Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 216: The Wheel in Space, Episode Six

Dear diary,

This is the part of the story where I should be complaining that, after all that, we get a total invasion of about eight Cybermen. And six of those don't even make it into the Wheel. You know what, though? I don't care! I've really enjoyed the ride for this story, and even the lack of Cyberman turning up as a really big invasion fleet isn't enough to dampen my spirits.

Being able to watch this Episode means that we get a chance to watch plenty of special effects. Indeed, I think this is the most obviously 'effects laden' episode we've seen since about as far back as The Ark. Oh sure things like The Web of Fear has it's web effect in the surviving episode, and The Underwater Menace has fish people bobbing about, but today we've got meteorites hurtling towards the Wheel! Jamie and Zoe making their way across space to the Silver Carrier! The crew of the Wheel blowing up the meteorites while our heroes dodge them… and that's all in the opening few minutes!

As the episode progresses we've got the Cybermen effects (the hypnotising thing we've already seen in Episode Three) and the Doctor electrocuting one of his foes, causing it to crumple up on the floor in a heap. You've then got the Cybermen's back up heading across to the Wheel, marching through space like a cold, unstoppable force!

Hm? Sorry? Oh, all right, then. Fine. Yes, the Cybermen heading over to the Wheel isn't the greatest of effects that the show has ever done, and I'll admit that it did let the ending down a little for me. Quite apart from the fact that they'd almost become transparent by the time they'd approached the Wheel, the Cyberman at the front insisted on walking along flapping his arms like a bird. It doesn't make for the most threatening thing we've ever seen them do. It's a shame, really, because a few seconds later he's trying to force open the doors to the loading bay, and that does work! It looks really effective! You can't have it all, I suppose.

The other effects in the episode - on the whole - are pretty good. The opening few scenes with Jamie and Zoe outside in space did put me in mind of a 1950's B-movie, but they did the job, and they didn't leave me disappointed - always a plus. We're now heading back to a period with a great many more surviving episodes (thanks to the animated release of The Invasion, I've only got five more episodes that I can't sit and watch from the rest of the decade), so I'm looking forward to keeping a tab on the effects in the series. Part of the fun in the early days was seeing how the team's confidence would build up, until they tried to do something that was just beyond their abilities.

I'm also pretty impressed with the design of the Wheel itself. I've been able to see it via the tele snaps right the way through the story, but today we get an especially good look at sections of it. The actual station itself, spinning in space, is as good as any ship ever designed for the programme, and it's nice to see some blueprints (of a sort) for it. As for the inside, the thing that really caught my attention was the bank of lava lamps! I shouldn't find them all that fascinating - I've got one in my flat, even! - by they do look fab in black and white, don't they? It doesn't hurt that they're much larger than your standard lava lamp, so they move in a slightly different way, too. I'm not at all sorry to admit that every scene they decorated the background of had me focussing largely on them as opposed to the Cybermen in front!

With the closing moments of the story, Zoe has slipped aboard the TARDIS and we're off into the third phase of the Second Doctor's era. I wasn't keen on her as a character when this story began, but I've warmed to her as the episodes have gone by (I think that's the intention, too. She's become more likeable and human as the story has progressed). I'm sure all her character will be stripped away over the next fortnight, but I'm looking forward to her joining the crew all the same.

Her first test as companion? Settle in and watch a repeat of The Evil of the Daleks. I've always found it odd that they wrote the repeat of a serial into the series itself, but even more odd, it's the story that introduces the previous companion! That must have been a bit jarring back in the day. I've always thought it might be better if they'd shown The Power of the Daleks instead - remind viewers of how the Second Doctor began. Actually, though, having watched through the series in this manner, I can see the logic behind choosing this one. It's got Jamie in, for a start, and Victoria is still fresh enough in the minds of the audience to make sense. Ben and Polly are our companions in Power, and they left the series a whole year ago - they're old news!

I had debated doing the serial again, to see if my opinion might have changed, but to be honest, I'm not thrilled by the prospect. I even considered spending tomorrow reading the Target novel of The Evil of the Daleks so I could at least claim that I'd tried. In the end, though, I'm keen to press forward with the series, so I'll be moving straight on to the next story, and trying something a little bit different…

(And no, I'm not going to bring up the Doctor's 'sexual air supply'…)

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 215: The Wheel in Space, Episode Five

Dear diary,

Aha, now we’re starting to see Zoe coming in as the new companion, and she gets to share a cliffhanger with Jamie, moving through space towards the Silver Carrier. It’s an odd sort of cliffhanger to lead into the final episode – the Cybermen aren’t the focus of the threat but it’s much more about the impending shower of meteorites. That’s sort of true of The Wheel in Space as a whole, though: the Cybermen are there just to be the token monsters. Even the Cybermats are only there to help further the plot.

I’m quite fond of the way that everything we’ve seen so far – Jamie sabotaging the Wheel’s laser (which would have been the first point-of-call for the Cybermats anyway), the destruction of the bernalium supplies, the two crew members heading over to the Rocket… it’s all simply been happening as a way to get the Cybermen onto the Wheel itself. The crew are now of little importance and can be disposed of, but up to now, everything has been calculated.

The only problem? I’m not entirely sure that I buy the Cybermen’s motives. The Doctor claims that they desire the ‘mineral wealth of Earth’… but is that true? What use would the Cybermen have with Earth’s minerals? I guess he could simply be speaking poetically, and what he really means is that they simply want the Earth itself (that’s their goal in The Moonbase, after all, which is set sometime not too far from now), but I’m still not sure. It’s a shame, because everything else is really working for me, but my favourite baddies are just a bit redundant here.

What’s lovely though is that by relegating the monsters to more background roles, we’re given plenty of chance for the rest of the characters to shine. Jamie and Zoe get to share a lovely scene here, in which he reassures her that they’ll come up with some way out of all this mess and she confesses that she’s not too sure. It’s very reminiscent of a similar scene with Victoria from the last story, but on this occasion it’s being held with someone who doesn’t know the Doctor’s way of doing things.

It’s lovely when Zoe wonders what’s left for her after all this trouble has passed. The Doctor has broadened her horizons somewhat, and taught her that a blind reliance on logic isn’t always the right thing to have. It feels like a theme that commonly runs through the modern version of the series – the Doctor takes people and makes them better. I know that Zoe is likely to just slump into generic companion mode before too long, but it’s nice to think that there could be a real journey for her character, and that travelling in the company of Jamie and the Doctor really could be beneficial to her.

The big thing to mention with today’s episode surely has to be that it’s the last time I’ll be using the work of John Cura during this marathon. He continued telesnapping up to somewhere around The Mind Robber, but we’re about to enter a period of surviving episodes the likes of which we’ve not seen in months. I don’t think there’s any debate that fans of archive British television owe an awful lot to John Cura – without him, we’d have an awful lot less to look at from these early stories of Doctor Who, for a start!

Regular readers of The 50 Year Diary will be well aware that I’m not a fan of reconstructions, but I do tend to flick through Cura’s telesnaps either as I listen to the soundtracks, or afterwards before I write up my entry. Since the first load of snaps I used for Marco Polo, I’ve been through a fair few of them. It's a really novel idea for a business - capturing images directly from the TV and selling them to the people involved in a time before any kind of domestic video recording was thinkable at a reasonable price.

Without the work of Cura, moving through all these missing episodes would have been a lot more of a chore - it's lovely to picture the stories in my head and then get home and find out how close I was to the actual truth. After 216 days of the diary, I've become pretty well attuned to the look of 1960s Doctor Who, and it's lovely to have a series of photographs to refer to.

Cura's work has also been used on reckons for The Avengers, and is a way to see missing parts of many other archive programmes of which I'd consider myself a fan, so now is the perfect time to say thank you to John - for the foresight he displayed and the joy that he's managed to bring to millions by preserving these lost classics.

a 

a  a

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 214: The Wheel in Space, Episode Four

Dear diary,

This is quickly becoming another one of those stories where I really wish that I didn’t know what’s coming up. I know that Zoe becomes our new companion, because I’ve seen bits of Season Six. It’s not obvious, though, while watching this story. There’s plenty of candidates here that could go on to be the ‘new girl in the TARDIS’ – Gemma, for instance – and Zoe isn’t the most obvious of those they could choose from.

There’s a point towards the end of the episode, when things have started kicking off, where Zoe asks if she can be of any help. ‘No,’ is the rather abrupt response. She tries to protest, deciding that there must be something that she can do. Still no. It serves as another chance to show that Zoe isn’t really all that liked by her colleagues on the Wheel, but it also makes her look a little useless as a potential companion. At least she’s trying.

There’s more examples in this episode of that background detail that I’ve been enjoying all along, and it’s fleshing Zoe out nicely. We get something of an explanation for her being the way she is when she complains that her brain has been ‘pumped full of figures’ and we hear the kind of training that she’s received being described as ‘brainwashing’. It seems in some ways as though Whittaker is trying to draw a direct comparison between Zoe and the Cybermen – she keeps being referred to as ‘emotionless’ and all this talk of brainwashing comes at around the same time they start to notice the Cybermen hypnotising other members of the crew.

And then you’ve got that cliffhanger, in which the Doctor and Jamie go down into the loading bay and discover the crates used to bring the Cybermen across from the Silver Carrier. Surely this would be a great opportunity for Zoe to join them in their explorations? Really highlight her as being the one best suited to be a part of this team? On the plus side, the cliffhanger is the one that I’ve been expecting, in some form, since Episode One – the Doctor and Jamie turn around to see a Cyberman! Dun, dun, dunnn…!

Actually, though, it’s done very well. It helps that we’ve had to wait for this one, meaning that the Doctor isn’t confronting the Cybermen directly until the last third of the story. It’s been a bit of a slow burner so far (which might go some way to explaining why several people have been commenting on how boring they find this story to be), but that’s really working for me: we’ve been dropped into this world, and we’ve watched on as the Cybermen have mounted their (slow) invasion.

I think my only real complaint with the Cybermen on this occasion is that there’s only two of them. Part of the reason The Tomb of the Cybermen looked so impressive is because when they thaw out, there’s loads of the silver giants stood around. They tower over the archaeologists and form a very credible threat. Here, there’s only the two of them and they’re doing all the legwork. From time to time, they check in with the Cyberplanner, but then it’s all up to them. Where are the rest of them? I’m hoping that this pair is just the advance party, and that the creatures will be turning up en masse before the story is over, but coming at the end of the season, I can’t say that my hopes are high…

One thing I did want to draw attention to is a quick exchange of dialogue between the Doctor and Gemma. It’s only brief, but when I heard it I was holding the door for someone on my way out of a building, looking like a loon because I was smiling my head off. It’s a lovely exchange because it perfectly highlights the background texture that I keep banging on about in this story. The Doctor tries to attract Gemma’s attention by calling her ‘Miss Corwin’ and she replies that it’s actually ‘Mrs’. When the Doctor apologises, she explains that her husband died three years ago in the asteroid belt. It’s only a little exchange, and I’m sure that it’s not going to have any massive significance later on in the story (were this the modern series, I’d possibly expect one of the Cybermen to be revealed as her husband post-conversion), but it gives her character a bit of depth and background that you don’t always get when the crews of these bases are simply sketched in before being bumped off by the monster of the week.

The same is true of our commander today. We’ve had plenty of stubborn base leaders turning up in the series since The Tenth Planet, so it initially struck me as odd that the Doctor would be so confused by the presence of such a person in command on the Wheel. Actually, though, we’re watching him go through some kind of a breakdown as the story progresses. It’s another reason that a slower-paced story can be beneficial – we’ve seen him at the helm of this space station when he’s in his right mind, making decisions and giving orders, so it makes a real impact when things start to go off the rails for him. There’s a sharp change between his reaction to Bill Duggan being found with a dead body and talking of metal rodents, to later releasing the Doctor and Jamie from their guard – it’s not something he’d have been doing twenty minutes earlier.

We’re at the point of the story now where we can start to see some real pay off. Having gone through all this build up, everything is in place for an explosive finale to the season. We’ve got the Cybermen on the Wheel, Cybermats in tow, and the focus should now be shifting to the climax. It’s been a promising start, and it’s looking increasingly as though Season Five could be going out with a real bang!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 213: The Wheel in Space, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Stupidly, I'd forgotten that the start of today's episode would give us a chance to actually watch the cliffhanger for Episode Two - there I was pouring over the telesnaps! Yesterday, I praised the fact that we'd not had a full Cyberman reveal yet, but having actually watched the cliffhanger now, it's pretty clear just what is inside the eggs before it bursts out. To be honest, though, I think it works even better! It's still not quite a full reveal, but it's still very unusual - both for the series and for the Cybermen, and I think that the sheer oddity of the whole sequence would have kept talk in the playground rife all week long.

Now that the Cybermen have properly hatched (what? it's as good-a term as any!), we get to see plenty of them in today's episode: and don't they look fab? It's not a massive change in design to the one that we've been used to since The Moonbase, but it looks really effective here. We get a couple of shots with a pair of Cybermen sat facing their computer banks, and every time we cut back to it, I seem to find myself smiling. It just looks so good. Admittedly, it's not quite as effective once the shot starts to move in on one of the creatures, but it's not long before we're back to the better angle.

Director Tristan de Vere Cole didn't helm any other Doctor Who stories, so there's nothing else that we can compare him against, but based on his work here, I get the feeling that The Wheel in Space might have looked pretty good throughout. The standout moment in today's episode has to be the Doctor idly musing that while his memory has been lost, there's still something floating around at the back of his mind. 'Some warning,' he mumbles, 'some menace…'. The close up of his face then fades into that of a Cyberman accepting orders at the computer terminal - it's simple but very effective, and not something that we often get in the series.

It's not just a pair of silver giants turning up for the action today, though. They've brought the Cybermats back with them, and I'm still finding myself utterly entranced by them. As I said during The Tomb of the Cybermen, I've always somewhat written off the Cybermats as being a bit rubbish, but they're actually a pretty effective 'monster'. There's a shot late in this episode where four of the creatures surround a man, all advancing on him as their tails wag… and it looks really good! I'd not go so far as to say that it was scary, but it's certainly a great moment in the story, and does help to up the creatures in my estimations.

We've also got the first appearance in the series of the Cyberplanner, although it's not described as such. It looks pretty effective when it appears full-screen against a black background, issuing orders to the more conventional Cybermen. Also - it has a voice I can understand. I don't know if it's just me being out of practice with the Cybermen (it's been a little while since they last turned up - certainly it's the longest stretch we've had without them since they first appeared), but when they started giving out instructions to the two crew members during the episode's cliffhanger, I didn't have a clue what was going on.

The Cybermen aren't the only cold, emotionless, logical creatures to play a big part in this story - we've still got Zoe hanging around on the Wheel. I have to admit that I am warming to her today, but much of that seems to be the rather sweet way that she doesn't realise the Doctor and Jamie gently teasing her. Maybe it's simply that she's got a pretty thick skin: some of the comments made about her earlier in the episode (directly to her face) would certainly be constituted as workplace bullying. Just some of the ways she's described today are 'all brain and no heart', 'just like a robot', and 'a proper little brainchild'. Compared to this, Jamie's tease that she's 'a right wee space detective' seems quite innocent (although it has led to the theme song from Captain Zep, Space Detective playing round in my head on a loop ever since).

While the Doctor seems initially hostile towards Zoe, he soon warms to her. I think he's sizing her up as a possible replacement for Victoria - letting her work out the answers for herself wherever possible and leading her in the right direction by suggesting that there may be more to the solution than simply analysing the facts. This episode is home to another of Troughton's famous lines - his 'logic' speech to Zoe. I think Jamie is starting to come around to the idea of her, too, as he seems to be thawing out a little as the episode goes on.

It's nice to see that - even with the Doctor now awake - Jamie is given plenty to do in this story. He's mistaken as being a saboteur when he vandalises the Wheel's laser (admittedly, it doesn't look great when someone walks in on you purposely putting your only form of defence out of order!), and he's quick to help the Doctor along with his investigations, which are all conducted from his hospital bed. I think we're starting to see the early stages of the team most people declare to be the 'best' of the Troughton line-ups, and it's nice to think that we're headed in the right direction…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 212: The Wheel in Space, Episode Two

Dear diary,

Something that I’ve seen complained about quite a lot in relation to The Wheel in Space is the idea that the Cybermen in the story are ‘hatched from eggs’. Admittedly, it’s a pretty fair description of what happens in the closing moments of this episode, but what the complaints fail to mention is just how effective it is as a cliffhanger.

Over the last two episodes, we’ve seen several of these eggs (the narration calls them ‘spheres’, but ‘egg’ just sounds better) float across the void of space and attach themselves to the side of the Wheel. We’ve watched the crew try to piece together all the various odd things that are happening to their systems, while we know that it’s being caused by the presence of these eggs. Now we find out that they’re not just some odd space phenomena – they’ve got Cybermen inside them!

Even more effective is that the cliffhanger still isn’t your run-of-the-mill ‘Cyberman bursts through a doorway!’, or ‘The Doctor and his companions turn around to see… a Cyberman!’. It’s left to you to recognise the fist of a Cyberman sticking out from the recently powered-up egg (there’s a sentence you don’t write every day), and then we’ll get the full reveal – I’d imagine – in the next episode. It’s nice, because it’s allowing the threat to build, and I’m less concerned about them spending the entire story stood around looking menacing, which is what I’d been expecting.

I think it’s always a good testament to the quality of a particular episode if you can remove the Doctor from the action (Patrick Troughton doesn’t appear at all in today’s instalment, and the unconscious Doctor is played by a stand-in) and still remain just as interested n the events unfolding on screen. Jamie is left to carry much of the action, heading out to explore the Wheel in the company of our new companion, Zoe. It’s interesting how much of a contrast they’re going for with Zoe, swapping out Victorian companion for a girl from the near-future, with an intellect that could square up to that of the Doctor.

What’s odd is that I don’t especially like Zoe, yet, and I’m not all that sure that you’re supposed to. She’s presented as treating things in a cool, logical manner and not really showing a great deal of personality. When asked to covertly keep an eye on Jamie as she gives him the grand tour, she declares that it could be ‘interesting’ as a project, and when another crew-member expresses fascination at the fact that some of the plant on the Wheel have travelled all the way from Venus, she chimes in to give the exact distance in several different measurements. I think Jamie sums it up best when he dryly responds: ‘Oh. I was dying to know that…’

The entire location of the Wheel feels very fleshed out – certainly more so than that of some other bases we’ve seen throughout this season. Yesterday i complained that none of the crew really stood out of the crowd for me, but today you get the impression of a history to these characters and a string of previous interactions in both their professional and private lives. This feels like a very real world, and I think that’s what’s drawing me in and keeping me interested. There’s discussion of people back on Earth who feel that the space programme should be suspended (although no further context is given) and they spot something is amiss with Jamie because he leaves his water – something that’s in short supply out in space. It all helps to make it feel like the TARDIS has landed our heroes into a place that’s been going for some time, and you get the impression that it’ll keep on going, long after they’ve left (assuming the Cybermen don’t totally wipe them out, that is).

Today’s entry can’t go by without mentioning two new naming additions to the series. Firstly, Jamie is given a middle name – Robert – when he identifies himself to Gemma. Secondly, and probably more importantly from the point of view of the series as whole, we get the first instance of the Doctor being given the alias ‘John Smith’. It’s a name Jamie takes from the side of some medical equipment, and it’s not fooling anyone from the start, but it’s a name that’s going to stick, and is still in use right up to the current series.

I’m almost sorry that we’re likely to move into a regular ‘base-under-siege’ tale from now on, in which the Cybermen attack the Wheel, as I’m enjoying all the build up. I’m hoping that the rich background that’s being painted here is going to hold firm throughout the rest of the story, as it would be lovely to see Season Five (and the format of Season Five) going out on a high. It’s certainly a good strong start…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 211: The Wheel in Space, Episode One

Dear diary,

I’ve always thought that had I been both a fan of Doctor Who and working in a high position on the programme during the original run, I’d have spent half my time renting out viewing rooms in TV Centre and watching all the old episodes on a loop. Well, until they destroy them all, anyway. It seems I’m not the only one to have such a mindset, though, because David Whittaker has obviously written today’s episode fresh from a viewing of The Dead Planet, Episode One of The Daleks.

The whole episode is filled with elements that make up the first 25 minutes of that Dalek tale – there’s something wrong with the TARDIS’ fluid link (though, this time, there really is something wrong – the Doctor’s not just making it up), and the ship is unable to leave this strange, seemingly dead location until they can find some more mercury to get things working again. When the ship first starts to go wrong, the Doctor instructs Jamie to check the ‘fault indicator’, which is clearly a component of the earlier fault locator, if not the same device entirely. He describes it as being ‘over there on the left’, which you could interpret as Jamie being sent off to the same room that featured in several of the early Hartnell adventures.

We’ve even got a scene in which Jamie is bamboozled by a ‘futuristic’ food machine, which splits out his desired meal in the form of a small cube. The scene plays almost identically to the one in The Dead Planet, and I’d not be surprised to hear Ian make the same ‘I’ve heard of a square meal’ joke as Jamie does here (though he didn’t at the time).

Perhaps the biggest thing that makes this feel like the earlier adventure, though, is just how long we spend in the company of just the Doctor and Jamie. Oh, sure, there’s a Servo Robot waddling around in the background, but really our only focus for at least the first fifteen minutes of the story is our two regulars. We get a recap of Victoria’s departure, and on this occasion they mention the TARDIS’ unusual take off at the end of the previous story – it was omitted from the end of the Fury From the Deep narration (possibly to let the story go out with the emotion of Victoria’s departure) – and then we’re into that old classic of the Doctor and his companion exploring their new surroundings without encountering any of the guest cast.

It’s almost becoming a tradition now that the Doctor and Jamie get an episode to themselves before they encounter their next companion, but it’s another one of those great opportunities to see the pair shine together on screen. It gives the pair a chance to breathe, and makes Victoria’s departure from the programme all the more poignant. It’s not simply a case of one out, one in, but rather a bit of a break before they meet someone else that they’d enjoy spending their time with. The only problem this gives me is that I’d love a full story of just the Doctor and Jamie from start to finish, and you’d think that this would be the time to have one – fresh from their loss but not quite ready yet to make a new friend.

When the guest cast does finally arrive on the scene, the narration gives us a full run down of every member we see, and I have to confess that I rather lost track of them all by the end. I’m sure they’ll each develop their own distinct personalities before the end of the story, but for now I’m just labelling them ‘generic base crew’. It’s a slow start to the new story, but I’m cautiously optimistic. If nothing else, it’s nice to see that the Cybermen haven’t been introduced as the end-of-episode cliffhanger, but we’re left guessing for that little bit longer. In contrast to Fury From the Deep, this feels fresh and different, and that can only be a good thing.

a