The Tenth Planet episode 3 discussion:
E: “I’m helpful, I’ll make coffee!” Gawd!
H: To be fair, Polly was a secretary.
Cz: I wish I could be helpful and make coffee!
R: I have to say this episode was a lot better than it was. Okay, I know it’s hard to explain. It was really weak in a lot of ways, but somehow that just didn’t slow it down at all.
Sp: The pace was ridiculous. This felt like a shorter episode.
K: It was a shorter episode.
H: By maybe a few minutes. [it came in about 1 minute shorter than the average Doctor Who episode]
P: Going back to the coffee I’m thinking “Great, she’ll spill it all over the control panel.” But I’m 40 years to early. (It’s more of a McGyver thing).
Sp: This does kind of continue the inconsistency about who’s prisoner, how they treat prisoners, who’s dangerous. “Lock up the Doctor, let the kids loose! Lock up the guy, the chick can stay.”
A: But she made coffee.
M: I felt very bad for the Cybermen. They were just mowed down.
Cz: They weren’t even a threat.
M: They just died kind of sad. Floof.
Sp: On the other hand, I would hope a military base would know how to defend itself. This episode counterbalanced the ninja Cybermen in coats nonsense from last week.
M: The Cybermen were just going to see what happened. They’re going to see what happened to their friends who weren’t answering their cell phones so they were tracking them “find my iPhone.”
H: SIRI, WHERE AAAA-RE MY FRIENDS?
R: That’s what you get for having the unlimited data package!
H: Timely.
K: The comment is not going to make sense when we post this…
Sp: So, Z-Bomb. Was it a hokey plot device from out of left field, or did it work for people?
A: Why did they have a bomb capable of destroying the earth?
H: Because the arms race at this point, it would have lead up to having a bomb like that.
Sc: It’s doesn’t make much sense that the peaceful international space agency would have the three deadly bombs.
P: Only one was at that base. They are hidden around the world.
H: But the general said there were three. Nonetheless, they still had one.
Sc: So they were expecting an attack from Outer-space, and they had a bomb capable of destroying a planet?
R: It was the 60’s. Science!
Sc: But it still doesn’t really make sense. If it’s a doomsday device, why did they have it on a rocket?
M: But it wasn’t on the rocket. They had to put it on the rocket.
K: Because it’s cool!
M: It goes back to WWII, with the Nazis myth of the doomsday bomb.
H: As opposed to the American reality of the doomsday bomb in WWII?
R: There are many things in this episode that do not bear too close scrutiny.
Sp: I called it! I called the air duct two minutes before it showed up!
R: The air duct that leads into the radioactive silo. When the rocket launches and the radioactive exhaust floods through the ventilation system of the whole base.
Sp: No no no no! See, I noticed their attention to detail on this one. When Popeye [Ben] is going through the duct, I praised at the time, in my head, that they bothered to show wind flowing in the duct. They had a fan off screen blowing on the actor. So obviously the air duct is blowing air into the silo, blowing all the radioactive air into the silo.
M: Except the air was blowing the wrong way.
R: And in a competition between a ceiling fan and a rocket, guess who blows harder?
P: The script writer?
R: Which brings me to my second silo relation foible. The general comes out, grabs Popeye, as he shall now be known, and hurls him down a shaft that, by all rights, should be six stories down.
Sp: No, that wasn’t the shaft. That was the catwalk that ran around the room. It was just a few feet. It was a control room.
H: Yes, it was the top half of the control room.
K: And Barkley actually said, when Ben asked about going into the rocket room without a radiation suite, that he was only going in the control room. So the vent didn’t even go to the rocket.
M: But that was the rocket. He was doing something to the rocket.
<debate about where the rocket and the control was. Too long, didn’t type.>
Sc: Was that in fact, the first crawl through an air-duct in a science fiction show?
H: No, Ian crawls through an air-duct in “Dalek Invasion of Earth.”
Sc: Ah, touche.
M: While I was following up on Ketina’s observation that the episode seemed to be short, was it actually shortened because Hartnell was sick?
H: No. Actually what they did, apparently, was they took Hartnell’s lines and divided them between Ben and Barkley. So Ben would say “the Doctor told me” blah, when the Doctor never actually told him.
R: So it actually made the humans look smarter. Accidentally.
E: Yay!
H: So Hartnell caught pneumonia.
R: From being out in all that fake snow.
P: Well now he’s out in the cold.
R: You don’t have to type all the things Photobug says, you know.
K: Hahahahahaha! I have control!! I really just make this all up!
Sp: My god, the entire TARDIS project has been inside Ketina’s head this whole time!
K: Ouch. Laughing too hard to type. <breathes>
H: Okay, so I’m going to make the point, to get it on the record, that this is the last fully moving episode we’re going to have for several months. For 2 ½ more stories.
P: I’m outta here!
H: So I hope everybody enjoyed it.
Sp: There will be other emotionally relevant story lines.
H: Moving pictures.
K: We have entered RECON HELL!!
H: Next week.
Sp: Attack of the Recons. Revenge of the Recons. Return to the Planet of the Recons.
Sc: The Recon Invasion of Earth.
P: The Recon of Doom. The Five Recons.
R: Recon the Destroyer.
Sc: The Wrath of Recon!
<applause>
Sp: So, Polly…
H: What about Polly?
Sp: My point exactly.
E: Coffee!
Sc: I don’t get why people are all hating on Polly.
Sp: I’m not hating on her. They just give her so little to do.
Sc: But she was the one who convinced Beard Dude [Barclay] to sabotage the rocket.
H: She used the coffee as a subterfuge as a reason to stay there and convince Barclay, aka Beard Dude.
R: What Ben said to do was basically just to find a way to stay and mess with them. So she was like “I can make coffee?” and they were like “That’s unoffensive.”
P: I’m sitting here thinking “Does she have poison?”
E: Coffee is a powerful tool of persuasion.
K: Yeah, but it’s like drip coffee.
Sp: Yeah, but it’s like Antarctica.
H: And it’s 1986. Of course it’s drip coffee. Alright, so final thoughts?
P: I think a good comment should be made on the Cybermen dying again. But two or three of them wandered off. The taking of their weapons was probably the best idea overall. And the Cybermen should learn in the future to be smarter when they attack.
M: They don’t.
P: I agree that the security is awful. And now that I know one of the three top bombs in the world is in a place like that, I’m pretty scared.
R: It’s Antarctica, one does not simply walk into International Space Base Four.
P: The second thing is, the plot point with the General losing his common sense for his son was kind of weak.
E: It made me think he was kind of a jerk.
M: It thought it made it very clear that he was irrational.
E: I started to hate him really fast.
Sp: Let half the world burn. We’ll repopulate the earth with my son and coffee girl here. And sometimes Barkley to have smart people around.
P: So, also what’s wrong with sending the rocket to the far side of this Mondas and then detonating it there?
R: Which would then shield the earth from the explosion.
P: The problem with that is, if you can’t even keep a ship in orbit, how can you launch a rocket to do that?
A: I thought it was interesting that we didn’t see hardly any Doctor, hardly any Cybermen, and yet it was still a really solidly enjoyable episode.
MS: Sometimes if you see the Cybermen, and then the Daleks together, you think maybe the Cybermen are the people who create the Daleks. Because the Daleks are from the future.
R: <Dalek voice> WE COULD HAVE BEEN SUCH GREAT FRIENDS. BUT IT WAS NOT TO BE.
P: <Dalek voice> TO BE OR NOT TO BE.
M: Gamera and Gogira would have sorted this out like that!
E: I kind of agree with Altair’s (A) statement that even though we didn’t see a lot of the Cybermen or the Doctor it was still really solid. I didn’t even notice that we didn’t see a lot of them until it was almost over. Also… coffee!
<coffee song happens>
Sc: I’ve got nothing. I think Altair was right. This feels like a more conventionally modern Doctor Who story.
Cz: I miss the Doctor!
K: Antarctica apparently has two suns. Evidenced by the double shadow of the landing Cybership.
<applause. And I didn’t even make that applause bit up. Really.>
R: I almost wish they’d done a bad kungfu movie and just had the Doctor passed out off screen. It was kind of distracting to have a voice that was clearly not the Doctor go “Ow, my football knee” and have a guy in a white fright wig that was obviously not Hartnell fall over and then spend the whole rest of the episode conspicuously not looking in the direction of the camera.
Sp: It wasn’t that distracting. It wasn’t like it was “Weekend at Bernies” or something.
R: Now I’m picturing someone dragging William Hartnell around.
P: How much longer did William Hartnell live?
H: Until ’75. So about 8-9 more years. He did do some more TV after this, but gradually stopped acting as his sickness progressed.
Sp: They seemed to involve an awful lot of the cast. Lots of people had bit parts, or reactions. The general’s back and forth with Dyson (other scientist). With the guy in Geneva. Various reactions with the other control room crew. So yeah, it really felt ensemble, and it felt like these guys had a history before this story. Tightly paced and well written. The general’s son up on the spaceship actually worked out. It initially felt contrived and forced, but they made it work. It was fun.
P: In the scene when they asked the son if he could see the other space craft, he appeared to look down at the floor and said “no I couldn’t see him.”
R: He may have been just embarrassed at his dad’s stupid question. “No dad, I can’t see an object the size of a bus 75 miles away.”
H: So, something that hasn’t been mentioned yet is one of the reasons it both worked as well as it did, and felt as tight as it did, was the idea of the countdown. Doctor Who as used countdowns before, notably in the first Dalek episode. Both getting the bomb ready, and then the countdown both tightened the episode and heightened the suspense. Which is why the cliff hanger worked really, really well. Is everybody looking forward to next week’s big finale?
Everyone: YES! NO!
H: We’ll miss Bill.
