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Doctor Who (William Hartnell), Ben (Michael Craze) and Polly (Anneke
Wills) land on earth 1986, the South Pole. As things go, they soon stumble
upon a science station set up by the military and are arrested by the
station's commander General Cutler (Robert Beatty), but make friends with
the station's head scientist Doctor Barclay (David Dodimead). Things get
out of hands when out of nowhere, a whole planet starts approaching earth,
a planet that's the splitting image of earth itself. Soon, an UFO from the
planet - which is called Mondas by the way - and out step three Cybermen,
emotionless men-machine hybrids, who want to take over the station ... but
are ultimately overpowered and destroyed by Cutler and his men. However,
their visit has made one thing clear: Mondas has run out of energy and now
needs earth's energy to refuel, meaning it soon starts to syphon off all
of earth's energy. That's bad news, obviously, made even worse for General
Cutler by the fact that his son Terry (Callen Angelo) is an astronaut
presently on a rescue mission in outer space, and if the Cybermen succeed
he'll flat-out die ... so the General plans to launch a nuclear
super-missile to blow up Mondas and save his son, even if that might
destroy half of the earth as well. At this point of the story, the Doctor
has passed out for no particular reason (actually, actor William Hartnell
has fallen ill during shooting, and the shooting schedules were so tight
these days there wasn't room for any delay, so if you're stranded without
your lead, write him out of the story ...), so Ben does the thinking and
sabotages the bomb with the help of Doctor Barclay. For that, General
Cutler plans to have Doctor Who, Ben, Polly and Barclay all shot, when a
second wave of Cybermen arrive, take the Doctor and Polly hostage and ask
the others to hand the super nuclear missile over to them ... because you
know, the Cybermen have a problem as well, if Mondas overfeeds on the
earth's energy resources, it will melt away, but you just can't tell a
planet to stop feeding, now can you? So the Cybermen plan to blow up earth
to fix that problem. Somehow, Ben comes up with idea after idea to stall
the Cybermen, lures them into trap after trap, and even takes a few of
them hostage. All to no avail it seems, since the Cybermen seem to have a
limitless supply of reinforcements, but then their planet really starts to
melt, and since Mondas is the energy source of all the Cybermen, they melt
with it. The finale sees the Doctor dying (he will regenerate the next
episode as Patrick Troughton, but nobody knew yet the Doctor could do
that). An episode that suffers from its budgetary limitations
more than most: To reduce the possible destruction of the earth to a few
hastily put together indoor sets supposed to portray a science station and
a few corny special effects is a bit lame, the Cybermen's UFO looks
ridiculous, and the very occasional stock footage fails to impress. On the
other hand, this one is a pretty tightly scripted episode that features a
few quite well-written characters. And the Cybermen, despite their cheap
and unconvincing costumes, look positively chilly, much more so than
later, more advanced models, which more often than not put streamelined
looks over creepiness. So yeah, this one is fun ... within its
limitations.
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