Doctor Who: The Moonbase (1967)

The second Cybermen serial, this survives complete on audio and partially (episodes 2 and 4) on video. It afforded a rare opportunity to see the Who cast in space-suits and an early, opportunist use (Apollo was in the news) of a reasonably credible offworld location - though the TARDIS's arrival on the moon perhaps raised the question of why everywhere else it materialised had Earth-normal atmosphere and gravity. Apart from the Daleks and a few one-offs like the Meddling Monk, the show hadn't yet got into its sequel craze - so it was unusual to pick up the threads of an earlier serial (The Tenth Planet, only a few stories earlier).

In this future of that future, 'every child' has heard of the Cybermen but they are popularly believed to be extinct. It's the standard base-under-siege plot, with a strange disease that blacklights nerves affecting the staff of a moonbase where a gravity-control device is used to run Earth's weather. The confined setting means some money laid out on sets, in the base itself and the surface of the moon - though there's the usual patchy art direction and costuming (the bathing caps worn in the Gravitron Room are especially silly).

Jamie (Frazer Hines), still new to the show, at first thinks a Cyberman is 'the phantom piper of the McCrimmons' and his suggestion of throwing holy water at it is adopted by Polly (Anneke Wills), modified by mixing up nail-varnish remover as a weapon to melt the Cyber chest-units. 'We'll need some more of that gubbins,' says the head honcho (Patrick Barr), in the sort of credible line you never heard on Star Trek. It has familiar plot problems (much unwieldy skulking in and out of the base and irrelevant but protracted stuff about where the villains are hiding) but a few of its flaws (like the infected zombie unnoticed in a busy control room) make an odd kind of sense.

The last episode features Troughton introducing a never-before-used or seen-again TARDIS device which glimpses the future (hardly necessary in a machine that can go there) to show a Macra claw as a preview for an upcoming adventure. Director Morris Barry rather likes letting the camera home in on Troughton and having him deliver his most urgent lines straight to it. The Cybermen are redesigned, with hard metal or plastic replacing the linen mummy look, and Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis make a rare attempt to suggest a truly alien viewpoint as the humans argue their case and can't make their enemies see that killing off all life on Earth is wrong. What works is that the Cybermen politely explain what they are up to blithely unaware that people might get upset and are genuinely neutral and unemotional rather than the croaking, hateful Daleks; though, as with the Daleks, the scenes of negotiation don't quite play since they are so determined from the outset to destroy that there's no room for deception. The finish, with the Cybermen floated off into space by the gravity-control machine, is conceptually spectacular but a bit rushed.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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