The Moonbase Episode 2

The one where the Cybermen poison the sugar...

After all my deliberating about whether contemporary audiences would recognise that the silver giant was a Cyberman (because they look so different), Polly makes a huge leap herself by stating that what she glimpses so very fleetingly is indeed a Cyberman. The fact that she knows Cybermen to be tall, cloth-faced, flesh-handed men with polythene-like suits - and the creature she sees briefly is quite, quite different - matters not to Polly, or indeed writer Kit Pedler. It doesn't ring true for me that Polly would know it to be a Cyberman, or that the Doctor would believe her so absolutely without a scrap of evidence. By the end of the episode, the Doctor reaffirms his belief that the culprits are Cybermen, but he still hasn't any more evidence than he did at the start. He must trust Polly so implicitly!

Good old Polly gets the most to do in this episode, but that's really not saying much. So far, Kit Pedler hasn't proven himself to be very good at writing solid subplots for the entire main cast. He virtually ignored Polly in The Tenth Planet, and Ben only got as many lines as he did because William Hartnell fell ill. In The Moonbase, Polly at least becomes the Doctor's lab assistant, but Ben is reduced to random exclamations that anybody could say, while Jamie remains semi-conscious in the sick bay spouting on about the phantom piper. I realise that Jamie's role in this story was small due to the fact he wasn't in the original drafts, but his absence from proceedings seems so obvious, and only highlights the fact the production team at the time just didn't know what to do with all of the characters they suddenly found themselves with. In Pedler's case, he just didn't bother!

Grumpy Hobson finally starts to question the unannounced arrival of the Doctor and his friends by making very natural connections between trouble starting, and the Doctor appearing. This will happen time and time again in the series over the next several decades, but Hobson's definitely been slow on the uptake. I do like his theatrical threat to the Doctor and co though: "I don't know who you are or where you came from. But you can get off the Moon now!"

The Doctor's little speech about the universe breeding evil, terrible things - "things that act against everything we believe in" - is a major turning point for the Second Doctor. It's Troughton's stand-out hero moment, delivering his lines as the camera closes in on him, and basically giving Doctor Who's mission statement for the next 50 years ("They must be fought!"). At last, this new Doctor gets it. And his determination to stay on the Moonbase and get to the bottom of the mystery is tangible. This is not the same man who begrudgingly had adventures on Vulcan and in Jacobite Scotland. This Doctor is a moralist who intends to side and fight for good against the terrors of evil.

There's another lovely moment between Troughton and Anneke Wills where Polly gently suggests that the Doctor's 19th century medical education with Lister might be missing something relevant and important in the year 2070. It's a sequel to the scene in episode 1 where Polly teases the Doctor about not understanding time cycles, and is a great example of how well she and he got on.

Much is made of the fact the Doctor states he gained his degree in medicine with Lister in Glasgow in 1888, but Lister was never in Glasgow in 1888 (he practiced there between 1860-69). However, two tiny words uttered by Troughton rescue this from being a proper continuity error - he says "1888, I think". Well, he simply thought wrong. It was more likely 1868, when Lister was Professor of Surgery at the University of Glasgow, but what's 20 years to a Time Lord? I'm sure we can forgive him.

Colin Shaw's set design is impressive, building and improving on the futuristic scale employed by Peter Kindred in The Tenth Planet. Although ambitious, I always think Kindred's Snowcap sets are too cramped, and the use of clompy steps all over the place fail to give it the scale he probably desired. Shaw's Moonbase sets spread out a bit more, and it feels like it's much bigger than we actually get to see (especially the Gravitron control room itself). It's a shame the doors don't close properly (a recurring problem in 60s and 70s Doctor Who!), and I'm not all that convinced by Sandra Reid and Mary Woods' costumes (those t-shirts are just a bit too tight for those middle-aged paunches, and as for the Gravitron shower caps...). But the Gravitron device itself is impressive, both as a full scale prop and as seen in model form (although the two don't accurately match up). One thing I do love though, is the regular-sized telescope at the rear of the set. Amid all the futuristic tech scattered around the Moonbase, they still need a common or garden Unitron telescope to keep an eye on the stars!

I also appreciate the casting of The Moonbase - but only to an extent. The international cast of characters is to be commended, reflecting a vision of the future where countries and cultures collaborate harmoniously (if only!) - with a 59-year-old Englishman in charge, there's two Frenchmen, a Dane, an African-American and a German. But the forward-thinking casting falls down a pretty deep crater when you realise they're all men (and predominantly white). Not a single female lives or works on the Moonbase, or so it seems. This might be due to the fact that back in the 1960s, it wasn't generally permitted for women to go into space - there were fears that a woman could bleed to death in micro-gravity due to menstruation - and this fear wasn't truly thwarted until the late 1970s. However, the first woman in space had already been and hadn't bled to death (Valentina Tereshkova in 1963), so while Kit Pedler's internationalist future was forward-thinking, perhaps it wasn't as gender-blind as it could have been. We shouldn't think too ill of Pedler though. After all, he was the man who put a black astronaut in The Tenth Planet, 17 years before real life got around to it.

There's mention of a threat to Miami from Hurricane Lucy unless they get the Gravitron back on track, so I quickly researched whether there really was such a hurricane and there was - and would be! Hurricane Lucy was a Category 3 which blew up to 117mph over the summer of 1968, reaching its worst on June 30th, but that was off the coast of Japan and the Philippines. There had already been a Category 4 Hurricane Lucy in August 1965, reaching a wind speed of 153mph on August 20th, but again, that was in the Pacific. Hurricane Lucy, at least in the 1960s, tended to be a Pacific weather event, so this one (albeit in the fictional year 2070) is well out of control!

Anyway... I'm getting ridiculously sidetracked here! The highlight of this episode for me is the scene where the Doctor gathers samples for his lab tests, milling about the control room, removing threads from Benoit's collar and rather incredibly removing a silver boot from Nils' foot (how he doesn't notice his missing boot I don't know!). Troughton is delightfully impish here, drawing on some of the greatest silent film stars - when Benoit harangues him in French, he gives a sweet Stan Laurel smile, and the physical dexterity around Nils' feet is pure Chaplin. It's also amusing that he responds to Benoit's Gallic outburst with a cheeky "enchante, monsieur" ("nice to meet you"!).

We get to see a bit more of the new look Cybermen in this episode too. The scene where a Cyberman appears silently behind Polly in the sick bay is startlingly unnerving (although it lacks a musical sting to up the ante), and then it proceeds to electrocute her (she's OK, but we don't know that at the time!). Later we see Cybermen viciously attack Faure and Schultz on the lunar surface (and I mean viciously too), and subsequently a fleeting shot of the Earthmen's empty space suits, suggesting the Cybermen have taken Jules and Franz for cyber-conversion. It's sobering to wonder if two of the Cybermen we see later in the serial are actually the fully converted Faure and Schultz!

The closing scenes of the episode ramp up the tension yet again as the Doctor slowly realises that it's poisoned sugar (which not everybody takes in their coffee) that is affecting the men. I once read an interview with actress Debbie Chazen (who played Foon Van Hoff in Voyage of the Damned) who said the acting by her father Arnold (as John Stacey) in the scene where he collapses from sugar poisoning was some of the worst she'd ever seen. She's not wrong - he's particularly bad, and really makes a meal of the few seconds he has in the limelight!

The climax is directed brilliantly by Morris Barry and performed so well by Troughton, who portrays perfectly the Doctor's gradual realisation that the Cybermen might be hiding in the sick bay with them ("Did they search in here?" he ventures with dread). His face is a picture of fear, and as our heroes search the sick bay looking for Cybermen, the tension is palpable. It's unravelled somewhat when the Cyberman leaps up and leaves his sick bed rocking noisily as the closing credits roll, but the idea behind the monster hiding in plain sight is wonderful. It reminds me of the cliffhanger to part 3 of Horror of Fang Rock, where the Doctor realises they've locked the Rutan inside the lighthouse with them, instead of outside. Wonderful stuff!

Still no clue what relevance the silver paper has that the Doctor found in episode 1 though...!

First broadcast: February 18th, 1967

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The moment when the Second Doctor finally comes into his own and delivers his mission statement for fighting evil. Fabulous!
The Bad: That noisy sick bed right at the end spoils a fantastic cliffhanger.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 3...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 3; Episode 4

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-moonbase.html

The Moonbase is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Moonbase-Patrick-Troughton/dp/B00H7WX790/