Review MOONBASE 3: BEHEMOTH - Episode 2

[Doctor Omega]

Your thoughts on this episode....


When two seismologists mysteriously vanish in the Mare Frigoris region, Caulder bans all travel into the area, a decision that upsets Dr Heinz Laubenthal (Peter Miles) who is conducting research in the area but won't reveal what he is working on. Some time later, Laubenthal is killed in an explosion in his laboratory. Investigations reveal that the lab walls were breached from the outside and strange tracks are found leading from the lab in the direction of the Mare Frigoris. As rumours of space monsters begin to disrupt life on the moonbases, Caulder leads a team into Mare Frigoris in search of the truth.

 

[Doctor Omega]

I think that, as a younger viewer, I would have been disappointed on first broadcast by the resolution of this mystery. But watching this as a portrait of how people's imaginations in isolation can get the better of them, it stands up as drama. I gather either Terrance or Barry got a phone call after it was broadcast from a disparaging fellow writer who said....

Spoiler

""Subsidence? Really?" Scoff.

I like the fact that the writers of that era could take criticism in good humour, be honest if they thought they had messed up, and do their jobs with a bit of a twinkle, like the whole Robin Bland thing.