When the Doctor arrives he discovers a disgusting and disturbing disease has broken out.[Target Illustration of the Doctor's Arrival]
The Doctor decides that in the midst of strange kidnappings, the Goonitron losing coordination, and the Cybermen poisoning everyone, that he should play his recorder loudly in the loon dome because it has great acoustics. Passionate pleas for the Doctor to stop his auditory attacks when everyone is down on their luck anyway fall on tone deaf ears. Ben and Polly decide that they should bring up the idea to the Doctor of looking into what is going on. The Doctor doesn't seem interested at first but then a Cyberman starts to touch him and call him "pretty eyes". Deciding that he can't stand another sexual encounter with the cyberfiends he gets involved in the mystery - which really isn't so mysterious. [Of Course He Only Started To Help After Escaping Wasn't An Option - Click here!] The Cybermen plan to kidnap loonies and force them to operate the Goonitron into destroying the Earth by making it's lunatics all run for political office simultaneously. [Target Illustration Of the Cyberslaves] Polly fights back by macing horny Cybermen but the main fleet sexually repressed baddies is heading towards them as quickly as possible. [Target Illustration of Polly Fighting Back] Suddenly the Doctor realises that the Cybermen are are susceptible to goonity variations - that is why the need loonies to operate the Goonitron. So by deflecting the machine's action to the Moon's surface he sends the Cybermen and their ship on a Goonfest usually reserved for the Three Stooges. With the Cybermen hyped up on goofballs the Doctor returns to his annoying recorder playing much to everyone's dismay. [Target Illustration Of Hyped Up CyberFoes] Book(s)/Other Related - Doctor Who & The Loonies Doctor Who Visits The Goonbase The Cybermen High On Acid Colouring Book With Special Psychedelic Colouring Crayons For Hippies And Inner City Children Fluffs - Troughton seemed to enjoy annoying the cast for most of this story Anneke Wills talks about living on the move even though this is well before her years as a drifting prostitute Troughton's reference to Lister being at Glasgow is wrong (it should be Liverpool or Red Dwarf) Fashion Victims - The Cybermen's 'Iron Wills' now glow in the dark. [Target Illustration Of This Fashion Disaster] Beniot wears a silly fake moustache, black beret, stripey shirt, and carries around handfuls of baguettes so we don't forget he's French. Goofs - The episode two cliffhanger is apparently that Cybermen are in the Loonbase, even though they've been going around threatening to bugger everyone for a good 50 minutes or so. The addition of Jamie leads to bizarre line sharing, for instance Ben is now a freakin' genius who knows the secrets of the friggin' universe everytime it helps the damn plot along! Damn that sort of out of character stuff annoys me! [Target Illustration Of Ben The Genius] In episode two when a Cybermen tries to push down Polly he doesn't even come close to touching her but she bends over anyway - is this a mistake or is Polly just into this sort of thing? The Cybermen's ships look like paper plates held up by string even though research clearly shows them to be paper plates held up by thread. Why did they let the Doctor play the recorder in the first place? And how strong are their ear drums? Links - The Doctor is filled with a sense of terror as a Cyberman asks him if that is a recorder in his pocket or if he just happy to see him. Visions of the Tense Planet fill his mind Technobabble - The "Goonitron" works on "Luna Wacky" technology Dialogue Disasters - A Cyberman says: "Relationships? Yes, we know this weakness of yours. We are swingers." He then spends the next scene begging Polly to go out with him for one miserable stinking moment of his life. When confronted by this sad contradiction by Ben he tries to play it off macho by saying "It was a joke. Only stupid earth brains like yours would have been fooled. Geez! See if I care." He also makes great use of sarcasm "Oh yeah!! I'm SOO SURE she likes YOU so much better than ME. I'm SURE she just HATES Iron Wills!" Dialogue Triumphs - DOCTOR: There are some corners of the universe which have breed the most terrible things...then there are the Cybermen. Still, someone's got to fight them, so what the hell. Rumors & Facts - The Loonbase was met with some popularity when it first aired. People were happy to see the return of the pathetic sexually repressed foes that had been the death of the original Doctor. The second appearance secured their long standing place in the series history and indeed in the public's traumatized memory. In a new special section I will call the "THANK GOD IT'S JUST A RUMOR" subsection I have to bring out the research which can let Doctor Who fans take a breather at last. The brief shot of sperm cells under a microscope slide was from a 15 foot piece of stock footage taken from an episode called "Science And Life" in a series called "Men and Microbes" and was definitely NOT supplied personally by Troughton himself at a BBC office party! I myself was scared to delve into the sickly squishy depths of this mystery but I felt it had to be done. Following the recording of the final episode a problem was encountered with the soundtrack. Apparently several Cybermen were heard carrying out a genuine drug deal on the set that was definitely never scripted or authourized by the BBC. This drug deal was edited out whenever possible but enough of it still exists on the soundtrack to know that someone got a serious bum deal. This story had a total budget of 10 pounds 99. The existing visual evidence suggests that they did not experience any problems coming in well UNDER this budget. In order to save money to fit the budget the script was taken directly from The Tense Planet whenever possible including a strange cliffhanger scene that shows Troughton regenerating into Troughton for no reason whatsoever. On BBC documentation serial HH was commonly nicknamed "Hot 'n Horny" in honour of Hartnell's run on the show.