So, this brings us to the end of the First Doctor. It’s taken a little longer than I hoped, but it’s over and it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience. Thankyou to everyone who has read this blog, and I’m especially grateful to my patrons for supporting me through this project. Idiot Box in Blue will return to cover the Second Doctor when we hit $25 per post over on Patreon, and we’re so fucking close!! For now the Patreon is very reliant on two $10 pledges. If you are able to chip in $1 or $2 to tip us over the edge, thankyou so much!

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Snow crunches underfoot as I walk deeper into the haze.

It’s not like this is the worst winter storm I’ve had to march through, gloved hands tugging at my coat as I try to keep warm. The winter of 1965 was far worse, an oppressive and anxious static screeching through the frigid winds. Even squinting, I could barely make out images that should have been right before my eyes. They were mere echoes in a howling blizzard, images frozen in the torrents of ice and snow.

But this is the winter of 1966. The winds are less biting, the falling snow less dense. I can make out vague images in the distance—the glow of a tenth planet looming high in Earth’s sky, as giant figures stalk across the Antarctic ice sheets. Headlamps glint under the light of that strange world. Occasionally, when the wind is still and I listen closely, I think I can hear the figures singing.

This is the winter of 1966. I can hear the electronic howl of a machine in distress, see glimpses of an aged man bending over a control panel as lights blink and switches move. His grip seems to grow weaker, his body slipping. He collapses to the floor in a blinding flash of light, and I can see no more.

This is the winter of 1966, and this is where Doctor Who ends.

Broadcast over four weeks in October, The Tenth Planet is the final serial to star William Hartnell as the Doctor. In 2021, only three of its episodes survive—the fourth and final episode seemingly lost to history, an absent storm of snow and static. Focusing on this as Hartnell’s final story, however, is to overlook the way in which this serial is part of a tumultuous period of aesthetic transition which stretches back as far as Galaxy Four almost an entire year prior. Consider the basic plot of this serial: the Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive at a polar base which is being used by International Space Command to supervise routine spaceflights. Already this seems unlike any Doctor Who story that precedes it, pushing the programme to engage with new ideas and images relevant to the world of 1966. This is without mentioning Earth’s wandering twin planet of Mondas, which has returned to parasitically leech the energy of its twin, or the ominous inhabitants of that dying world. But that’s really been the story of Doctor Who since Verity Lambert’s departure: a whirlpool of transition from one aesthetic vision into another, rudderless against the current.

It’s tempting to take this opportunity to try and close out the First Doctor’s era by looking for some kind of narrative unity, or a point where it feels as if it has come to a natural close. Perhaps we could argue that the Hartnell era already ended several episodes ago—with The Massacre, or more recently in The Savages. Picking either would suggest we’ve been lingering in a protracted epilogue, waiting for the moment when Doctor Who will find the right process which will allow William Hartnell’s visage to fade away from our screens one last time.

And yet trying to seek some kind of unity might be to misunderstand the nature of this ending. It would be trying to view Doctor Who through a scientific framing, seeking to understand “the unity of [its] world and the lawfully regulated order of things” within. It would, to quote Rudolf Bultmann, mean that we approach The Tenth Planet from one of two objectifying perspectives: obscuring “the real intention of myth, namely, its intention… to talk about human existence.”

Bultmann proposes engaging with the process of demythologisation, which tries to reveal a “philosophy of existence.” Bultmann, however, was a theologian attempting to look at religious myths from a more existentialist perspective. I’m writing about Doctor Who. And yet through demythologisation, Bultmann reminds us of the need to focus on this “existentialist interpretation.” He reminds us to focus on how myth—or fiction, as we’re applying it to here—explores these basic questions of human existence.

So let’s talk about Ten Little Aliens for a brief moment.

Yes, we’ve just spent a whole post on Ten Little Aliens, but there was a line in that novel that I never really unpacked. It’s a line that firmly establishes Ten Little Aliens as an attempt to bookend the First Doctor’s era, returning to an ethos left behind at the end of the programme’s first season:

‘Our destiny is in the stars, the pioneers used to say.’
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, that’s a fine sentiment.’

Ten Little Aliens (Stephen Cole)

This line—that “our destiny is in the stars”—is a direct quote from the final episode of The Reign of Terror (“Prisoners of the Conciergerie”), where Ian Chesterton and the Doctor share one final exchange as the season winds to a close:

DOCTOR: But as we see, so we learn.
IAN: And what are we going to see and learn next, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Well, unlike the old adage, my boy, our destiny is in the stars, so let’s go and search for it.

Doctor Who, “Prisoners of the Conciergerie,” (Dennis Spooner)

In this exchange, we can see how the characters are looking towards the future as the Doctor promises his companions that they can look forward to further adventures through space as they continue to “see and learn.” This search for knowledge and understanding is associated with the stars, with the Doctor saying that they must search for “our destiny” there. No wonder the Doctor finds it a “fine sentiment” in Ten Little Aliens—it’s a belief that he himself had uttered once upon a time. We could also, however, suggest that the Doctor is pondering a more existential question, that through an engagement with a broader universe we might learn something about ourselves. The real intention of Doctor Who and its journeys through time and space is “to talk about human existence.” All in all, it’s rather Rudolf Bultmann.

“Our destiny is in the stars, so let’s go and search for it.”

Ok, sure. But what does this have to do with The Tenth Planet? And what does this even have to do with Lloyd and Davis—they’re not the ones quoting it. Stephen Cole did so in 2002, four decades after the fact.

And yet the line speaks to me. It guides me through this snowy haze, making the indistinct shadows marching through the snow look more recognisable. More familiar.

Through the howling snowstorm I can hear them as they sing their song about a fragile little world that had “drifted away… on a journey to the edge of space.” A song about how a race of humans was forced to reckon with their own destiny in the stars by circumstances beyond their control. A song about how humans sought to repair themselves with “spare parts,” refashioning themselves into giant beings of metal and plastic and bandages.

Their destiny was also in the stars, and they found it. They are the Cybermen.

It’s certainly not a hot take to suggest that the Cybermen are an idea through which Kit Pedler, with Gerry Davis offering substantial assistance as a co-writer, sought “to talk about human existence.” Usually this has been framed through Pedler’s anxieties over limb replacement, a procedure that he feared could eventually lead to people who had become more machine than man. I wish to take a slightly different approach.

Consider “Episode 2,” which features scenes where the Cyberman leader Krail engages in lengthy dialogues with the human characters. In these scenes Pedler and Davis use Krail to highlight the differences between humans and the Cybermen—for instance, Krail describes emotions as “weaknesses that [they] have removed.” A consequence of this is that feeling and suffering have no meaning to the Cybermen—in a later scene, Krail is even confused when Polly refers to “feelings.” When the commanding officer of the polar base, General Cutler, confronts the Cybermen and insists that they need to save two astronauts stranded in space Krail states that any action they take would be meaningless. “They will not return,” Krail claims, saying that it is “unimportant” and that “there is really no point.” As the humans continue to insist that they must do something to save the astronauts, Krail relents but continues to say that it would be “impossible for them to get back now” because the “pull of Mondas is too strong.”

The Cybermen are usually interpreted as beings of logic, and this is how their attitudes in this scene are usually understood. Emotions are illogical, and why would you try to save someone if they’re clearly beyond saving?

But again, I want to take a slightly different approach. I want to consider the Cybermen as nihilists.

This involves opening up one hell of a can of worms, not least because nihilism is often used as a moral term. It is, as Nolen Gertz claims, “typically viewed as something dark, negative and destructive.” Alan Pratt further observes that nihilism is usually associated with an “extreme pessimism,” and nihilists will believe that “because miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible.”

Gertz claims that nihilism isn’t “a discernible system of beliefs about nothingness,” but rather something which is lived and practiced. He uses the example of how people will often respond that they have been doing “nothing” when asked mundane questions such as “what have you been up to,” stating that:

“… if we are spending so much time doing nothing worth mentioning, then… perhaps this does indicate that our lives are not worth mentioning, that we are doing nothing with our lives, that we are nothing, that we believe in nothing.”

Nihilism (Nolen Gertz)

A consequence of this, Gertz states, is that “we are living lives that accord with the belief that life is nothing.” If we do claim to hold some belief about life having meaning, then “it is incapable of motivating us to do something rather than nothing.” Nihilism is a way of living, of evading reality—however Gertz suggests that this could take the form of “either trying to destroy it or by trying to ignore it.”

Nietzsche, who both Pratt and Gertz agree is the philosopher most closely identified with nihilism, certainly believed that it was a destructive practice:

“Nihilism is… not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.”

Will to Power (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Nietzsche seems to view this, however, with deep anxiety: as Pratt notes, he was concerned that the “collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history,” claiming that by the late-19^th century Europe was well on a path towards a nihilistic future. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Nietzsche, prophesying the inevitable collapse of European civilisation, was so popular with the Nazis.

I want to set that aside for a moment though and focus on a branch of nihilism that I think is more immediately relevant to the Cybermen: existential nihilism. As Pratt writes, this branch of nihilistic thought was popularised throughout the 1940s and 1950s by the atheistic existentialist movement in France. Pratt claims that existential nihilism is “associated with the belief that life is meaningless,” and that “when we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of not only absolute freedom but also existential horror and emotional anguish.” “Given this circumstance,” Pratt writes, “existence itself—all action, suffering, and feeling—is ultimately senseless and empty.”

For Gertz, nihilism describes a series of actions and practices—a way that people live. Pratt, meanwhile, suggests that (existential) nihilism is not just a discernible system of beliefs but a revelation: one that simultaneously offers liberation, horror and anguish. Is this, then, what the Cybermen found as Mondas underwent its journey to the edge of space? Instead of finding their destiny in the stars, did they instead find a nothingness—an existential horror and emotional anguish? Perhaps when Krail claims that the Cybermen have removed certain weaknesses—emotions—it was to make existence within a meaningless universe slightly more bearable. After all, how can you suffer from the existential horror and emotional anguish of nothingness if you no longer feel pain?

It is through Bultmann that we are considering the ways in which The Tenth Planet speaks about human existence, but the Cybermen clearly came to a very different conclusion. For Bultmann, after all, “human existence [is] grounded in and limited by a transcendent and unworldly power,” with demythologisation intended to “make clear and understandable the real mystery of God in its authentic comprehensibility.”

And yet the Cybermen have found nothing except existential horror and emotional anguish. They found weaknesses and had them removed.

So are the Cybermen nihilists by thought, or nihilists by deed? I don’t think that it’s as simple as one or the other. It’s worth returning to the statements that Krail makes in “Episode 2.” They certainly sound quite nihilistic: after all, “there is really no point” in trying to save the astronauts stranded in space. We could easily claim that the Cybermen are “incapable of motivating [themselves] to do something rather than nothing” to save the lives of others, a point that Polly treats as ethically appalling:

POLLY: But don’t you care?
KRAIL: Care? No, why should I care?
POLLY: Because they’re people and they’re going to die!  
KRAIL: I do not understand you. There are people dying all over your world yet you do not care about them.

Doctor Who, The Tenth Planet, “Episode Two,” (Kit Pedler)

There’s a concerted effort here by Krail to ignore the potential suffering of the astronauts—their suffering is meaningless, because people die all the time. So why should Krail, or the other Cybermen, care about these two? Even if the Cybermen have removed all emotion, it’s very easy to read Krail’s comments as being extremely pessimistic—as if the Cybermen have accepted as fact “life is meaningless” and given into “existential horror and emotional anguish.”

A process of self-actualisation, an opportunity to discover something about human existence, has turned the Cybermen into nihilists. It’s profoundly bleak, as if the ethos of Doctor Who has gone wrong—which, to be fair, is kind of the point of the Cybermen. They’re intended as an unsettling subject, held up by Pedler and Davis for social critique.

So let’s dust off an idea that we haven’t actually played with in quite some time and begin discussing Verfremdungseffekt.

It’s an idea that I used when reading the first thirteen episodes of Doctor Who. There I claimed that David Whitaker attempted to apply the techniques of Brechtian theatre to the fledgling science-fiction programme. Specifically, this period sought to examine the ideological effect of nuclear weapons upon society by projecting modern anxieties onto such subjects as prehistoric cavemen or the fascistic, armoured Daleks. So, time for a brief refresher. Verfremdungseffekt (or V-Effekt) was a political form of theatre developed by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. It was designed to answer a specific question: “if the world could be shown differently… could it not be differently made?” As such the purpose of Verfremdungseffekt was to “provoke, inspire, [and] teach,” demonstrating how an audience could find “pleasure in changing the world.” It’s a call to action—the complete opposite of nihilism, which Gertz describes as “incapable of motivating us to do something rather than nothing.” After all, to value the idea of changing the world one needs to believe that action and suffering have meaning and purpose.

Brecht saw performance as key to this political agenda—of inspiring its audience to find “pleasure in changing world.” Actors would make “actions observable, pointing to the structurally defining causes behind them,” and play their roles as “the object neither of the audience’s identification nor their scorn.” As filmed by Derek Martinus, the Cybermen move through the studio space and perform broad, gestural motions with their arms as they speak—a direct consequence of their mechanical, expressionless society. The viewer is also unable to see the actor’s face, obscured behind a cloth mask, making it difficult to either identify with or scorn Krail as they claim “there is really no point” in saving the doomed astronauts. Looking at all of this, it seems as if we’re supposed to understand this cold, nihilistic worldview to be associated with the transformation of the Mondasians—implicitly, human beings—into Cybermen.

But why did the Mondasians transform into Cybermen? Krail claims that it was a transformation pursued by “our cybernetic scientists” to solve the problem of shortening lifespans. That it was cybernetic scientists is crucial here: the solution to human problems was, seemingly, technological. It’s an idea that Polly reacts to with shock, alleging that this process has turned the Cybermen into “robots.”

However, this idea of “life itself… [being] seen as a problem to be solved technologically” was one that Gertz himself considered in a 2020 interview. If life is meaningless, he claims, then movements such as transhumanism seek to find meaning in “the dream of deathlessness.” It’s worth noting that this isn’t inherently negative—after all, as Pratt suggests, there can be something liberating in the embrace of nihilism.

When Krail states that the Cybermen are “only interested in survival,” perhaps they refer to something similar: a nihilistic “dream of deathlessness,” born of viewing life “as a problem to be solved technologically.” Are we meant to understand this as being the historical cause of the Cybermen? A nihilistic worldview that understands human life as something to be solved through technology, reducing us to what Polly derisively calls “robots”? If so, then we can certainly see how The Tenth Planet attempts to ask that Brechtian question: “if the world could be shown differently… could it not be made differently?”

I wish it were as simple as that.

Firstly, let’s step back for a moment and discuss a different programme that I feel is a useful lens for understanding the new aesthetic vision that Davis and producer Innes Lloyd have begun to establish: Thunderbirds.

I previously referenced Thunderbirds when discussing The War Machines, where the WOTAN project was the culmination of international cooperation to create a “central intelligence” and “problem solver” which would “think logically without any political or private ends.” There’s clearly something idealistic about the vision that WOTAN represents, looking hopefully towards a world of peaceful international collaboration.

Although my focus was specifically on those episodes written by former-Doctor Who story editor Dennis Spooner, one thing still stood out about Thunderbirds from such a small sample of episodes: an ethos of idealistic internationalism. This is, after all, the principle upon which International Rescue is founded: crises can be averted through global cooperation. Whether it be a nuclear disaster or rocket failure during spaceflight, cooperation makes it possible for human actions to resolve crisis and contain chaotic disasters.

In Doctor Who, however, WOTAN wasn’t the means for resolving a crisis. WOTAN was the crisis, a threat to the British state which needed to be put down with military force.

There is a point of similarity between both Thunderbirds and The War Machines: that humans can take meaningful action to contain and avert crises.I think that in The War Machines this reflects the politics of Ian Stuart Black, whose previous script, The Savages, unambiguously invites the viewer to take “pleasure in changing the world” through revolution. Black, at least, seems to believe that the world could easily be made quite differently.

So what of The Tenth Planet? Consider “Episode 1” of The Tenth Planet, which opens with stock footage of a rocket in the middle of take-off. It is “just a normal atmosphere testing probe” performing a routine flight—the sort of thing which wouldn’t be out of place in Thunderbirds. In fact, much like a Thunderbirds episode, something soon goes wrong with the rocket. The difference here, however, is that no distress signal can be sent out to request assistance from International Rescue. International Space Command, the body overseeing this routine spaceflight, is more than capable of sending up a second rocket to offer some assistance, but in the end there is nothing that can be done to save the doomed rocket. If Thunderbirds is built on the idea that global cooperation can resolve crises, The Tenth Planet appears far more pessimistic—fundamentally nihilistic.

But then perhaps Pedler and Davis merely seek to juxtapose a universe of existential horror and emotional anguish with the stubborn resilience of human beings—that, unlike the Cybermen, this is an existence that we can bear without having to remove “weaknesses.” Take Polly, for example. Pedler and Davis use Polly’s character to serve as a moral anchor throughout The Tenth Planet, calling the Cybermen “robots” and being the most visibly affected by their apparent lack of empathy. When she insists in “Episode 2” that Krail should care about the astronauts stranded in space because “they’re people and they’re going to die,” it seems as if she’s being used by Pedler and Davis to make a specific argument: that human lives are inherently meaningful, and we have a duty to look after our fellow human beings regardless of how effective our actions may or may not be.

This moral position is put to the test in “Episode 3.”

It turns out that the rocket which has been sent up by International Space Command to assist the two astronauts is piloted by Lieutenant Cutler—the son of the military officer in command of the polar base. Faced with both the existential horror of the Cybermen and the emotional anguish of his own son being sent “to his death,” the general decides to use an atomic weapon known as the “Z-Bomb” to destroy Mondas.

Let’s just think about this for a moment. At the beginning of its third episode, at its midpoint, The Tenth Planet introduces an actual, honest-to-god nuclear weapon as General Cutler’s solution to existential horror and emotional anguish. If the Cybermen have responded to this harsh world by purging themselves of emotional weaknesses, allowing them to question why they should even care about the suffering of others in the first place, then this is the point where Cutler begins to consider the idea that “everything deserves to perish.” One of his scientists, a man named Barclay, expresses concerns that the Z-Bomb would “destroy all life on the side of the Earth that’s facing it” and “would certainly destroy the space capsule.” Cutler, however, is committed to using the Z-Bomb and dismisses Barclay’s concerns. “That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” he says.

But again, let’s think about this for a moment.

We have a serial which has made use of Verfremdung to invite its audience to critique the Cybermen as nihilistic beings. It marks a return to an approach which the programme has long since moved away from—a return, of sorts, to the very beginning. And key to that beginning as well was the alienating, reified power of atomic weaponry. The purpose of Verfremdungseffekt in serials such as The Tribe of Gum and The Dead Planet was to critique the societal and political impact of the atomic age upon its subjects, to “provoke, inspire [and] teach” the viewer how the society they were living within was not the norm but rather an historically rooted epoch.

Here in The Tenth Planet, Pedler and Davis propose a new cause for this social anxiety towards nuclear weapons. It’s not that they are some reified objects with power over society, but nihilistic objects of existential horror.

Cutler’s decision to use nuclear weapons is rooted in very direct causes, namely his own emotional anguish and the existential horror represented by the Cybermen. Through the Z-Bomb, Cutler tries to pursue a course of action that will allow him to evade reality by “trying to destroy it.” The thing is, Pedler and Davis don’t seem to even treat Cutler’s action as having much meaning in its own right. After all, it would mean something if he could use nuclear weapons, take action and affect the broader universe. It would be horrifying, but Cutler’s decision would have meaning and consequence. Pedler and Davis want to use the Doctor to suggest that Cutler’s action will be meaningless—later in “Episode 4” he claims that Mondas “will disintegrate” and that all the humans need to do is “play for time.” Due to William Hartnell’s deteriorating health, he isn’t actually present in the third episode when most of the focus is on Cutler’s plan to use the Z-Bomb, and instead it falls to characters such as Ben to represent this position:

BEN: Look, the Doctor said that it’s not only Earth that’s in danger, but that Mondas itself is in far greater danger. Otherwise, why have they bothered coming here?
CUTLER: And just how did he figure that out? It’s draining energy from the Earth, isn’t it?
BEN: Yes, but he said eventually it would absorb too much energy and burn itself out. Well, shrivel up to nothing. So all we’ve got to do is wait!

Doctor Who, The Tenth Planet, “Episode 3,” (Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis)

Polly, who Pedler and Davis have established as key moral voice in their narrative, also subscribes to this view. When speaking with Barclay during “Episode 3,” she repeats the idea that it would be best to “wait… until Mondas is destroyed,” relying less on human action and more on cosmic inevitability. However, there’s a little twist: just like in “Episode 2” there is an astronaut stranded in space, fragile against the force of Mondas. Whereas she argued with the Cyberman Krail that the astronauts on the original rocket were “people and they’re going to die”—reason enough to care and try to help them—Polly here acknowledges that merely waiting “would probably mean the end of Cutler’s son, but that’s one life against millions.”

People may end up dying all over the world, so Polly is able to not care all that much about the fate of Cutler’s son. His life doesn’t have inherent value that makes him worth saving, so much as the value of his life is relative. One life or millions. We could easily ask why Polly doesn’t care but we know why: the potential threat of the Z-Bomb is an existential horror that is unfathomable. Compared to such meaningless death and destruction the life of one stranded astronaut seems pretty meaningless. If Polly is being used to critique the nihilism of the Cybermen, it’s worth acknowledging that there’s something a little nihilistic about Polly herself.

And yet despite suggestions to wait and allow Mondas to inevitably die of its own accord, Cutler insists that he is “going to accelerate the process” and “make [Mondas] disappear just a little bit sooner.” Clearly this is all about him trying to feel in control of a situation increasingly beyond his control.

When faced with the existential horror and emotional anguish of a meaningless universe, Cutler doesn’t feel liberated. He is a tiny, pathetic man viciously lashing out so that he can feel as if his actions have any kind of meaning. Honestly, some men would rather nuke an entire planet and wipe out humanity than go to therapy.

In some respects, he’s not too dissimilar to the Cybermen. Consider—Cutler attempts to use the Z-Bomb to destroy Mondas, which continues to drain energy from the Earth, and in the process both save his son and eliminate the Cybermen. After his attempt fails, “Episode 4” depicts the Cybermen similarly attempting to use the Z-Bomb to destroy Earth—claiming that one must be “eliminated for the safety of the other” and that they “cannot allow Mondas to burn up.” And so again—just as Cutler’s decision to use the Z-Bomb is rooted in the overwhelming existential horror and emotional anguish he increasingly feels, the Cybermen see the Z-Bomb as a tool to be used to address an existential threat to their existence. It’s an act of desperation, of trying to prove that their actions have meaning and that they’re not just small, insignificant and meaningless creatures incapable of influencing the universe. The thing is that, as depicted in The Tenth Planet, their actions are ultimately meaningless.

The use of Verfremdung in The Tenth Planet, however, is still mostly restricted to the Cybermen themselves. The human characters don’t have the same kind of gestural performances, existing more to be juxtaposed with the exceedingly estranged figures of the Cybermen. However, they are still held up for critique—as potentially susceptible to nihilism as the Cybermen are.

So where does this leave Doctor Who, now in the opening moments of its fourth season? If it is the intent of myth to talk about human existence, then The Tenth Planet depicts the desperate measures that human beings will go to when confronted by nothingness, overwhelmed by existential horror and emotional anguish. This isn’t a universe where one can take “pleasure in changing the world,” and it’s a vision of the universe which appears ideologically opposed to the gleeful pleasure with which the programme has embraced revolution in its brief three-year history so far. After all, what are serials such as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Space Museum or The Savages if not actively in favour of taking action to change the world in which the characters live? Hasn’t the Doctor clearly said that he opposes injustice and menaces to common humanity?

But coexisting with these calls to action is a very different sort of Doctor Who. It is a Doctor Who where history cannot be rewritten—where the Doctor “dare not change the course of history.” It is a Doctor Who that takes place within a universe of inevitabilities, where our actions are inconsequential.

And what is Mondas, and Earth’s encounter with the Cybermen, if not something that’s explicitly historicised? The Doctor is already well aware of events before they happen—he already knows “what this planet [Mondas] is and what it means to Earth,” and that its arrival means that they shall have “visitors.” It’s the Doctor, as previously mentioned, who is framed as the main proponent of waiting and allowing Mondas to inevitably “burn itself out… shrivel up to nothing.” It’s the Doctor, then, who frames the events of The Tenth Planet as inevitable and sees human actions as unnecessary or even pointless. All that needs to happen is to wait, and the situation will just inevitably resolve itself. The Doctor, surrounded by nihilists intent on destroying the world and nihilists who have removed their capacity for empathy, stands revealed as yet another nihilist “incapable of motivating [himself] to do something rather than nothing.”

He’s a far cry from the Doctor that once ambled through a junkyard in Totter’s Lane. In “An Unearthly Child” he was an asocial and anti-heroic character, evoking the “rascals, bums, fools and comics” to be found in theatre such as that by Bertolt Brecht. There were tensions of course—he was a bum in a junkyard dressed as an Edwardian gentleman, Hartnell performing his character using the standard received pronunciation of the British middle class—but the Doctor was “less defined by [his] class position than by [his] mobility beyond any stable social hierarchy.” He was, within the political worldview of Verfremdung, “in a good position for undermining the presumed solidity or hierarchy of a social order.”

And yet Doctor Who hasn’t regularly used Verfremdungseffekt since what, The Dalek Invasion of Earth? Sure, the Doctor has interacted with nobles and the upper class since then, performing the roles of musicians and gods as he undermined the hierarchy of the social orders he found himself within, but the Doctor’s ability to perform these roles has itself been undermined since late-1965. Perhaps, once, the Doctor was “in a good position for undermining” the social structures that Verfremdung is designed to critique.

By The Tenth Planet we find both the Doctor and Hartnell himself to be aged men, “wearing a bit thin.” The Doctor was absent throughout “Episode 3” due to Hartnell’s deteriorating health, and upon the actor’s return in “Episode 4” his character claims to have been affected by an “outside influence”—that, or “this old body” is gradually beginning to fail him. But why might that be? Somehow, is placing the Doctor in such close proximity to the existential horror and emotional anguish of nihilism killing him? Is his insistence on merely waiting out this crisis, of trusting in inevitability—being “incapable of motivating [himself] to do something rather than nothing”—killing him?

Halfway through “Episode 4,” the Doctor and Polly are taken to the Cyberman spaceship. It mostly serves to separate them from the episode’s main focus—namely, Ben and the remaining crew defending themselves from Cybermen as they “sit tight and wait until Mondas breaks up.” After Mondas finally, inevitably, disintegrates during the episode’s climax, Ben makes his way to the Cyberman spaceship to free the Doctor and Polly.

Except, the Doctor seems incredibly drained. There is no vigour to Hartnell’s performance as he delivers the Doctor’s lines in this scene, weakly asking Ben to repeat himself. This is clearly an intentional acting choice: following the destruction of Mondas, and having been kept prisoner in the Cyberman’s spaceship, something is seriously wrong with the Doctor. And, in one of the few surviving pieces of footage from this episode, Derek Martinus does something rather important. He uses his camera to frame Michael Craze, William Hartnell and Anneke Wills in a medium shot—showing the weakened Doctor using Ben to support himself as Polly looks on from behind them. Then, taking his hand off Craze’s shoulder, Hartnell ambles forward. As he closes the gap between himself and the camera, he appears to stare out through the screen—speaking to the viewer directly. Hartnell takes what had begun as a medium shot and ends it on an extreme close-up, his shadowed face taking up the majority of the screen. Throughout this shot the only change to the camera’s position comes as it tilts slightly, ensuring that Hartnell’s face remains the camera’s focus.

Hartnell has long been denied use of the camera to speak directly to his audience, denied the para-social relationship that he had carefully cultivated during the programme’s formative episodes in late-1963. And here, in one of his final scenes, Martinus allows him one last use of the camera. Staring through its lens, breaking the division between the TV studio and the public, Hartnell mysteriously proclaims that “it’s far from being all over.”

Through the camera, Martinus allows Hartnell to interrupt the denouement of the episode. It’s an interruption that pre-empts a montage, shots of Hartnell bent over the TARDIS console juxtaposed with shots of the console in operation. Lights blink. Switches move. The central column rises and falls.

There has been little pleasure taken in changing the world in The Tenth Planet. All we can do is wait for that which is inevitable. And yet here, in its final moments, The Tenth Planet might just offer an alternative with its final, most confusing image. Hartnell now lies sprawled across the studio floor, Martinus’ camera zoomed in tightly on his face. Despite the strangeness of what is occurring, there’s something peaceful about Hartnell’s expression in this moment. As the phosphors of the television screen begin to burn a bright, blinding white those features begin to obscure and change into something—into someone—else.

When the screen finally settles, William Hartnell is gone.