The Wheel In Space: Ranking - 86

                     The Wheel In Space

(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 27/4/1968-1/6/1968, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: David Whittaker  ('from a story by Kit Pedler'), director: Tristan De Vere Cole)

Rank: 86

   'The wheel in space goes round and round, round and round, round and round all day long...

The cybermen hiding in the wheel in space go rrrrinnnngrrrreeeeehummmmm. Sometimes.Mostly when there's a cliffhanger.

The Doctor's electrocution machine that kills the cybermen on the wheel in space goes cracklecracklecrackle'

 

I always feel a bit sorry for ‘The Wheel In Space’. There it sits, at the end of Troughton’s middle and best loved season, ticking all the boxes of what everyone loves from that era (an outpost of humans under siege, the era’s most popular monsters The Cybermen, a strong cast of supporting characters including one who ends up a companion, great cliffhangers, frights a plenty) along with a few snippets of the best of the Hartnell years (we get to explore a world more than just fight a load of monsters, the characters all go through lots of emotion particularly the companion and rich dialogue) and yet everyone seems to forget about it. I honestly don’t know why: for a six-parter it’s a pretty nifty bit of storytelling that builds up tension nicely from first scene to last, going from a minor bit of inconvenience in getting the Tardis back from the other end of a space station to an epic battle against an implacable foe who just won’t stay dead. The Cybermen never looked better (their design changed a lot in the early days but now they look – and indeed sound – the way everyone remembers them,now with their familiar ‘teardrop’ design that’s so clever: it looks like something associated with human emotions but its really just part of their electronics) and the shots of them hiding inside giant eggs, waiting for the time to be right for a mass invasion, are the logical next stage after seeing them break free of their plastic wrappers in ‘The Tomb Of The Cybermen’, combined with the space-age angle that suited them so well in ‘The Moonbase’.

What’s more, it’s an impressively modern sort of a story that felt out of kilter amongst the stories around it but makes a lot more sense now. If you’re a Star Trek fan then you’ll recognise a lot of these tropes, but only from the more modern series of the 1990s. It’s set in a space ‘wheel’ that sits in Earth’s orbit, a stepping stone between ‘home’ and ‘outside’ which was a fairly new and daring concept back then. The model shots of it look not unlike ‘Deep Space Nine’. Meanwhile there’s an international base made up of people from all walks of life (including a Russian who turns out to be the heroine back at peak cold war era) where the second in command is a psychologist-come-counsellor (just like Deanna Troi in ‘Next Generation’, though it’s the Russian who’s loosely a telepath). Then there’s Zoe, our new companion, who has such a clever quick brain that she’s been pumped full of knowledge and trained to think like a computer, when all she really wants is to be a normal girl (just like Data!)  ‘Wheel’ confused a lot of fans at the time, who didn’t understand why this story didn’t work like other 1960s telly or indeed other Dr Who base under siege stories, but it’s emphasis on people struggling to work together and accidentally clashing while the big event mostly happens off-screen is very like 1990s television. Oh and the Borg, of course, always owed an awful lot to the Cybermen, so much so that a comic crossover from 2012 ‘Assimilation’ see the two team up against the 11^th Doctor and Picard.  

The reason it turned out so differently to the three earlier Cyberman stories is the writer they gave it to. Like ‘Tenth Planet’ ‘Moonbase’ and ‘Tomb’ the idea came from scientific advisor and Cyber creator Kit Pedler, who’d been hired by the Dr Who production team for his knowledge of pioneering technology and how it might look in the future (not for nothing does he become the co-creator ‘Doomwatch’ in the 1970s, alongside Who script editor Gerry Davies). Having covered bases at the South Pole, on the moon and in Egyptian-like tombs on their own planet Pedler moves us to space, with mankind dangling precariously in the middle of a meteorite storm that the Cybermen use as an excuse to invade. Pedler no doubt expected the usual thing, that the writer his ideas were passed to would have The Cybermen stand outside the space station and gloat for five episodes until a mass invasion at the end, but – with Gerry Davies gone and new script editor Derrick Sherwin still finding his feet – they’ve given it to the most experienced Who writer around, David Whittaker, with his last full script for the show (though see ‘Ambassadors Of Death’ for one that was heavily re-written). He’s never really been ’commissioned’ in this way before – all his ideas for the show have either been his own, even when he’s been ‘pretending’ to be Terry Nation and writing Dalek stories. Whittaker just isn’t interested in writing a base under siege story all about the monsters; he’s far more interested in the Humans. So far from being a mass invading army the Cybermen are only seen either in shadows or in the cliffhanger, on the periphery right up until the final episode climax. They only get one scene with The Doctor for instance, while by comparison the supporting cast at the station get far more lines than would normally be the case (as The Doctor is knocked unconscious midway through episode one and won’t wake up till episode three so Patrick Troughton can have a holiday).

Whittaker, who was always more interested in laboriously researched history or wildly imaginative futuristic stories, has no time for this near-future setting either (there is no actual date but given in this story but from what Zoe says later we know it’s the 21^st century and probably in the 2030s). So this story is less about ‘this could be you!’ and more about exploring an alien environment, with the first half of the first episode given over to exploration and discovery, rather than plot, just like the old days (there’s even a scene with a food machine, though the Servo-Robot is a very different design to the Tardis one from ‘The Edge Of Destruction’). Oh and there’s a problem with the fluid link again, which has been working fine since Whittaker invented it as a plot point when script-editing ‘The Daleks’ (one which can only be repaired with Mercury: The Doctor should have filled up on Vulcan in ‘Power Of The Daleks’, another Whittaker story. A regeneration story that was partly about how mercurial The Doctor now was compared to his old self; is this Whittaker wanting to inject a bit of unpredictability to a series he fears has fallen into a rut? This phial is noticeably larger though). Whittaker too has no interest in Pedler’s science either, getting some of it hilariously wrong (space works just like the seas, another reason this serial resembles Star Trek and their navy uniforms and whistles, with air currents and knots that don’t work the way things really would in space – where for instance there is no friction to stop things from moving when set in motion; I’d also love to have seen the look on Kit’s face when he read the scene where cyber-hypnosis is defeated by The Doctor taping a metal plate with a transistor to a crewman’s shoulder against all logic!) and all but ignoring what Pedler considered the most important aspect of the story, a ‘lazer machine’ that fires x-rays into space.

Whittaker doesn’t spent long scenes getting to the heart of The Cybermen and their desperate struggle to survive either: they’re just another monster to defeat. In fact their plan is very un-Cybery and more like The Master in its complex convoluted illogicalness. For this is it: by chance The Cybermen find ‘The Silver Carrier’ drifting through space not unlike the Marie Celeste (another naval reference and featured in another Who story shortly after Whittaker’s day ‘The Chase’, when it was beset by Daleks!) So they fill it with cybermat eggs and send it drifting into the path of the Wheel (official name W3 as there are five of them). They then ionise a star which turns super nova and creates a meteorite storm (did I mention Whittaker wasn’t too hot on science?)  The Cybermen know that the x-ray lazers will get rid of them, but to do that the crew will run out of their supply of a metal called bernilium. Desperate for more the Humans are bound to search the Silver Carrier where the Cybermen will be lurking in crates. They’ll then be smuggled aboard the Wheel where they will break out en masse and take over the station’s radio channels, transmitting a signal to their Cyber armies to come and invade Earth. No it’s not very logical is it? There are so many stages where things can go wrong. Not least the appearance of The Doctor in the middle of it all, though if anything his and Jamie’s presence are how this plan gets as close to fruition as it does (it’s Jamie, for instance, who sabotages the lazer in a desperate attempt to stop the Tardis from being blown up, while Jarvis’ erracticness means the wheel are paying less attention than they normally would, something the Cybermen can’t possibly have foreseen). Why don’t they spend all that time setting up their own beacon rather than going to all that fuss? And why bother with Earth? if they can travel this far through space and have such a bad track record on our world then there’s no reason they can’t, say, cyber-adapt The Ice Warriors on Mars instead (already far tougher than any Humans and better for an army) or the weedy Plutonians, much easier to conquer and more likely to accept the Cyber way of life if it means avoiding taxes (see ‘The Sun Makers’). It’s almost as if they’re suffering from sort of mental (metal?!) breakdown. They should definitely sack The Cyber Planner, who’s no replacement for The Cyber Controller. Even letting loose a bunch of cybermats is more of a giveaway that they’re there than an actual help, though weirdly Bill, the Wheel member who first discovers them, adopts one as a pet rather than give the alarm (and note that Whittaker treats them more like animals than robots, like rats on a navy ship in fact). In a way though it’s a nice change: Wgittaker knew he couldn’t top pass mass invading Cyber armies and those scenes were getting a bit repetitive in any case so he goes the other way in having the Cybermen – hulking great seven foot men who dominate the screen in their other 1960s appearances – reworked to be a shadowy threat, effectively playing hide-and-seek throughput the plot so that you never quite know where they’re going to come out next (well, OK. Its usually the cliffhangers but still).

No, what interests Whittaker is people and it’s the base personnel that shine in this story, written with more care than any earlier Cyber story as the writer really gets into what it would be like to be so vulnerable in space, cut off from your own kind, pioneering technology but without the creature comforts of home. They’re all going through their own problems before the Cybermen even arrive, cooped up in this tiny world and trying to live a normal life in decidedly odd circumstances. As ever the most telling parts of a Whittaker script come in the stage directions: the ‘Silver Carrier’, the spaceship where the Tardis lands, is described ‘If one imagines some kind of approach like that of a nuclear submarine where every inch of space is essential but where some gestures must be made to the men who serve’. Whittaker figures that, if man was up there for any length of time with the responsibility to keep Earth safe, you’d either have lots of time on your hand to research (as the wheel has an amazingly impressive library for somewhere that needs to reserve every bit of weight it can get) or go mad. And guess what: just as in ‘The Rescue’ it’s a character called Bennett who goes a bit loopy. Only this time it’s the captain! Jarvis Bennett is the ‘real’ enemy in this story, far more than the Cybermen, because his actions put everyone in jeopardy. The silver giants are logical and easy to second guess but Bennett’s mercurial moodswings and unpredictability put everyone in danger because they don’t know what he’s going to do next. Whittaker spends the whole story like that, juxtaposing one against the other: the Humans are more fragile than the Cybermen and given the danger Bennett puts them in its easy to see why the Cybermen might be right, that erasing logic and emotions that overwhelm Humans and which can make them a danger to themselves or others is a bad thing and they need to be repaired. But the Humans are also kind and compassionate, empathetic to Jarvis (mostly) and better able to think on their feet (unlike The Cybermen, who only have one plan and stick to it even when it goes wrong).

There are some great characters on board this space station and some notably strong female roles too, long before people started praising the Chris Chibnall era for its ‘women’s lib’ stories. While the male captain, Jarvis, cracks under the strain and Leo seems to be around mostly to check his hairdo, look at how calm and courageous new companion Zoe is from the first and it’s no surprise, given that Whittaker at least co-invented all of them, that she’s the most developed companion on first meeting since the 1^st Doctor/Ian/Barbara/Susan and/or Vicki days. Although it was Peter Ling, in his scripts for ‘The Mind Robber’, who named her Zoe – he had to name her something and hated naming her ‘girl X’ so plucked a name he thought would be nicely space age yet recognisable; producer Peter Bryant liked it and asked his other commissioned writers to include it, including Whittaker (who seems to have paid attention too: back in 1968 Zoe was a traditional, almost forgot name – one Ling, as the oldest writer to work on the series probably remembered from his parents or grandparents – so Whittaker throws in a few more that were rare in the 1960s, like Gemma, Leo, Jarvis, Enrico and Tanya. I’m still waiting for the last two of these to make a comeback but the rest are pretty much spot on if this story is set roughly ‘now’, meaning most of these characters were named either just before during or after the Russell T comeback era. It’s a clever bit of educated guesswork from a writer  who knows his patterns and the way great-grandparent names tend to come back into fashion a century or so later. My future cyber-converted self can’t wait to see a return of ‘Billie’ as a girl’s name somewhere around the 2090s).

Anyway, back to Zoe: she is, when we first meet her, not unlike The Cybermen herself, her head full of facts and figures and always seeing things from a logical, unemotional point of view (like I say, she is Data in every way but the biology). This is a deliberate move from Whittaker who couldn’t give two hoots for the people that have already been converted into robots but who cares about his Human characters more than most and so he makes this story a rite of passage for the girl. She’s horrified by how cold and ruthless the Cybermen are and begins to panic that she is on course to become just like them. So she rejects her learning, bit by bit, learning to think more like The Doctor from a place of compassion (although that doesn’t stop her spending the entire story teasing poor Jamie!) Interestingly it’s the exact same arc to Susan’s in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’, who had her education at Coal Hill School so that she would learn all the social cues she’d been missing on Gallifrey and learn to be a ‘person’, only this time e actually see how Zoe has her head pumped ful of facts she’s been trained to recall perfectly, but without ever actually understanding (Bob Holmes, Whittaker’s successor in so many ways, will pick up on this idea of education for ‘The Krotons’ the next year, the one story where Zoe shines as brightly as a character). Zoe could easily have become an irritating know-it-all but Whittaker cleverly makes her realise that’s a flaw and has her try to stop it, even before she meets The Doctor (well, Jamie first for an episode), without ever being able to give up her thirst for knowledge and need to be right. She’s not like any ‘librarian’ I’ve ever met, closer to a computer terminal than a lady behind a desk(and possibly named for the Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh, one of Britain’s oldest,  the Heriot half of which was a philanthropist befriended by King James VI of Scotland who founded many educational establishments). She’s strong and feisty in a way that Victoria never was (and far less deferential – she’s one of the few companions to treat the Dr as more or less an equal on first meeting and whose first scene with Jamie finds her teasing him for wearing a ‘skirt’ and responding to his Highlander retort that ‘I’ll put you over my knee and larrup you’ with ‘this is going to be fun, I’m going to learn a lot from you!’) Zoe is very much like Romana in many ways: booksmart in the extreme, but it takes The Doctor to make her streetsmart and taper what she’s learned with how she needs to apply it. Wendy Padbury is perfect casting, managing to seem both like an innocent little girl and older than time, depending who she’s speaking to and about what (a bit of my favourite trivia: in real life she was married to Melvyn Hayes who played ‘Skeleton’ in ‘Superted’ to Jon Pertwee’s ‘Spotty Man’. In the 1980s stage show adaptations she even played Spotty’s sister Blanche! She’s also one of the few Who companions who had a bigger success after leaving the show when she was in the show ‘Freewheelers’ – where her brother was played by Eric Flynn, this story’s Leo. He’s also in real life the son of actor Errol Flynn).

In many ways though Zoe is the least interesting character here. Jarvis is a fascinating character, given all the traits of every other base commander we’ve seen in past Cyber stories (stubborn, ruthless, passionate) and yet he’s fragile. You don’t think he’s going to send the Cybermen packing when he can’t even get his act together by himself. His passion and stubbornness, a strength in so many similar stories, have become a weakness that have taken too far over the edge, his emotions having gotten the better of him. You feel real sympathy with him even though at times he’s a monster putting everyone in danger and leaving his crew to walk around eggshells around him, a far scarier threat than a predictable army. Michael Turner is truly excellent, alternating between rationality in one scene and manic episodes the next. Your eyes can’t look away from him, even on telesnaps (as alas this is another story wiped, or at least two-thirds of it: a badly damaged copy of episode six was always held in the archives, probably because of the expensive spacewalk sequence, while a private collector sent back episode three in the 1980s). Then there’s Gemma, the second in command whose not used to this but tries to be calm and rational despite her rising panic. She’s the one The Doctor looks to for help the most and takes all the courageous decisions out of loyalty, her death scene – carrying out The Doctor’s instructions – sadder than any previous Cyber invasion because you know and like her. She even flirted with The Doctor, much to his obvious embarrassment and surely no action is antithetical to Cybermen than flirting! Though never seriously considered as a companion she’d have made an interesting one, like Liz Shaw will become but more pro-active and less stuffy. Then there’s Tanya who might just be the most interesting of the lot. On a wheel where everyone is trying to think like the Cybermen and use logic she’s an intuitive who senses danger and helps lead to the discovery of many layers of the Cyber-plan. Had they not had someone like Tanya on board they’d have all been goners: that’s what Whittaker’s true message about the Cybermen is (and it’s where Davis and Pedler started but got lost somewhere along the way) that we need to stop thinking like machines because if we do we will lose so much. In many ways she would have made a far more valuable companion than Zoe, exotic and other-worldly, more like Susan was originally supposed to be in fact (though having a Russian companion in 1968 would have no doubt caused a lot of fuss they got away with that in Star Trek, with Chekov introduced the same year to cover for when George Takei as Sulu was busy on another project and left them without a navigator).   

Of course if you’re coming to this story purely for the plot and for a plucky base being picked off one by one you’re going to be disappointed. This isn’t a tightly paced story like ‘Tomb’ or ‘Moonbase’ where you’re left scurrying behind the sofa and aren’t sure how our heroes are ever going to get out of this one. This is a story that lacks the one big hook that made the others so memorable: there’s no attack on the South Pole through a blizzard, no virus that makes people’s veins show on the outside of their skin, no attack through London’s streets or hiding in the sewers and few Who stories ever had a central image as great as the Cybermen waking up from the ice tombs on Telos. A Cybermen squatting inside an egg, while brilliantly scary and tense in the context of the episode, doesn’t quite cut it the same way. Yet even though there’s less ‘plot’ than it’s three predecessors this is the first cyber story longer than four episodes and so Whittaker takes the scenic route, spending more time with the Humans debating with one another and keeping the cyber threat to the cliffhangers for the most part (even so, ‘The Invasion’ is two episodes longer and is itself more tightly plotted than this one). This is, in a way, the least frightening cyber story simply because they’re barely here – and when they do finally invade The Doctor defeats them fairly easily. While the Cybermen hatching out of their ‘eggs’ (in a sequence we still have as moving film, luckily) is terrific even that’s a pale copy of the Cybermen cutting their way out of their tombs and there are no individual scenes as strong or as scary. Being in space, too, in the middle of nowhere, means you don’t get the same sense of claustrophobia as a base at the South Pole or on the moon or down a tomb; also even if the Wheel personnel die out (and a lot of the do) there’s still chance for a fight-back from Earth: the Cyber-armies still have a way to go before they invade. You could, if you wanted to, zip straight from the opening scene of the Tardis landing to the episode one cliffhanger without missing anything much at all. But then Whittaker isn’t trying to tell that sort of a story. This one is about how the lucky Humans pull together despite their differences and save the day, not how The Cybermen ever so nearly won if not for The Doctor.

For The Doctor and Jamie don’t actually do much this story till the end and rather get in the way for a lot of it. Troughton’s holiday so early in the story is both this story’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. On the plus side it gives us a chance to mourn Victoria properly before her replacement arrives (Zoe doesn’t turn up till episode two) and they have been rushing around so long they haven’t had much of a chance to do just be themselves lately without a Dalek/Ice Warrior/another Cybermen/’big fat hairy beastie’ chasing them. It’s also a chance to see Jamie take the lead and Frazer Hines does brilliantly as a fish out of water, loyal to The Doctor even when it puts the people around him in danger. A lot of the first half of the story comes from Jamie’s desperate attempts to do what he thinks the Doctor would do: stall for time, brazen his way out with lies and confuse everyone when they ask him questions about why two people have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, only he’s not as good or natural at it. This sort of plot with the companion in a Doctory role is something  we won’t really see again until Romana, though Jamie ends up messing up in a more Clara type way, nearly paying for his life after going too far and sabotaging the craft, just at the point when the Cybermen have started doing something shady unseen. Jamie is, from the Wheel’s point of view, an even bigger danger than Jarvis: there he is, making up back stories that obviously aren’t true, sabotaging their expensive machine for the sake of what sounds like an ordinary blue box and being generally shifty. Yet Gemma (the psychologist) is sharp enough to see that he’s a good soul in a lot of inner turmoil over his friend and is protecting him rather than meaning to get in their way. Jamie copes very well actually, coming up with the plan to alert the base that people are aboard (beating out a regular pattern on the Doctor’s time vector generator as befits the piper in a Highland gang) and improvising the pseudonym The Doctor will use for the rest of his life (a good job the X-Ray machine is made by ‘John Smith and Associates’ rather than ‘Marjory Slopbucket’ or something!) And yet Jamie has a rotten time: he’s still moping that Victoria has left, is teased by Zoe from the time of their first meeting (‘why are you wearing female garments?’) and The Doctor is appalled at the mess he’s made of things when he wakes up. The reactions he gives and the switch between doing something brave and foolish and feeling guilty and small, gives Jamie more character development than we’ve seen in ages (since ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’ perhaps, another Whittaker script, where Jamie felt betrayed by The Doctor). When the Doctor wakes up though this is a great story for Troughton whose pushed out of his usual trait of observation and letting other people do the dirty work by how urgent the situation has become while he’s been unconscious, more in the middle of the action than he usually is. Even he’s more emotional than we usually see him too, positively angry and vengeful against the Cybermen following Gemma’s death. Troughton was always good at being intense but didn’t often get a chance to show it and its all the more remarkable the way it comes after all the clowning around in the first episode (which is by far the weakest, even with a cute servo-robot to enjoy). This also means that The Doctor is late to the party and the pleasure comes from seeing his clever brain work things out rather than fighting back the Cybermen. In other words this is more of as ‘Columbo’ story (where we now who dunnit from the opening scene,  more often than not) rather than an Agatha Christie ‘I’ve gathered you all here in the drawing room today…’ one. This makes a nice change from how past Cyber stories work, but again it makes it all seem a bit slow as The Doctor learns things that we already know, over and over again.

Much of the tension of the story comes from the fact that we know how deadly the Cybermen can be, particularly in such a small space, but no one else in this world does – for some reason they’ve forgotten about all the Cybermen invasions of Earth in the recent past (something which always used to seem odd when I watched it – after all it’s not that far in the future: in Dr Who chronology ‘The Tenth Planet’ takes place in 1980 and this story is only set fifty odd years on, so it would be like everyone forgetting the 1970s today. Although admittedly this plot point is suddenly a lot more plausible now everyone seems to have forgotten about covid and brushed it under the rug). The drama comes from getting The Doctor and Jamie to convince people of what we already know, which across six episodes without any real sub-plots and several cul-de-sacs along the way makes this story seem more of a drag. That said, I rather like the slower pace, which gives this story a chance to breathe and a chance to get to know the characters and it’s far more credible a space-set story back in the days when coverage of moon landings involved a lot of sitting around waiting for something to happen (that said there’s still more happening than in ‘The Seeds Of Death’ and ‘The Space Pirates’, two stories that also take this same tack and the spacewalk by Jamie and Zoe, though comedically slow by modern standards, would have seemed unduly speedy for viewers who were watching this in between the real thing. It’s a beautiful scene actually, better than most later variations on it like ‘Four To Doomsday’ amongst many others, for all they would do it in a ten second scene in modern Who). The climax, too, still manages to be wonderfully tense: The Cybermen have had the upper hand all the way through and only in the dying moments of their plan does The Doctor confront them, tease their full plan out of them then electrocute them, before the cyber army are sent packing with a forcefield. Most Dr Who plots are solved in the nick of time, as if by magic and plot convention, but this one feels organic: everything comes to a head in those final minutes and its lucky indeed that the last (in many ways the best) episode miraculously survived. It’s not just the ending though: Whittaker runs the whole gamut of Human emotion here, making you cry with the deaths of Gemma and Leo (so unnecessary yet so brave both of them), making you laugh with lots of jokey Doctory moments and the sibling relationship between Jamie and Zoe and making you think about how you might fare trapped in space for years on end.

Above all, though, this is the one Cybermen story where the juxtaposition between how much the humans feel (anger, sadness, fright) are set against how much the Cybermen are past all feelings is stronger than any other – these people are genuinely terrified and feel pain and lose their lives out of desperation rather than doing it (ironically given the circumstances) mechanically because that’s what always happens in Dr Who stories. The one time that the old way of doing things rubs against the newer one, when the most logical and formulaic era of the series in many ways is written by someone more interested in character and dialogue than plot and threat. The result  is an anomaly that confused many, a story that isn’t quite one thing or the other, both before and after its time, a Hartnell story with a modern emotional feel to it ‘pretending’ to be a base under siege story (Troughton, usually so reliable, even gets his most notorious ‘Billy fluff’ when he refers to the ‘sectional’ air supply as ‘sexual’!) I rather like it though, especially after a run of stories that largely do much the same thing – this is one that stops to think about the people the threat is happening to rather than concentrate on how or why. You just wish at times that they’d get on with it a bit, or that the set and costume designers and even the director had been trying as hard as the writer and cast are obviously are at making everything seem ‘real’. In many ways its a shame that part of this story exists but not all or none of it: we can’t build our own visions in our head of how magnificent it might have looked (as we did with ‘Tomb’ before it was re-discovered) but neither do we have the full story to gauge the full impact and this is one of those Dr Who stories you really do need to see episode by episode so that the tension builds, rather than in bits. Were this story ever to be recovered in full I suspect that, like ‘Enemy Of the World’ when it was rediscovered in 2013, it would surprise a lot of people who’ve overlooked just what a strong story this is (equally, as the worst selling Target novelisation, few fans ever got to read it compared to other missing stories, although Dr Who Magazine did release it as a freebie in 2025. It was written by Terrance Dicks, who was always fond of it – this was the first Who story he ever worked on, as assistant script editor, not that he did very much work on it – but being a ‘W’ title it was left till near the end of the run when the books weren’t selling). In other words, while it is arguably the weakest of the five original cyber stories from the 1960s ‘The Wheel In Space’ is nevertheless not as far behind as many fans will tell you and still, uh, wheely wheely good!

It also leads into a very clever idea they should have done more of, as The Doctor sits a stowaway Zoe down to tell her about all the dangers she’s going to face and everyone (including us) watches a repeat transmission of ‘Evil Of the Daleks’ (something that’s a bit mean to Jamie, really, given he’s trying to move on from Victoria…Alas it’s the closest Zoe ever comes to being in a ‘Dalek’ story). They should have done this more I think: I’d have loved the newly born 5^th Doctor to sit his companions down and watch the ‘Five Faces of Dr Who’ repeats in 1981 by saying ‘Tegan, you have it in you to be a fine navigator and Nyssa of course has the technical understanding…which would have been so useful back when I faced these giant egg-boxes with vacuum cleaner detachments who were turning us into primeval soup’ or Dr 13 telling Yaz ‘Romances never work out around me. Did I ever tell you about the day an Abzorbaloff turned my mate Elton’s girlfriend into a paving slab?!’ (Update: They sort of do this in the middle of ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday/Empire Of Death’ when The Doctor pauses to watch ‘Pyramids of Mars’ on BBC4 with Ruby and Mel, but alas the cliffhanger doesn’t lead into it and The Doctor doesn’t project it with his mind).

POSITIVES +While most music in Dr Who only does its job by enhancing the mood so subtlety you’re not directly aware of it, this is a good example of one of those Dr Who stories where the music embellishes the scenes so well you can’t help but notice. It’s a good blend of recognisable and alien, merging the best Radiophonic Workshop bleeps with more musical moments by the workshop’s Brian Hodgson that are still melodic, mostly alternating between the more musical tones we get when something is happening to the emotional Humans and when something is happening to the clinical emotionless Cybermen. Which is a clever idea more Cybermen scores should have tried and a rare case of a Dr Who score without any actual musicians in it that doesn’t just sound horrid and off-putting (all except for the ‘fake’ scanner picture of an idyllic holiday anyway, which is ‘Tranquil Scene’, a piece of stock music). The constant hum of the base adds to the tension too, making it seem as if the Humans are still surrounded by Cybermen even though its just their own technology (but then, as all fans of the Cybermen know, they’re just the logical extension of where we’re headed as a species by getting technology to do all the work for us anyway.

NEGATIVES - The sets alas aren’t amongst the best Dr Who ever had. It looks as if the space station has been through a few battles already by the time the Tardis gets there, inside and out, while bland white wallpaper seems to be the look for the future. Although there’s good reason for this: welcome (if you’re reading these views chronologically) to that Achilles heel of so any future Dr Who recordings, the strike. This is the first time Dr Who had been directly affected and it’s a set dresser strike, which means that not only are man powers down but this story had to be recorded in any available studio whether the rather large sets that had been built were suitable for it or not. So this story is unique in being recorded in five different studios: Ealing (the spacewalk was done on film as per usual for such big elaborate set pieces), Lime Grove the more usual home of Who in this era (episode one), the smaller studio 3 at TV centre (episodes two and four), the bigger studio 1 at TV centre (episode three) and Riverside (episodes five and six). Thankfully things go back to normal after the Summer break though even then ‘The Dominators’ alternates between TV Centre’s studios 3 and 4 (although the sets are the least of that story’s problems…) As for the costumes, they have no excuse yet there’s no getting round the fact that this ‘Cyber army’ consists of a grand total of three costumes (and only two for the bulk of the story). Fashions get really odd in this period too apparently, with some of the ugliest uniforms in the series 9again sort of like Star Trek, but this time nowhere near as good): a sort of one-piece in two-colours body hugging shell suit outfit that’s not exactly flattering (especially for poor Zoe who has to wear the wretched thing for her next few stories; oh an incidentally apparently bras aren’t a thing in the future, at least not for her). Its really not that far in the future for fashions to have changed this much. Notably everyone on this space station has ‘proper’ eyebrows and nobody’s orange so a lot has to happen between now and then…

BEST QUOTE: ‘Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority’.

Previous ‘Fury From The Deep’ next ‘The Dominators’