Doctor Who: The Moonbase

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The Moonbase is the sixth serial of Season 4 of the classic Doctor Who series. It originally aired in four weekly parts from 11 February to 4 March 1967. It was written by Kit Pedler and directed by Moris Barry and stars Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, Anneke Wills as Polly, Michael Craze as Ben Jackson, Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon.

The TARDIS arrives on the Moon in the year 2070 at a weather-control station called the Gravitron, where a strange illness is spreading and the Cybermen are secretly planning to seize the base and use the Gravitron to devastate Earth.

The Doctor investigates like a detective, while Polly shows quick thinking by mixing a simple chemical solvent to fight the Cybermen, and Ben and Jamie help defend the crew as the danger grows. With tension mounting, the team unites the frightened staff, exposes the Cybermen’s plot, and turns the Gravitron against the invaders to save the Moonbase and protect the planet below. Episodes 2 and 4 survive in the BBC archives; Episodes 1 and 3 are missing but have been reconstructed with animation and audio.

Episode 1

The TARDIS lands on the Moon in the late 21st century. The Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie bounce across the dust, thrilled by low gravity, until Jamie takes a bad fall and is knocked out. They are escorted into a sealed weather-control outpost (“the Moonbase”) where Commander Hobson oversees the Gravitron, a giant machine that steers Earth’s weather from afar.

The base is in crisis: crew are collapsing with a strange sickness that leaves dark traceries on their skin, the medic is incapacitated, and storms on Earth grow wilder as the staff dwindles. The Doctor offers to investigate despite Hobson’s suspicion. Polly tends Jamie in the sickbay, where he drifts in and out, muttering about a “Phantom Piper” from Highland legend. Outside, someone, or something, has been seen moving among the antennae, and huge, inhuman footprints mark the dust.

While the Doctor studies samples and maps where the illness spreads, men vanish from the infirmary without opening the doors. Hobson suspects sabotage. The Doctor traces a pattern to the food stores and a particular batch of sugar, but he needs proof. As an alarm shrieks, a figure looms in the hatchway: a metal giant with a blank face. The Cybermen have returned.

Episode 2

Panic ripples through the dome, but the Cybermen speak in calm, dead voices and claim the base will continue: under their terms. They have slipped in through a service conduit, removed the sick one by one, and replaced them with controlled workers wired to obey. Hobson orders a lockdown. The Doctor presses on with his inquiry, certain the illness is man-made and targeted. Polly nurses Jamie, who keeps waking to the vision of the Piper bending over him, only to reveal another Cyberman in the shadows of the ward.

The Doctor experiments and demonstrates the contaminant’s path: the sugar has been tainted with a neuro-agent that disrupts the nervous system, softening the base for takeover. While Hobson’s dwindling team fights to keep the Gravitron stable, the Cybermen bring more units across the surface, their footprints marching from the darkness to the airlocks. They cut communications, threaten the dome, and demand access to the Gravitron to “correct the Earth.”

The Doctor warns that means catastrophe: tides, storms, and gravity used as a weapon. Ben scouts the maintenance corridors and finds an external hatch the Cybermen are using. The base braces for assault as the Doctor, at last, proves the sugar plot: and the scale of the plan behind it.

Episode 3

The Cybermen strike. Controlled crewmen turn on their friends, and silver figures force an airlock, gliding into the main dome. Hobson’s defenders fall back around the Gravitron controls while the Doctor devises countermeasures from whatever the stores provide. Polly has a spark of inspiration: the Cybermen’s chest units are sealed with plastics and synthetic rubbers. She mixes a cocktail of solvents from the medical and engineering cupboards, and Ben rigs the brews into modified fire extinguishers.

The first counterattack works. Jets of solvent pockmark casings and melt seals, and a Cyberman crumples on the control room floor. But outside, more ranks assemble; a heavy weapon is deployed to blast the dome supports. The Doctor completes his analysis, proving the virus was distributed through the sugar supply routed to every galley and dispenser.

Hobson orders all contaminated stores dumped and the vents purged. Jamie rallies, shaken but mobile, and joins Ben in reinforcing the gantries above the control room. The Cybermen adjust, swapping tactics for a radio beam that jams the crew’s coordination. The Doctor realises the enemy’s aim is not a siege but a system swap: seize the Gravitron itself and turn it toward Earth. If that happens, no wall on the Moon will matter.

Episode 4

The final push begins at dawn over the Sea of Tranquility. Cybermen pour across the dust, a carrier on the horizon lowering more troops. Inside, Hobson’s men and the travellers fight from console to catwalk with solvent jets and improvised barricades. A squad breaks through to the Gravitron; the Doctor cuts safety interlocks and seizes manual control, pointing the instrument not at Earth but outward, into lunar sky.

Gravitational forces howl through the dome. Outside, the carrier lurches; Cybermen stumble and then lift, sliding across the regolith as if on a tilted world. Ben and Jamie hold the upper platform while Polly keeps the solvent flowing. Hobson keeps the team steady as the Doctor edges the Gravitron’s beam higher and wider. One by one, Cybermen and their ship are swept up and flung off the Moon, tumbling into space.

The radio jamming dies; the controlled crew collapse, then slowly recover. With comms back, weather stabilises on Earth. The base is bruised but intact. Hobson thanks the Doctor, still not quite believing how close they came. The travellers step back to the TARDIS. Jamie, fully on his feet now, grins at the stars. As they depart, the Doctor’s time scanner flickers, hinting at a monstrous claw waiting in their future.

Themes

As a lean “base-under-siege” thriller, The Moonbase earns its place near the top of Season 4. It is tighter and more atmospheric than The Underwater Menace, if not as operatic as The Evil of the Daleks or as iconic as Tomb of the Cybermen. As a Cybermen outing it’s a touch below the scale of The Invasion and the shock of Earthshock.

It’s claustrophobic tension, lunar isolation and Patrick Troughton’s quicksilver Doctor make it a benchmark for the format that later stories would emulate. In the company of The Ice Warriors, The Web of Fear, and Fury from the Deep, it stands as one of the defining exercises in pressure-cooker storytelling.

Linking past to future, it develops the threat first unveiled in The Tenth Planet, placing the Cybermen in a more insidious, covert mode that later echoes through The Invasion, Attack of the Cybermen, and even World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls. It follows directly from The Underwater Menace and ushers Ben, Polly, and Jamie into the classic siege rhythm before the tone swivels again in The Macra Terror.

Its lunar setting foreshadows the return to the Moon in The Seeds of Death, and its emphasis on sabotage and systems failure anticipates space-station defenses in The Wheel in Space. In short, The Moonbase is both consolidation and springboard: it perfects an early template while pointing the way to many of the series’ future battles with steel.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Second Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Second Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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To view the list of other Doctor Who serials, please click this link

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