. The audience’s future is his history. And, even though we trust him by now, that’s still a little bit eerie. I love that.

As fate would have it though, illness prevented Hartnell appearing at all in the serial’s surviving third episode, which really suffers as a result of the lead man’s disappe­arance. In a way, though, the Doctor’s hastily-scripted collapse lends the final episode even more weight. The Doctor is spent, having given his all, but from somewhere he finds the reserves to fuel him through the finale – “once more unto the breach.”

The regeneration itself isn’t really broached here, the hows and whys instead falling within the remit of Troughton’s first adventure, The Power of the Daleks. It’s literally just one flash of blinding light, a twitch and then Troughton. As such we don’t really know what triggered the first Doctor’s rege­neration – hell, he may have been the only incarnation to perish of old age. Most estimates would place him round about the four centuries mark by this point in his life, which for one of his incarnations is bloody good innings.

Watching the regeneration though, it’s hard to focus on its mechanics as, even today, it still has a sense of shock and awe about it; funereal and exhilarating in one confused breath. And, even though the final episode itself has been lost to time, we can still enjoy the moment as it was originally intended to be thanks to the clip that survived as part of an ancient edition of Blue Peter, which now crowns the Restoration Team’s painstaking, Loose Cannon-style reconstruction of Episode 4. Through a comprehensive medley of telesnaps, surviving clips, 8mm off-screen footage, linking text and an off-air recording of the final episode’s sou­ndtrack we can now, at last, enjoy The Tenth Planet in its entirety – and revel in its illicit infamy."