The Wheel In Space

Coming at the end of Season Five, ‘The Wheel in Space’ ends the season not with a bang, but with a whimper. It is hard to believe that the man responsible for writing ‘The Power of the Daleks’, ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ and ‘The Enemy of the World’ is responsible for this, and it is tempting to lay the blame at the door of Kit Pedler, who provided the basic story. Unfortunately, some of the story’s deficiencies are script related, which rather undermines this theory. 

‘The Wheel in Space’ does some things right. For the most part, the characterisation is up to David Whitaker’s usual standard, with Gemma Corwyn and Leo Ryan standing out. Bill Duggan and Flanagan also come across well. Unfortunately, the major weak link is Jarvis Bennett, who is the archetypal unstable base commander. I could excuse Robson in ‘Fury From the Deep’, because it seemed as though he had reasonable leadership qualities under normal circumstances, but quite how Bennett got his job is beyond me. Firstly, there is his reaction to the Silver Carrier. Surely, blowing up seemingly abandoned spacecraft out of hand is not a good idea? For starters, if it really had wandered millions of miles off course, there might be something to be learned from trying to find out why exactly this has happened. Not to mention trying to recover any bodies from it, if only to find out what happened to the crew, about whom somebody somewhere must care. His justification for this pyromania is that the ship might at any time crash into the wheel, but if he’s worried about this, why doesn’t he have the crewmembers that he sends to rescue Jamie and the Doctor break into the locked control cabin and make sure that this isn’t going to happen? Because they’d discover the Cybermen and the rest of the plot would have to be rewritten, that’s why. Consequently, Jarvis is portrayed as an idiot who likes blowing things up, and thus not the sort of man that should be in charge of a remote space station. His later breakdown on learning of the Cybermen is also astronomically fast; the fact that the crew all have capsules implanted to detect mind control suggests that the crew’s training at least allows for the possibility of hostile action from some party or other, so his complete inability to even deal with the possibility is absurd. Frankly, Jarvis is an unnecessary plot contrivance. 

Would that Jarvis were the only problem with ‘The Wheel in Space’ however: the actions of the Cybermen are beyond belief. Their plot to gain control of the wheel is ridiculously over-complicated and raises the question of why they don’t just take it by force. After all, they can get Cybermats on board. And even if they couldn’t, they can destroy entire stars, so I find it hard to believe that the Wheel’s defenses pose a problem. The excuse given in the script is that they need to destroy the crew’s ability to send messages, but it’s a fairly flimsy excuse. Since their ship approaches whilst the laser is functioning, its defenses are presumably enough to protect it, had the Doctor not wired the time vector generator into the works, so they may as well have just attacked out right; I find it hard to believe that if they can blow up stars they can’t block transmissions from the Wheel. Why all the rubbish with the Bernalium rods when they need the Wheel’s laser to function? Why not just hijack the Silver Carrier, pilot it to the Wheel, send an automated distress signal, and take over the minds of the rescue party? Ironically, their preferred method would have caused them to be blown up if Jamie hadn’t unexpectedly been on board and able to send a signal to the Wheel. And then there is the aforementioned business with the star. Now I can suspend disbelief when watching Doctor Who, but even with only a basic grasp of astrophysics I can spot twaddle. As The Discontinuity Guide points out, blowing up a star in a different galaxy not only wouldn’t affect the Wheel that quickly, it wouldn’t affect it at all. Perhaps the Cybermen’s control device (which I’m going to refer to hereafter as the Cyber Co-ordinator) isn’t well schooled in the field either. Perhaps it’s taking the piss. That might explain why it gets the name of the Silver Carrier wrong…

There are other problems with ‘The Wheel in Space’. Bill Duggan sees a Cybermat and decides to dismiss it as a space bug. Now even assuming that he’s so stupid that he can’t see that it has obviously been built by someone, I find it astonishing that he just ignores it. It could be the space equivalent of a rat, or a locust. Surely it’s worth reporting? Just in case? The actual use of the Cybermen seems pointless, as for the first time they are truly reduced to the role of generic robots form outer space. This can work if the story is decent enough, but here it isn’t. Even the Doctor, who has met them at least three times, tells the crew that the Cybermen need the mineral treasures of Earth. Surely they need the human population of Earth? They’re Cybermen, it’s the whole point of them. A bad script and plot can sometimes be partly rescued by decent production values, but the production here is lacklustre to say the least. There are some nice aspects; the corridors in the Wheel are quite nicely designed to avoid looking generically functional, and the redesigned Cybermats look much more sleek and deadly than in ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’. They also get to kill someone, which makes them seem dangerous for the first time, and their ability to fire some kind of invisible beam from their eyes works quite well. I also have a soft-spot for the bulbous Servo-robot too, although this is another plot contrivance; there is no actual reason why the Cybermen couldn’t just stay awake and pilot the rocket themselves (I know, their trying to conserve power but the robot clearly needs to be powered instead, so…), but if they had (a) Jamie and the Doctor would be real trouble in episode one, and (b) the cliff-hanger to episode two would be blown. The actual Cybermen however don’t really benefit from being redesigned. The teardrop shape cut into the eye sockets looks quite good, but the one in their mouths somehow makes them look like slack-jawed imbeciles. Which would actually fit in with their silly plan, I suppose. Their new voices are a bit weak and lack the impact of their predecessors, which seems unnecessary since the Co-ordinator actually retains the voice used for the Cybermen in ‘The Moonbase’ and ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’. The space walk sequence doesn’t do them any favours either, as the actors involved appeared to have decided to make them look like ballet enthusiasts. 

The costumes of the Wheel personnel don’t look too bad. The model work varies; the Wheel is passable, the Silver Carrier is rubbish, and the Cyber ship is really rather good and avoids the cheap saucer designs of ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Moonbase’. Most of the sets on board the Silver Carrier and the Wheel are poor, and contrast strangely with the less-functional looking corridors I mentioned above. So amidst all this dross, is there anything good about ‘The Wheel in Space’?

Actually, yes. The plot device used to separate the Doctor and Jamie from the TARDIS (the time vector generator) is quite novel, although I find it hard to believe that after the trouble he had during ‘The Mutants’, the Doctor doesn’t keep spare stocks of mercury (as a lab worker, with knowledge of current safety regulations, it’s also quite funny to see a jar of mercury just sitting about on a bench in the Wheel – we aren’t even allowed to buy mercury thermometers anymore!). As usual in a Cyberman story initiated by Kit Pedler, there is a well-intentioned attempt to show international cooperation on board the Wheel, but this inevitably results in some dubious accents, most notably Chang’s. Troughton gets some lovely character moments, including his obvious guilt and distress when Leo Ryan tells him off for engendering Jamie and Zoe in episode six, and when he quietly talks the Cybermen in the same episode and then calmly electrocutes one of them. He’s also visibly affected by the death of Gemma Corwyn, for whom he quickly develops respect during the earlier part of the story. Jamie also gets to do more than just fight too, as he is forced to look after the concussed Doctor early on. He works out how to use the Time Vector Generator to signal for help, and also comes up with a cover story to explain why they were on board the rocket in the first place. Gemma sees straight through it of course, but he tries his best. And the fact that she realises that he is reluctantly lying says a great deal about his basically honest character. His rapidly developing friendship with Zoe is also convincingly scripted and acted and establishes the new companion team nicely. Zoe is initially rather irritating, but as she is forced to face up to the problems of her training and comes to realize that she needs to develop emotionally, she becomes a good choice for a companion. In stark contrast to Victoria, whom the Doctor took under his wing because she had nowhere else to go, Zoe is keen to join the Doctor on his travels, even after having encountered the Cybermen. This bodes well for the new TARDIS dynamic. 

Finally, despite the plot holes and the fact that it feels horribly padded, ‘The Wheel in Space’ does at least achieve an air of suspense from the moment that the TARDIS materialises on board the Silver Carrier. This is partly due to the unobtrusive but effective incidental score, but is largely due to the director making the most of a bad job. There are also one or two nice moments, my favourite being the vaguely pointless but visually effective sequence of the Cybermen “hatching” at the end of episode two (or rather, at the start of episode three, which is of course how I was able to see it!). Overall however, the good points of ‘The Wheel in Space’ don’t manage to outweigh the bad, and it proves to be a disappointing end to what is otherwise one of my favourite seasons in Doctor Who’s history.