The Moonbase
(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben Polly and Jamie, 11/2/1967-4/3/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Kit Pedler, director: Morris Barry)
Rank: 23
'I see the moon and the moon sees me
A round speck of hope in a starlit sea
Until invaded by Mondas monsters all silvery
Replacing all we've gained with what they want us to be
How can mankind ever be free?
By embracing the situation's gravity
And saving the moon for you and for me'
Ever since original producer Verity Lambert had left at the start of season 3 Dr Who has been in freefall. Second producer John Wiles lasted a whole three stories before promptly retiring and third producer Innes Lloyd is pretty certain about what he doesn’t like about the series (getting rid of lots of traditions like world-building and exploring, alternating futuristic stories and historicals, companions galore and even the Doctor) without being quite sure what it is that he wants to fill the vacuum of time and space with. A lot of season 4 is an exercise in vamping before something better turns up – sometimes quite brilliantly (‘The Tenth Planet’ ‘The Power Of The Daleks’) sometimes, umm, not (‘The Underwater Menace’). It reaches the point where every story since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ twelve whole stories ago would have been described as ‘oddball’ by people who were watching them in sequence and even the ones that have the strongest glimpses of what’s to come (‘The War Machines’ ‘Power’) seem deeply odd seen in context of stories about celestial toymakers and fish people. Out of nowhere, though, like a cyber army invading a human base on some cut-off corner of some distant planet, in comes ‘The Moonbase’ and pulls everything into sharp focus, offering a whole new way of doing Dr Who that’s every bit as frightening and fascinating and imaginative as what’s come before it but which feels more urgent and desperate somehow. For ‘The Moonbase’ is the story that ends up standing on the shoulders of the sometime silvery giants before it and starts leading Dr Who into the promised land as a hit series about monsters and invasions and what it means to the invaded humans who fend them off. ‘The Moonbase’ is the template for easily the next seven years of the series and arguably the next fifty after that. From now on Dr Who isn’t about exploration and gaining new insight into the universe but about survival and losing what we already have. More than just being important, though, whilst there have been better loved, better remembered, better conceived stories that use the same template there are few that do so with such charm and intelligence.
This is the ultimate
‘survivor’ race up against mankind in the most remotest outpost you can think
of (this is the story that has the Doctor’s speech about ‘terrible things that
must be fought’ out there in space, a speech it’s inconceivable of him making in
any earlier story than this one – you’d never get the 1st Dr being so black and
white about alien life for a start). To my eyes at least it’s part of a shift
in who the ‘threat’ really is. Most kids sitting down to watch The Daleks for
the first time in 1963 would have seen them as a recognisable threat from the
days when you were afraid that your enemy would become more powerful and
outright invade you. In their first appearance in ‘The Tenth Planet’ that’s
kind of what The Cybermen do too, charging through the snow impervious to the
cold and overpowering the humans at a base at The South Pole unstoppable
because they don’t have the same weaknesses humans do. In this hastily
scheduled sequel, though, writers Kit Pedler and script editor Gerry Davis have
been doing some thinking. Instead of just being an army of soldiers, a physical
presence, the Cybermen are more like a virus, an ideology that gets under your
skin and converts you without you realising. They’re no longer the ghosts they
were last time, both literally because of their bits of white cloth still
hanging from their bodies walking across a polar blizzard but also symbolically,
as they stood around looking menacing but are more about talking than killing.
The Cybermen are still a
ghostly presence though, compared to say the directness of a Dalek, playing
hide-and-seek with the base so that you’re never quite sure where one’s going
to pop out from next They’re a subtler menace in this story as befits a new
cold war era of espionage and propaganda rather than outright fighting, with
The Cybermen both lurking in the shadows (well, as easily as a seven foot tall
being dressed all in grey can do), out for your body but also your mind and
soul. They don’t kill you they convert you and make you like them – a fate
worse than death because it’s not really living and your body just ends up
being used to convert your friends, family and work colleagues too. They even
release a literal virus that makes you become like them, infecting you with
their ‘mind control’. They do this so subtly that you don’t even notice when
the people around you have been converted. They’re still close enough to us to
be cousins and while they’re more than good enough to bring back they’re just
another promising idea rather than a monster on a par with The Daleks. On the
surface the threat is the same as in ‘The Tenth Planet’ just four stories ago:
The Cybermen, late of Earth’s doomed twin planet Mondas, are still travelling
the solar system to look for spare body parts they can convert and despite
having defeated them once humanity is still an obvious choice, especially as we
tend to be a bit smaller, and punier than they are. What’s changed is how they
come across. By ‘The Moonbase’ though they’re that much further along in their
evolution and that bit further cut off from their humanity, their hands and
faces now covered by metal, their survival instincts darker and more desperate,
their methods more ruthless, their voices scarier. They look like robots now
rather than men in costumes, standing tall and menacing (only actors above 6”2
were cast in the roles so that they tower over the actors, particularly Patrick
Troughton’s Doctor; this is another reason why the lone 4th Dr Cybermen story
‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ doesn’t work so well as he’s the same height they are
and sometimes taller!) Only instead of just being another physical monster army
there’s the clever scifi twist that they became robots, rather than were made
that way, still with memories of what life was like as flesh and blood, however
much the idea repels and sickens them now. The Daleks are so scary partly
because they hate humans so – by contrast The Cybermen used to be humans and
hate ‘us’ because we remind them of all they’ve lost and given up. In other
words, if The Daleks are Nazi Germany that wants to destroy you for being
different to them then The Cybermen are communist Russia, beings who want you
to be just like them.Whist while we in 2023 know
how the story of Soviet Russia ends back in the 1960s the thought that you
could end up ‘like them’ was a very real fear. More than just another
unthinking unfeeling bunch of soldiers they’re scary precisely because they
weren’t always unthinking or unfeeling. Circumstances changed them, harsh
conditions (like the rumours about harsh Russian winters) turning them to throw
their lot in with a collective that changed them and helped them survive only
by sucking out their soul. Now they’re brainwashed, talking with the same voice
about the system that ‘saved’ them and how much better life is for them – and
how much better it will be for you too if you allow yourself to be ‘upgraded’.
It’s not true of course (capitalism is responsible for at least as many evils
as communism and will go on to get its own stories where it’s the baddy, such
as ‘Terror Of the Autons’ and 9/10ths of ‘Kerblam!’
until the rotten ending) but to a lot of the audience watching at the time a
cyber-communist conversion was the single scariest thing that could happen to
you. Plus The Cybermen really do seem unstoppable while the humans in this
story, despite being as fit and healthy as well trained astronauts would be,
seem frail and vulnerable. It’s no surprise that The Cybermen start their take
over in the sick bay, a sign of human fragility (you can bet your cyber chrome
dome head The Cybermen don’t have an equivalent sick bay, though they might
have a garage full of spare parts!), while they can kill you outright, take
over your body, smash up your base or deliver a virus that can convert you.
This isn’t a race who can be defeated with just a bomb or an explosion they’re
a race that can attack you from all sides and you never know when they’re about
to strike. Shot in black-and-white, with director Morris Barry’s shot selection
emphasising the Cybermen’s tallness and stillness while the humans flutter
around emotionally and going to pieces, as these unstoppable giants take them
over one by one, is one of the most threatening scenarios Who ever provided. Give
or take a few Dalek cliffhangers ‘The Moonbase’ is the first time Dr Who is
properly scary and had there been room behind my sofa (most people have them up
against the walls don’t they?) this would still be one of the top five Who
stories of any era that would send me scurrying there. I mean what’s the only
thing scarier than being killed by a ruthless killing machine? Becoming a
killing machine.
The biggest change is in
the voices – where they used to be actors speaking in a sing-songy type of way
now their vocals are fully robotic, not like the Daleks’ grating emotional
staccato but a more even tone, via a ‘mechanical larynx’ used in the ‘real
world’ on people who had lost use of their vocal chords (mostly smokers) by
placing an electronic gadget up against the actors’ throats as they mouthed
words (a lot of the poor actors will get sick from all the vibrations including
poor Peter Hawkins in this story, who felt nauseas and suffered headaches
across most of the four weeks of recording). The metal, too, is a logical
update of the old look, with all those previously vulnerable parts like hands
and faces replaced, with the addition of an ‘accordion’ full of bits on the
front (useful for holding the few squishy body parts you still need to
function) and carry-handles on the head (useful for hanging up in a closet).
All traces of humanity have been removed so that even the eyes that stare back
are no longer human and obviously that of an actor. Not every update in Dr Who
is good (let’s face it, there have been more bad and pointless 21st
century updates of 20th century monsters than good, the earliest of
which have dated more badly already than the ‘men in suits’ made half a century
ago) but this one not only looks amazing it makes total sense. All these
updates are something recognisably ‘our world’, yet also something totally
robotic and alien, a logical progression to Pedlar’s original inspiration of
the Cybermen from his human transplant patients awaiting new body parts and how
that might end up. It’s also perfectly in character that The Cybermen would
keep ‘upgrading’. Monsters like The Daleks are already convinced they’re perfect
and don’t need to change a thing, but Cybermen are always on the look out to be
better and (literally) heartless enough to chop and change and leave past
templates behind.
This is only the second
true Dr Who base under siege and the one that really sets the format: weirdly
this moon set feels more ‘real’ than The South Pole, perhaps because so much of
the imagery was based on real documentaries of space travel (and there were a
lot in 1967, in the run-up to man’s first mission to the moon). It’s a natural
place for the series to go, with space the next great unknown after The South
Pole (whose explorers were the astronauts of their day) and with the moon being
the backdrop to the ‘space race’ in the cold war and a reminder of the days
when the Cyber-Russians were competing with the Americans to get to the moon.
It’s an obvious place for any monster from out of space to set up a base to
invade us and it’s a surprise we hadn’t had in the series before: the moon is
our closest neighbour and our next big thing to get to and a sign of humanity’s
own evolution and progression, now a step further on from the last encounter
with the Cybermen 84 years earlier. It’s the big buzz word of the day too: ever
since JFK promised about getting a ‘man on the moon by the end of the decade
NASA have been working on real moon missions. This was an era when everyone
went loony for the lunar surface and it was everywhere, with endless news
bulletins and updates from NASA about their planned moon missions. And oh the
thrill of seeing that we actually get there, with the surprise as the Tardis
crew turn the corner and find a base there on the lunar surface. In fact the
first of these, Apollo one, has been planned for February 1967 right at the
time this story was going out on air, something that I’m willing to bet this
story’s two scientists creators knew well – alas that mission will be cancelled
in January after a huge fire in testing but they weren’t to know that when they
were making this story. Just imagine how much extra shock value there would have
been if man really had got to the moon a mere week after the Tardis landed
there on screen! (In the end Apollo eleven lands in July 1969 in the off-season
between Drs 2 and 3, six months after ‘The Seeds Of death’ makes out that this
gloriously new and exciting space travel by rocket is ‘old hat’ that belongs in
a museum). The Cybermen’s original home ‘Mondas’ too is a word that sounds like
‘Moon’; both of us may have got it from ‘month’ and the idea of time registered
in orbits round the Earth, but whereas the moon is regular and stable, rotating
every 28 days like clockwork, ‘Mondas’ is irregular and unstable, which might
be why the Cybermen have become such cold, hard, logical creatures as compensation.
Technically Mondas was destroyed, with a cut scene making mention that these
Cybermen are a group of stragglers who were away from home when The Doctor blew
them up in ‘The Tenth Planet’ and have resettled on Telos, to be seen in the
sequel ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ but you don’t hear that on screen; besides just
as you the moon astronauts will always be from Earth so you can’t separate the
Cybermen from their home planet which made them who they were. Quite literally,
out of bolts and metal.
Anyway the moonbase
itself is one of Dr Who’s greatest ever sets. both the moon outside and inside.
We’ve seen it recreated so many times in big blockbuster films now that it’s
worth remembering how few TV series had ever series to re-create the moon in a
TV studio and they do it really well. So well that I’ve actually seen it quoted
in ‘moonlanding conspiracy’ sites to argue that yes of course Hollywood could
re-create the moon’s surface in 1969, because they managed to do it so
successfully on a BBC budget two years earlier. As for the base itself it was
designed as a deliberate money-saver by having one huge set rather than lots of
little ones (even the brief Tardis scene is in a shrunken set that uses blowup
photographs for the missing walls, not that we can see this sequence anymore
either). It’s terrific, looking every bit as big and technological as you’d
expect for a base set up to control The Earth’s weather (the hint is that Pedlar
is again attacking mankind for playing ‘God’ and trying to change his
environment, the start of a slippery slope towards becoming unfeeling
automatons. I bet he didn’t even own an umbrella). The gravitron machine, much
ridiculed in some quarters for looking flimsy, is also really good for the
times I think, a prop so big and heavy it nearly killed Patrick Troughton when
he went for his usual wander round the set pre-filming to familiarise himself
with his marks and it fell over, missing him by inches. Some Who sets stretch
the idea of future technological marvels past credulity given that it’s clearly
made of cheap polystyrene but this one feels like it could plausibly be us in
the future (the setting of 2070 is getting ever closer - a small child watching
this first time round might have had
hopes of living in their twilight years in this date with advances in medicine)
and the fact that the Cybermen are crashing what was in 1967 mankind’s biggest
achievement as if its nothing adds a whole frisson of vulnerability to mankind
in this story. Like the best Dr Who stories we’re a speck of dust in an
infinite cosmos, nothing that special, so up against a real threat we come over
feeble and useless.
Something else feels
quite ‘modern’ about this serial too in the way it depicts the future. Back in
1967 nations are still squabbling and wars are breaking out every few minutes
but belatedly, perhaps as a result of all the monster threats in the Dr Who
version of our universe, somehow we’ve pulled together by having an
international base made up of people from lots of different countries who were
‘enemies’ when the episodes first went out. This is the first real time Dr Who
has been inspired by its new rival in town ‘Star Trek’ (on in America since
1966 and not shown over here till 1969, but people still talked about it) and
this tale reads like someone whose read about Star Trek without getting the
chance to actually see it. Europe, it’s fair to say, doesn’t do utopias the way
America does. We’re too old, had too many enemies for too many centuries and
we’re all so packed together we’re always looking over their shoulders with a wary eye on who
might be invading us next. So what happens in this story is what would probably
really happen for real: there are lots of people from different countries (two
Australians, two New Zealanders, two Frenchmen, a Canadian, a German, a
Scandinavian, a Nigerian and a Welshman with a Brit in charge, naturally - I mean what other nationality would be this
obsessed about the weather? One of the extras who doesn’t speak with the thick moustache
is Victor Pemberton supplementing his writing income with a quick buck on the
side; he’ll be back in Who as the writer of ‘Fury From The Deep’; the one whose
sick and unconscious from the first scenes is the voice of the controller back
home, Alan Rowe) but they all stay in their bubbles and make jokes at each
other, while teasing each other about their racial stereotypes. Somehow they’re
still all very British in character, unlike Star Trek where despite their
nationalities everyone is very American (Star Trek will repay the compliment by
‘borrowing’ the Cybermen concept for the Borg). Still, even the idea that there
is an international community of people working together is quite a hopeful
change compared to most Whos of the 1960s and even with its token Frenchman in
a cravat (actually there to hide a mistake in the spelling on Benoit’s name-tag
because they’d given him the ‘wrong’ first name; good job they made the mistake
with the Frenchman really!) it’s a remarkably forward-looking vision of the
future and notably everyone is a fully rounded character with motivations of
their own, not just a bunch of people we barely know (as per a lot of the base under
siege stories to come). There’s even a Nigerian, a dashing pioneering hero like
all the others here, back when black actors tended to be the butt of the jokes
if they were on TV at all and our equivalent of ‘Uhura’. One fascinating point:
this is an era when only two countries have the means or money necessary for a
space race, with no other countries possessing any form of space travel at all.
But where are they? Do the Americans and Russians have their own bases by now?
Or, given the complete lack of Americans in particular in future-set stories,
did they finally kill one another off? For ‘The Moonbase’ is another of Who’s
great cold war stories even if it never quite comes out and says it, about the
dangers of heartless rational beings treating enemy humans as cannon-fodder and
how that sort of ‘progress’ isn’t really progress at all.
In his last two stories
the 2nd Doctor hasn’t skipped a beat, plying off to the side of stories and merrily
leading Scottish highlanders and Atlanteans on a joyful dance as he plays his
recorder while Ben, Polly and Jamie did all the difficult stuff. Till now the 2nd
Doctor has been very much the clown, wearing a stovepipe hat (removed at the
suggestion of head of drama Andrew Osborn and only agreed to by Troughton
reluctantly) and big baggy trousers (which Troughton refused to remove, so were
sneakily taken in little by little by the costume department so subtly that he
wouldn’t notice; they’re almost a good fit by the time of ‘The War Games’), but
no sooner has his hat been removed at the end of the previous story than he gets
down to business with a more serious and tough persona, as if the shock of
encountering Cybermen again has shaken off the cobwebs of his regeneration. Till now
2nd Doctor has been in shadows, having adventures on the side to make contrast
with the 1st Doctor’s habit of owning every room he walks into, but
here is where he takes charge, even giving one of the most quoted Dr Who
speeches about it being his moral duty to combat monsters. Troughton has till
now been unsure how to play this quirky little Doctor and make him different,
but director Morris Barry finally did what none of his predecessors did and sat
down with the actor to discuss how to go forward. Fun as the first three
Troughton stories are they aren’t scary because The Doctor never treats them as
anything serious but in this story he’s scared. So much of this story’s drama comes from the Doctor’s conviction that the
Cybermen can wipe humanity out in seconds and trying to make the second of many
a sceptical base of cut-off humans realise the danger they’re in (it helps that
Ben and Polly are every bit as scared following their first encounter with the
Mondas metal meanies). This is also the first time we really see the Doctor’s
scientific credentials as he tries to work out where the cyber-virus is coming
from and why it only affects some people at the base and not others (spoilers:
I still think of this scene whenever somebody asks me how many sugars I take in
my tea and might be the reason why the answer is zero, while it’s so
Cybermenish to hide the virus inside something that gives human tastebuds
pleasure and exploit human ‘weaknesses’ for sweetness that they abhor; although
it still seems illogical that the Cybermen don’t, say, poison the water supply
and therefore affect everyone who uses it not just a chosen few).
The Cybermen also have a
natty space plague that kills people horribly, affecting their nervous systems
and making people’s veins turn dark as they become infected, a strikingly
visual idea that makes humans look as if they’re turning into Cybermen without
needing clunky body parts (I’m still half-convinced covid is a Cybermen plot as
it works in much the same way, just invisibly – people might start taking it
seriously again if they could flipping see it!) Which is another thought. Why
sugar at all? Despite my earlier assertion that the Cybermen are Russians I
have wondered if instead this story is another one of 1960s Who’s generational
discussions (or maybe both at once?) with parents afraid of what their ‘flower
children’ will turn into when they’re grown and running the planet. I mean,
sure everyone’s working together in peace and harmony (a few jibes aside) which
is great, but will these hippies really do what it takes to keep their people
safe from invasion? Are they up to fighting off the monsters their own age that
are surely being bred in secret by those crazy communists? For I don’t think
it’s a coincidence that the plague comes in the form of sugar cubes; this is,
for those not in the know, how many a 1960s youth took their LSD dripped on top
of sugar and, well, this was shown in 1967 when LSD was the in drug in a story
written by one of the few adults who knew the chemistry behind the drugs if not
the realities of taking it, so if Dr Who was ever going to slip in a sly drug
reference it would be this particular story in this particular year. Note the
way that it targets the nervous system specifically: it’s both the thing that
Cybermen certainly don’t have and which in many ways makes Humans weak
(Cybermen you see don’t get ‘nervous’) and what in the end causes the humans to
sort-of win, thanks to their ‘fight or flight’ adrenalin response to their
invasion. The idea that it only affects the nerves of some people and not others
though feels like another drug reference: for some hippies on LSD it was a
miraculous experience that opened up their creativity and led to creative and
philosophical insights that helped them understand their place in the universe;
to others it was a slow burning death-trap their bodies couldn’t tolerate that
put too much strain on their nerves. Note also the big chance since last time
is that they’re ‘equal’ with no leader, something the hippies dream of. This
plotline seems like a horrified parent idea of drug culture based on stories
and gossip – this is a bit early for Syd Barrett but he’s an obvious example of
a drug casualty who took much ‘doped sugar’ it set his nerves on edge and
turned him (we think) schizophrenic. Admittedly if anything drugs enhance your
emotions and put you in touch with your ‘inner child’, encouraging playfulness
and enhancing memories long forgotten in ways the Cybermen can’t stand, and
doesn’t turn people into hulking great six foot cybernetic droids, so maybe its
all coincidence. Nevertheless this story fits a more overall theme of the
people making Dr Who in the early years becoming afraid of what might happen in
the future when they’re dead and gone and the youngsters have taken over and it
is a story set in the future when the youth of the day have become the ‘old
guard’.
Taking of youngsters,
while Ben doesn’t get much to do as usual this is easily Polly’s best story,
the one where she gets back a lot of the sarcasm that was her biggest character
trait in ‘The War Machines’. As much as people quote Sarah Jane as being
the show’s first feminist there are actually lots of candidates going back to
Barbara at the beginning; Polly though is one of the more interesting examples
– she screams and runs away with the best of them, but she also keeps a cool rational
head and fights the idea that she should sit things out and let the boys have a
go. She effectively saves everyone twice: everyone laughs at the way she’s told
‘Polly put the kettle on’ but it’s her tea-making duties that help identify the
virus is in the sugar, whilst realising that her nail varnish remover might attack
the Cybermen’s dangly metal bits in much the same way as her nails with the
idea for the ‘Polly cocktail’, as realistic and real world a solution to the
danger as any we’ve had in the series (it’s a compound of real chemicals, this
being a story written by a scientist, made up of things you could find round
the house like acetone, benzene, ether and alcohol. Despite being
the first to spot The Cybermen heading out a door and being terrified they
might come back Polly is no wimp either, staying put alone with the others rush
around, something that, say, Jo or Rose would make far more fuss about. It’s
all incredibly forward thinking for 1967. Of course people don’t talk about those
scenes; they talk about Ben’s refusal to let her use her own invention because
it’s ‘man’s work’ as a stick with which to beat Dr Who’s sexism. I love the way
the camera lingers on Polly’s eye-roll when Ben says this though, which says
more about gender equality in 1967 than any amount of women’s lib speeches from
Sarah Jane a few years later. As for Jamie he has a mixed time of it. On the
one hand he still suffers from how last minute his addition to the Tardis crew
at the end of ‘The Highlanders’ is, a decision taken after many of the season
four scripts had been ‘finished’ which has him knocking his head on the moon
flight in episode one and remaining in bed for most of the story. Yet on the
other hand Davis and pedlar switch him round with one of their supporting
characters who spots The Cybermen from sickbay and invents a very natural
sounding story about a feverish Jamie’s memories of ‘the phantom piper’ who
haunts his Scottish regiment, taking souls at the point of death. It’s a
brilliant bit of character that also gives us the point of view of someone we
know and trust, so we believe Polly’s story that bit quicker (and is a lot
better than simply giving Jamie either Ben’s or Polly’s lines, that don’t fit
his character). We trust Jamie but we can also see why he’s so easily dismissed
before the mass invasion in the last episode turns
them into a living nightmare. They’re a braver bunch than most these
scientists too, as in future most stories will take a more cynical view of
mankind and have us wilt under the slightest pressure but here they hold their
own – there’s no bunch of men (of course there’s no women: that’s a stage too
far for 1967) I’d rather entrust the future of humanity to in the face of such
a disaster than this one.
In other words it’s another close run thing this battle: the Tardis crew are more than just hangers on leaving things up to the Doctor (give or take a poorly Jamie out of it till the last episode) and the base are worthy but the Cybermen are such a powerful apparently unstoppable force in this story you still feel that they only just win this battle, especially the epic fourth episode where the stakes keep getting higher and higher, ending with (spoilers) a glorious shot of the Cybermen flying into the air on kirby wires as the moonbase turn off the gravity, these supermen just as susceptible to natural forces as we are for all their posturing and weaponry. A tense, taut, frightening thriller with one of the Cybermen’s more logical invasion plans (till the last episode anyway: The Cybermen have near enough ‘won’ through a combination of hypnotism and virus with a waiting army about to invade when they suddenly decide to blow a hole in the base for good measure, knocking out the human they’ve taken over) and filled with a great script, great acting and great ideas, there’s very little in this story that goes wrong at all. What does tends to be common to other Who stories of the era: three companions is one too many even with Jamie unconscious for half of it (at least in this era when stories are more compact; it worked in the first season of sic and seven parters but in four parters there aren’t enough lines to go round; this gets even worse in the 5th and 13th Dr years when there’s almost always somebody with nothing to do), we don’t get as much of a chance to explore this world as we would have done with the Hartnells as all we see is one set and a sick bay and some of the dialogue seems woefully dated at times (mostly whenever Polly is told to put the kettle on and make everyone a cup of tea). Unique to this story too is a weird experiment that doesn’t quite work where the Doctor talks to himself while mulling over his investigations and we hear him talk back to himself via pre-recorded tape as if we’re hearing his thoughts (you wonder why he never does it again – the 4th Dr barely tolerates conversation with anyone else as it is).
Mostly though you notice
what this story gets right: it’s faster paced than anything seen in the series
before (except possibly close cousin ‘The War Machines’), the monsters are a
real threat rather than something odd to gawp at and if you’re not scared at or
moved by something somewhere in this story then I have bad news about how
Cybermen might have taken over and replaced your nervous system already. The
Cybermen are a wonderful creation, mankind’s killer cousins who used to look on
us with envy and spite who are now taking us apart limb by limb out of logic
and reason. As great as all the 1960s Cybermen stories are, though (not so much
the later ones) this is the story that makes best use of their threat, the one
where they’re the most cunning and evil, the backdrop of mankind’s greatest
achievement being the time of our possible disaster only adding to the tension
and power of this story. The result is a story that’s a real trip, one that manages
to recreate the moon (amazing to think that episode four was back at Lime
Grove, the BBC’s tiniest studio!) and then throws one of Dr Who’s most
realistic and believable monsters at it. ‘The Moonbase’ takes all the things
that made ‘The Tenth Planet’ so good (an unstoppable monster that wants to convert
you, taking over a base) and upgrades them by throwing in some extras (That
voice! Those bodies! That set! The idea that the Cybermen aren’t individuals
with names nd a leader who can be knocked out but a proper conglomerate army! The
claustrophobia!) I love the mirroring too: the further mankind heads into space
the more we become like Cybermen, adapting ourselves in order to survive. The
Cybermen aren’t that different to the humans in this story, wearing space suits
and controlling the weather, adapting life to make it easier. But there’s a
danger that we might take it too far and that our next great leap for mankind
will come with all sorts of unseen steps that really take us backwards and take
us away from our true selves. As great as ‘The Moonbase’ is an adventure story it’s
a wonderful philosophical debate too, as Pedler moves on from his pet worry
about transplants in the present and looks towards the future with problems
mankind is still grappling with today.
This is a story that might
not be perfect from beginning to end but still includes so many of my very
favourite Who moments. Alas we can’t see it as episode one is missing (so is
episode three, though two and four exist) and Dr Who sets tend to look
different when people are moving on them rather than standing statically on
them in telesnaps, but judging by the surviving photographs of it and contemporary
memories the recreation of the lunar surface was breathtakingly good. There are
lots of stories about how uncomfortable and strange it was for the actors
crammed into heavy spacesuits and flown by kirby wires across a set full of
mock-up craters and after reading the novel first I had a sinking feeling it
would just look stupid on screen, but no – the delight as Ben, Polly and Jamie
launch themselves across the moon’s surface (and thus rather neatly getting in
the gravitational plot element for later) is infectious. At least until poor
Jamie comes crashing down and bangs his head; a clever way of writing him out
for this story. In many ways it’s the most important scene of them all outside the
first Tardis take off and regeneration, given that it was this scene that
encouraged so many curious viewers to try a fading series after being featured
in a trailer and rescuing this series from a fate where it might have been
cancelled (or worse ‘upgrading’ into a show that no longer felt like Dr Who
rather than one that’s a ‘regeneration’ of it). The glorious cliffhanger when
the Doctor recognises the cyber Doc Martens sticking out from under a bed sheet
in the sick bay before it lumbers towards him with no hope of escape that’s one
of the best; near-immediately beaten by the epic end to episode three when a
whole army of Cybermen march across the moon, totally in control, their heavy
regimentation in sharp contrast to how the Tardis crew individually bounce
their way over in episode one in their fragile spacesuits, an army that can’t
be stopped by such puny human ideas as peace. Even something as simple and
funny as The Doctor turned scientist taking the commander’s boots off and
checking his feet as he tries to keep control during a crisis (one last
hangover form the earlier stories of the 2nd Doctor being a clown
not the bringer of death; future stories show that’s not necessarily a
contradiction). It’s Dr Who at its primal basics, reduced to a fight between
good and evil as The Doctor himself says for the first time, as the best of us
are held up against the worst of ‘them’, whether they be paranoia of Russians
hippies or fears of the future. It’s a
quite brilliant little story considering that it was written from scratch
within just 14 weeks, the length of time since ‘The Tenth Planet’ was shown
(and I love the early playing around with time travel in that, while it’s been
14 weeks for the viewers it’s been 84 long years for the people in this story,
enough time for the events of ‘The tenth Planet’ to become a fairytale told by
the base’s grandparents and for the baddies to get a makeover). No wonder this story became the template for
so many future stories and no surprise either that this is the point (thanks
mostly to a nifty mid-season trailer in the build-up to episode one) when Dr
Who’s ratings began to recover. This story might feature a lot of period
details to seem hi and contemporary to the times it was made in but it also
feels like the future – and still does even now.
POSITIVES + Part of the
reason this story is so scary and memorable is its unique, deeply unsettling
score, the Radiophonic Workshop coming up with a ‘tune’ that sounds
like a Clanger playing wine glasses through a food mixer, but even weirder than
that. I get goosebumps every time I hear it still and run under my bed for cover and I’m 42. What little music
there is comes from stock, from an Eric Siday composition originally written
for a film ‘The Horror Of Party Beach’, but works a lot better as the soundtrack
to marching human converts than it does the motorcycle mods of the original.
NEGATIVES - This is the
third story born from the fruits of Dr Who’s association with actual scientist
Dr Kit Pedler, as part of his mate Gerry Davis’ quest to get ‘proper science’
into Dr Who under his watch as script editor. Most of the science is scarily
accurate: Pedler’s concern over transplants and the point at which we ‘lose’
our personality is key to the Cybermen’s creation, whilst an outpost on the
moon just like this one is still being talked about now (and might yet become a
real thing by 2070, the date of this story’s setting, if only we can sort out
the mess down here first). There are lots of little nuggets of scientific fact
smuggled in too: the way that fire extinguishers won’t work in the vacuum of
space (which is why fire was and is the biggest danger to manned missions) and ‘The
Doppler Effect’, a real problem whereby radio transmissions can’t stay stable
when received from moving objects like a space shuttle which is why there are
so many breaks of transmission back to Earth in real tapes of 1960s and 1970s
space missions with everyone praying they’ll switch on again later. Even the ‘virus’
subplot isn’t the filler it seems today: this was a genuine worry of the era, when
the biggest threat to spaceflight was something that we might not be able to
see. Even today astronauts spend days in quarantine in coming back to earth
just in case they’ve picked up a microscopic germ we can’t see. As for the Gravitron
controlling the weather – I doubt it would ever work quite like that but I’ve
seen actual scientists put forward similar ideas about how to combat climate
change by having parts of the planet given over to crops and carefully watered
by capturing clouds to stay above them. And then they go and spoil it all when
the Cybermen invade and damage the moonbase’s dome and the air is sucked out of
it at speed. How do the humans get out of this sticky situation? By placing a
drinks tray in place of the hole and filling it with sandbags. Erm, err...not
so sure about the science of that one, which must be one of the dumbest bits of
science in the series which even I can see through. I guess even scientists
have their off days… Oh well, at least they didn’t do anything really
stupid, like make out that the moon is an egg the way they do in ‘Kill The Moon’,
a story you think would have more impact on this one given that its set a mere
21 years earlier (and before you point out that the alien insect hatched that
egg and this is the ‘real’ moon it re-laid another one at the very end of the
story. Surely it would have woken up when the Cybermen started marching across
it even if the humans didn’t wake it up somehow?)
BEST QUOTE: ‘There
are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things,
things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The
Doctor had already visited the moon once in the comic strips back when he was
still William Hartnell in a story entitled ‘Moon Landing’ which ran in Tv Comic
across July and into August 1965 (issues #710-712). In a neat bit of
fortune-telling the first men land on the moon a mere year after they did in
real life (which isn’t a bad guess at all) – although as far as I know they
didn’t see a police telephone box there when they landed. For the only time
ever the comic strips actually do a more scientifically accurate job than the
telly (and not just the lack of polystyrene trays covering up holes in a dome
either): the entire first part bar the first panel is about the astronauts
rather than the Doctor, John and Gillian and concentrates on the difficulties
in space, of the prototypes that went wrong (the mechanical failures, the
natural hazards and the occasion when the rocket goes completely off course and
misses the moon altogether’), not being able to communicate in the vacuum of
space very easily and the moon’s low gravity. The moon expedition goes badly
wrong with the expedition team trapped down a crater and the Doctor is
desperate to communicate with them but of course cannot shout or talk using the
radios inside their suits so he has to resort to placards telling them that
they can jump to safety on the moon’s low gravity. Worried that they’ve been
beaten to being the first people to set foot on the moon the expedition wonders
what they’ll say back hoe before the Doctor grins and tells them that
technically he never left the Tardis and that he doesn’t want to change the
course of history which will record their exploits forever. Not the best comic
strip ever (it’s a bit dull) but an informative one and quite the time capsule:
Interestingly the faces of the astronauts seem to be loosely based on the
Apollo one astronauts who died in a fire on base in January 1967 (and look
nothing like Armstrong, Aldrin or Collins), a sad reminder of how, back in
1965, Grissom White and Chafee were the household names expected to be heroes
forever).
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