Retro Review: The Moonbase

1967: Year of Haight and Ashbury, Country Joe and the Fish, and Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis.

Everyone has their own theory of when “Doctor Who as we know it” began. Is it An Unearthly Child (The actual beginning)? The Daleks (It’s got Daleks in it)? Marco Polo (The regular cast start to get along)? The Dalek Invasion of Earth (Returning monster, companion leaves)? The War Machines (Contemporary Earthbound adventure)? The Tenth Planet (Hello Regeneration)? The War Games (The Time Lord reveal)? Or even The Green Death (The Doctor mopes over Jo leaving)?

I think it begins with The Moonbase.

Here’s some reasons why.

A base, under siege.

Female companion shows strong heroic streak (albeit between bouts of coffee making), whilst mouthy male companion is fairly ineffectual.

Larks with spacesuits on the lunar surface

Monsters that creep up on you and stay mostly hidden until a big reveal.

Returning Monsters that aren’t Daleks.

The Doctor has finally started acting like the Doctor we know.

A few stories into his tenure, Patrick Troughton stops dressing up, dumps the hat, and gets to grips with the part. He’s the definitive Doctor, as the character crystallises here and becomes the basic template for Doctorish behaviour. Yes, Hartnell originated the part, and he definitely has his fair share of defining moments. But, his Doctor also tries to brain a caveman with a rock, nearly gets everyone killed on more than one occasion due to his selfish curiousity, and is mostly interested in getting back to the ship and getting away. He’s not the heroic, never-cruel-or-cowardly figure we’re used to. Troughton’s Doctor is occasionally dark and manipulative, but he’s a hero, as opposed to an observer who gets swept up by events.

Famously, his oft-quoted speech in Episode 2 sees the moment where the Doctor finally stops being a tourist, rolls up his sleeves, and assumes the mantle of full time hero. The dialogue he’s given is slightly dry and stilted in places, and occasionally he talks like Hartnell, but this is where Troughton truly starts to shine, whether quietly trying to move on before exploring the Moon, removing a Moonbase worker’s boot, or squaring up to the Cybermen. There’s a brilliant blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when Polly tells him she’s seen a Cyberman, and a look of disquiet flashes across his face, as if to suggest flinching at the memory of his recent regeneration. Nice touch, Pat. It’s easy to forget what a new thing regeneration was back then.

The Moonbase is very much a sequel to The Tenth Planet, transplanted from snowy wastes to the Moon, and shot through with additional doses of cold war paranoia. In some ways it’s almost a photocopy. There’s a grizzled, distrustful authority figure leading a motley group of scientists, the unhelpful voice of International Space Control over the “radio”. And, of course, there are Cybermen, accompanied by their unofficial early theme tune, Martin Slavin’s Space Adventure, the little piece of stock music that kept on giving.

It’s fair to say that many viewers in ’67 didn’t see their return coming, after debuting only a few months earlier, not even the Daleks made such a speedy return. Drastically redesigned, these Cybermen also sound different, and also behave very differently to their oddly flamboyant predecessors. They don’t sweep in and announce themselves like in The Tenth Planet, they’ve snuck in (through….er…..a hole in the wall…best not to give this too much thought), and have been picking off the crew through a fake plague. Visually, they’re more impressive (especially on the lunar surface), but perhaps most importantly, these are the Cybermen that everyone remembers, the sneaky ones, lurking silently in the shadows or under sheets in the sick bay.

This is the kind of Cyber behaviour that the modern series tries to evoke with varying success, lurking behind plastic sheets in Army of Ghosts or in the fitting rooms in Closing Time. The Cybermen are a funny one really. Almost every iteration of them is criticised for different reasons. The Tenth Planet ones look ridiculous, but seem to have gained in popularity over the years based on how weird they are. The ones in Wheel in Space sound funny and there’s only two of them. The Invasion ones hardly say anything and have silver DMs and wetsuits. The Revenge ones are camp. The Earthshock ones are too emotional. The Five Doctors ones are too short and too easy to kill. The Silver Nemesis ones are too shiny, the RTD-era ones are too big and clunky, and the Nightmare in Silver ones are too fast. There’s just no pleasing us where our Cybermen are concerned, except perhaps for the ones in Moonbase and Tomb. They strike a chord somehow, despite the presence of obvious Kirby wires and foam, and the fact you can barely understand what they’re saying.

The Cyber-plot to take over the Moonbase and mess up Earth’s weather by sabotaging the Gravitron doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, especially when it’s entirely dependent on whether or not you take sugar. In fact, the story seems unusually fixated with hot beverages. The ‘plague’ is transmitted by sugar in coffee, the hole the Cybermen enter the Moonbase through is covered by bags of sugar, and a breech in the hull is plugged by a tea tray. Yes, that’s right. A tea tray. Due to the dodgy science I’m guessing Gerry wrote that bit.

What’s more effective is that they’re lurking around in the dark and they want to get us. Others have commented on a “Reds Under The Bed” vibe here, with the Cybermen cast as saboteurs or enemy agents. Unlike the Nazi parallels with Daleks wanting to destroy the unlike, the Cybermen want to convert you and make you like them, so maybe Pedler and Davis saw them as Communist Analogs as well as a comment on spare part surgery.

The plot in general is fairly basic, and the guest cast aren’t bad, although only two of them do much talking, Hobson and Benoit.

No, Andre Maranne is not putting it on, that’s actually a real French accent, possibly exaggerated to make him seem even more French. He’s even got a rather natty scarf on. He is so French I’m surprised he doesn’t attempt to woo Polly with the promise of a picnic by the Seine on the basis of his enthusiastic introduction to her. Clearly no-one up here’s seen a woman in a fair while, but no-one else seems that bothered.

Patrick Barr as base commander Hobson is a sturdy example of that old Doctor Who standby, Serious Leader In Charge Of a Big Science Thing. The only jarring thing about Hobson is that he’s distrustful of The Doctor and Polly and suspects them to be saboteurs, but oddly seems to trust Ben when he has no reason to. Maybe it’s because Ben’s a sailor, but the Doctor’s a bohemian drop-out, and Polly’s a girl. Considering the era in which it was made, the crew of the Moonbase is quite multicultural, albeit all male.

That said, it’s almost as if Hobson is actually ticking boxes with his recruitment strategy as whole countries are represented by individuals “France? Check…” “Denmark? Check….” They also multitask as scientists who take turns cooking and doing the general dogsbody work, as there’s not many of them to start with. An honourable mention should go to the very camp space suits used by both the TARDIS and Moonbase crews. They’re brilliantly kitsch, with both fishbowl helmets and goggles, and any scene involving them is fun, but are unconvincing with their amusingly flimsy looking oxygen tanks. It’s a shame as the rest of the design on this story is pretty good.

There’s a crowded TARDIS here, with three companions, and, as with most of Doctor Who’s history, the writers struggle to accommodate all three. What is most apparent is that three stories in, the production team have no idea what to do with Jamie yet, rendering him unconscious and keeping him mostly out cold for much of the story, only occasionally rambling in delirium about the “McCrimmon Piper”. No wonder the Cybermen keep rejecting him, the poor lad comes across as a bit of a loony. Oh well, at least he’s allowed inside the Moonbase. If this were the 80s he’d have spent several episodes in the TARDIS, possibly unconscious, like Nyssa.

Ben and Polly pretty much swap roles here. She’s impressively proactive, asking the right questions to advance the plot, and mixing her Cyber-killing “Polly cocktail” considering the less enlightened time this was made in, although this is undercut by her merrily heading off to put the kettle on, and when she tells Ben that going after the Cybermen is “Man’s work”. Ben on the other hand seems out of sorts and feels redundant, and traipses round after the Moonbase crew in search of odd jobs. He should have stayed on, Hobson’s good at finding odd jobs for people. I like Polly, Ben’s ok, and Jamie’s great, but the Doctor and companions aren’t gelling brilliantly. Jamie has yet to find his feet as a character, and Ben and Polly don’t quite click with this Doctor, who’s much more suited to the later boy-girl formula that starts a few stories later with Evil of the Daleks.

The missing Episodes 1 and 3 have been animated by Planet 55. In my opinion this is the best animated reconstruction yet, bettering even The Invasion. The simple yet moody style of animation suits the Cybermen very well, and the notoriously elusive facial expressions of Troughton are captured far better than in previous efforts by Cosgrove Hall and Qurios. It also somehow feels less jarring when returning to live action. Director Morris Barry does pretty well in scenes involving Cybermen and the film sequences on the lunar surface, but otherwise his direction is a little flat and the pace isn’t exactly rip-roaring for a four parter. The ending is fun, with Cybermen being thrown back into space, but it’s over quickly, and for all the innovations this story brings, a well wrapped up ending isn’t one of them.

Overall, The Moonbase isn’t in itself a classic, but it has a lot to give with, and most importantly it gives us the classic Doctor Who we know and love, with a brilliant, unpredictable Doctor, and scary monsters that hide in the shadows, and in our beds.