A Bluffer’s Guide to Doctor Who: The Moonbase
A small step for man, and giant leaps for Cybermen.
Previously…
Patrick Troughton’s time as the Doctor started well but the wheels are coming off behind-the-scenes. What Doctor Who is desperately looking for is a formula it can re-use, and a new monster it can re-use…
Describe The Moonbase in six words:
Hostile environment, one base under siege.
This is… the one with Cybermen on the Moon.
Episodes: Episodes 149–152 out of 870
First broadcast: 11th February — 4th March, 1967
First overseas broadcast: October, 1967 (ABC in Australia).
Last broadcast before prints were considered missing was on ZBS in Zambia, June 1970. The surviving Episode 4 might be a ZBS print.
Key Characters
Doctor: Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton)
Companions: Ben Jackson (Michael Craze), Polly (Anneke Wills), Jamie (Frazer Hines)
Villains: Cybermen (voices — Peter Hawkins, actors — John Wills, Sonnie Willis, Peter Greene, Keith Goodman, Reg Whitehead)
Other Key Parts: Hobson (Patrick Barr), Benoit (André Maranne), Nils (Michael Wolf), Dr Evans (Alan Rowe)
I’m New To This. What Should I Know?
- Well, by reading this far, we’ve spoilt the surprise return of the Cybermen.
- But let’s be honest, to experience this story now, you’ll see the Cybermen on the DVD cover, or on the images that BritBox displays. And you’re going to discover that something else…
- Two out of the four episodes are missing but using surviving off-air audio recordings, this serial has been reconstructed with animation.
The Narrative
Location: The Moon
Time: 2070
What Happens?
Upon landing on the Moon, the time-travellers enjoy the gravity. But when Jamie hurts himself, they all take shelter in the Moonbase: an international operation controlling the Earth’s weather. The base is experiencing a disease that they can’t trace, so a “doctor” is accepted.
It becomes apparent that the Cybermen are invading in an attempt to control the Gravitron: the machine that allows the Moonbase to influence the weather. After tackling the few inside the Moonbase, the Cybermen’s reinforcements are defeated by using the Gravitron on them.
The Production
Recording Dates
Filming: January 1967 at Ealing Studios
Studio recording: February 1967 at Riverside 1 (eps 1–3), Lime Grove D (ep 4)
Key Production Crew:
Writer — Kit Pedler
Incidental music — various library tracks
Special sounds — Brian Hodgson
Designer — Colin Shaw
Story editor — Gerry Davis
Producer — Innes Lloyd
Director — Morris Barry
Any Behind-the-Scenes Gossip?
Shortly after, the Cybermen’s first appearance in The Tenth Planet, Innes Lloyd approached their creator Kit Pedlar about using them again. He believed that the Cybermen could be used to rival the Daleks. Pedlar agreed because why not?
The new story, provisionally titled “The Return of the Cybermen” was to be set on the Moon to take advantage of public interest. Davis, who had struggled with the previous scripts wanted a limited cast, and ideally one big set with smaller sets coming from that one. In incorporating Jamie into his scripts, Pedlar opted to have him unconscious for half the story.
Lloyd was thinking of leaving the series soon, and Davis’ new assistant, Peter Bryant, looked like the man for the job. Bryant took over for a week while Lloyd took a quick holiday.
Unfortunately, for Lloyd, Doctor Who was no longer to enjoy Riverside Studios as it had been moved into Lime Grove Studio D, the smaller, cramped studios it had had when the show first began. (Hmm, Davis’ ideas for having one big set and smaller sets coming from it now looks like a concept worth returning too…)
Oh, and during camera rehearsals for Episode One, the Gravitron prop fell down, right where Patrick Troughton had been seconds earlier.
The Analysis
Where Does This Story Come From?
- Marnier 4: Ben talks about seeing photographs of the Moon. Mariner 4 didn’t take photographs of the Moon but Mars. Significantly though, it proved that Mars was a dead planet and that life there was impossible. Dr Sandifer argues in her TARDIS Eruditorum essays, that this creates a shift in science-fiction from interesting living stuff (Quatermass, The Web Planet, all those sci-fi films of the 1950s) to a vision of life in space being dangerous and wondrous because of our abilities as humans to create ways to survive it.
Stray Observations
· The scanner shows where the TARDIS has landed before the TARDIS lands
· “That’s the Moon” — being on the Moon as shocking as Atlantis for Jamie (Ben and Polly too)
· Continuity: Why does Polly think it’s the Moon despite Mars being red. Because the scanner shows images in black and white (cf. Keys of Marinus)
· Hobson isn’t impressed with his first meeting but doesn’t question the idea of ‘civilians’ on the Moon. Perhaps he thinks they’re the 2070 equivalent of adrenaline-junkie billionaires
· The next shuttle rocket in Ep 1 is simultaneously due soon, and not for another month.
· Doctor respects Jamie’s belief in the Piper
· Set pieces in each episode
1. High-flying jumps on the Moon
2. Fighting the hurricane with the Gravitron
3. Using the Polly cocktail
4. The Moonbase glass dome is breached
(Admittedly, Number 2 isn’t as exciting as the script wants it to be)
· Why do the Moonbase crew wear the same trainers as the Cybermen
· It’s fascinating to see Troughton’s understated comedic investigation after The Underwater Menace (Think how OTT it would have been after The Highlanders) (In the documentary ‘Lunar Landing’, Anneke Wills indicates this was Morris Barry’s influence)
· Doctor has tongs in his pocket
· Hobson knows about the space plague (an event prior 2070 then)
· The Cybermen recognise the Doctor
· Hobson an intelligent, calm leader: Tells men not to try anything, observes that the Cybermen are using men and not themselves (similar to Ben and Barclay in The Tenth Planet: The Cybermen using others rather than themselves exposes their weakness)
· Doctor’s internal thoughts fascinating. Not just in that we hear his thoughts but that he thinks in questions and answers aloud, under his breath.
· Jamie and Ben: Ben thinking that Jamie is trying to impress Polly. A fascinating taste at a love triangle?
· The siege in Ep 4 works in stages
1. Lord Haw-Haw moment
2. Destroy hope (the relief rocket)
3. Hold the patients at bay
4. Dome puncture
5. Using the Gravitron to defeat the laser
6. The Doctor’s plan to use the Gravitron won’t work
7. Making it work through manual control
8. It’s working
· “Then I’ll certainly stay here,”: Troughton’s Doctor being brave, standing firm.
Going a Bit Deeper
Nearly every discussion of The Moonbase is drawn to the gravity of The Tenth Planet. It is essentially a remake: Antarctica is replaced by the Moon; the future within reach of 1986 makes way for a more future-flung 2070; the belligerent American of General Cutler is re-imagined as the more reasonable if still acerbic English scientist Hobson; the weakness of radiation swapped with gravity. These are very reasonable comparisons to make. Indeed, the gravity of The Tenth Planet forces us to evaluate The Moonbase on the merits of its predecessor: Both Lawrence Miles’ and Tat Wood’s About Time critique, and the analysis in David J Howe’s and Stephen James Walker The Television Companion do this.
The maddening thing is The Moonbase comes up better. And while this is fair, it’s maddening because the Cybermen of the Moonbase are completely different from their Tenth Planet predecessors, beyond the design.
For starters, let’s compare the first cliffhanger. In The Tenth Planet, it is the frightening visage of some horrible entity. There are no witnesses to it apart form the camera and the audience, as everyone else in the scene has just been struck down. In The Moonbase, there is an audience: Jamie, one of our regulars who we can believe is going to be safe. The tension of the cliffhanger isn’t that Jamie is going to die, it’s that we recognise the threat. It signals the return of the Cybermen (if you can recognise them after a radical re-design). The Tenth Planet Cybermen come from a vampiric planet and offer salvation. The Moonbase Cybermen want to invade. A key part in The Tenth Planet was Cutler making the situation worse by attacking the Cybermen. The calmer, pragmatic Hobson would have been Barclay’s best ally. Here though, Cutler would have been in the right. The Cybermen are not the strange entities of before, but Returning Monsters (TM).
In this sense, they are rivals to the Daleks. The Daleks power and elasticity to repeat adventures comes down to their desire to kill anything different. Failed attempts at capturing the Daleks’ success focused on their strangeness as mutant survivors from a nuclear war: the Voord, the Zarbi, the Mechanoids, the Chumblies.
Here, stripped of their unique Mondasian trappings, the Cybermen become the rivals Doctor Who has always looked for: Mindless killing machines that can operate in any location.
But there’s something else that’s new: the Doctor. If the Cybermen aren’t the same as they were from The Tenth Planet, the surprising thing is that the Doctor is.
Yes, okay. It’s not the William Hartnell incarnation but the new Patrick Troughton model. Yet, this Troughton model is different from the past three stories. Rather, he is a listener, a scientist, a player, a sleuth. The comedic moments are understated and the deliberate heroicism emphasised. He even sneaks away without saying goodbye. And just as the Doctor in The Tenth Planet knew they should be “expecting visitors”, so does the Doctor in The Moonbase know that “some corners of the universe have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. They must be fought.” One is the Doctor in future history while the other is the Doctor in an adventure serial stating a maxim. There’s an ability to recognise the story they’re in — or the time period, at least — and how to react accordingly. In both cases, they are the hero and things would go better if people trusted them more. It’s only production differences that obscure this: Hartnell’s bad health impacting The Tenth Planet’s latter episodes, and the Cybermen being giving the first two episodes to be a mysterious presence before taking charge in The Moonbase’s latter episodes.
The Moonbase proved that the ‘base under siege’ formula worked well. What happens next are not monsters that rival the Daleks half as much as they end up rivalling the Cybermen from The Moonbase: The Yeti transport well from their natural Himalayas to the London Underground. Bases find more interesting ways to be entered other than a hole in the food room, such as the Seaweed Monster using pipes. Indeed, the edge that the Cybermen get are repeated goes and some mythologising that happens quite soon. The direction that Llyod, Davis and Bryant take the show following The Moonbase has more gravity than Sandra Reid updating the costumes: Far more than comparing The Moonbase to The Tenth Planet, we should compare The Moonbase to everything that is about to happen to Doctor Who.
Between You and Me
Very exciting as a child. I remember enjoying the novelisation too. Happily put Episodes 1 and 3 on my magic wishlist of discoveries.
Further / Recommended Reading: