Synopsis:
As General Cutler absorbs the news that his son is now in orbit in the Zeus 5 capsule, a radar technician announces that a huge fleet of Cyberman spaceships is approaching the Earth...
Cutler orders scientist Dyson to contact his son in the Zeus 5, just as the Doctor suddenly collapses. Ben and Polly are told to take him to the crew room.
Terry Cutler is notified that he will no longer be rendezvousing with Zeus 4, and is advised to keep an eye out for the Cyberman fleet which should be in a lower orbit. Cutler assures him that he will bring him down safely - no matter the cost.
Ben and Polly return to the tracking room to hear that the General plans to destroy Mondas. Snowcap Base is one of the sites where the powerful Z-Bomb is housed.
Barclay is horrified as this weapon could damage the Earth with radiation due to the proximity of the two worlds. Cutler admits the risk, but dismisses it as potentially affecting only the side of the Earth facing Mondas.
He contacts Wigner in Geneva and seeks permission to use the Z-Bomb, but this is explicitly refused due to the dangers mentioned by Barclay. However, the bureaucrat does allow Cutler to use any means necessary to defend against the Cybermen - little realising that the General will twist this to mean deployment of the Z-Bomb. Barclay, Ben and Polly realise that the base commander is becoming mentally unbalanced, due to his obsession with saving his son.
When it becomes clear that he intends to launch the weapon, as Mondas directly threatens the Earth, Ben tries to tell him that the Doctor thought otherwise. He claimed that Mondas was more at risk from Earth than the other way round, due to its energy-draining. He had advised patience.
Cutler refuses to heed this advice and begins the launch preparations.
Polly is asked by Ben to start working on Barclay, to get him on their side.
Sure enough, he is so opposed to the Z-Bomb use that he agrees to help them sabotage the launch.
The radar technician reports another landing nearby of a Cyberman spaceship. The three weapons earlier captured from Krail and his fellow Cybermen are taken outside by a squad of soldiers who conceal themselves in the snow. As a group of Cybermen emerge out of the blizzard, they are ambushed with their own weaponry and most are destroyed, with the survivors retreating back to their craft.
Barclay has sent Ben through a ventilation shaft from the crew room to the missile silo, with instructions on how to sabotage the weapon in such a way as it will take a long time to trace and put right.
Cutler becomes suspicious and goes to the silo room in time to catch Ben tampering with the device. He pushes him and he falls from a gantry, leaving him stunned.
He is brought to the tracking room as the missile countdown begins - with the General threatening to kill him and Barclay if anything goes wrong.
Polly desperately asks Ben if he succeeded in his mission, but he is still confused from his injury. He simply cannot recall.
The countdown reaches zero and the rockets fire...
Data:Written by Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis
Recorded: Saturday 1st October 1966 - Riverside Studio 1
First broadcast: 5:50pm, Saturday 22nd October 1966
Ratings: 7.6 million / AI 48
Designer: Peter Kindred
Director: Derek Martinus
Additional cast: Callen Angelo (Terry Cutler), Christopher Dunham (R/T technician)
Critique:
After completing his scripts for the first two episodes, Kit Pedler was taken seriously ill in the summer of 1966 - necessitating surgery and a hospital stay. Gerry Davis was very busy at the time working on both The Smugglers and the story which would launch the new Doctor - then known as "The Destiny of Doctor Who". He had already been guiding Pedler through his contributions, and so it was decided that he would complete Hartnell's final adventure himself - for which he had to get special permission, being the series' Story Editor. He would be entitled to split the fee with Pedler as well as be given on-screen credit for his work.
This was discussed with Pedler, who agreed to the arrangement. He was able to inform Davis of his ideas for the remaining two instalments, though it was up to the Story Editor how much of this he could use.
It was also agreed at this time that Pedler and Davis would enjoy shared copyright of the Cybermen.
During the summer break Hartnell had suffered bouts of ill health. On completing recording of the second episode of his final story, the star was struck down by bronchitis. His doctor prescribed a week's rest along with his antibiotics, and so he would be unable to attend rehearsals for the next instalment which commenced two days later. The Doctor would have to be written out of the episode.
Having been forced to pen the episode himself, it now fell to Davis to make the necessary adaptations to cover Hartnell's absence.
The Doctor simply falls unconscious at the beginning of the episode, and his exposition is split between Ben and Barclay. It is noticeable that Ben speaks of things which the Doctor is supposed to have said - such as the danger to Mondas and the call for restraint - when he has never been heard to say any such thing, and there hasn't even been any opportunity to do so off-screen.
The consequences of using the Z-Bomb against Mondas and other scientific dialogue was given to Barclay.
As with the third episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, when Hartnell had been forced to miss a week through injury, a double would be employed, seen only from the back - their sole job being to fall over in the first shot. They would then remain unconscious off camera for the remainder of the episode.
Having already doubled for Hartnell in Cornwall for The Smugglers, and for the opening South Pole scenes at Ealing, Gordon Craig was hired to feature briefly at the start of the episode, collapsing in a faint. The Doctor is then taken to the crew room and spends the rest of the instalment under a blanket on a bunk bed.
As well as the dialogue changes, the initial draft of the third episode did not include Ben in the tracking room at the conclusion. The Doctor was to have felt ill throughout, and not played a significant role anyway. He was to have rested in the crew room for much of the instalment, only being brought back to the tracking room for the cliff-hanger.
The Cybermen did not feature at Riverside on the third studio day. The creatures appear in one sequence only, which was filmed at Ealing on Thursday 1st September.
This had been the first time that the actors had worked in the costumes, and many of the problems in doing so only became apparent this day.
Some fainted under the hot studio lights, and everyone needed help getting back up after falling in the ambush. As previously mentioned, the lamp on the top of the head was fitted with a bulb which was supposed to illuminate - but it blew on being switched on and the idea was quickly dropped.
Parts of the costume came loose, requiring running repairs from Sandra Reid and her assistant.
A BBC photographer was present on the day to record the activity. It was on this occasion that all of the group shots of the Cybermen in the snow were taken. The chap on the right, above, wearing glasses, is director Derek Martinus.
The three actors who would be playing the Cybermen in studio were amongst the group - Reg Whitehead, Harry Brooks and Gregg Palmer - and joining them for filming only were John Slater, Bruce Wells, John Haines, and John Knott.
Model filming depicting the raising of the Z-Bomb rocket took place two days earlier, Tuesday 30th August, also on Ealing's Stage 3.
During the rehearsal period, Martinus wrote to Hartnell wishing him a speedy recovery and informing him of how they had covered his absence.
One side effect of the changes made by Davis was the removal of a new scene for Glenn Beck as the TV News announcer. Instead, he and Roy Skelton - not needed for Cyber-voices - provided background vocals for the various intercom messages throughout the episode.
Skelton also provided the Z-Bomb countdown.
The studio day did not get off to a good start, as Martinus was angry with the state of the tracking room set. It had been transported to Alexandra Palace for storage as there was insufficient room at Riverside, and had been damaged at some point in transit.
Davis' name was misspelt in the opening credits.
The Zeus 4 set was reused as the Zeus 5 one. Callen Angelo, playing Cutler's astronaut son, was only ever seen in close-up on monitors to help disguise this.
The main new set was the multi-level rocket silo room, which included the wall-mounted grill which Ben had to crawl through.
Stuntman Peter Pocock doubled for Michael Craze in the sequence where Ben is knocked off the gantry by the General.
Recording breaks were mainly to allow cast members to move between the tracking room and silo sets, and to allow Craze to move along the ventilation shaft in close-ups.
Stock footage of rocket jets firing was used for the final scene, and countdown numerals were superimposed over the Snowcap crewmembers.
The Tenth Planet very much provides the blueprint for the "base under siege" story structure, which will come to prominence in the Troughton era of the programme. We have the small group of people - generally scientists rather than trained soldiers, though there may be some of those to act as "red shirts". They are housed in a claustrophobic location, situated in a hostile environment - making simple escape impossible. To add to the drama, the person in command of this location is wholly unsuited to the role, suffering from some mental health issue - triggered by the alien threat or an existing condition which the situation exacerbates.
Cutler is clearly a hard taskmaster whom it is difficult to work with, and the nature of the remote and confined location is specifically mentioned in the first episode as the Sergeant explains how no-one works here for more than a few months at a time.
We've seen how ruthless the General can be when dealing with the Cybermen, but he totally flips when his son comes under threat. He is quite prepared to ignore a direct order - twisting Wigner's "any means necessary" to include the very thing he's been specifically told not to use. His planned actions can destroy a whole half of the earth at the very least, but he's single-mindedly fixated on saving his son. This can't all have come out of nowhere. Clearly Cutler must have already been suffering some kind of obsessive-compulsive behaviours prior to this, which his superiors really ought to have picked up on. People working in remote hostile environments would be getting psychological check-ups on a regular basis.
Even if ISC were unaware of any of this, they ought to have known that sending into danger the son of the man responsible for dealing directly with an alien invasion would be a distraction at the very least, and the trigger for a complete mental breakdown at worst.
It may be a Cyberman story, but with this third episode Gerry Davis is more interested in telling a human story.
Trivia:- The ratings see yet another significant increase of more than one million on the previous week. The appreciation figure remains constant and under 50, however.
- Bernard Hepton, who would go on to find fame in Colditz and Secret Army, was originally considered for the role of Dyson. When rewrites saw the part diminished, he was no longer interested.
- Cutler's son is named Terry in the credits and in various production documents - but it is never mentioned in dialogue.
- The script specified that Wigner should speak to one of his underlings in Greek, but actor Steve Plytas opted to use French instead.
- The forthcoming change in lead actor was reported in the US entertainment trade paper Variety on Wednesday 28th September. The piece mentioned how the Doctor's personality would change along with his appearance, and pointed out how successful the series had been so far in foreign sales.
- Michael Craze could be seen in the Wednesday Play series in the run-up to broadcast - in a comedy called A Piece of Resistance. This was actually a repeat, however, as it had debuted on BBC 2 on Boxing Day, 1965.
- The layout of the base has to be questioned, as it appears that there is a ventilation shaft leading directly from the crew room to the rocket silo - suggesting that anyone lying in bed during a launch would most likely be cremated...
