Wednesday, 25 September 2013

The Tenth Planet - Episode 3

The penultimate episode in William Hartnell’s final story doesn’t feature in it as he told the production team via telegraph that he was too ill to attend. I think that the story manages to work around this as he was in the background in the previous episode anyway.  This is the final episode in the William Hartnell era to exist on video because the final episode doesn’t exist except in animated form. The plot of the episode is split into two. The first being the Cybermen invasion which is briefly shown at the begin at the episode and the second being the General’s attempt to get his son back.

The Z-Bomb is something that is very much of its period. Nowadays it would be a generic bomb or missle. However its effect seems to be just as big and when the General wants permission to use it and doesn’t get it he uses a technicality to get around this. I like how the General has gone slightly mad in this episode. It’s countered by Barclay who has become more likeable as the story has gone on and becomes an allie of Ben and Polly. He helps them come up with a way of stopping the Z-Bomb from being launched and rather predictably it falls to Ben to do it.
It’s 15 minutes into the episode before the Cybermen are heard from again and when they do we get the same walking across the horizon as we did in episode one but there are more of them and its looks just as good.  There is an ambush so their walk outside is somewhat cut short. The snowy set is rather more impressive in this episode. The Cybermen are somewhat on the side-lines in this episode which isn’t something that I’ve noticed before. The second half of the episode deals with the countdown to the launch of the Z-Bomb. There is a nice bit of tension when we see whether what Ben has done is enough to stop it and the countdown gets very close to lift-off. It’s a nice little cliffhanger which creates enough of an excuse to see what happens in the final episode.

It’s a solid enough episode especially when you consider that it doesn’t feature the Doctor and the Cybermen are somewhat conspicuous by their absence.  The story and the characters are good enough to make you forget those that aren’t in the episode. It’s building up nicely to what will be a fine finale to the end of an era in Doctor Who.

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