The Wheel in Space

Episode 1

We rejoin the TARDIS as it breaks down aboard a deserted spaceship. (For those of you keeping score at home, the existing episodes this week are 3 and 6.)

Hannah: The fluid link has gone again. Where are they going to find all that mercury?
Me: Ah, you remember it from The Daleks?
Hannah: Of course.
Me: It feels like such a long time ago now.
Hannah: The film did the same thing, so it was covered twice.
Me: He really should have started keeping an emergency supply on board after that incident on Skaro.

The TARDIS has detected danger outside, but the early-warning system (although clearly improved since The Edge of Destruction) is a little on the abstract side: it projects pictures of suggested alternative destinations onto the scanner. Hannah is hard-pressed to think of a rationale for this particular strategy.

Hannah: Why is the TARDIS' response to danger always to play guessing-games with them? A sophisticated piece of technology like that should have a much clearer way of communicating danger to its crew and advising a course of action; a nice clear message saying "leave immediately" would have done the trick. And if it can detect danger outside, why hasn't it done that before?

After five consecutive earthbound stories it's a relief to finally see another off-world adventure, even if it means listening to vast swathes of dialogue-free audio while the ship's servo-robot pilot waddles around the ship.

Hannah: I'm just glad to see some kind of robot that's not a Yeti.

The Doctor and Jamie locate a food machine ("Go on, be the stupid little tablet things"), so the Doctor orders roast pork with potatoes and carrots (a man after my own heart) and Jamie requests roast beef with all the trimmings.

Hannah: Did they have that phrase in his time?
Me: No, I don't know where he got that from. Maybe he picked it up when they stayed for dinner with the Harrises at the end of the last story.
Hannah: When was Yorkshire pudding invented?
Me: 1842.
Hannah: Really?
Me: No.

Jamie still misses Victoria, but the Doctor reassures him that she's chosen a good and prosperous historical period to settle in.

Hannah: How does he know? He never asked anyone the date!

The servo-robot starts sealing the doors shut, trapping them inside.

Hannah: I hope this isn't going to be six episodes where it's just the two of them and a robot that doesn't talk.
Me: How did you know?
Hannah: It's just a theory.
Me: That's exactly what happens.
Hannah: I don't want you to tell me that, even if you're lying.

The Doctor pulls something out of his pocket and neatly unseals the door.

Hannah: Is that his sonic screwdriver?
Me: Not this time.
Hannah: Obviously his lightsaber, then.
Me: It's the time-vector generator.
Hannah: Oh. Convenient that it also doubles as a laser, then. The one thing they've grabbed from the TARDIS before they ran out the door has helped them to survive, even though its main function is something completely different.

Hannah is disappointed when Jamie rudely uses the device to destroy the robot, rather than talking out their differences first, but she really starts to worry when the Doctor passes out after hitting his head.

Hannah: Last time he felt unwell and went for a lie down, he regenerated. It's too soon for him to change; I'll be very disappointed if that's what happens.

Episode 2

Our heroes have been brought aboard a nearby wheel-shaped space station, where the second-in-command Dr Gemma Corwyn (who reminds us both a great deal of Judi Dench) is giving Jamie an examination.

Hannah: I like that they've addressed the need for a psychologist on a space station. It's a reasonable thing for them to need, and not enough sci-fi shows seem to realise it.

Jamie is at a loss to explain the Doctor's identity, so he comes up with a false name: Dr John Smith.

Hannah: Is that the first time he uses that name?
Me: Yep, and he continues to use it all the way up to the present day.
Hannah: I know he uses it later on, but it's interesting that Jamie is the one who originally came up with it.

Gemma, clearly not entirely satisfied with his story, arranges for Jamie to take a tour of the wheel.

Hannah: Suspicious man arrives in suspicious circumstances; give him a tour of the entire facility!

Jamie's tour guide is the wheel's genius teenage librarian astrophysicist mascot, Zoe.

Hannah: I feel a companion coming on. She's exactly the right kind; young and excitable. She seems interesting, although I'm worried that a know-it-all is going to get annoying very quickly.

Gemma wonders whether the Doctor and Jamie might be saboteurs.

Hannah: If he is an agent, he's a bit shit at it. He's turned up in a kilt and done loads of things to give himself away.

Some white spheres (which apparently have the ability to pass through the hull of a spaceship) begin to grow, their skins glowing and becoming translucent to reveal a humanoid shape curled up inside, until one bursts open to reveal a silver metal fist.

Hannah: Oh, it's a metal man in a ball. It looks like a Cyberman, except they're not born; I don't want it to be something we've already seen, again.

Her suspicions are confirmed when she realises that this story was written by Dr Kit Pedler, co-creator of the Cybermen and the writer of all their stories to date.

Hannah: I'm confused about the Cybermen's ball size.
Me: I beg your pardon?
Hannah: Did they start off small, and then grow after they floated through the ship's walls? Why are the Cybermen hatching out of glowing eggs?

Episode 3

The wheel is preparing to destroy the rocket with the TARDIS on board, so Jamie is forced to sabotage the laser.

Hannah: I don't know why he's doing this. Why doesn't he just stop them and say he's left something important on board?
Me: Because they wouldn't care.
Hannah: But now he's just a vandal. I think he's done a really, really stupid thing.

The Cybermen have been redesigned yet again, with their helmets now sporting the iconic "teardrop" in the corner of each eye.

Me: Look, they've got the teardrops!
Hannah: I don't like the idea of an enemy that can just phase itself through walls anywhere it likes. Do they walk through walls at any other point? It's terrifying.
Me: I know. But look at the new design!
Hannah: I can't remember what they looked like last time.

But when one of their little helpers turns up, she greets it like an old friend.

Hannah: Oooh, a Cybermat!
Me: You remember them?
Hannah: Yes. Why would I forget an electronic horseshoe crab?
Me: I'm more surprised that you remembered the name.
Hannah: Only because it's a stupid name.

Jamie, unable to explain his actions, has decided to let the Doctor deal with it instead.

Hannah: He's just woken up from a concussion, and now he's got to think of an excuse that doesn't make Jamie look like an absolute tit.

Hannah is unclear on Zoe's credentials.

Hannah: Is she a parapsychologist?
Me: No, she's an astrophysicist.
Hannah: Oh. But it's a parapsychology library?
Me: That's right.
Hannah: Do they have more than one library? What about a psychics library?
Me: Not as far as we know, although you'd think a space station would have books on some other subjects as well. Either way, it's a very specific topic for a whole dedicated library.

One of the crew members is attacked by Cybermats...

Hannah: Oh no! They've got shooty eyes now. Evil little lice!

...and ends up dying horribly. Quelle surprise.

Hannah: That felt way too over-dramatic.

Episode 4

The Doctor and Zoe are trying to explain the Cyberman threat to the wheel's commander, Jarvis Bennett, but he's stubbornly refusing to believe them. If you think this is getting repetitious, you're right.

Hannah: Once again, the writer has put another over-worked idiot in charge just so that the enemy can take hold a little further and increase the threat. It's getting very annoying.

The crew have apparently never heard of the Cybermen, so while Hannah spends a large portion of the episode trying to get her head around the Cyberman timeline, the Doctor surmises that the Cybermats had been sent in to destroy the laser; Jamie takes this as proof that his act of vandalism is no big deal.

Hannah: Oh, so that excuses his actions, does it, because it was going to happen anyway? Hmmm.

Jamie, although demonstrably capable of sabotaging operations on a space station, is nonetheless completely baffled by Zoe's tape recorder.

Hannah: Jamie's travelled so far across time and space, and he hasn't heard of a voice recorder?
Me: Not only that, but they used one in the previous story to destroy the seaweed monster at the end of Fury from the Deep, so God only knows what he thought was happening there.

One of the engineers (all of whom might as well be labelled "Cyberman fodder") goes down to the loading bay.

Hannah: Poor chap. He's going to die. And he's done two shifts in a row. That's a tough day.

The Doctor suspects two other crew members are under the control of the Cybermen ("Nobody has noticed that they're speaking monotonously and acting a bit weird"). The good news is that each crew member has an implanted circuit that gives off a signal when the owner is being controlled; the bad news is that it needs to be checked manually.

Hannah: Odd. Why isn't it something that's constantly monitored? Shouldn't there be a little alarm that pings in the corner somewhere when this sort of thing happens? It should go ping when there's stuff.

We get to see a censor clip of one of the victims, an engineer called Duggan, committing suicide by smashing a communications console with a heavy spanner.

Me: I'd forgotten how unpleasant that scene is.
Hannah: Oh, he kills himself by electrocution; that's why someone cut that bit out.
Me: I'm not surprised.

The Doctor prescribes an anti-brainwashing device: just tape a metal plate and a transistor to the back of the neck and it absorbs the Cybermen's control signals.

Hannah: Their brainwashing can't be very effective if a piece of metal Sellotaped to the back of the neck can stop it from happening.

Episode 5

The past three seasons have been a bit of a struggle at times; out of 128 episodes, 79 have been reconstructions. But, after a difficult few months, this is going to be our last missing episode for a while. [Insert thanks to the deity of your choice here.]

The Doctor is concerned that the Cybermen are going to start tampering with the wheel's air supply.

Hannah: Do they not need air at all?
Me: We've already seen them marching across the surface of the moon, so presumably not.
Hannah: But they've still got some organic tissue left. Surely their brains still have some tissue?

I make an effort to distract her from some of the more ridiculous story elements (like the plot).

Me: So, do you like the new teardrops on the Cyberman helmets?
Hannah: They're like gangster tattoos.
Me: It always gives me the feeling that they're weeping for their lost humanity. Maybe I'm just more poetic than you are.

Meanwhile, Bennett has finally flipped.

Hannah: So it turns out that the commander is actually completely unstable, which seems highly unlikely if he's been hand-picked for this job and having regular psychological evaluations. At the first sign of an unexplained event he starts spouting off about conspiracy theorists, and how he's right and everybody else is wrong. It's just completely unfathomable that a commander who's being evaluated regularly and thoroughly is going to flip out like that.

While the Doctor and Gemma wonder if he could be shocked back to normal ("They're going to give him a brain shock because he's having a sulk?"), Zoe bemoans the fact that her training has left her with a sense of emotional detachment and a blind reliance on facts and logic.

Hannah: I like Zoe. She sounds a little bit precocious, a little bit Hermione Granger, but she's not that extreme; she's really clever but realises that there's stuff she doesn't know, which redeems her.
Me: She's more interesting because she's got a lot of knowledge, but none of it's contextualised; she's got no real-world experience of anything, so she's super-intelligent but also naïve and inexperienced at the same time.

The Doctor needs the time-vector generator but it's still on the rocket, so he gives Jamie a homework assignment.

Hannah: He just wants Jamie out of the way, doesn't he?

Zoe accompanies Jamie on his space-walk (leaving Hannah in no doubt that she must be the next companion), but then Gemma gets blasted by a Cyberman.

Hannah: No, don't die! Not Judi Dench! Oh, she did. I liked her. She was intelligent and level-headed and she was in charge now. Now what's going to happen?
Me: It's a shame, she would have been a good companion.
Hannah: It's got so much more impact when it happens to the main characters who are helping to keep things together, rather than just random redshirts.

In fact, it has so much impact for us that it somewhat undermines the cliffhanger, in which a cluster of meteorites hurtles towards Jamie and Zoe. Hannah is in no mood for sympathy.

Hannah: Well, you were warned, weren't you? You were told that there's loads of debris out there and it's coming straight for you, and then you go outside and find loads of debris coming straight for you. I mean, no shit.

Episode 6

Hannah: The wheel isn't symmetrical. It's wonky.
Me: Never mind that; we're watching this episode 50 years to the day since it was first broadcast.
Hannah: That's quite a coincidence. It's almost like you planned it.
Me: If I was going to make the effort to plan a 50th anniversary viewing, why would I have planned it for The Wheel in Space?

The Doctor urges the crew to switch over to the "sectional air supply". Maybe. There's some ambiguity within fandom over what Troughton actually says, so I play the line again so that Hannah can judge for herself.

Hannah: "Sectional". Why? Do people think he's saying "sexual air supply"?
Me: A lot of people do think it's a Freudian slip, yes.
Hannah: It's "sectional".
Me: Well, that's certainly what was in the script...
Hannah: It sounded like "sectional" to me, and I always pick up on rude bits. I'd be the first person to tell you if it sounded like "sexual".

We've missed most of the scene by this point, so I rewind the DVD.

Hannah: Now I hear it! That's annoying. It sounds like "sexual" now.

Gemma's body is still lying on the floor.

Hannah: It's really sad that they don't have the time to pick her up and move her.

The Doctor confronts the Cybermen but their fleet is drawing closer to the wheel and, as if the plot wasn't already absurd enough, swarms of Cybermen are marching through space towards them.

Hannah: Oh, they walked across from the rocket, did they?
Me: Erm, yes...
Hannah: But... if the rocket is close enough for them to space-walk across, then it's close enough that the wheel would have felt the impact if they'd blown it up. You don't explode something when it's that close to you.
Me: So you're not going to question how they walked over?
Hannah: Well, people have already been walking backwards and forwards to the rocket and I never mentioned how stupid it was. If you made one push, you would maintain your momentum all the way across, so I don't see how Jamie and Zoe were waving around and pushing away from each other when there's nothing to push on. You can't do that in space.
Me: It's not great, I'll grant you, but it still makes more sense than hatching out of eggs that can pass through solid metal.
Hannah: Did you say this was written by a real scientist?

After the Cybermen have been thwarted and sucked out into space (again), Zoe wants to join the Doctor and Jamie. Jamie isn't so keen on the idea, but promises not to forget Zoe.

Me: (under my breath) We'll see about that.
Hannah: What?
Me: Nothing.

The Doctor is more receptive but thinks she should know what she's getting herself into, so he dusts off an old gadget and starts projecting his thought patterns onto the TARDIS scanner.

Hannah: What? When did he develop that, then?
Me: It could be part of the TARDIS, maybe?
Hannah: And this is the first time he's decided to get it out to convince someone not to come with him? People have stowed away so many times now so he's trying to be careful not to accidentally steal anybody again, and really make sure that this is what they want. He didn't do this for Jamie! Nobody even told him what was happening, let alone mentioning that there's stuff out there and he's probably going to die.

The image on the monitor shows a man being confronted by a Dalek.

Hannah: We've never seen that bloke before, have we?
Me: Yes. This is the last episode of the fifth season; the BBC repeated The Evil of the Daleks during the summer break before the sixth season started in the autumn, so for the first and only time in the series' history we're getting a scripted introduction to a repeat.
Hannah: (laughing) What?
Me: They showed all seven episodes as a flashback, basically.
Hannah: And to think that repeats became a regular thing, but back then it was so special that they had to allude to it in some way. I like that. Most shows have a flashback episode, but this is an entire story. It's very odd.
Me: By the way, have you noticed that all seven stories in the fifth season - from The Tomb of the Cybermen onwards - have been "base under siege" stories, where the Doctor turns up at an isolated base somewhere and helps the personnel defend themselves from an outside invading force? The only exception has been The Enemy of the World.
Hannah: That's a good point; they're all camps or research stations of some kind. Why was it like that? They've all had different writers.
Me: Has it felt repetitive at all, or have you not really noticed it?
Hannah: It has felt a little bit repetitive. I've noticed that there hasn't been so much running around lately; I hadn't noticed that they've all been the same kind of setting, but I've felt the same kind of mood.
Me: I think you'll find season six a lot more varied. What do you think of having a companion who's as clever as the Doctor?
Hannah: Differently clever. I don't see why not, as long as she doesn't become too much of a know-it-all.

The Score

Hannah: It was alright, although the Cybermen were barely in it; they could have been any enemy.
Me: That's probably true of almost any Cyberman story apart from The Tenth Planet.
Hannah: The Cybermen usually want to make people like them, but they weren't interested in doing any of that here; all we saw was them trying to take over a space station by controlling some people and then killing others. It was such a convoluted plan, and the whole story is just nonsensical to me.
Me: It's not just you; the whole story is nonsensical.
Hannah: I liked a lot of the characters, especially Zoe and Gemma - I was very sad that Gemma had to die - and Tanya was alright, and then I can't remember any of the guys' names. But it felt very much like a family in space; it's a high-stress environment but they're all pretty cool and getting on. I did enjoy it, but I wanted it to be better than it was; so much of it was farcical, like an interesting idea being presented by an inept waiter on roller-skates who was constantly fumbling and trying to keep it level. I just couldn't take it seriously.

6/10

Hannah: If it wasn't for Gemma and Zoe, it would have been more like a 5. Try harder next time.