The Wheel in Space Episode 6

The one where the Cybermen show up in force...

It's the Season 5 finale! Don't expect anything too special though, judging on the previous five episodes. Doctor Who could do finales well, even in the 1960s (look at The Evil of the Daleks and The War Games for instance, and for a great example of a mid-season finale, look no further than Destruction of Time). However, The Wheel in Space brings Season 5 to a very disappointing end after a run of excellent serials through 1967-68.

The Doctor's ridiculous idea of sending two novice spacewalkers over to the Silver Carrier to get his Time Vector Generator takes a slightly darker turn when our hero openly admits that risking Jamie and Zoe's lives is worth it to save the lives of many. He's right, of course - maybe - but it's still surprising that it's his best friend he's willing to risk, and it gives this impiest of Doctors a darker tinge at the edges. However, this Doctor does not take the deaths of others lightly (as some Doctors do), and the moment he breaks the news of Gemma's demise to the others is a brief yet poignant counterpoint to his earlier pragmatism.

Jarvis Bennett meets a particularly sad end when he learns of Gemma's death (represented this week by a series of photographic stills, to avoid having to pay Anne Ridler another week's salary!). He wanders out into the corridors, only to be viciously murdered by a Cyberman. The grimmest aspect of this is that the Doctor, Leo and Tanya watch him being killed on the monitor, helplessly unable to stop what they're witnessing. Director Tristan de Vere Cole shows the Cyberman looking impassively down at the body in a perfectly chilling moment too.

There are a couple of moments which boast the chill factor actually, thanks to some nifty direction by de Vere Cole. I'm thinking also of the bit where the Doctor is talking to the others via the power room videolink, and cuts his broadcast short. "Hello... I think I've got company," he says, and as he's about to turn around, he cuts the link and it goes to black. We then cut to the power room and see two Cyberman standing watching the Doctor from the doorway. The Doctor and the Cybermen meet at last! "I suppose you've come for me..."

This little confrontation - the only time in the entire story that the Doctor and the Cybermen actually speak - is lovely, because the Doctor has very creatively rigged up a device to fend them off using bits and bobs he's found around him. Very Doctory. He questions the Cybermen, who, in the main, reply with the implacable: "You know our ways." And then the Doctor flicks a switch and a Cyberman is trapped in a deadly electrical field, and de Vere Cole uses the image in negative (rather like a Dalek death ray) to show the assault on the creature. I never realised how scary a Cyberman's helmet was until seen in negative! And then it does a little dancefloor boogie and slumps to the floor. His companion refuses to fall for the same mistake, and says: "You will be destroyed... Others are coming!", then points at the Doctor as he backs out of the door. As I said, pretty chilling!

The conclusion to what has been a pedestrian and frustratingly silly serial comes when a Cybership appears in space and approaches the Wheel (the Cybership's design is appalling), but it is merely zapped to smithereens by the x-ray laser (which the Cybermen helped repair!). There's also a bunch of Cybermen who spacewalk from their ship toward the Wheel, flapping their arms as they approach like they're doing bird impressions. They look silly, until the moment when the airlock door closes on them, and one Cyberman tries to prise apart the doors. This puts me in mind of that memorable scene in Earthshock when a Cyberman is fused with a spaceship door. But here, the Cyberman is using his sheer strength to force his way through. He ultimately fails though, when Flannigan activates the neutron forcefield and they're all repelled off into the void (rather like what happened in The Moonbase).

It's all solved so easily and quickly. After five and a half episodes of wondering what the heck the Cybermen are up to, their plan is scuppered by firing a gun that they repaired themselves, and switching on the forcefield. Ah, right. So it was all a bit pointless then.

At least this conclusion means that handsome Leo Ryan and foxy Tanya Lernov can now finally get a room and put into action what they've been wink-winking at for the last six weeks (the scene where he places his hand on hers is less than subtle).

Zoe wants to see inside the TARDIS, as she's naturally and characteristically curious, but it's interesting that Jamie hasn't connected with her enough to automatically think to ask her to come with them. Maybe he still misses Victoria, maybe he doesn't think she can be replaced, but it's the sign of a spirited new companion who hides herself aboard before they take off. She's rumbled of course, thanks to an unusually empty wooden chest in the control room, and the Doctor decides to give her fair warning of what sort of life she'll have if she does choose to join them on the TARDIS (a nice little nod to the reason Victoria chose to leave).

The Doctor uses thought waves to show Zoe a recent adventure, namely The Evil of the Daleks, but he frustratingly shows her a clip from episode 2, the only existing installment of that missing serial! If only he'd shown her a scene from episode 7, future fandom would be much happier! The Doctor says he will weave his memories into a complete story, and by that he means complete with opening and closing titles and cast credits over the course of nine weeks, interrupted for two weeks by Wimbledon fortnight! If we think about it too much it hurts our heads, because it means the Doctor created the Doctor Who titles and music in his head, and knows that real actors play all the characters! ARGH!

The Wheel in Space is a lousy Doctor Who story. It's lazy and slow, silly and illogical, and smacks of the very worst aspects of all those atrocious Saturday morning two-reelers from the 1930s and 40s with Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Things happen for no good reason, while other things happen in order to make something else happen which needn't have happened in the first place. It's like David Whitaker wrote each episode with only a vague, distant memory of what he'd written before, and pretty much no idea what he was going to write next. The "story" by Kit Pedler on which it is based has very little of the scientific intelligence shown in The War Machines or The Tenth Planet. It's just a mess, a long, drawn-out and ultimately inconsequential mess.

And I really don't think we'd benefit from seeing any of the missing episodes back. They still wouldn't make any sense. What a sorry end for a fantastic season.

Note: My 4.17 average score for this serial's six episodes means it's my lowest rated story to date (by some margin), across the entire first five seasons of Doctor Who. I wondered at first whether I really do think that The Wheel in Space is worse than The Celestial Toymaker or The Space Museum, but on reflection, I stick by it. It proves (to me at least) that even the presence of Patrick Troughton doesn't always make a Doctor Who story good. Soz Pat!

First broadcast: June 1st, 1968

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Doctor's confrontation with the Cybermen.
The Bad: After everything, the humans just shoot their laser to defeat the Cybermen. After all that! And the sight of the Cybermen flapping their way through space towards the Wheel is laughable, and brings home the fact that for 142 of the serial's 150 minute duration, there are only ever two Cybermen.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ (story average: 4.2 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: The Dominators...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5

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/.