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polly and ben The welcome home party from last night combined with ten hours at work had left me very tired, but when I walked in through my front door this morning I remembered that Netflix had sent me two Doctor Who discs from my queue. Naturally I couldn't go to sleep without at least taking a peek at one of them and went out to the mailbox to retrieve them. Then before I could help myself I watched what there was of Moonbase and thoroughly enjoyed it. For those not in the know, most of the Troughton era episodes were destroyed by the BBC in a odd sequence of events back in the 1970's. So what we have left are a handful of complete stories and fragments of stories gathered from various television stations located around the world. Moonbase is one of the incomplete stories, but there is enough of it to get the plot. I had never seen a Patrick Troughton era episode with Polly and Ben. I knew their names and I had seen photos of both of them, but this was the first time that I had ever seen them on the small screen. Seeing them alongside the second Doctor trying to defeat the Cybermen was fun. Plus the idea that in the future humanity will control the Earth's weather from the moon by means of a gravity device was something that never would have occurred to me. I have a feeling that that will never be scientifically possible, but that didn't take away from the story. Watching nearly forty year old science fiction is hard to explain to people, but there is a certain charm to it. At the time special effects were much more limited so that meant a much stronger story in my opinion. Rather than trying to overwhelm the audience with effects, one had to pay attention to what was being said and done by the actors. For me that is a major difference in storytelling and is something that has been lost in modern science fiction movies. |