Film

Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet

A foundation stone of *Doctor Who*: the TARDIS lands at an Antarctic space station where a rogue planet has entered the solar system, and we meet the Cybermen for the first time. It's earnest 1960s sci-fi with real stakes, creeping dread, and a story that still resonates. For anyone curious how the show began, or why it lasted.

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Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child1963

The very first *Doctor Who* serial. Watch how it all begins—the mystery of the Doctor, the accidental voyage through time, a story that still feels fresh. The DNA of everything that follows.

But The first episode is almost a domestic drama; if you want immediate sci-fi spectacle, it takes patience to arrive.

Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child poster

Tales from the Crypt1989

The Daleks' debut. A survival story that becomes an allegory, featuring one of fiction's most perfect villains. It made the show and the character immortal. You'll understand why immediately.

But Seven episodes of a four-episode story; repetitive padding in the middle, though the framework is brilliant.

Tales from the Crypt poster

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks1967

A seven-part Dalek epic with time travel, psychological games, and a moral edge that cuts deep. Ambitious and weird in the best way. The Daleks at their most dangerous.

But Its length and pacing require real stamina; only two episodes survive intact, so you're watching a patchwork.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Quatermass and the Pit1967

Both are earnest 1960s British sci-fi that treat the impossible as a problem to solve logically, with real dread underneath.

A BBC science fiction film that has the same DNA as *The Tenth Planet*—serious, grounded, a threat emerging from beneath the earth (or ancient history). Eerie, intelligent, and it proves the BBC's sci-fi ambitions extended beyond the Doctor.

But It's slow-burn and cerebral; no action sequences, just an accumulating sense of something wrong. Black-and-white 1960s pacing.

Quatermass and the Pit poster
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The Andromeda Strain1971

Both use the arrival of an impossible celestial body as a mirror to show us how we'd really behave under existential threat—less heroic than we'd hope.

A French-language hard science fiction film about an identical planet appearing next to Earth. Made five years before *The Tenth Planet*, it's urgent, eerie, and driven by the same astronomical premise. Remarkable prescience.

But Subtitled, slow by modern standards, and its special effects are deliberately restrained. It's also deeply pessimistic about humanity's response to crisis.

The Andromeda Strain poster

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Chocky, Doppelgänger, Warning from Space, Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child, Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, Primeval