033 - The Moonbase

Broadcast:

11^th February - 4^th March 1967

Doctor:

Patrick Troughton

Companions:

Ben, Polly, Jamie

Adversary:

Cybermen

Written by:

Kit Pedler, Gerry Davis¹

Director:

Morris Barry

Music:

Stock

Script Editor:

Gerry Davis

Producer:

Innes Lloyd

Average Viewers:

8.33m (8.1, 8.9, 8.2, 8.1)

Summary: A mysterious plague is decimating the staff of a weather controlling station on the Moon and the afflicted start to disappear when unexpected guests arrive. Can the Doctor find the cure, prove his innocence and fend off an attack on the base?

As with the previous story, The Moonbase was written before Jamie was added to the list of travellers and had to be adjusted to include him. The easiest option was to knock him out and make him a victim of the mysterious illness. Frazer Hines felt like his character was being sidelined, but it gave him a gentle easing into the series and allowed for some heritage to be added (his clan's "phantom piper") as well as making him the centre of viewers concerns...

In the news, 197 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's workings were discovered in Spain, Jim Garrison claimed that the Kennedy assassination had been planned as part of a conspiracy in New Orleans and that he would solve the case, and Britain launched HMS Renown, its second nuclear armed submarine. Jamaica had a new Prime Minister, Trinidad and Tobago became the first Commonwealth nation to join the Organization of American States and the Soviet Union announced it had sent troops to the Chinese boarder. The Soviets also carried out nuclear tests in Kazakhstan and forbade satellite states from having diplomatic relations with West German (nearly a month after Romania established just that). In slightly lighter news, the home of Rolling Stone Keith Richards was raided by police ultimately resulting in him, Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser being charged with possession of drugs; Queens Park Rangers won the first League Cup to feature a single-match final, becoming the first 3rd Division team to win; the first North Sea gas was pumped ashore and the Queen Elizabeth Hall opened in London.

Cinemas at the time of broadcast were showing films such as Funeral in Berlin, Just Like a Woman and The Taming of the Shrew while the music charts saw The Monkees complete their four weeks at the top with "I'm a Believer" followed by Petula Clark's "This Is My Song" and then Engelbert Humperdinck began a six week run with "Release Me".

Meanwhile, the TARDIS is careering out of control as the Doctor tries to visit Mars...

It's not long before the Doctor gets things stable again and Jamie vows to never ask him to prove his control abilities again! The landing, however, is a little confusing (thankfully, the missing episodes are represented by animation rather than relying on limited telesnaps) apparently we see that the TARDIS is approaching at, in Ben's words "A fair rate" then we see the planet surface and see the TARDIS materialise... a bit of an abstract leap of imagination that could be largely overlooked, but the sound used for the landing is actually the dematerialisation sound, starting with the thump and gradually building rather than the other way around! Things inside the TARDIS are uncertain as well as Polly declares that the Doctor succeeded and that they have arrived on Mars, but Ben, ever the sceptic, points out that it looks more like the moon... while Jamie looks on in disbelief and suggests they might meet the famous "man in the moon". The Doctor, however simply wants to leave because something must have caused the rough landing and they're not where they were supposed to be. Ben convinces him that it would be unfair to take them to the Moon and then not let them out to see it and so the adventure begins...

When watching The Moonbase, we have to remember that it is February 1967, two and a half years before NASA put the first men on the Moon. The Doctor tells everyone to put on space suits from 'the chest' and what they wear are nice lightweight quilted suits with oversized 'fishbowl' helmets. Of course, these are almost certainly Time Lord suits, or at least of an advanced origin (remember that the Doctor's 'people' have not yet been defined) so we can ignore any lack of realism in their design. However, Polly makes a point of asking about the 'clogs' they have to wear - big heavy boots to help with the smaller gravity on the Moon. They seem to walk across the surface quite normally, which is slightly disappointing but possibly better than any attempt to represent any kind of floatiness... but then they start jumping to prove a point! The wire work is fairly crude but does the basic job, however each jump is accompanied by an electronic swanee-whistle style glissando which makes it quite laughable today. I should also point out that the traveller's time on the surface is only viewable in episode 4, so my judgement of the wire work is based on a combination of the animated reconstruction and the scene featuring Cybermen in that last episode (which presumably fed the animators' style anyway).

As if to demonstrate the extreme nature of the oversized jumps, Jamie jumps completely out of sight, presumably over a ridge, and is next seen laying on the ground unconscious. Like some of The Underwater Menace's contrived moments, no sooner have the rest of the travellers seen him than two figures emerge and take him away, clearly highlighting the way Jamie had to be inserted into the script and how late in production it was done. The others follow them in and the original story and continue. We see half a minute of near silent action as the scientists go about their routine and one falls ill. We learn that even their doctor has succumbed but that a replacement would be due on the next relief rocket... setting up the expectation that the Doctor would be mistaken for the replacement, however this is soon dismissed by the fact that the rocket isn't due yet and hasn't arrived early. The whole episode, indeed the bulk of the first two episodes is quite sedate and slow paced but punctuated by tense and eerie shadows and sudden appearances of Cybermen as they take away the sick men and Jamie's feverish cries about the phantom piper. Men are falling sick unexpectedly, controllers on Earth offer little sympathy, there are occasional drops in air pressure and radio communications show signs of being monitored.

There's an interesting hark back to Doctor Who' original remit to be educational in several scenes, but they often fall short of the details. The heavy boots is the first real case of this as Polly never gets a direct explanation and the oversized jumps suggest that they don't actually help! Something I did find informative and hadn't considered before is how a 24 hour period on the moon is not like a day on Earth with Sunlight during the day and darkness at night. The Doctor explains that the Moon passes through "a fortnight of days and a fortnight of nights", which makes sense when you consider the phases of the moon that we see from Earth, but getting your heady around the geometry of it can get your brain itching (since the Moon frequently goes 'behind' the Earth, shouldn't it fall into shadow...? No, because the Earth is rotating faster than the Moon is orbiting it!) Another unexplained point came as a very familiar surprise. Following the Series 8 episode Kill The Moon which aired earlier this year, I was left more than doubtful about the dismissive way in which the Doctor told Clara that the disinfectant spray wouldn't work on the moon. We were just expected to take it as fact with no way of understanding so I made my own investigations an concluded that the mechanism would work fine but it was possible that the spray exiting the nozzle would be rendered useless. Back in 1967, the same trick was being used against Cybermen as Polly concocted a solvent mix (referred to by Ben a Polly-Cocktail, or perhaps polycocktail, given the meaning of the prefix 'poly'!) and put it into one of the base's fire extinguishers (which were the same kind of spray bottle, rather than a compressed canister of a traditional extinguisher) He explains that it won't work outside because the liquid would just vaporise in the vacuum. Curiously, the Cyberman gun doesn't work in a vacuum either but it is something of a curiosity anyway since we also see a very effective spark of electricity being sent from their hands to incapacitate their victims (including Polly), but perhaps this is only usable at close range. Also interesting is the fact that the Cybermen later use a large laser like weapon to attack the base as a whole but which is defeated by the very thing they are after, the bases 'gravitron' which has a primary use of controlling weather systems on Earth but can also be used at close range to deflect the laser beam and send the Cybermen on their way. These uses of the spark generator and laser weapons were a first for the series but by no means the last.

Similarly, The Moonbase features the first of many make-overs for the Cybermen. They were deliberately made more robot like with metallic heads and silver body suits rather than the stocking masks and see-through bodies. The chest units are slightly reduced to make life easier for the performers, the 'handles' are more sturdy on the rigid head piece with a much smaller lamp and their limbs are adorned with tubing and 'ball joints' to suggest hydraulics - the balls are clearly lightweight practice balls for golf. Also changed are the bare hands which are now covered with very pointed gloves and not even five fingered gloves but two fingers and a thumb to look very machine like. Finally, the voices are far more distorted machine like. Gone is the sing-song lost soul feel and in its place a buzzing breathless resonance that is at times hard to understand. Some people say the original design is more frightening because it is so close to still being human it feels more real, but in a child's eyes the machine is the more monstrous especially in the way they move in this story. Today, we are used to Cybermen marching in time with big stomping feet that fill you with dread as you hear them approaching, but in The Moonbase they are silent, lurking in the shadows and appearing from nowhere to take their victims. We see for the first time that they are not only evolved from their own people with cybernetic improvements, but they are now taking innocent victims and modifying them, not complete conversions but early stages with small headsets which receive sonic control commands. There is a slight reminiscence of the Robomen in The Dalek Invasion Of Earth with their zombie state controlled by a head piece, but these are more agile retaining much more of their human nature. It is interesting to note that the concept of sonic control is a step up from the method used in The War Machines and is perhaps a hint towards the invention of the now standard sonic screwdriver which was still some way off being introduced.

If the first two episodes are calm and eerie then the last two are where the action and clever writing are. The Cybermen are only seen briefly and are kept to a minimum in the first two episodes and with the redesign it is perhaps not surprising that Polly in unsure what she has seen, but once they are exposed outright, there is no denying it. There is now a sense of threat and imminent danger rather than concern over a neurotropic virus there is a minute and a half of just music over the approach of the Cyberman army, introducing us to "Space Adventure" by Martin Slavin which would go on to be used as the Cyberman theme in Tomb Of The Cybermen and The Invasion, imparting drama, tension, a sense of attack and eerie chill. The final episode opens with a reprise of this followed by a reminder of the plot as the Doctor asks "They can't just march in can they?" and is told "Not now we've discovered how they go in" "Oh yes, they tunnelled into the storeroom" - stopping short of suggesting that it has presumably been patched over. We hear the first cry of "Resistance is useless" following on from the previous episode's complete disregard for humanity, when it is pointed out that their drones would be driven insane in twelve hours, they reply "No problem. Our purpose will be achieved before that." In opposition to this is the far more human theory that "Everything's got a weak point, it's just a question of waiting until it shows up" and the parting reaction when the Doctor slips out of the base silently once it's all over "Maybe it's just as well. Got enough mad men here already"... though what that actually refers to isn't exactly clear since the whole team seem decent enough. And speaking of the team, it is worth mentioning that like The Tenth Planet, this futuristic group has an intonational construction with a truly international cast playing them. Forward thinking that would be repeated for year to come. The year, incidentally, is 2070, quite some time after the events of The Tenth Planet but the Cybermen are remembered but believed wiped out. Curiously, the first thing they say to the Doctor is "You are known to us" to which he replies "You are known to me"... a curious exchange since the Doctor has regenerated since they first saw him and after drawing attention to this anomaly, nothing more is made of it!

The Moonbase may have been a rushed story to bring back the Cybermen based on their first story - almost beat for beat if you pay attention, but it solidified the feel of the Second Doctor with his more serious side playing through and reaffirmed Innes Lloyd's idea of saving money whilst keeping things looking good by using one main, large composite set helped by the formula of "base under siege". Ironically, it also marked the end of the show's time at Riverside Studios as episode four saw them return to the antiquated Limegrove D where they would remain almost exclusively for two years until Patrick Troughton quit. It was also the last time the original title sequence would be used until The Day Of The Doctor revived it with a twist for the 50th anniversary. All in all, The Moonbase is an enjoyable serial with forgiveable flaws and great developments and I scored it 67%. It's a shame the closing TARDIS scene is all we have left of the next one...