Year: 1973

Rejected for a seat on Britain’s expensive, high-profile manned mission to Venus, astronaut Adam Blaney is stuck on Moonbase 3, heading up a research team – and, whether he consciously knows it or not, deliberately putting their experiments and their careers in jeopardy. One of his scientists worries about the state of his marriage since his wife remains on Earth, and the other is hesitant to jeopardize her career, worried that she’s washed up due to her age. Dr. Caulder, under strict orders to rush research whose potential revenue is needed to fund Moonbase 3, tries to keep Blaney and his team on task. Moonbase psychologist Helen Smith becomes a counselor to this team, but she fails to detect Blaney at the center of all of these problems; when he ends up starting a relationship with her, she’s even more blinded to the potential trouble. It’s only when she’s at the mercy of the vacuum of space that she realizes that refusing his advances could bring out a more dangerous side of him.

written by John Lucarotti
directed by Christopher Barry
music by Dudley Simpson

Cast: Donald Houston (David Caulder), Ralph Bates (Michel Lebrun), Fiona Gaunt (Helen Smith), Barry Lowe (Tom Hill), Edward Brayshaw (Adam Blaney), Ann Ridler (Kate Weyman), Malcolm Reynolds (Bill Knight), Nancie Wait (Dodi Knight), Peter Bathurst (Director General), Joanna Ross (Jane), Anne Rosenfeld (Lisa), Oliver Ford-Davies (Astronaut)

Original Title: The Gentle Rain

Notes: Moonbase 3 had already predicted the existence of a European Union (with Britain as a member nation), and here it identifies the currency of this body as the “eurodollar”; where Moonbase 3 is experiencing a budget crunch, Caulder complains that the American and Russian-funded Moonbases are blessed with far deeper pockets. Although the term that inspired this episode’s title, “Achilles’ heel,” includes a possessive apostrophe, the episode’s title does not include the apostrophe and is chronicled here as such. Writer John Lucarotti (1926-1994) was one of the earliest group of freelance writers to pen Doctor Who scripts in the 1960s, including the well-regarded historical story The Aztecs. All of his Doctor Who contributions aired in the 1960s, which makes his participation here a bit of a coincidence, since the then-current team of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks – both serving in the same capacities for Moonbase 3 – had not worked with Lucarotti on any produced Doctor Who stories. Actor Oliver Ford-Davies, making an early career appearance here as a nameless astronaut, is now better known to genre fans at Sio Bibble, governor of Naboo and advisor to Queen Amidala, in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Talk of massive cuts to Moonbase 3’s budget loom, as does a visit from Dr. Hauser, a member of the Moonbase’s Earthbound appropriations committee. Caulder ramps up the pressure on his resident researchers to come up with a breakthrough – any breakthrough – to impress Hauser and save the Moonbase’s funding. One scientist is on the cusp of just such a major discovery, as he tries to perfect a process by which an incredibly strong but lightweight metal, normally something which can only be formed in microgravity, can be replicated under Earth’s gravity. Another scientist’s experiments into a new energy source are promising, but inconclusive. Both of them already feel isolated from the small community manning Moonbase 3, and the pressure to produce a major breakthrough manifests itself differently in each of them. The metal experiment produces a resounding success before Hauser’s eyes, but Caulder is surprised to see a major breakthrough in the energy experiments as well – but when he discovers that the seemingly successful experiment was faked, he has to decide whether or not to keep that a secret from Hauser.

written by John Brason
directed by Ken Hannam
music by Dudley Simpson

Cast: Donald Houston (David Caulder), Ralph Bates (Michel Lebrun), Fiona Gaunt (Helen Smith), Barry Lowe (Tom Hill), John Hallam (Peter Conway), Tom Kempinski (Stephen Partness), Madhav Sharma (Rao), John Moreno (Juan Benavenie), Garrick Hagon (Bruno Ponti), Victor Beaumont (Franz Hauser), Jonathan Sweet (Walters), Patsy Trench (Jenny), Edmund Pegge (Macadam), Christine Bradwell (Ingrid), Cy Town (Technician)

Notes: Cy Town, seen here as a nameless Moonbase technician, has graced many an episode of the BBC’s much more familiar SF series, Doctor Who – even though his face usually isn’t seen during his many stints as a Dalek operator.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

A Russian delegation visits Moonbase 3 ahead of a groundbreaking manned mission to Mars, and with his base under constant threat of being shut down by budget cuts – and the potential embarrassment of the breakdown of the Omicron 4 weather satellite – Caulder is surprised when the Russian commander invites the Europe to participate in a manned mission to the outer planets of the solar system. Such a mission isn’t in the European space budget, not by a long shot, but Caulder doesn’t reveal that little bit of information. Tom Hill personally takes on the Omicron 4 repair mission, but finds himself in life-threatening danger when a misalignment of his space capsule’s docking mechanism leaves him stuck to the satellite without a way to bail out of his capsule. Caulder immediately starts to plan a rescue mission, but the only pilot who volunteers to rescue Hill is one of the Russians, and this creates an international incident that gets Caulder relieved of his command. Always critical of Caulder’s command style, deputy director Michel Lebrun relishes a shot at command, but given the chance, will he reverse Caulder’s rescue mission orders and leave Hill to die, or allow the mission to proceed and possibly end any chances for the proposed outer planets mission?

written by John Lucarotti
directed by Christopher Barry
music by Dudley Simpson

Cast: Donald Houston (David Caulder), Ralph Bates (Michel Lebrun), Fiona Gaunt (Helen Smith), Barry Lowe (Tom Hill), George Pravda (General Trenkin), Milos Kirek (Colonel Gararov), Peter Bathurst (Director General), Madhav Sharma (Rao), Mary Ann Severne (Sandy), Perry Sobolsky (Mather), Christine Bradwell (Ingrid)

Original title: The Dark Side Of The Moon

Notes: Probably the best episode of Moonbase 3 to be produced, Castor And
Pollux takes its title from the names of the mythical twins in the constellation of Gemini. Ironically, the Gemini spaceflights of the 1960s inform much of the episode’s details: Gararov’s hand-held maneuvering jet strongly resembles the one carried by Gemini astronaut Ed White in the first American space walk in 1964, while Tom Hill’s constantly-spinning predicament may have been inspired by the Gemini 8 mission, which nearly resulted in the deaths of astronauts David Scott and Neil Armstrong in 1966. Even the design of the space capsules themselves is reminiscent of Gemini hardware. The scenes of Gararov’s rendezvous and spacewalk are extremely realistic, and are even thoroughly explained in other characters’ dialogue, the one possible criticism being that the shadows of such details as ladders, hand-rails and exterior gantries do not move, a dead giveaway that the camera – not the vehicle – is spinning. (If the vehicle had been spinning, the shadows would have shifted constantly as the capsule’s orientation changed relative to an unmoving light source such as the sun.) The most surprising piece of forward-thinking space science is the mention of the “Grand Tour” alignment of the outer planets, a fairly recent (as of 1973) discovery which resulted in the real life Voyager missions. Where Moonbase 3 comes uncannily close to predicting such “future” political developments as a unified Europe with a single standardized currency, it falls down a bit on its political predictions by depicting the Russians as members of a communist (and possibly still Soviet) state, with characters referring to each other as “comrade” (though the Soviet Union is not mentioned in dialogue as still being in existence).

LogBook entry by Earl Green