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 there’s rich dialogue from original script editor David Whittaker) and yet everyone seems to forget about it. I honestly don’t know why: for a six-parter its 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) 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’. Yes they don’t do a lot they didn’t before, but then they don’t really do much new in ‘The Invasion’ or ‘Earthshock’ either and everybody seems to love those stories. This month’s base under siege is a space station built like a wheel hanging in the air and as such seems remarkably like Star Trek’s ‘Deep Space Nine’ – there’s nothing to say that it isn’t the same place either (albeit in different centuries and different locations) and its easy to imagine Sisko and co turning up any moment (the Borg, after all, owe an awful lot to the Cybermen). There are no aliens on this space station but you do get a similarly combative crew who are 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 trapped as the Dr and Jamie are once the Tardis ends up on the part of the base that gets jettisoned. The story makes better use of the yearly holidays in the regular’s contracts too, as after an episode of exploring (more like a Hartnell story than a Troughton and giving fans the space to mourn losing Victoria at the end of ‘Fury From The Deep’) the Dr bangs his head when the space station suddenly lurches and 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. It’s the sort of plot 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. We at home know that Jamie is only trying to stop them blowing up the Tardis without knowing it (another way this is more like a Hartnell story) but of course through their eyes he looks very suspicious and a wakened Dr then has to fight harder than ever to make the humans listen to his warnings. When the Dr 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, while space station crew member Gemma (who he becomes most attached to) and her unexpected death really pushes all his buttons and we seem him as angry and vindictive as the 2^nd incarnation ever is. 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). 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 even forgotten about all the Cybermen invasions of Earth in the recent past (something which is suddenly a lot more plausible now everyone seems to have forgotten about covid). 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, Tanya is cool calm and collected and Dr Gemma is visibly being groomed by the Dr into being his next companion; he’s visibly impressed with her bravery until she sacrifices herself in a most harrowing scene (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, of course, there’s good ol’ brainbox Zoe, the actual new companion, whose 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!’) Wendy Padbury is excellent from the off as Zoe who undergoes a crisis of confidence of her own after finding out during the course of the story that cutting herself off from emotions and filling her head with logic is probably not the best way to live – a neat parallel with the main Cybermen plot who have become all the more inhumane and unfeeling in their quest for survival. Or, to quote the story’s best known line from a script full of good ones, ‘logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority’. What stops this story being truly top tier like the other Cybermen stories around it is that it 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 DW stories ever had a central image as great as the Cybermen waking up from the ice tombs on Telos (all first class stories still to come in this ranking). 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. There are, too, only four episode’s worth of material here – which is hardly unique (arguably there’s only four in ‘The Invasion’ and that’s a flipping eight parter!) but it does lead to a lot of sitting around talking and waiting for the Cybermen to do something for the plot to move along again. 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. 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 – starting with the regulars, who 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. I also approve of the change 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 – you can’t work out their plan from A to B the way you can most others and even when the Dr laces up a machine to kill them it only kills a few so they get the chance to re-group and come back again). Yes its a daft plot that doesn’t make much sense (they effectively invade the wheel three times over the course of the story and ionising a star does seem a rather odd way of invading such a feeble species as humanity), but if you take this as a cyber-colony who know they have to be stealthier after all their previous mass invasions of earth were defeated then it starts to make a lot more sense. The parts of this story that do work - the 2^nd Dr tinkering with a servo robot that has ideas of its own, the last full size DW ‘monster’ to not just be a human in a suit or a hopeless puppet until as late as The Weeping Angels - is fun, the death of Gemma properly sad, Jamie’s and Zoe’s spacewalk properly impressive for 1968 (when mankind was still a year away from doing anything like that for real) and the climax seriously tense. Above all, 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 DW stories. 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 DW 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 it just what a strong storey this is. In other words while not perfect ‘The Wheel In Space’ is still, uh, wheely wheely good!

+While most music in DW 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 DW 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 moments 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 DW score without any actual musicians in it that doesn’t just sound horrid and off-putting. 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 (If they don’t include at least one AI/Cybermen crossover story in the forthcoming series I’ll be disappointed as its surely the most 2023/2024 plot ever).

- The sets aren’t amongst the best DW 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. Fashions get really odd in this period too apparently, with 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). Incidentally we don’t get a dating as such in this story but Zoe talks later about how she comes from the 21^st century so its not that long to go for fashions to change this much. Notably everyone on this space station has ‘proper’ eyebrows and nobody’s orange so it can’t be too close to our time.