Earth’s moon is a satellite that has been visited many times by the Doctor in Doctor Who. Man landed on the moon in 1969. Many species inhabit the moon or have invaded or colonised it. Perhaps most bizarre of all, the moon is actually an egg!
The Moonbase
★★★☆☆
TX: 11/02/1967 – 04/03/1967
Written by Kit Pedler Directed by Morris Barry
The TARDIS lands on Earth’s Moon in 2070 and the Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie discover a nearby moonbase. The moonbase operates a Gravitron which controls Earth’s weather. However, a group of Cybermen have infiltrated the moonbase by poisoning the humans’ sugar supply. The Cybermen intend to use the Gravitron to disrupt Earth’s weather and destroy life on Earth. Polly creates a ‘Polly Cocktail’, a mixture of gold with other liquids which is lethal to Cybermen because of their allergy to gold. This enables the Doctor, Ben, Polly, Jamie and the humans on the moonbase to repel the Cybermen. The Doctor uses the moonbase’s Gravitron to blow the remaining Cybermen off the face the of Moon. The time travellers depart in the TARDIS, satisfied that Earth’s weather is once again safe in the hands of the moonbase staff.
The Seeds of Death
★★☆☆☆
TX: 25/1/1969 – 1/3/1969
Written by Brian Hayles Directed by Michael Ferguson
The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive in an old space museum on Earth. The trio are instructed to take an old decommissioned rocket to a moonbase where all contact has been lost. The Ice Warriors have invaded the moonbase in order to take control of T-Mat, the teleport system that allows supplies of food to be sent all over the world. The Ice Warriors place seed pods into the T-Mat capsules and send them around the world, to pollute and kill the human race. The Doctor discovers that water can dissolve the seedpods, so he, Zoe and Jamie return to Earth and stop the spread of the seed pods. Back on the moonbase, the Doctor is finally able to defeat the Ice Warriors. After being extensively rewritten by Terrance Dicks, The Seeds of Death’s six episodes do ramble and feel somewhat stretched. And the Doctor’s solution that using water can stop the seedpods is a bit of a copout. However, the direction from Michael Ferguson is superlative, with his single camera POV filming proving highly atmospheric. With Mark Gatiss having recently revealed that his upcoming episode will feature “a new kind of Ice Warrior”, this story is notable for having introduced the concept of a caste system within Martian society, through the introduction of Commander Slaar. There’s not a lot that I can say about The Seeds of Death as it is not a story that summons up enough opinions in me. It was broadcast slap bang in the middle of Patrick Troughton’s underrated third and final season. While it may not live up to other fondly remembered stories from that series, such as The Invasion and The War Games, The Seeds of Death has certainly proved to be another fitting outing for the Ice Warriors and their creator Brian Hayles.
Frontier in Space
★★★★☆
TX: 24/02/1973 – 31/03/1973
Written by Malcolm Hulke Directed by Paul Bernard
In the far future, the vast space empires of both Earth and Draconia are on the brink of war. Tensions have been heightened due to recent attacks on Draconian spaceships by humans and by human attacks on Draconian spaceships. However, this is all a trick by the Master and the Ogrons, who have been using a device that causes hallucinations, which fools each side into believing that the other is attacking them. The Master and the Ogrons are trying to trigger a war between Earth and Draconia. The Third Doctor and Jo Grant escape capture multiple times, from the Ogrons, the Master, humans and the Lunar Penal Colony (also referenced in Bad Wolf). The Doctor and Jo finally make it to Draconia, where they manage to convince the Draconian Emperor that they are being fooled by the Master and the Orgons into believing that the humans are their enemy. The Draconians are reptilian and they resemble samurai. Jo and the Doctor have saved the peace between Earth and Draconia. The Master kidnaps Jo and the Doctor and his friends follow them to the Ogron homeworld. There they discover that the Master and Ogrons are being employed by the Daleks, who wanted to provoke the war so that they could emerge afterwards as the supreme beings. The Master escapes during a skirmish in which the Doctor is injured. Jo helps the Doctor into the TARDIS where the Doctor follows the Daleks’ signal to the planet Spiridon. The Doctor also uses the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits to send an emergency message to the Time Lords.
Tooth and Claw
★★★★☆
TX: 22/04/2006
Written by Russell T Davies Directed by Euros Lyn
The Tenth Doctor and Rose arrive in Scotland, 1879 where they bump into Queen Victoria on her way to the Torchwood Estate. Unfortunately, the house has been taken over by warrior monks and the owner Sir Robert MacLeish has been blackmailed into doing their bidding. The monks, led by Father Angelo want to unleash a caged werewolf on Queen Victoria, which is being kept in the cellar of the house along with the monks’ prisoners. The werewolf tells Rose and the other prisoners that it will bite Queen Victoria, pass into her blood and begin “the Empire of the Wolf”. The full moon causes the werewolf to transform and break out of the cage. The terrifying creature devours many people in the house. The Doctor, Rose, the Queen and Sir Robert hide in the estate’s library, which has been coated in mistletoe to repel the werewolf. Sir Robert’s father studied the beast for years and the books in the library reveal that the wolf is a parasitic alien that fell to Earth in a meteorite, inhabiting host after host over the centuries since. The Doctor also realises that Sir Robert’s father designed the estate as a trap for the werewolf. The estate has a strange telescope, which when used with the Queen’s Koh-i-Noor diamond, its cut fashioned by Prince Albert, can be used to destroy the werewolf. Sir Robert sacrifices himself to allow the Doctor, Rose and the Queen to prepare the telescope in the Observatory. The werewolf breaks in but the Doctor and Rose use the telescope to kill the werewolf with the concentrated light of the full moon collected by the diamond. The Doctor asks Queen Victoria if the werewolf bit her but she is reluctant to answer. Queen Victoria knights the Doctor and Rose before banishing them. After the time travellers leave, Queen Victoria tells Sir Robert’s grieving widow that she will establish an institute to investigate extraterrestrial threats to Great Britain. The Queen names it the Torchwood Institute after the estate in which she encountered the werewolf.
Smith and Jones
★★☆☆☆
TX: 31/03/2007
Written by Russell T Davies Directed by Charles Palmer
Having checked into a London hospital in order to do some undercover investigation, the Tenth Doctor meets his new companion, medical student Martha Jones. However, the meeting is promptly interrupted by the entire hospital, along with its staff and patients, being transported to the Moon. The rhinoceros-like Judoon, an intergalactic police force for hire, has moved the hospital to a place of neutral jurisdiction in their search for a blood-sucking criminal, a Plasmavore. The Doctor allows the Plasmavore called Mrs Finnegan to drink his own blood so she registers as non-human on the Judoon’s scanners, allowing them to find and execute their wanted murderer. The Judoon return the hospital to Earth just before the air supply runs out. Back on Earth, Martha Jones discovers that her adventures with the Doctor have only just begun.
I wrote a Doctor Who short story that got published in an anthology. It was based on a scene in Smith and Jones where the Doctor name drops that he met Benjamin Franklin:
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
★★★★★
TX: 23-30/04/2011
Written by Steven Moffat Directed by Toby Haynes
The Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory and River Song are sent envelopes to meet at Lake Silencio, Utah, USA in 2011. However, this was an invitation to watch the Doctor’s death at the hand of a mysterious astronaut that emerges from the lake. An elderly man called Canton Everett Delaware III shows up and provides gasoline to cremate the Doctor’s body in a boat. A younger version of the Eleventh Doctor shows up at the diner later when Amy, Rory and River Song return there. The four travel in the TARDIS back to 1969 to find the young Canton who is working for President Richard Nixon. However, America has been occupied by a race of creatures called the Silence, that you can’t remember after looking away from them. The Silence rule the world through post-hypnotic suggestion. The Doctor, Amy, Rory, Canton and River Song go undercover for three months to observe the Silence. The time travellers find an astronaut suit which is meant to contain the Doctor’s assassin, an unknown little girl. The Doctor alters part of the Command Module of Apollo 11, Canton and Amy visit a nearby orphanage in Florida, hoping to find where the girl in the space suit was taken from. The Silence kidnaps Amy, taking her to an underground control room. Canton shoots and wounds one of the creatures, and from it the Doctor learns the Silence’s name. Analysing the now-empty space suit, River realises that the girl possesses incredible strength to have forced her way out of it, and that the suit’s advanced life-support technology would have called President Nixon as the highest authority figure on Earth when the girl got scared. The Doctor realises why the Silence have been controlling humanity; by guiding their technological advances, they have influenced humanity into the Space Race for purposes of building a space suit, which must somehow be crucial to their intentions. Meanwhile, Canton interrogates the captured Silence member, who mocks humanity for treating him when “…you should kill us all on sight”. Canton records this using Amy’s mobile phone. The Doctor tracks down Amy’s location, and lands the TARDIS in the Silence’s control room five days later. As River and Rory hold the Silence at bay, the Doctor shows them the live broadcast of the Moon landing. As they watch, the Doctor uses his modification of the Apollo command module to insert Canton’s recording of the wounded Silence member into the footage of the landing. Because of this message, humans will now turn upon the Silence whenever they see them. The group frees Amy and departs in the TARDIS, while River kills all the Silence in the control room. Amy, telling the Doctor that while she is not pregnant, she worries that if she is pregnant, her travels in the TARDIS might affect her child’s development. As the trio sets off, the Doctor discreetly uses the TARDIS scanner to attempt to determine if Amy is pregnant. Canton asks Nixon if he can get married to a black gay man, which Nixon reluctantly agrees to. It is a common and unfortunate trope that the black guy often dies first in Hollywood movies. However, Hollywood has improved in terms of representation, as we have seen numerous black US Presidents in film and television. This was a useful preparation for a black US President in real life: Barack Obama, the best US President in my lifetime. Six months later, the girl in the space suit is in New York, dying. She starts to regenerate to fix her body… Doctor Who was very popular in America when Matt Smith was the Doctor. Doctor Who was therefore Matt Smith and Karen Gillan’s passport to Hollywood. During the Matt Smith era, Doctor Who made a successful appeal to the American TV market by casting American actors in the show and also filming Doctor Who in America (The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, The Angels Take Manhattan). The show also featured multiple Eleventh Doctor episodes set in the USA (The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, A Town Called Mercy (which was filmed in Spain) and The Angels Take Manhattan) in addition to other America-set episodes: The Gunfighters (First Doctor), The TV Movie which was filmed in Canada (Eighth Doctor), Dalek (Ninth Doctor), Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, Dreamland (Tenth Doctor) and Rosa which was filmed in South Africa (Thirteenth Doctor). Doctor Who has always had a strong following in America, but it was not until the Matt Smith era that the series entered the mainstream of popular culture there and started to appear at sci-fi and fantasy comic cons etc. The most recent Doctor Who US premiere was in 2024 and every February there is a major Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, USA called Gallifrey One.
Kill the Moon
★★☆☆☆
TX: 04/10/2014
Written by Peter Harness Directed by Paul Wilmshurst
Clara’s pupil Courtney Woods doesn’t feel special because of the Doctor. So the Doctor decides to make it up to her by making her the first woman on the moon. The trio travel in the TARDIS to the year 2049 where they arrive on a space shuttle on the way to the moon. The Earth astronauts have come to the moon because they have detected unusual activity on the moon and a previous expedition never returned. The abandoned moonbase is infested with moon bacteria spiders and dead bodies. The spiders kill two of the human astronauts and attack the Doctor and Courtney. The Doctor conducts some scientific experiments and discovers that Earth’s moon is in fact the egg of a giant space creature and that it is about to hatch! Anything is possible! And anything is possible in Doctor Who! The moon egg hatching may imperil all life on Earth, so Courtney, Clara and the Captain of the expedition are faced with a terrible choice: kill the unborn moon egg creature before it can hatch (pro-choice) or let the creature hatch and fly away (pro-life), potentially destroying the Earth. The Captain mentions that America finally has a female President by 2049, but Michelle Obama would be awesome as the first “black Barbie President” of America right now! Earth’s population votes to abort the moon egg creature but Clara goes with her instincts and cancels the nuclear detonation. The Doctor was testing Clara and so he picks them up in the TARDIS and brings the humans back to Earth where they witness the Moon egg hatching. The chick flies away harmlessly and doesn’t damage the Earth. It also lays another moon egg. Inside the TARDIS, Clara rages at the Doctor for manipulating her and tells him that she doesn’t want to travel with him anymore. The Doctor is patronising and he talks down to Clara which worsens the situation so she storms out of the TARDIS. However, Danny later tells Clara to calm down and rethink her decision. Clara continues travelling in the TARDIS in the next episode Mummy on the Orient Express. Kill the Moon is an allegory for the abortion debate, exploring both sides of the argument (pro-choice or pro-life). With regard to abortion, I am pro-choice and I support a woman’s right to choose. This is the most pro-feminist, most pro-women website ever made! I am a feminist and I love women so so so so so so so much! 🥰 ♀Years ago, an Icelandic friend of mine had an abortion at a young age and that was very brave of her! I am not religious so therefore I don’t believe that it is acceptable for right-wing politicians to dent women’s reproductive rights just because of what is written in the Bible. Ten years after this episode was broadcast, abortion was a key issue that decided the outcome of the 2024 US Presidential Election. Doctor Who has a liberal agenda and it has rubbed off on me in a big way!
Chris Olsen's TARDIS 