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Trivia / Doctor Who S4 E2 "The Tenth Planet"

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  • Accidentally-Correct Writing: There's talk of man landing on the moon, three years before it actually happened. Similarly, the United States ends up losing a spaceship with all hands on board in 1986, which actually ended up happening in the real world in that exact year via the Challenger disaster.
  • Fake American: Robert Beatty as General Cutler was Canadian (like many actors playing American characters in sixties British TV) and Earl Cameron as Williams was Bermudan.
  • First Appearance: Both the Cybermen and the concept of "regeneration" make their first appearance (although the latter is not referred to as such, and the rules of the concept would not be nailed down until the Third Doctor regenerated seven years later in "Planet of the Spiders". As late as the 1990s, Doctor Who Magazine stated that the First Doctor's "renewal" should not be confused with the later Doctors' regenerations).
  • Missing Episode: Like every serial from Season Four, this one is incomplete. In this case, only one episode is missing (making it the only story of the season where more than half the episodes exist). Unfortunately, it's the final episode, where the Doctor regenerates for the first time. However, most of the regeneration scene itself does survive thanks to the BBC having made an extra copy of that bit to show on Blue Peter.
  • Prop Recycling: One of the astronaut suits used in this story was later seen on the reptilian bounty-hunter Bossk in The Empire Strikes Back.
  • Romance on the Set: Michael Craze (Ben) met his future wife Edwina Verner during the filming of this serial. As the production assistant, she got the fun job of throwing around fake snow during Episode 1 and playfully threw a handful in his face. Unfortunately, he had broken his nose recently and getting the stuff up his nose didn't help the situation. Luckily, this didn't get in the way of their relationship— they married a few years later.
  • Science Marches On: Mondas would be the Ninth Planet these days, thanks to Pluto's downgrading to a dwarf planet. That said, the serial is set in space-year 1986.
  • Self-Adaptation: The Doctor Who And The Tenth Planet novelization was written by the televised story's script writer, Gerry Davis.
  • Technology Marches On: Seeing Antarctic-station personnel trying to keep warm in ordinary fur-ruffed woolen coats and knitted gloves, rather than the thick quilted parkas and mittens that would become standard garb for extreme weather by the 1970s, is a bit jarring for a story set in 1986.
  • Throw It In!: The regeneration effect, where the Doctor's face whites out almost completely before fading back, was created by taking advantage of a malfunctioning vision mixer. The original plan for the regeneration was to simply have the Doctor's face be covered up by his scarf as he fell to the ground at the end of part four, with part one of "The Power of the Daleks" opening with the scarf being lifted back to reveal Patrick Troughton; the fact that the vision mixer could be exploited like that allowed for what ultimately became the most iconic cliffhanger in the show's history.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Sandra Reid’s first designs for the Cybermen had them with more human-like faces and mechanical, rod-covered arms. "Attack of the Cybermen" would eventually implement the rodlike arms, but the outer sleeves would remain opaque.
    • The Doctor’s regeneration was supposed to be off-screen. At the end of the story, he would’ve collapsed in the TARDIS with his cloak covering his face, only for the next serial to show that he had become Troughton. However, mixer Shirley Coward was able to use an error in exposing the video to blend the regeneration.
  • Written-In Infirmity: Because of William Hartnell’s ailing health, the Doctor is gone from the third episode. Aware of how ill Hartnell was by this point, the scripts had been written to give him relatively little to do and lines mostly given to others in case of such an eventuality.


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