The Tenth Planet and Frankenstein Mark II
A blank mask for a face, round goggle-like sockets for eyes, a plastic skin, with chest and limbs swathed in the tubes of an artificial life-support system… It sounds like a Cyberman, but it’s not. It’s a description of another creature, from another programme entirely. It won’t surprise anyone that other television series have had their own Cyberman-like monsters, but it may surprise you to learn where and when this one appeared: BBC2, 13 October 1966. That’s not just close to the Cybermen’s debut in Doctor Who, it coincides with it, being two days before their full introduction in The Tenth Planet’s second episode.
The programme in question was Frankenstein Mark II, an instalment of the BBC’s adult science fiction anthology Out of the Unknown. The series mixed adaptations of novels and short stories with original teleplays. Frankenstein Mark II was an original script by experienced television dramatist Hugh Whitemore, though a measure of inspiration comes from Mary Shelley, as he acknowledges in his title.
Sadly, the play is one of the 20-odd episodes of Out of the Unknown now lost from the archive, like The Tenth Planet’s final instalment. However, a synopsis shows the story to have significant similarities with the origins of the Cybermen. It revolves around Anna Preston, who becomes concerned about the whereabouts of her scientist ex-husband George after some suspicious events. She investigates and, after initially being stonewalled by them, finds answers at the research facility where he worked.
George’s superiors explain that they have been working on a space exploration project: adapting Man to survive in the hostile environment of space. George volunteered to be the guinea pig. He has had his lungs partially deflated, his blood cooled and bodily functions taken over by computer. His memory has also been wiped and, Anna is told, his emotions programmed out. She is horrified by the brief glimpse of him she is given.
The sight of his ex-wife reawakens suppressed emotion deep within George. That night, he breaks out of the facility and goes to his old home. He approaches Anna, as if for reconciliation, but she backs away in revulsion. At this reaction, he rips his life-support devices and artificial skin away, and falls dead.
This could easily be a genesis-of-the-Cybermen story with very few changes. A contemporary viewer could have gone from the Cybermen emerging from the blizzard above the Snowcap base at the end of part one of The Tenth Planet to their full appearance in part two, having in the intervening week watched a drama which could almost be a flashback to a prototype Cyberman’s creation. Mondas is said to be Earth’s twin, and nothing in the synopsis of Frankenstein Mark II indicates that it has to occur on our Earth. Looked at like this, it’s wonderful timing. Alternatively, the coincidence of concept is a disaster of scheduling of the type production teams strive to avoid. Admittedly, the intended audience was different; children for one, adults the other, but there would still have been some overlap.
George’s appearance, as described at the beginning of the article, is much like a Cyberman, and he dies like one too, with severed life-support tubes spraying liquid in a manner seen in several Doctor Who stories. His breakdown is reminiscent of the ‘rogue’ Cyberman in The Invasion which flees into the sewer upon having emotions re-introduced. Of course, there are dissimilarities also, with the cause of the conversion not being for basic survival, but for the purposes of space exploration. Even so, the two creatures are a lot more similar than they are different.
It’s interesting to wonder how much knowledge of each other’s stories the Doctor Who and Out of the Unknown production teams had. As the BBC’s only ongoing science fiction programmes, it seems unlikely that they weren’t at least casually acquainted, seeing as each could benefit from the other’s experience. There were certainly later crossovers of props and costumes. The drama department also issued ‘early warning’ synopses of programmes in development to help avoid clashes of content. This also makes it seem unlikely that the two teams could have been entirely unaware of each other’s forthcoming stories.
Even so, the two stories were clearly developed in isolation and it should be no surprise that two such similar concepts should occur simultaneously. Their origins are not obscure. The concept of scientists mixing the bodies of men with mechanical and electronic equipment progresses through literature from Frankenstein to the modern-style ‘cyborgs’ in the likes of Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo ‘90 from 1952. More pertinently, these possibilities were coming ever closer to reality during the 1950s and ‘60s with advances in medical science, cybernetics and ‘spare-part surgery’. It was this, and a fear of ‘dehumanising medicine’, which inspired Kit Pedler in his part in creating the Cybermen.
Whitemore was similarly inspired with his creature, which pre-dates the Cybermen’s conception. His initial, unsuccessful, proposal had been submitted as early as December 1964. Only the previous year, NASA had developed a ‘Cyborg Program’ to investigate such possibilities as Whitemore dramatises. His revised version was commissioned in early 1966, several months before The Tenth Planet’s commission. In his correspondence about the play, Whitemore referred to contemporary American medical research and the “Life International Report on Cyborgs”, which had suggested how a man could be adapted for space travel, many elements of which he used in his script.
Whilst Pedler would certainly have been aware of the American research drawn upon by Whitemore, The Tenth Planet makes no reference to the Cybermen as astronauts or their adaptations facilitating their passage through space. However, their next few adventures show that they can exist in a vacuum and propel themselves through space unaided, so perhaps they have a further similarity to George, as creatures also perfected for space missions.
Great minds think alike, as they say.
Images © BBC
With thanks to Jim Trenowden
This is an updated version of an article originally published in Panic Moon in April 2011
Sources
Out of the Unknown: A guide to the legendary BBC series by Mark Ward (Kaleidoscope Publishing, 2004)