The Wheel in Space Episode 1

The one where not very much happens...

After a run of stories which seem quite modern and contemporary for the time (stories set in Earth's present, near and far future), this episode feels like an echo from Doctor Who's past, as if it was a leftover script from Season 1. It reminded me very much of The Daleks and The Sensorites. It has that slow-burn exploration of a seemingly abandoned location, but sadly with this particular exploration, there isn't very much to find, and it proves really quite tedious at times.

The first thing that took me back to the Hartnell era was, of course, the fluid link, which vaporises and gives off a toxic mercury gas which the Doctor and Jamie have to be careful not to breath in. The Doctor's rather extreme reaction is to dismantle the time vector generator, which essentially disconnects the TARDIS's interior dimension from the exterior dimension. Suddenly, the TARDIS interior begins to shrink - the "walls shimmer and fold in on themselves", as Wendy Padbury's soundtrack narration puts it - and the Doctor and Jamie have to get out of the Ship before they're presumably squished.

It's an odd opening for the episode. It seems so needless when all writer David Whitaker could have done is have the TARDIS land and be done with it. What happens to the interior dimension when it is disconnected from the exterior? If the inside reverts to being just a police box again, how will the Doctor get back in? It's just weird, and while it shows that Whitaker was remembering the stories he script edited himself back in 1963, it just feels odd, in the middle of the Troughton era, to be referring back to fluid links and fault locators. There's even a food dispenser later in the story.

The vast bulk of this episode is taken up with the Doctor and Jamie exploring a seemingly empty spaceship. Ordinarily this might provide some quite tense or spooky drama (the aforementioned The Daleks and The Sensorites are perfectly good examples, and there's similar quality in the likes of The Ark in Space and Under the Lake), but here, virtually nothing of any interest happens.

The closest the episode gets to a moment of jeopardy is when the dinky Servo Robot aims its laser at the Doctor and Jamie, and even then we can't be sure it actually wants to harm them. Being on audio only, the entire episode relies on its sound design and dialogue, but neither are particularly strong. The robot doesn't speak, it just buzzes and beeps, and the telesnaps show that it looks about as threatening as a plum.

The Doctor and Jamie spend time eating roast meals and ice cream, and then have a quick nap in the absent crew's bunks, but there's never any danger to hand. It feels like what the Doctor gets up to between his TV adventures, when nobody's looking, those times when nothing goes wrong, there's no monster, and life is just fine (the sort of life Victoria craved, actually!). If Whitaker intended the Servo Robot to be the "monster", then its design totally undermines any threat it might have had. It's obviously one of those wannabe Dalek designs the production team hoped would replace the metal meanies, but it just ends up being a proto-Quark - and they weren't much good either. Ultimately, the Servo Robot is disabled by a silver bedsheet, and then destroyed by a blast from the time vector generator. Good.

It's nice that the memory of Victoria isn't forgotten completely (another sign that Whitaker is at the helm). Jamie is reluctant to let her go, and wonders what she might be doing. The Doctor reassures him that she'll be fine, as the time period she's in has "very few wars and great prosperity" (optimistic writing from Whitaker there!). Interestingly, he doesn't confirm that Fury from the Deep was set in 1968, further muddying my understanding of when it was supposed to be set - the futuristic weaponry used in episode 1 on the beach is never picked up on again, but everything else about the story screams 1968.

There is a moment of intrigue though, when a mysterious pod opens and a bunch of white spheres float out of the ship's hangar into space. On the face of it, viewers may well have thought they were something to do with the Great Intelligence, which had twice used spheres to try and invade Earth in Season 5. The spheres make their merry way toward the titular Wheel in space, otherwise known as Station 3 (code sign LX88J), connecting with the exterior walls of the Wheel, and then absorbing into them, causing drops in air pressure within.

By the end of the episode, the Doctor is lying unconscious on what we now know to be the long-lost Silver Carrier, a supply ship for Station 5, which reported it missing nine weeks ago. At this point I am already assuming Patrick Troughton will be off on his hols next week, leaving Frazer Hines to carry the narrative alone.

There's a brief couple of scenes spent with the crew of the Wheel - Leo Ryan, Gemma Corwyn, Jarvis Bennett, Tanya Lernov and Enrico Casali - which bodes well for the future as we'll have some actual characters to get stuck into. The episode closes with Bennett threatening to blow up the Silver Carrier using an x-ray laser, which is pretty forward-thinking of story adviser Kit Pedler - in 1978, the US military launched Project Excalibur, which ultimately aimed to use x-ray lasers as part of the Star Wars strategic defense initiative.

But as for the here and now? I don't really care if they blow it up or not. I sort of think it'd be more interesting if they did...!

First broadcast: April 27th, 1968

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: I do like the fact Jamie is not yet ready to let Victoria go.
The Bad: It's all so tedious, and I'm not all that convinced it would be any better if we could see the episode.
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 2...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5; Episode 6

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-wheel-in-space.html

The Wheel in Space is available on BBC soundtrack CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Wheel-Wendy-Padbury/dp/0563535075/.