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