Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Moonbase (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story. Although, tbh, I'm not sure I'd actually watched the serial when I wrote that. I literally don't understand where I was coming from.

The Moonbase's DVD replaces the missing episodes with
animation, like last week.

Doctor Who - Season Four, Story Six - The Moonbase
Written between 21st and 23rd September 2015

It is not surprising that a show spanning 26 years of continuous programming through three distinct decades managed to end up following certain archetypes when it came to writing stories. What is surprising about the Second and Third Doctor's era is how often the same one comes up. Yes, I am indeed talking about "Base-Under-Siege", a plot template with the same circumstances and character archetypes which defines many of the stories across Doctor Who - but especially in the Second Doctor's era. Troughton didn't, of course, originate this - The Tenth Planet from last week was one of these stories. But it's more important here because last week, the whole world was being invaded, while this week we're focusing on a small tiny base. On the Moon.
     While attempting to land on Mars, something drags the TARDIS off-course and they end up on Earth's moon in the year 2070. There they enter the Moonbase, staffed by a small scientific team in charge of the Gravitron, a device used in the future to control the Earth's weather. The Doctor and his three companions (Ben and Polly from last week, and Two's favourite companion, Jamie McCrimmon) discover that the base has been inundated with an epidemic, causing staff members to become comatose with black veins. The director, Hobson, is immediately suspicious of The Doctor and his friends - especially when people start going missing. As we see, this is down to the Cybermen, something which The Doctor immediately suspects. Soon the base is being sieged by an Army of Cybermen, intent on using the Gravitron to kill everyone on Earth. Using the help of the remaining crew, The Doctor manages to direct the Gravitron towards the Cybermen and their ships, expelling them from the moon, as Polly and Ben despatch the remaining few with a solvent cocktail.
     This is the fourth story of Troughton's era, but, thanks to the missing episodes, it contains only his third and fourth surviving episodes. Half of The Moonbase is missing and has been for years - this is another DVD release (brought out in 2014) where the remaining episodes have been animated. I really like this selection of stories because it shows both sides of the problem - next week's Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in its entirety and didn't live up to expectations, but The Wheel In Space the week after contains only two of its six episodes. When I first watched The Moonbase and reviewed it (as can be read in the link at the top of this article) those animations hadn't been done, and I distinctly didn't remember the first episode being gone. I must have started on the second episode, not had a clue what was going on, and judged it from there.

These Cybermen are much more into subterfuge.

     So, what is "Base-Under-Siege"? The Doctor and companions enter a remote, claustrophobic base. It's being run by a small (emphasis on small) team of people who usually follow a set of archetypes. Among others, there's the suspicious and hardline leader, the medic who speaks as the voice of reason, and the plucky one with lots of technical knowledge. People start being picked off when the alien enemies slowly start to pick people off, making their way closer and closer to our heroes and their defences. What story am I describing? It's definitely a description of The Moonbase. It's also a description of dozens of other Doctor Who stories. Dalek is Base Under Siege. Flatline is Base Under Siege. It is ubiquitous. The problem with Troughton's Base Under Siege stories being a lack of variety caused by repetition of the plot and not a lot of budget to separate them from one another.
     The turnaround between the broadcast of The Tenth Planet and filming for The Moonbase was apparently only two weeks. Despite this hasty schedule, the new Cyberman design is both simpler and slightly more effective, and the fact that a hefty accordion has been replaced by a boiler suit with handles means that they were able to create a fairly convincing "army". As I put rather nicely in my previous review, the new design is a trade-off which would go on to define the design of the Cybermen in all later incarnations. The robotic boiler suit men have much less of the humanoid design of their predecessor - their hands are three-fingered pincers, their voices now a harsh electronic buzz that requires subtitles to understand. Although The Doctor does mention their history, it's not immediately obvious that these things are human beings - but when that history is brought up, their inhumanity becomes all the more terrifying.
     Of course, like last week, and like some time to come, there is an air of pronounced sexism which often gets brought up around The Moonbase. Polly is given quite a nice scene where she works out a way of discovering a way to defeat these Cybermen - using a combination of solvents to erode the plastic coating on the Cybermen's chest apparatus. But apart from that, she doesn't get much else to do but scream at the Cybermen, be disbelieved about having seen the Cybermen, and be told by three different people to make coffee. Often there's a counter-argument that The Doctor asking her to make coffee is an attempt to diffuse the tense situation that had arisen amongst the staff of the base. But one thing that is never brought up is the fact that at one point Ben literally says, "Not you Polly, this is Men's work." I suppose it's historical accuracy, however unpleasant it may be.

Two's characterisation takes it's most well-known form here.

     The Moonbase ends up being lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. It doesn't have to spend as much time explaining itself as its predecessor did, and so it gets to add a bit more tension and suspense. The story was meant to capitalise on the new Cybermen, and it did that, while at the same time finally calming Troughton's more clownish tendencies and allowing the more serious side of his character to come out. Despite how we may be able to categorise and scrutinise it, and despite some of the more distasteful idiosyncrasies of its era, The Moonbase is a very enjoyable story for fans of this era.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The Boy Wonder of the Troughton era, which just happens to be a Cyberman story. Join with us as we defrost The Tomb of the Cybermen.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tenth Planet

One with Ben at the South Pole.

Doctor Who - Season 4, Story Two - The Tenth Planet
Written between 19th and 20th September 2015

Under William Hartnell's tenure as The Doctor, the show had not only begun, but had also become a national phenomenon. Other shows take a while to get embedded into the public imagination, but under Hartnell the show had risen phenomenally, following the 60s trend of Dalekmania. Behind the scenes, however, several accounts show a man often harder to work with. In 1966, near the start of the show's fourth season, Hartnell's failing health and friction with newer members of the production team led to the suggestion of his leaving the show. In order to do this, writer Gerry Davis created the concept of regeneration, and he incorporated it into a story he'd been writing with his friend Kit Pedler, about a race of cybernetic creatures known as Cybermen...
     The Doctor and his two companions Ben and Polly (both from 1960s England) arrive in the South Pole. There they wander into an underground base led by General Cutler. The base is a scientific station monitoring a rocket launch towards Mars, and the three are immediately treated with suspicion. The rocket starts heading off course, and is ultimately lost, as a planet seems to come within range of Earth - a planet The Doctor identifies as Mondas. Soon the base is invaded by tall, bumbling creatures called Cybermen, who explain their origins as a race of human-like beings forced to replace parts of their bodies with technology. They want to invade Earth, robbing it of enough energy to keep Mondas alive and to kidnap to human population in order to convert them into more of their own kind. Before they can truly get their plan under way, however, Mondas absorbs too much energy, and is destroyed. As the Cybermen lie in ruins, The Doctor, feeling a bit tired, makes his way back to The Tardis and collapses, regenerating into The Second Doctor.

This amazing shot wouldn't be half as effective
if the costume designer had remembered the gloves.

     The previous, premier story of this season, The Savages, was filmed as part of the previous production block, meaning that for Hartnell, he was essentially coming back to the show solely to film his exit. It's been said that this quite frustrated him, even if his health kept continuing to disrupt the show even through the production of this story. At one point Hartnell missed a week of filming due to complications from his arteriosclerosis, and he was hence written out of his own penultimate episode, a lot of his lines being given to the serial's other characters. This means that the third episode, lacking both Doctor and Cybermen, is by far the serial's most boring and tedious, but that actually contributes to the serial's success, as the Doctor's collapse and tired recover foreshadows the (for the time) incredibly surprising regeneration at the end.
     The execution of the original concept of the Cybermen is... well, it's hard to say with a perspective so drowned in hindsight. The explanation of the Cybermen is fantastic - you can really imagine that these beings were once men and women. As with Hartnell's absence in episode 3, blunders sometimes help - the Cybermen's silver gloves weren't ready in time, and so they had to go on without them. The resulting Cybermen, gripping their foes with human hands, look far more body-horror for it. They also, for some people, contribute to the opposite effect. I remember in particular my sister watching The Tenth Planet with me and laughing her head off at them, with their beady eyes and ridiculous sing-song voices. For me, of course, it all works and is a horrifying view into a potential future of the human race. The voices are still funny though.
     Now, for the stuff related to this story's release today. As I mentioned in the prologue to this month, many of the episodes from the black and white days are missing. This provides several interesting and unique challenges in watching the old series, with fans resorting to the use of "recons", facsimiles of the show created using stills, stage directions and the original audio. Luckily, for four stories, their DVD releases have been accompanied by complete animated versions of the missing episodes, using a unique animation style which attempts to as closely as possible match the original shots. Here, the fourth episode of The Tenth Planet is animated, the entire episode (bar the regeneration, thanks to Blue Peter) having been lost. I actually really like it - after the dullness of the third episode, the animated episode has a brilliant element of style and menace which does the Cybermen (and Hartnell) due justice.

Even in animation, Hartnell's final lines carry a great sense of
poignancy.

     There's a brilliant sense of decline in this story which may or may not have been intentional. The Cybermen represent, here, a humanity driven by a desire for survival to a dark, technological fate. They are shadows of their former self. This is a black mirror for the idea of Regeneration in the first place. The Doctor's main aim this episode, interestingly, is simply to wait and allow things to work themselves out, as he knows that the Cybermen will fail. The same was known by Hartnell of himself, and so it stands out as a very definite, very final story for the Doctor who allowed the show to come into being. And I salute him.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The Second Doctor is in a base which is under siege. You could say that it's a kind of... "base-under-siege" story. It's The Moonbase.