Review of Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet (1966) by Tim L — 21 Aug 2010

One of the problems with any sci-fi programme/film that sets itself in the not too distant future, is that when that time arrives, it loses most of it's believability and ends up looking rather daft. In this, sadly the last of the first Doctor's stories, we are told it is '1986,' and yet the fashion and technology are very much from the 1960s when it was shot.

This aside, this is an ok story; rather slow even for the first Doctor, and I found my attention dropping quite a lot. I found the companions rather annoying in this one, and I definetly missed Barbera and Ian, who I've also become fond of in discovering these early stories.

However, I actually liked the early cybermen and thought they would indeed have scared me as a kid, as 'naff' as they are by modern standards. The strange-intonations in the voices do sound like something you could imagine in a computerised mind trying to interact with humans, and to me to 'gimp masks' were pretty creepy looking. I suppose I'm a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to early Doctor Who episodes, as I feel the black and white hides a multitude of sins, and I do find it a lot easier to get into the 'dodgy' effects from the Hartnell and Troughton days than those of the third Doctor.

As much as I love Troughton's Doctor, I'm sad to see the first doctor go, and I'm really impressed with how much depth Hartnell brought to the character, that 10 others (so far) have explored since he lay down the prototype.