I invite you to come back to with me to a few
days after Christmas 1975. My younger brother has received money, and spent
some of it on buying the Target Books novel “Doctor Who and the Cybermen” by
Gerry Davis. This is the novelization of “The Moonbase”. He has read it, and
now it’s my turn. I thoroughly enjoy it, and it goes right up there with
“Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen” as my favourite Doctor Who novels. OK – 3 – 2- 1 – you’re back in the room. Even
though this was 40 years ago, I can still remember the basic plot of the
novelisation pretty well. In some ways, it’s a virtual reworking of “The Tenth
Planet”, although I recall that I didn’t enjoy that novel anything like as much
as this one.
Well, you’ll maybe recall that I did enjoy
watching “The Tenth Planet”, so my hopes for “The Moonbase” couldn’t be a great
deal higher than they already are. Two episodes exist, but for the other two
the BBC, as they did with the last episode of “The Tenth Planet”, commissioned
a team of animators to reproduce them using the original soundtracks. The
animation for the last of “The Tenth Planet”, well, we’re not exactly talking
Disney Pixar standards here, but it looked good, and although the animation
itself was limited, it did the job far better than any recon I’ve yet watched.
In fact, I’m having to do the mental equivalent of pouring a bucket of water
over myself – it’s not fair to raise my own expectations so high that the story
couldn’t possibly be expected to live up to them.
After
Watching
Okay, now that I’ve watched it, the question
I’m sure that you’re dying to know the answer to is, did “The Moonbase” live up
to my expectations?
Yes, it did.
I enjoyed the novelization more than I enjoyed
the novelization of “The Tenth Planet”, and I enjoyed the story itself more
than I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet”. It does make such a difference when there
are official animations of the missing episodes to watch. I draw the comparison
to “The Tenth Planet” deliberately, for the similarities between the two
stories are fairly clear. Both are set in an inaccessible base – on the moon in
this one. Both of them are staffed by an international crew. Both bases are
attacked by a party of Cybermen, who initially managed to take over the base,
before being repulsed when the humans discover one of their weaknesses. Of
course, there are differences. In “The Moonbase” the base exists to house the
Gravitron, a gravity device that has the power to control Earth’s weather. The Cybermen
intend to seize said Gravitron, and use it to devastate the Earth by
manipulating said weather. When asked if they are doing it for revenge they
strenuously deny it, being emotionless as we know that they are. Alright, so
they’re just gits, then.
Actually these Cybermen are great. They look
good today – how good they would have looked in the mid 60s I can only imagine.
The cloth heads have been replaced by shiny metal helmets, and the overhead
headlamp has been made smaller and incorporated into the helmet itself. Their
hands are now no longer human, and not only part of the costume, they had
become a sort of three pincer arrangement. These have the added bonus of
allowing the Cybermen to shoot electricity out of them and zap anyone who gets
close range. Having said that though, this only tends to happen in the first
two episodes. For some reason they start using guns after that. Not really sure
why. Finally the chest unit is a lot less bulky than the original, and in fact
is the classic chest unit that would remain part of the cyberman costume until
the complete redesign for Earthshock in the Davison era.
The cyber voices have changed as well. Instead
of trying to make them sound inhuman through varying the rhythms of normal
speech, they have a flatter, yet at the same time more conventional delivery,
with a more heavy electronic treatment. It works very well, because it does
sound like the artificial voicebox which can be used by people who have had
theirs removed.
I can only judge by the animation I saw, but
the first episode really looked rather good to me. Alright, the spacesuits are
very unconvincing, even for the 60s, but they didn’t spend very long in those,
thankfully. Jamie takes a giant leap for Mankind and knocks himself out at the
foot of the base, necessitating the visitors seeking medical help. Once the
travelers get into the base, the tension starts to ramp up. The scientists on
the base are being decimated by an unknown virus. This is a nice touch, not
giving away immediately that this is the work of the Cybermen. If I remember
correctly they reused this tactic in Tom Baker’s Revenge of the Cybermen. The
first hint we get that the Cybermen were involved is a shadow, then we see one
skulking around near the sickbay. It must have been even more effective when
first viewed, since the title wouldn’t have told the viewers that the Cybermen
were involved, as tended to happen with Dalek stories. At the risk of being
accused of hyperbole, there’s parts of this first episode which remind me a
little of Ridley Scott’s first “Alien” film, where the remaining crew members
know that the alien is on the ship hunting
them, and they are searching along cramped metal corridors for it.
The moonbase set itself, and the model work for
the exteriors are pretty impressive work for the time that they were made. I
use the work of Gerry Anderson as a comparison. Now, I freely admit that what
was being produced by Gerry Anderson in the early and mid 60s was very clearly
aimed at the kids, as compared with Doctor Who, which always was a show for the
family, and this is an important distinction to make. Even a mediocre Doctor
Who script is considerably more complex and interesting than, let’s say, a
Fireball XL5 or Stingray script, which is not a criticism since that’s the way
it was meant to be. However, where they are worthy of comparison is in their
use of models. You can argue that in the mid 60s, when Anderson was making
Thunderbirds, the models his productions were using were pretty much state of
the art, and as good as it got – certainly on television anyway. This shouldn’t
come as a great surprise. His philosophy was to treat every episode as if it
was a blockbuster movie – from “Stingray” in 1964 onwards all of his shows were
shot in colour, even though it would be 3 years before the first colour
television programmes were shown in the UK. From Thunderbirds in the mid 60s
onwards, a man called Derek Meddings was Visual Effects Supervisor, and it’s
worth noting that he went on to work on many Hollywood blockbusters of the
1970s, and his work was more than once nominated for an Oscar. So it’s not a
bad idea to compare model work in Doctor Who to What Anderson were producing at
the same time. And in terms of “The Moonbase”, the model of the base itself
certainly holds its own. Yes, it’s maybe not quite up to Moonbase Alpha from
Anderson’s Space 1999, but that was quite a few years in the future. Much less
impressive is the Cybermen’s spaceship which lands on the moon. It’s a rather
unimpressive flying saucer shape, and the effect is of a similar quality to the
spaceship shots in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. The sets inside the base,
though, are rather good, especially the main control room, with the dome
looking out onto the surface of the moon.
I rather enjoyed the performances of the actors
playing the humans. It was nice to see Andre Maranne popping up as Benoit, the
very French member of the crew of the base. He was an actor who got a lot of
work in British films and TV shows of the 70s playing French men. He’s probably
best remembered for being Andre the restaurateur in the Fawlty Towers episode
“Gourmet Night”.
As regards the relationships between the
travelers, well, for the first time there was a little bit of macho posturing
between Ben and Jamie once the latter started to recover from his illness.
Allowing for the fact that this was family viewing, and so there are only ever
going to be hints about the travellers’ feelings for each other, in this story
it’s clear just for that moment or two that Ben thinks of Polly as his
territory. I can’t quite make up my mind either how well Polly is served by
this story. I mean, on the one hand it is Polly who comes up with both the idea
of attacking the Cybermen’s chest units, and using acetone to do it. On the
other hand, she does more screaming than usual, and the Doctor is very
dismissive towards her when she asks what she can do to help, and he tells her
to make coffee for everyone.
Whatever you do, it’s probably not a good idea
to analyse the science in this story very much. For example, unless I’m much
mistaken, Polly and Ben put the plastic dissolving Polly cocktail into plastic
plant sprayers. Which don’t dissolve, although the Cybermen’s chest units do.
Then the gravitron sends the Cybermen and the Cybership off into space, and
everyone hopes that this will be the last that we see of the Cybermen. Why
can’t the ship wait until the gravitron is switched off and then zoom around
and pick up the Cybermen drifting around? Oh, and the Cybermen use a laser to
cut a hole in the dome of the base, which is plugged with a plastic drinks
tray. Don’t try this one at home, kids.
Nevertheless, overall, I think the part of me
that will always be 10 years old, that I mentioned in the last review, was
always going to love this serial. And it’s fair to say that suspending your
disbelief, and watching this one as you would have watched it as a kid is by
far that best way of enjoying it. Watch it to enjoy the Cybermen tramping
across the moon towards the base, kicking moondust as they go. Enjoy them
rising like butterflies on their Kirby wires as they drift off into space.
What
have we learned?
If
you don’t like the British weather, then all you have to do is to invent the
gravitron and sort it out.
The Cybermen’s
chest units are made from the same sort of plastic that Easter eggs are held in
their boxes by.
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