The Doctor has
had many epic moments in the 50 years that Doctor
Who has been on the air. But this moment featuring Patrick Troughton
isn’t just one of the most epic, but possibly the most important of all. This
is the moment where the Doctor announces his mission to battle evil for the
first time.
https://gizmodo.com/50-great-doctor-ish-moments-from-50-years-of-em-doct-456440392
The above clip comes from “The Moonbase,” a 1967
story that’s just out on DVD, and it’s a significant story for a few other
reasons as well. For one, it features the second appearance of the Cybermen —
and they’re way more menacing and awesome than in their first appearance in
1966’s “The Tenth Planet.” For another, it features Troughton
starting to find a balance between humor and intense seriousness, after a few
stories in the role of the Doctor, the mysterious time traveler.
But the above scene seems not just iconic, but significant
— because not only is the Doctor saying that “the most terrible
things” in the universe “must be fought,” but he’s also stepping
up and saying he’s the one to do it. Hobson, the commander of the Moonbase,
wants the Doctor and his companions to get off the Moon, but the Doctor refuses
to, because there is evil here.
Contrast that with most of the William Hartnell era, in
which the Doctor is usually unable to get back to the TARDIS because someone
has stolen it, or there’s a force field, or it’s broken down, or one of his
companions is a prisoner somewhere. The Doctor gets dragged into an adventure
because he’s stranded somewhere.
It’s only in the last year or so of Hartnell stories that
the Doctor doesn’t need to be forcibly separated from his time machine —
there’s nothing keeping him from leaving in “The War Machines,”
except that Sir Charles asked for his help. But here, the authority figure in
charge is telling the Doctor to leave, and he’s refusing. It feels like a bit
of a sea change.
But also “The Moonbase” feels like a story in
which all the classic Who elements
start to gel in lots of ways. It’s the first “base under siege”
story, and the first time any monsters besides the Daleks really feel menacing
— although the very next story, “The Macra Terror,” does a lot to
keep raising the bar, judging from the clips that survive. But it also shows
how much more of an instigator Troughton’s Doctor is becoming, right out of the
gate, as he pokes around looking for trouble to get into.
The good news is, the new DVD of “The Moonbase” is
the first opportunity most of us have to appreciate this story in its full majesty.
Episodes one and three of this story are missing from the woefully incomplete
BBC archives. Somewhere in a cardboard box, I have a VHS tape of a fan-made
“reconstruction” of those two episodes, and you can also get the
audio with linking narration. But now, the two missing episodes have been
professionally animated, to the original audio that survives, and it’s way more
watchable. (Similar to the DVD releases of “The Invasion,” “The
Ice Warriors,” “Tenth Planet” and a few other stories.)
That said, the animation feels a bit slow in parts, even by
the standards of 1960s Who — and I
think part of it is just that you can’t see the expressions playing against
Patrick Troughton’s face, and some of the other actors doing physical acting.
The animators really try to make the faces look expressive and mobile, but it’s
not the same thing. The Cybermen look pretty awesome in the animated versions,
however.
And like I said, “Moonbase” is brilliant — it’s
as good as the other Troughton Cybermen adventure from the same era, “Tomb
of the Cybermen.” The Cybermen, who were a bit dense and feeble in
“Tenth Planet,” are suddenly a lot more cunning and relentless in
their second outing. (Similar to how much better the Daleks are in “Dalek
Invasion of Earth” than “Dead Planet,” their first story.) With
episode three now in place, you get to see the Cybermen take over the Moonbase
before being ejected, and that leads into their iconic march across the Moon’s
surface.
The DVD extras are relatively sparse, by the standards of
recent releases — which is actually not a bad thing, since some of the
hour-long featurettes on the classic Who
discs can get a bit hard to sit through. There’s a “making of”
documentary, plus production subtitles.
And you come away with the sense that this was an unusually
challenging story to pull together — the sets, including a Moonbase and the
Moon’s surface, are incredibly ambitious. And the sets weren’t ready in time
for the first episode’s filming — they had to film the Moonbase control room
scenes with the paint still drying and some magazine cutouts in place of actual
controls. And the fourth episode was unexpectedly moved to the dreaded Lime
Grove Studio D, a tiny cramped space where the earliest Doctor Who episodes were filmed — requiring a lot more ingenuity
to pack that much action into a teeny space.
And you learn that director Morris Barry made a huge point
of toning down Patrick Troughton’s humor and trying to bring out the serious
side of the Second Doctor, resulting in moments like the one at the top of this
post.
We’ve come a long way from the time when there were only a
handful of Troughton stories still available in any format — more episodes
have been recovered, and other episodes have been recreated using animation.
With the rediscovery of “The Web of Fear” and “The Enemy of the
World,” plus next month’s half-animated release of “The Underwater
Menace,” the Troughton oeuvre is starting to look downright respectable.
And unlike a lot of times when a lost classic resurfaces,
for the most part the Troughton era holds up just as well as you always hoped
it would. He’s the scrappy champion of good and justice who leaves chaos in his
wake and confounds the monsters of the world. Moments like the one up top,
where he suddenly reveals the steely seriousness under his comical exterior, are
part of what make it all worthwhile.
