The Moonbase

"The Moonbase" is charmingly naive, and it's only a short stop on from naivety to sloppiness. The story has a bad to middling reputation due to some less than inspiring characters and a somewhat workmanlike plan by the terrible Cybermen. In later stories they would invade Earth by distorting the navigation of a space beacon and transmitting a hypnotic signal to the entire planet. Here, they poison the sugar supply. Still, why invent Concorde when you can get where you want to go on a pushbike?

"The Moonbase" is often brought down for its somewhat cavalier attitude to the Gravitron, a device which could cripple the Earth if allowed to cease functioning and which they idly consider switching off to see what will happen ("I overheard that!" says Earth Control. "You're not to do that! You hear?"). But are we missing the point? The main strength of the story is in the Cybermen themselves. They aren't as effective here as elsewhere, but then Cybermen don't always need to be. Half the fun is in the fact that they are Cybermen, they look awesome, and they kill people in frightening ways.

The Cybermen were always the PROPER most popular monsters. Wasn't it funny how they always came second to the dratted Daleks in polls and the like, yet you never actually met anyone who didn't prefer the Cybs? When we went to Longleat in the eighties, it was my sister who wanted to be photographed with the Dalek. I headed straight for the two towering Earthshock Cybermen, bent over backwards as if in debate over what to do with the new found child captive that posed between them.

"The Moonbase"'s trump card is the way it depicts the newly redesigned monsters. They skulk around in the shadows of the base, silently appearing behind people at unexpected moments and always acting as a hidden menace. And they run! Or at least look as if they might run. Very few monsters in Doctor Who run, the Autons in "Spearhead from Space" being a notable exception. Collective wisdom tells us that slow stalkers were always scarier, but you could out-run those robot mummies and be making good your escape before they even lumbered round. Wasn't it more scary when the enemy was as nimble as you were? The Cybermen in "Moonbase" are like karate-chopping dancers, whether legging it through the sliding doors of the base, slicing someone up on the moon's surface or, at the end of Part 2, jumping forward to adopt an especially camp attack position!

It was what I suspect you paid your entrance money for in the sixties. A roaring Yeti at the end of every tunnel, an agile Cyberman hiding somewhere in every spaceship. Okay, there don't appear to be any decent scientists on the moon before the Doctor shows up (and no women at all) and when it looks like he, Ben and Polly are saboteurs they're allowed to wander about stealing peoples shoelaces in the middle of a crisis. And the Cybermen infiltrate the base by climbing into hospital beds and keeping quiet. But then, that's what they were always there for. The best monsters were always hiding in the shadows.