Doctor Who A-Z #33: The Moonbase (1967)

The Second Doctor’s natural habitat is the edge of the frame. In stories like Fury from the Deep he scurries around in the background, cheerfully letting this week’s guest cast underestimate him until the time comes to deliver the coup de grace. There’s a bit of that in The Moonbase, most entertainingly when he makes a nuisance of himself collecting forensics from the titular station’s staff. But there are also moments in the surviving two episodes where director Morris Barry gives Patrick Troughton a big close-up, right in the foreground, reducing everyone else to background details.

It’s an unusual sight – Troughton’s face filling the screen is jarring and surprising in a way that, say, Tom Baker’s or David Tennant’s isn’t. But it makes sense in this story. Troughton in close-up has just as much low-key charm as Troughton at any distance, but it serves notice that the Doctor will be occupying a different place in the narrative than he does in The Power of the Daleks. There, the Doctor was an unpredictable, chaotic element. Here, he’s an action hero. He gets his famous statement of intent about things in the universe that must be fought, which is the kind of big statement-of-purpose speech the Doctor has rarely had before. Hartnell had a couple of these in An Unearthly Child and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and he delivered them with grandeur. Troughton’s tendency as an actor is to understate things, and that holds true here. Even so, it’s a moment that gives you shivers. After gradually turning up the heroism throughout Hartnell’s run of stories, the Doctor is now wholly the character who, in his eleventh incarnation, will define himself as the thing monsters have nightmares about.

You can see the Troughton era collecting its themes and concepts as far back as The Power of the Daleks, whose central idea – pit a race of recurring monsters against a human space colony that doesn’t believe they exist – is reprised exactly here. After that, the show slipped back a bit with two Hartnell-era throwbacks – one fairly successful, the other less so. You could argue that the embarrassment fans experience when watching the Dance of the Fish People in The Underwater Menace is only partly because of its poor realisation; it may also be because we’re aware that this slow, whimsical, straightforward approach to science fiction is a relic in the more propulsive, horror-oriented era we’re stepping into. Sure enough, one story later you have The Moonbase, where the Doctor, Jamie, Ben and Polly get into trouble as soon as they’ve worked out they’re on the moon, and the action never slows down from thereon.

Sometimes this relentless pace is a lazy writer’s friend, disguising plot holes and errors that would be glaring if the story paused to breathe. There’s a bit of that in The Moonbase; Hobson and his staff take forever to work out the very obvious way the Cybermen have used to gain access to their base, while it’s anyone’s guess how the Doctor doesn’t notice the Cyberman in the medical bay at the end of episode two. The Cybermen themselves are showing worrying early signs of the emotional outbursts that would make a mockery of their core concept, snapping at the moonbase crew for their “stupid, stupid, stupid” behaviour. Despite writer Kit Pedler having been brought onto the show as a scientific adviser, the science in this story is absolutely preposterous, reaching a nadir when Hobson and Benoit fix a hole in the side of the base by putting a tea tray over it. I wouldn’t trust that to keep the rain out, let alone the airless vacuum of space.

But if The Moonbase forces you to reassess Pedler’s credentials as a scientist, it pushes you into a more flattering verdict on his skills as a writer. The usual fan line on Pedler is that he was an ideas man who needed a co-writer to flesh his work out. Initially this was Gerry Davis, then as Davis established himself more as a solo writer Pedler hopped from working with David Whitaker to Derrick Sherwin before leaving to co-create Doomwatch. Doomwatch is, I suppose, a series rooted in science; it’s specifically rooted in scaring the hell out of you with science, which is the approach Pedler takes here. The appearance and behaviour of the victims of the Cybermen’s poison – thick black veins, sudden screams of terror – is perhaps the nastiest of Doctor Who‘s many plagues. As noted above, the Cybermen are starting to become more straightforward evil robots than they were in their first appearance, but their essential horror – the idea that they are, essentially, reanimated humans – is restated when they strap mind-control devices onto the infected base members. For a while, The Moonbase is basically about zombies on the moon, and its family-viewing treatment can’t disguise the fact that this is the kind of story idea Lucio Fulci would have a ball with.

There are definitely problems with the story’s internal logic, but no more than there are in Davis’s script for The Tomb of the Cybermen, and that’s the one that gets used to make the case for Davis as one of the show’s greats. Indeed, part of the strength of Tomb is that it takes The Moonbase‘s triumphs and runs even further with them: more horror, more action, even scarier Cybermen and an even more daring Doctor. The one limitation Pedler has that his sometime co-writer won’t have next season is a surfeit of companions. The TARDIS is more crowded here than it has been since the show’s very first season, and back then there seemed to be more thought put into their different roles. Here, Ben and Jamie are splitting the action-hero business between themselves and a newly proactive Doctor, while Polly – in the story’s most infamous moment – is told to make the coffee.

Except going to the kitchen allows her to figure out how the Cybermen have poisoned the base, and Polly is also the one who figures out how to use household chemicals as a makeshift anti-Cyberman weapon. Maybe The Moonbase would be better with just one or two companions, but you can’t say Pedler isn’t trying to preserve their unique characters: Polly’s chemistry knowledge and Ben’s ’60s-kid knowledge of lunar trivia subtly remind us that they’re from our world and Jamie isn’t. Like Ian Stuart Black in the next story, Pedlar manages the rare trick of incapacitating one of the regulars in a way that furthers the plot: Jamie’s sickness, like Ben’s possession by the Macra, successfully makes the threat feel more real and dangerous than it would if it only affected this week’s guest stars. It’s definitely a step beyond just leaving K9 in the TARDIS every time they land in an outdoor location.

Next: The Macra Terror (1967)

Graham’s Archive – The Moonbase

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