The Wheel in Space Episode 4

The one where the Cybermen incinerate a corpse...

The Wheel in Space is written "by David Whitaker from a story by Kit Pedler", apparently. What story?! There's very little in this serial to show that it's been written by one of Doctor Who's finest scribes, the man who helped shape and sculpt the stories of Doctor Who's debut season, the man who wrote some of my favourite Doctor Who stories of the 1960s (The Rescue, The Evil of the Daleks, The Enemy of the World). A man who I believe understood Doctor Who on a fundamental level, and knew what made it work, and also what made good drama.

But The Wheel in Space is not good drama. It's laborious, runaround, talky, nonsensical hogwash. It feels like somebody pretending to write like Whitaker, so we've got a many and varied crew aboard the Wheel, but they have little of the Whitaker sparkle that turns them from mere names on the page into real people, with personalities and backgrounds (except, perhaps, the widowed Gemma). Whitaker was known for writing stories with interesting and realistic characters, and engaging plots, such as The Crusade, The Power of the Daleks and The Enemy of the World (and The Ambassadors of Death to come). But The Wheel in Space is just a mess, as if the input of Kit Pedler's "story idea" has muffled Whitaker's usually sparkling talent. Somehow I doubt that's to blame, but it sure feels like something went very wrong in the script development process for it to end up this messy.

Aside from the fab Dr Gemma Corwyn, there's an attempt to portray a mental breakdown in the gradual decline of Jarvis Bennett. But actor Michael Turner just isn't up to the job, which needs far more subtlety than he is giving it. What Whitaker writes is a man slowly unravelling when faced with facts and scenarios he isn't accustomed to, which he rejects, but what Turner delivers is a bog-standard raving grump with little or no nuance. Compare what Michael Turner does in The Wheel in Space to what Robert James did so fantastically well in The Power of the Daleks (same writer), and to a lesser extent Marius Goring in The Evil of the Daleks (same writer again).

But it's the actual plotting which is the worst thing about this serial, and maybe Pedler has more responsibility for that. The Cybermen are ferried over to the Wheel secreted in bernalium crates by the spacewalking Laleham and Vallance, but why are they spacewalking in the first place? The Wheel is a space station, so surely it has shuttles to get to and from exterior locations such as the Silver Carrier? Transporting these bernalium crates across the empty void of space seems just silly.

And why do the Cybermen have to come across hidden in crates anyway? We've already seen that their magical spheres can float across space and penetrate the fabric of the Wheel because that's how the Cybermats got there. And we've already seen that the spheres can grow in size by absorbing energy, and then "give birth" to a Cyberman, so why don't they just float some more spheres across space, through the Wheel's wall and invade it that way?

And now we learn that the Cybermen are most keen that the Wheel is not destroyed by the approaching meteorite storm, so they repair the x-ray laser, which was originally disabled by the Cybermats. I mean, truly: what is going on?!

Oh, and let's not forget the atrocious casting of Peter Laird as crewmember Chang, a character so-named, I'm sure, because he's meant to be Chinese. But actor Peter Laird is as far from Chinese as you can get, having been born in Middlesex and completely unable to affect a convincing Chinese accent. He neither looks the part (looking at the telesnaps) or sounds the part, at one point saying: "Aaahm on mah waaahy" like he's auditioning for an old Charlie Chan movie. I fully understand that that's just the way it was in TV production back then, that many ethnic roles were given to non-ethnic actors and it was the norm. But by 1968, surely broader minds could have been a little more imaginative? I mean, The Wheel in Space has at least two black actors as extras who don't speak. Why not employ them in speaking roles? It's like non-white skin was totally invisible to those making TV shows in the 1960s. And from my 2018 perspective, it's not so much offensive (because I understand the context), but it's still very, very disappointing.

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now. I'm glad Chang gets killed in a very "Ralph-in-The-Moonbase" way by a lurking Cyberman, although the gruesome way that his body is disposed of is rewardingly grim (he's thrown in the waste incinerator!).

As the episode ends, we still don't have a clue what the Cybermen are up to, apart from enjoying various free rides through space hidden in eggs and crates. The Doctor finally gets out of bed half way through the episode, but continues to have zero impact on the story. We're two-thirds of the way through this adventure, and there's really not very much I can say has happened of any great import. Shocking.

First broadcast: May 18th, 1968

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Chang being chucked in the waste incinerator.
The Bad: Chang.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 5...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; 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/.