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